Study of design is science, not revelation

MARK HARTWIG
Sunday, August 28, 2005

“Intelligent design.” It’s been in the news a lot lately. Lawsuits over textbook stickers, the presentation of evolution and the legality of presenting alternatives, have thrust the term into public awareness. Even President Bush has acknowledged it as a scientific program worthy of further research and study.
But just what is intelligent design? To hear some folks talk, you’d think it’s a scam to sneak Genesis into science classrooms. Yet intelligent design has nothing to do with the six days of creation and everything to do with hard evidence and logic.

Intelligent design (ID) is grounded on the ancient observation that the world looks very much as if it had an intelligent source. Indeed, as early as the fifth century BC, the Greek philosopher and astronomer Anaxagoras concluded, “Mind set in order — all that ever was — and all that is now or ever will be.”

After 2,400 years, the appearance of design is as powerful as ever. That is especially true of the living world. Advances in biology have revealed that world to be one of staggering complexity. For example, consider the cell. Even the simplest cells bristle with high-tech machinery. On the outside, their surfaces are studded with sensors, gates, pumps and identification markers. Some bacteria even sport rotary outboard motors that they use to navigate their environment.

Inside, cells are jam-packed with power plants, assembly lines, recycling units and more. Miniature monorails whisk materials from one part of the cell to another.

Such sophistication has led even the most hard-bitten atheists to remark on the apparent design in living organisms. The late Nobel laureate Francis Crick, co-discoverer of DNA’s structure and an outspoken critic of religion, has nonetheless remarked, “Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed but rather evolved.”

Clearly, Crick (and others like him) considers the appearance of design to be strictly an illusion, created by naturalistic evolution. Yet it’s also clear that this impression is so compelling that an atheistic biologist must warn his colleagues against it.

In contrast, ID theorists contend that living organisms appear designed because they are designed. And unlike the design thinkers whom Darwin deposed, they’ve developed rigorous new concepts to test their idea.

In the past, detecting design was hampered by vague and subjective criteria, such as discerning an object’s purpose. Moreover, design was entangled with natural theology—which seeks, in part, to infer God’s character by studying nature rather than revelation.

Natural theologians often painted such a rosy view of nature that they became an easy mark for Darwin when he proposed his theory of evolution. Where they saw a finely-balanced world attesting to a kind and just God, Darwin pointed to nature’s imperfections and brutishness.

Since the 1980s, however, developments in several fields have made it possible to rigorously distinguish between things that “just happen” and those that happen “on purpose.” This has helped design theory emerge as a distinct enterprise, aimed at detecting intelligence rather than speculating about God’s character.

Dubbed “intelligent design” to distinguish it from old-school thinking, this new view is detailed in The Design Inference (Cambridge University Press, 1998), a peer-reviewed work by mathematician and philosopher William Dembski.

In contrast to what is called creation science, which parallels Biblical theology, ID rests on two basic assumptions: namely, that intelligent agents exist and that their effects are empirically detectable.

Its chief tool is specified complexity. That’s a mouthful, and the math behind it is forbidding, but the basic idea is simple: An object displays specified complexity when it has lots of parts (is complex) arranged in a recognizable, delimited pattern (is specified).

For example, the article you’re now reading has thousands of characters, which could have been arranged in zillions of ways. Yet it fits a recognizable pattern: It’s not just a jumble of letters (which is also complex), but a newspaper article written in English. Any rational person would conclude that it was designed.

The effectiveness of such thinking is confirmed by massive experience. As Dembski points out, “In every instance where we find specified complexity, and where [its] history is known, it turns out that design actually is present.”

Thus, if we could trace the creation of a book, our investigation would lead us to the author. You could say, then, that specified complexity is a signature of design.

To see how this applies to biology, consider the outboard motor that bacteria such as E. coli use to navigate their environment. This water-cooled contraption, called a flagellum, comes equipped with a reversible engine, drive shaft, U-joint and a long whip-like propeller. It hums along at a cool 17,000 rpm.

Decades of research indicate that its complexity is enormous. It takes about 50 genes to create a working flagellum. Each of those genes is as complex as a sentence with hundreds of letters.

Moreover, the pattern—a working flagellum—is highly specified. Deviate from that pattern, knock out a single gene, and our bug is dead in the water (or whatever).

Such highly specified complexity, which demands the presence of every part, indicates an intelligent origin. It also defies any explanation, such as contemporary Darwinism, that relies on the stepwise accumulation of random genetic change.

In fact, if you want to run the numbers, as Dembski does in his book “No Free Lunch,” it boils down to the following: If every elementary particle in the observed universe (about 1,080) were cranking out mutation events at the cosmic speed limit (about 1,045 times per second) for a billion times the estimated age of the universe, they still could not produce the genes for a working flagellum.

And that’s just one system within multiple layers of systems. Thus the flagellum is integrated into a sensory/guidance system that maneuvers the bacterium toward nutrients and away from noxious chemicals — a system so complex that computer simulation is required to understand it in its entirety. That system is meshed with other systems. And so on.

Of course, what’s important here is not what we conclude about the flagellum or the cell, but how we study it. Design theorists don’t derive their conclusions from revelation, but by looking for reliable, rigorously defined indicators of design and by ruling out alternative explanations, such as Darwinism.

Calling their work religious is just a cheap way to dodge the issues. The public—and our students—deserve better than that.

Mark Hartwig has a Ph.D. in educational psychology from the University of California, Santa Barbara. He was an early organizer of the intelligent design movement and for 10 years was managing editor of the science journal Origins Research.

Study of design is science, not revelation - York Daily Record