Design? Yawn, Ho-hum

Jeffrey Shallit doesn't think "that the question 'is it designed?', in the absence of any candidate for a designer, is particularly interesting." I guess it's a regular yawner. This came as part of a continuing blog discussion with Michael Egnor.

The Panda's Thumb crowd has nailed Dr. Egnor with the deadly, unanswerable epithet of "egnorant." I was labeled with equally deadly, unanswerable labels, like "Gilligan," in grade school. Sometimes they actually do make substantive responses to Egnor's work at Evolution News and Views, as Shallit did here. He cannot be easily dismissed, though, and his answer to Shallit this time is powerful, including this:

"Is design in the absence of any candidate for a designer really uninteresting? Imagine coming home from work and finding a note on the table, in your wife’s handwriting: 'I love you.' It’s a wonderful note, but not particularly interesting, because you know who wrote it and how and why it was written. The sentiment is wonderful, but the note is mundane. Now imagine that you find a note, written in unfamiliar handwriting, taped to your car: 'I love you.' You don’t know the author, and you have no casual history for the note, except that you surmise that the paramour is human, shy, and probably of the opposite sex. Most people (even scientists!) would agree that this note is a lot more interesting, precisely because its vintage is uncertain. The absence of a discernible casual history makes the design more tantalizing."

That's a taste of his answer, not the whole thing. The point is well taken. Egnor could have gone further in answering one of Shallit's points, though:

[Egnor:] The analogy between human design and biological design isn’t perfect. There’s no reason to expect that it would be — the design in the genetic code is, after all, rarified design, not human design. Yet Dr. Shallit chooses odd examples of disanalogy:

[Shallit:] Genes, for example, are often pleiotropic; they have multiple interacting effects. Human design, on the other hand tends to separate systems so they don't interact.

[Egnor:] Human designs don’t interact? What about electronic networks, assembly lines, feedback systems, and autopilots? What about integrated circuits? Surely Dr. Shallit occasionally opens computers and looks.

Add this: why do humans keep systems independent, to the extent that we do? Interlocking systems, with shared resources and inter-related information processing, can be more efficient than those that are separate. They grow exponentially more complicated, however, as they increase. That makes them beastly difficult to handle, with unanticipated feeback loops, instabilities, competing resource needs, and so on. But pleiotropy is amazing: it works! One gene can have multiple effects. Multiple interlocking systems like pleiotropy can easily be a sign of far more intelligent design, not unintelligent design.

Egnor's riff on "skirnobs" is relevant to our recent discussions on "explanation" here. A "skirnob" is some newly discovered artifact that may or may not exhibit signs of design. Shallit says whether it's designed or not is scientifically irrelevant. Egnor answers,

"If the skirnob is designed, the scientist can completely understand the skirnob only by studying the teleology — the purpose — of the artifact, as well as the laws and chance that played a role in its emergence. The scientist would discover that the stains, in addition to abiding by the laws of chemistry and physics, conveyed meaning — in this case, the lament of an aging poet (Shakespeare, in his 73rd sonnet).

"The correct inference to design — rarefied or mundane — is essential to an understanding of a phenomenon, because it determines how we study it. The distinction between a natural object and a designed artifact matters. We might melt down an asteroid to understand its composition. We wouldn’t melt down a spacecraft to understand it."

Here, too, you'll need to read the whole for the full context.

If skirnobs are designed, then their being designed is part of their explanation--no matter what else we learn or fail to learn about them. That's not to say that our search for understanding stops there. It's just the beginning. We would still explore their material aspects (what can be learned by traditional scientific means), and we would search for understanding of the designer. That it's only the beginning of understanding does not make it any less a contribution to what we know about skirnobs.

There's also this from Shallit:

"Dembski likes to say something on the order of 'witnessing specified events of low probability implicates design'. But the correct claim is merely 'specified events of low probability are never witnessed at all; if they are, that is prima facie evidence that your probability estimates are wildly off'."

I don't know the mathematics by which they came to this conclusion, but it sure looks to me like they're saying that no matter what you see, it's evidence that you're wrong. I do understand the example they followed this with, and it's certainly not something that can be generalized to prima facie proof that one's probability estimates are off. It's an example with extremely low credibility, its probability (about 1 in 10^-18) is low but far higher than Dembski's 1 in 10^-150 boundary, and there's no specification to it.

Finally, Shallit complains,

"To say that SETI is like the genetic code means that we have to hypothesize some designer who designed something for some reason. But where's the designer?"
If we say the designer is God, we get blasted for going beyond the science to get there (and indeed, science really doesn't get us that far). If we say we're only going as far as the science gets us, we get blasted for not knowing where the designer is. Nice trick.

Posted: Thu - September 27, 2007 at 09:44 AM |

Thinking Christian by Tom Gilson getCategoryName("<$CategoryUUID$>");

Design? Yawn, Ho-hum

Thinking Christian by Tom Gilson