Dennett on ID-- a response

Daniel Dennett, the author of Freedom Evolves, and Darwin's
Dangerous Idea, has an editorial in the Sunday Times on intelligent
design, with a near catalogue of the standard Darwin distortions on
evolution. The question of what to teach in the schools is a troubling
one, since all the parties with the clout to decide are visibly carrying an
agenda, and the debate is degenerating in short order into confusion on both
sides.

But the idea that those in favor of secular education should grant
kneejerk support to the proponents of Darwinism plying their monopoly of
fallacies is due for a rude awakening. Such a statement means an acceptance of
evolution but a critique of the theory of natural selection. This point
constantly gets lost in discussion, and round table discussions on television
now slide into questions about the fact of evolution itself. Science could met
that by simply defending evolution, but exhibited open caution, allowing
doubt, about natural selection. A close look at the question of natural
selection shows the suspicious resemblance of that theory to intelligent
design itself. It is an empty theory, without much content, sufficient for
microevolution, but dangerously misleading when applied to reduce complex
questions to simple ideological answers. These articles are irritating because
the issue is not science but boilerplate well positioned in a media channel.
Distortions don't matter, only the market share.

August 28, 2005

Show Me the Science

By DANIEL C. DENNETT

PRESIDENT BUSH, announcing this month that he was
in favor of teaching about “intelligent design” in the schools,
said, “I think that part of education is to expose people to different
schools of thought.” A couple of weeks later, Senator Bill Frist of
Tennessee, the Republican leader, made the same point. Teaching both
intelligent design and evolution “doesn’t force any particular
theory on anyone,” Mr. Frist said. “I think in a pluralistic society
that is the fairest way to go about education and training people for
the future.”

The question of how to teach biology in the schools is a
difficult one, and the attempt to shoehorm ID into the classroom in the name
of fairness is no doubt disingenuous on the part of its proponents. In
principle, however, the point is well taken. We should teach students a
balanced set of perspectives. That would include a lot more than intelligent
design, which is already being positioned as the only alternative to
Darwinism.

Is “intelligent design” a legitimate school of
scientific thought? Is there something to it, or have these people been
taken in by one of the most ingenious hoaxes in the history of science?
Wouldn’t such a hoax be impossible? No. Here’s how it has been done.

Intelligent design may have it problems but it is hardly a
hoax. Isaac Newton believed in design arguments, and Thomas Ray the founder
of Natural Theology was a member of the Royal Society. With the later
development of physics, and with the critiques of many philosophers such as
Hume and Kant, the trend beyond design arguments was established, and
rightly so, but it was never a one-way victory for science, witness the
resurgence of Paley's natural theology, or such figures as Babbage, the
founder of modern computer science, with his complex beliefs on issues of
design. The tactics of the current intelligent design movement may be
deceptive, but design arguments are no hoax. However, here our critique is
of natural selection. The failure of natural selection is not grounds for
rejecting naturalism.

First, imagine how easy it would be for a
determined band of naysayers to shake the world’s confidence in
quantum physics - how weird it is! - or Einsteinian relativity. In spite
of a century of instruction and popularization by physicists, few people
ever really get their heads around the concepts involved. Most people
eventually cobble together a justification for accepting the assurances
of the experts: “Well, they pretty much agree with one another, and
they claim that it is their understanding of these strange topics that
allows them to harness atomic energy, and to make transistors and
lasers, which certainly do work…”

Fortunately for physicists, there is no powerful
motivation for such a band of mischief-makers to form. They don’t have
to spend much time persuading people that quantum physics and
Einsteinian relativity really have been established beyond all
reasonable doubt.

With evolution, however, it is different. The
fundamental scientific idea of evolution by natural selection is not
just mind-boggling; natural selection, by executing God’s traditional
task of designing and creating all creatures great and small, also seems
to deny one of the best reasons we have for believing in God. So there
is plenty of motivation for resisting the assurances of the biologists.
Nobody is immune to wishful thinking. It takes scientific discipline to
protect ourselves from our own credulity, but we’ve also found
ingenious ways to fool ourselves and others. Some of the methods used to
exploit these urges are easy to analyze; others take a little more
unpacking.

