Intelligent Design– Dennett Space Alien Example
The naked anger at the idea of intelligent design is one of the best signs that it’s plausible. As you can see from the links on Christianity Today’s weblog, the critics typically equate it with creationism and then attack that straw man, or sputter about the credentials of ID people without coming to grips with the argument. It isn’t helped, of course, by the habit of many ID advocates of talking about “Darwinism” as if their own theory weren’t mostly Darwinist. A good example of a critic, because he is smart but make a confused attack anyway, is Daniel Dennett in the New York Times. In coming up with what he thinks is a devastating example against ID, he actually supports it:
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.
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.
Dennett is quite right that the space-visitors hypothesis is just like the ID hypothesis. Look at the name: “Intelligent Design”. It’s not “Divine Design”. ID people admit that they have not pinned down the identity of the designer in the theory. So Dennett’s example does not work against ID.
Moreover, his example refutes his own argument, a common one, that there is no way to test an intelligent design theory. He’s proposed a test: if you find a user’s manual in the junk DNA, you’ve got an intelligent designer. Or, you might find a copy of the Bible there.
Of course, we haven’t found a user’s manual in junk DNA. To this there are two responses.
First, even the intelligent design theory does not say that there *must* be a user’s manual in junk DNA. All we can say is that if we do find such a manual, then the random mutation theory must be false. It’s a one-way test.
Second, maybe we still will find such a manual. I don’t think so, but it’s possible.
“But that’s grasping at straws!” would say the Randomists. “You can’t just say it must be there and you just haven’t found it yet.”
I quite agree— but that’s one of the big problems for the Randomists. Their theory predicts that there ought to be lots of intermediate animal forms between, say, the dinosaurs and man, but we haven’t found their fossils. Why not? Just bad luck, they say– which may be true, but is like my “second” above. If we say that Intelligent Design is refuted by lack of a user’s manual or Bible in DNA, we must say that Randomism is refuted even more strongly by lack of intermediate fossil forms.
August 31st, 2005 at 10:58 am
Dear Eric,
I believe we met once at the Poynter Center when you presented a paper you had written on sexual harrassment in the workplace. Did you ever get that published?
You write that “The naked anger at the idea of intelligent design is one of the best signs that it’s plausible.” By that logic, Darwinian evolutionary theory is also plausible, correct?
I think you missed the point of Dennett’s example. Whether the intelligent designer is God or aliens is irrelevant. All that does is put us back in the quandry Darwin faced when he had no mechanism to explain natural selection. Now we do have a mechanism - it’s called genetics. Calling it an intelligent designer without specifying anything else about the designer amounts to mere hocus pocus.
I think people get angry about intelligent design theory because it masquerades as science, but it is actually non-science. Intelligent design theorists essentially say that if they can’t explain something (like how the eye evolved), it can’t be explained - except by referring to an intelligent designer, which they can’t explain. It’s giving up.
I also think you’re wrong about the missing link argument. There are many, many links in the fossil record between ancient life forms and current ones, and there are many, many links between ancient mammals and human beings. If the record as it stands is not good enough for you, could you specify what a knock-down convincing missing link would look like?
Ken
September 2nd, 2005 at 5:35 am
I don’t pretend to give any scientific weight to an argument either way, but from a social standpoint it’s interesting how this debate looks from the sidelines. I first read a few things about ID some six or seven years ago, thought it was a quirky and interesting little idea, and thought nothing more of it. Well, after a few more years, the scientific community seems to be changing their attitude from thinking that ID is a cute little diversion to thinking of it as a threat. The scientific community says this largely has to do with the way ID is shortcircuiting the normal scientific routes and going straight to the people (selling mass-market pop science books, trying to get ID taught in school, etc.), but when I read things like , I have to think that something deeper is bothering them.
September 4th, 2005 at 2:04 pm
Yes, that’s quite right. The anger that Darwin inspired was a sign of its plausibility. There are interesting parallels, which someone might write up. Anti-Darwinists also commonly attacked Darwin’s motives instead of his arguments (”He’s really just trying to promote atheism” versus today’s “He’s really just trying to promote Christianity”) and relied on emotional appeals to authority (”His theory is blindly naturalistic” and “This is just what one man thinks; most experts think otherwise,” versus today’s “His theory really isn’t scientific” and “Hardly any scientists think that”)
“Genetics” is only part of an answer. The idea of mutations does fix one of the biggest deficiencies of Darwin’s original theory— how you get new characteristics for selection to act on— but there still are problems with how we get the right mutations.
Keep in mind, too, that intelligent design isn’t just about evolution. It also points to odd coincidences needed for physics to generate the world we observe.
And what do the anti-ID people use for explanation? Nothing at all. They just say, “Yes, it’s implausible, but randomness must have produced it somehow. And whatever produced it, it can’t be an intelligent designer”. That’s less of a theory than intelligent design has.
The issue here is not whether there are *any* current life forms whose evolution from ancient life forms we can trace. There certainly are– I’ve heard the horse described as one. But that’s no more relevant than the fact that there are some life forms that have existed essentially unchanged over most of the fossil record– the horseshoe crab is one of them, I think. We can’t use the horse to say that we have proof that all organisms have evolved smoothly, and we can’t use the horseshoe crab to say that no organism has evolved.
(We can use the horse as evidence that *some* creatures have evolved smoothly, which is applicable to the evolution/creationism debate, but that isn’t the ID debate.)
Rather, the question is whether we have found the number of intermediate forms that we ought to have found. I’ll address that in a separate post.