With evolution it is indeed different. Physicists have
fewer hastles with religionists because they have a true science, and the
attendant methodology. The same is not true of evolution. The idea of
a continuous spectrum of sciences reaching from fundamental physics up
through evolution is a myth. There is as yet no truly scientific
methodology that can deal with the question of evolution, and the claim
that natural selection foots the bill here is the source of all the
controversy that won't go away, and can't go away because the claims for
natural selection are nearly metaphysical in their reach, and spurious in
their inability to properly document such a mechanism.

BTW, Dennett consistently introduces design language into
his statements about natural selection. It takes on God's traditional task!
There can hardly be a triumph over design, and a true science of evolution
if Darwinists have to fall back on such language for their terminology and
description. Nor is this usage ironical. Clearly natural selection,
therefore, is itself a crypto-design argument, although not an 'argument by
design' as a proof of divinity. This sense of design is built into Darwin's
term 'selection', from animal breeders, and provokes its own chaotification.

The issue of divinity should be irrelevant. The use of
Darwinism to promote atheism is as futile as using the design argument to
promote theism. We can see the net equivalent of design is needed for
a theory and its implications for the existence or non-existence of divinity
is likely to be nill.

Darwin's (crank) theory has to be the biggest case of
wishful thinking ever. Over and over the implausible nature of the theory
has been pointed to, but the Darwin juggernaut proceeds apace. .

A creationist pamphlet sent to me some years ago
had an amusing page in it, purporting to be part of a simple
questionnaire:

Test Two

Do you know of any building that didn’t have a
builder? [YES] [NO]

Do you know of any painting that didn’t have a
painter? [YES] [NO]

Do you know of any car that didn’t have a maker?
[YES] [NO]

If you answered YES for any of the above, give
details:

Take that, you Darwinians! The presumed
embarrassment of the test-taker when faced with this task perfectly
expresses the incredulity many people feel when they confront Darwin’s
great idea. It seems obvious, doesn’t it, that there couldn’t be any
designs without designers, any such creations without a creator.

Well, yes - until you look at what contemporary
biology has demonstrated beyond all reasonable doubt: that natural
selection - the process in which reproducing entities must compete for
finite resources and thereby engage in a tournament of blind trial and
error from which improvements automatically emerge - has the power to
generate breathtakingly ingenious designs.

I know of no builder without a builder. That's not enough
to make me accept design arguments. The examples cited have restricted
domains. The design argument proceeds toward a greater totality, and the
validity of the argument probably fails for that reason. And, while I think
that this does not prove there isn't such a thing as the net equivalent of a
'designer' in the cases cited, the claims for natural selection simply
reinforce that sense of puzzlement by providing a fake answer. A builder
without a designer is not intuitive for our limited evolutionary minds, so
any claims otherwise require a thorough constructivist argument, and natural
selection simply won't foot the bill. To say that the question is beyond
reasonable doubt is blatantly untrue, witness the debate. Note that
design and natural selection serve the same role, with different coloration.

The idea that natural selection has demonstrated anything
beyond reasonable doubt is the most ludicrous distortion, one that feeds on
itself through repetition. The first reviewers of Darwin expressed
disbelief. T.H. Huxley himself was not fully convinced. But soon the myth
took hold.

Take the development of the eye, which has been one
of the favorite challenges of creationists. How on earth, they ask,
could that engineering marvel be produced by a series of small,
unplanned steps? Only an intelligent designer could have created such a
brilliant arrangement of a shape-shifting lens, an aperture-adjusting
iris, a light-sensitive image surface of exquisite sensitivity, all
housed in a sphere that can shift its aim in a hundredth of a second and
send megabytes of information to the visual cortex every second for
years on end.

But as we learn more and more about the history of
the genes involved, and how they work - all the way back to their
predecessor genes in the sightless bacteria from which multicelled
animals evolved more than a half-billion years ago - we can begin to
tell the story of how photosensitive spots gradually turned into
light-sensitive craters that could detect the rough direction from which
light came, and then gradually acquired their lenses, improving their
information-gathering capacities all the while.

The claims for the random evolution of the eye always
were, and remain an immense stumbling block for natural selection. Nor is it
sufficient to say that we see various stages in the development of the eye.
That's an argument for incremental evolution, but not necessarily for
natural selection. Clearly we see some naturalistic evolution of the eye.
But we have no conclusive evidence whatever this is due to natural
selection.

In the age of evo-devo this kind of thinking is probably
obsolete anyway. The eye evolves because it gets programmed to do that by
developmental processes. The issue then is the evolution and context of
those early programs evolving, and about that little is known. Biologists
are forced to conclude that highly complex processes with teleological
biochemical sequences arose themselves by chance. Where's the proof?

These genetic discoveries have essentially already
falsified Darwin's original theory. We can see now that many of Darwin's
original claims are simply nonsense when we look at the DNA world.

We can’t yet say what all the details of this
process were, but real eyes representative of all the intermediate
stages can be found, dotted around the animal kingdom, and we have
detailed computer models to demonstrate that the creative process works
just as the theory says.

There are no computer models whatever that can mimic the
evolution of the eye, by chance. These programs have an embedded random
generator to mimic chance, and the results always fall short.
There may be computer programs without those embedded subroutines. There
could be programs that incrementally target some end. In any case, the
computer program is a highly ambiguous variant of a design argument, but one
well adapted to a naturalistic postdarwinism. It would make much more
sense to use these computer analogue to replace natural selection and design
arguments both with something closer to what we see in nature, if we could
understand it.

All it takes is a rare accident that gives one
lucky animal a mutation that improves its vision over that of its
siblings; if this helps it have more offspring than its rivals, this
gives evolution an opportunity to raise the bar and ratchet up the
design of the eye by one mindless step. And since these lucky
improvements accumulate - this was Darwin’s insight - eyes can
automatically get better and better and better, without any intelligent
designer.

It takes a lot more than one lucky mutation, and the odds
against that are astronomical. The famous argument from Hoyle about an
airplane in a tornado has never really been answered. It is unlikely for
random chance to produce minor beneficial changes. But since that is the
claim we should ask for some hard empirical proof. None whatever is offered.
As here, the argument shifts gears to ask us to look at the fact that eyes
actually evolved as proof natural selection was the cause!

Brilliant as the design of the eye is, it betrays
its origin with a tell-tale flaw: the retina is inside out. The nerve
fibers that carry the signals from the eye’s rods and cones (which
sense light and color) lie on top of them, and have to plunge through a
large hole in the retina to get to the brain, creating the blind spot.
No intelligent designer would put such a clumsy arrangement in a
camcorder, and this is just one of hundreds of accidents frozen in
evolutionary history that confirm the mindlessness of the historical
process.

More of the 'panda's thumb' style of flawed evolution
argumentation. The point is well taken that a designer wouldn't design flaws
into a product. But the existence of flaws is no argument for natural
selection. And in any case flawed designs are abundant in life. But they
often still do the job.

If you still find Test Two compelling, a sort of
cognitive illusion that you can feel even as you discount it, you are
like just about everybody else in the world; the idea that natural
selection has the power to generate such sophisticated designs is deeply
counterintuitive. Francis Crick, one of the discoverers of DNA, once
jokingly credited his colleague Leslie Orgel with “Orgel’s Second
Rule”: Evolution is cleverer than you are. Evolutionary biologists are
often startled by the power of natural selection to “discover” an
“ingenious” solution to a design problem posed in the lab.

If natural selection is so counterintuitive maybe there is
something wrong with it. It is not a believable argument. We should
certainly defer assent until the proof is in, and not take on faith in such
a religious fashion the most improbable hypothesis.

This observation lets us address a slightly more
sophisticated version of the cognitive illusion presented by Test Two.
When evolutionists like Crick marvel at the cleverness of the process of
natural selection they are not acknowledging intelligent design. The
designs found in nature are nothing short of brilliant, but the process
of design that generates them is utterly lacking in intelligence of its
own.

Intelligent design advocates, however, exploit the
ambiguity between process and product that is built into the word
“design.” For them, the presence of a finished product (a fully
evolved eye, for instance) is evidence of an intelligent design process.
But this tempting conclusion is just what evolutionary biology has shown
to be mistaken.

This point is reasonable, the ambiguity of 'design' and
'process' is real. We lack the conceptual means to examine natural processes
of design and are forced to fall back on fake arguments due to chance and
randomness.

Yes, eyes are for seeing, but these and all the
other purposes in the natural world can be generated by processes that
are themselves without purposes and without intelligence. This is hard
to understand, but so is the idea that colored objects in the world are
composed of atoms that are not themselves colored, and that heat is not
made of tiny hot things.

The focus on intelligent design has, paradoxically,
obscured something else: genuine scientific controversies about
evolution that abound. In just about every field there are challenges to
one established theory or another. The legitimate way to stir up such a
storm is to come up with an alternative theory that makes a prediction
that is crisply denied by the reigning theory - but that turns out to be
true, or that explains something that has been baffling defenders of the
status quo, or that unifies two distant theories at the cost of some
element of the currently accepted view.

To date, the proponents of intelligent design have
not produced anything like that. No experiments with results that
challenge any mainstream biological understanding. No observations from
the fossil record or genomics or biogeography or comparative anatomy
that undermine standard evolutionary thinking.

If intelligent design is untestable so is natural
selection, the reason for its spurious persistence, and the ease of
exploiting it as an argument, since noone can ever disprove the claims. No
observations from the fossil record? Indeed, there are almost no
observations to conclude anything, least of all natural selection. The idea
here seems to be 'proven until proven false', a distortion created by those
who control the space of debate.. It is impossible to prove natural
selection, so why conclude that it is the mechanism?

Instead, the proponents of intelligent design use a
ploy that works something like this. First you misuse or misdescribe
some scientist’s work. Then you get an angry rebuttal. Then, instead
of dealing forthrightly with the charges leveled, you cite the rebuttal
as evidence that there is a “controversy” to teach.

Note that the trick is content-free. You can use it
on any topic. “Smith’s work in geology supports my argument that the
earth is flat,” you say, misrepresenting Smith’s work. When Smith
responds with a denunciation of your misuse of her work, you respond,
saying something like: “See what a controversy we have here? Professor
Smith and I are locked in a titanic scientific debate. We should teach
the controversy in the classrooms.” And here is the delicious part:
you can often exploit the very technicality of the issues to your own
advantage, counting on most of us to miss the point in all the difficult
details.

You can use natural selection on any argument. Sight
unseen it can construct any device no matter how complex. Sight unseen
language in man developed by chance, random mutations. The exploitation of
natural selection in this fashion is completely outrageous. The shoe is on
the other foot.

[snip: see below]

For now, though, the theory they are promoting is
exactly what George Gilder, a long-time affiliate of the Discovery
Institute, has said it is: “Intelligent design itself does not have
any content.”

Since there is no content, there is no
“controversy” to teach about in biology class. But here is a good
topic for a high school course on current events and politics: Is
intelligent design a hoax? And if so, how was it perpetrat- ed?

Intelligent design may have no content, but neither does
natural selection as an argument. A good example of that is in one of Mr.
Dennett's own books, Freedom Evolves, where the issues of free will
are reduced by fiat to products of natural selection, and adaptation. Such a
highly speculative claim is typical of Darwinists, and looking at the
promotion of Darwinism we see all the tactics charged against its critics
fully in evidence in the field of biological evolution. To say there is no
controversy is simple belief. The bungled nature of Darwin's theory has
produced a controversy that has gone on for so long it is almost pitiful,
and the stimulus for that is the aberrant violation of proper scientific
methodology and standards of proof by Darwinists themselves, along with
their clear strategic realization that the issue is a media game, repeat the
same old distortions over and over, and get the editorial space in the
Times, and it doesn't matter if stitched together pseudo-arguments convince
people of the rightness of error.

It is the paradigm, stupid. Darwin's Dangerous Goof.

______________________

continued

William Dembski, one of the most vocal supporters
of intelligent design, notes that he provoked Thomas Schneider, a
biologist, into a response that Dr. Dembski characterizes as “some
hair-splitting that could only look ridiculous to outsider observers.”
What looks to scientists - and is - a knockout objection by Dr.
Schneider is portrayed to most everyone else as ridiculous
hair-splitting.

In short, no science. Indeed, no intelligent design
hypothesis has even been ventured as a rival explanation of any
biological phenomenon. This might seem surprising to people who think
that intelligent design competes directly with the hypothesis of
non-intelligent design by natural selection. But saying, as intelligent
design proponents do, “You haven’t explained everything yet,” is
not a competing hypothesis. Evolutionary biology certainly hasn’t
explained everything that perplexes biologists. But intelligent design
hasn’t yet tried to explain anything.

To formulate a competing hypothesis, you have to
get down in the trenches and offer details that have testable
implications. So far, intelligent design proponents have conveniently
sidestepped that requirement, claiming that they have no specifics in
mind about who or what the intelligent designer might be.

To see this shortcoming in relief, consider an
imaginary hypothesis of intelligent design that could explain the
emergence of human beings on this planet:

About six million years ago, intelligent genetic
engineers from another galaxy visited Earth and decided that it would be
a more interesting planet if there was a language-using,
religion-forming species on it, so they sequestered some primates and
genetically re-engineered them to give them the language instinct, and
enlarged frontal lobes for planning and reflection. It worked.

If some version of this hypothesis were true, it
could explain how and why human beings differ from their nearest
relatives, and it would disconfirm the competing evolutionary hypotheses
that are being pursued.

Not the intelligent design proponents, but Mr. Dennett
here proposes this outlandish hypothesis. Along with natural selection it
is so far not falsifiable, but, apart from its egregious science fiction
apparatus, it would explain a lot of the discrepancies in the current
account. It joins natural selection as a 'far out' claim.

We’d still have the problem of how these
intelligent genetic engineers came to exist on their home planet, but we
can safely ignore that complication for the time being, since there is
not the slightest shred of evidence in favor of this hypothesis.

But here is something the intelligent design
community is reluctant to discuss: no other intelligent-design
hypothesis has anything more going for it. In fact, my farfetched
hypothesis has the advantage of being testable in principle: we could
compare the human and chimpanzee genomes, looking for unmistakable signs
of tampering by these genetic engineers from another galaxy. Finding
some sort of user’s manual neatly embedded in the apparently
functionless “junk DNA” that makes up most of the human genome would
be a Nobel Prize-winning coup for the intelligent design gang, but if
they are looking at all, they haven’t come up with anything to report.

Candidates for intelligent designers are dime a dozen,
and it is hardly true that opponents of Darwin are reluctant to discuss
alternatives. Plato himself proposed a demiurge. But Dennett is
certainly correct that this a rocky road to travel. The plain and simple
issue is the failure of natural selection, more than that goes off the
deep end.

It’s worth pointing out that there are plenty of
substantive scientific controversies in biology that are not yet in the
textbooks or the classrooms. The scientific participants in these
arguments vie for acceptance among the relevant expert communities in
peer-reviewed journals, and the writers and editors of textbooks grapple
with judgments about which findings have risen to the level of
acceptance - not yet truth - to make them worth serious consideration by
undergraduates and high school students.

More of the aura of peer review. It is not hard to show
that the Darwin game has to be either a deception or a Kuhnian paradigm so
frozen as to breaks all records, voiding our trust in the peer review.
Peer review is the problem, not the solution. If the failure of Darwinism
went into free fall, the field could recover and stop handing religious
opponents 'victory' on a platter.

SO get in line, intelligent designers. Get in line
behind the hypothesis that life started on Mars and was blown here by a
cosmic impact. Get in line behind the aquatic ape hypothesis, the
gestural origin of language hypothesis and the theory that singing came
before language, to mention just a few of the enticing hypotheses that
are actively defended but still insufficiently supported by hard facts.

The Discovery Institute, the conservative
organization that has helped to put intelligent design on the map,
complains that its members face hostility from the established
scientific journals. But establishment hostility is not the real hurdle
to intelligent design. If intelligent design were a scientific idea
whose time had come, young scientists would be dashing around their
labs, vying to win the Nobel Prizes that surely are in store for anybody
who can overturn any significant proposition of contemporary
evolutionary biology.

Remember cold fusion? The establishment was
incredibly hostile to that hypothesis, but scientists around the world
rushed to their labs in the effort to explore the idea, in hopes of
sharing in the glory if it turned out to be true.

Instead of spending more than $1 million a year on
publishing books and articles for non-scientists and on other public
relations efforts, the Discovery Institute should finance its own
peer-reviewed electronic journal. This way, the organization could live
up to its self-professed image: the doughty defenders of brave
iconoclasts bucking the establishment.

Daniel C. Dennett, a professor of philosophy at
Tufts University, is the author of “Freedom Evolves” and
“Darwin’s Dangerous Idea.”