The Design Revolution

Today I'm going to do something a bit different. I just finished reading The Design Revolution, by William A. Dembski. It's about the idea of intelligent design, in the form of a series of questions that critics of the idea would or have asked him about the idea of intelligent design. I just wanted to write down my thoughts about the book here.

A huge theme in this book is the dogmatism of science today, especially when it comes to evolution. Scientists believe that evolution is true. Period. In many ways the ideas of a dogmatic science may seem counter-intuitive--after all, isn't the idea of science to reach for new knowledge in an unbiased way?--but I think it's true, at least to a certain extent. It's certainly true of scientists and creationism (which is separate than intelligent design, which simply states that some being created or shaped life as we know it)--every scientist I've ever known speaks of creationism as really stupid. Scientists try to think of themselves as open-minded, but they often have a very set thought pattern. This is true not just in their thinking about intelligent design versus evolution, but in everything.

Another theme was the complexity of life. Dembski argues that irreducible complexity--a system where taking out any one part of the system makes the system unable to function--is a reliable way to spot intelligent design. The idea behind this is that such a system, where everything is vitally important, could not gradually evolve--it must have come about just the way it is, because no other combination of parts makes a functioning whole. On one level that makes sense--in fact, a similar technique is used in lots of other things too, like archaeology and cryptology--and on another level I doubt it. How can we infer anything about a designer we know nothing about? He/she/it (I'm speaking here of a purely theoretical designer, not the God that I ultimately believe to be the designer) is so far beyond our understanding that how can we infer/decide anything about him/her/it? (I suppose you could make a similar argument about Christianity, but we have the guidance of God. He spoke to us and told us about Himself. How much would we have known otherwise, though?) Dembski did address this point, by pointing out that archaeologists and cryptologists and so on don't need to know anything about the person who made the artifact/code they're analyzing to be able to realize that it's been designed, and I suppose the same is true here. Also, of course, science shouldn't just shy back because of the possibility that they won't understand or that they're wrong, because there's always that possibility.

Irreducible complexity, Dembski argues, is something that has not been adequately explained by evolutionists. It's true that a hypothesis is not the same as proof that something happened the way the hypothesis says it did. But Dembski also argues that evolutionists need to provide proof that some irreducibly complex system evolved gradually, as they claim irreducible complexity did evolve. How would they prove that? It is, after all, impossible to un-evolve an organism back to the way it was X million years ago, after all. The lack of proof and provability to a lot of evolutionary biology, especially the formation of species and macroevolution in general, is a huge problem for evolution. All of the proof for macroevolution is based on inferences, mostly from evidence like the incomplete fossil record, DNA, and geographical location/history. The problem with inferences is that if you don't understand the situation as well as you think you do, you can be so completely wrong and still think that all the evidence points your way.

And it is true that so much of macroevolution especially is still a complete mystery to biologists, whether they want to admit it or not. Dembski even goes so far as to claim that it is a completely unproven theory. My first response to that was definitely to get all defensive, but in a way it's true. Certain amounts of species formation has been observed by biologists--for instance in apple and hawthorn flies, which used to be a single species. Once the apple tree was introduced to North America, some flies switched to feeding on them. Over time, this switch appears to have led to the isolation, and possibly complete splitting off into a separate species by, the apple-feeding flies (For more information see Berkeley's "Sympatric Speciation" and Martin G. Kelly's "As the Worm Turns: Speciation and the Apple Maggot Fly"). However, this is a short-term example. Yes, there are other examples, but just because one species of fly appears to be able to split into two species without obvious help doesn't mean that a plant or animal could evolve from a bacteria, or birds from reptiles, or any of the other major evolutionary transitions that have occurred in the history of life could have occurred, without help. Yes, there is most definitely proof that macroevolution and the formation of species has occurred. That doesn't mean that those new species arose purely because of evolutionary mechanisms, or even because of evolutionary mechanisms at all. So many new species and new innovations, like flight in birds and flowers and insect pollination, seem to have just suddenly appeared, and no one really has any idea how or why. The typical explanation is that much of evolution is driven by ecological factors, many or all of which it would be impossible to determine from the fossil record, or that the fossil record is spotty enough that intermediate fossils don't exist or haven't been found yet. And maybe at least some of that's true. But the more I've learned about such problems, the more I think that something must have pushed or nudged to get things to how they are now, or at least on the path to become so. Take the evolution of flight in birds. No one can really think of any good intermediate reason for the reptiles that evolved into birds to have gone from having four legs to having two legs and two wings. Wouldn't the intermediate have been awkward, to say the least? It's clear that they two are related, evolutionarily, but again that doesn't prove that evolution was the mechanism that caused reptiles to evolve into birds. (Perhaps I should point out here that when I say 'evolution', I mean completely random evolution with no input at all from any outside source, ie the designer ie God)

Which brings up another really interesting, and I found really convincing point, and that is the tendency of life to go from less to more complex. Evolutionists always explain it as the way things are, just a tendency of evolution, but that really doesn't make sense. The Second Law of Thermodynamics says that the entropy (ie randomness, and presumably also organization/complexity) of a system (such as the universe) is always increasing, and the only way to increase the organization is to put energy into doing so. Why would a completely random evolution favor an increase in complexity? It doesn't make sense. Especially since increases in complexity in the history of life almost always seem to just appear, almost out of nowhere. Why would God want to create a world full of complex organisms? Did He really create the whole universe and history of life just for us humans? If so, why go to all the trouble? Why not just create humans and the earth, as He wanted them, at the beginning, like Genesis says? Of course, I have no idea, I was just wondering. If anything, I'd say that if you look at how natural selection acts on organisms, it favors simplicity. Parasites especially tend to become extremely simple over time. Natural selection has been proven to be able to modify existing structures and behaviors, but it has never been observed creating entirely new structures (although it is often argued, and there is some support for this, that most "new" structures are actually pre-existing, modified structures).

One problem I did have with the book was Dembski's criticism of evolutionary biology for its lack of ability to make predictions. Biology is not physics or mathematics, where every theory has a working, fairly accurate formula. Life is not predictable like numbers are. We understand how natural selection works (and natural selection is a proven phenomenon, which Dembski admits as well), but we do not understand how an organism's body works; it's much too complex. We also don't particularly understand how ecosystems work. But it's these two things that are interacting, because with natural selection the ecosystem is one of the things that is putting pressure on the organism and its body. So how could we possibly predict what would happen? (Is this the point Dembski is trying to make?)

Another, more scientific criticism I had was the fact that Dembski totally ignored several aspects of evolution. Evolution occurs through four mechanisms: mutation, gene flow, genetic drift, and selection (Wikipedia's article "Evolution" is actually pretty thorough, and mentions a few other evolutionary forces as well). Only selection, and only natural selection at that, were even mentioned (there's also artificial and sexual selection--possibly because neither are particularly random, unlike the other evolutionary forces), except for a few brief mentions of mutation. This did surprise me a bit, not least because all four of these mechanisms are essentially completely random processes (which was a large, and I thought rather successful part of his argument--come on, how likely or logical is it that nothing would evolve into a bacteria would evolve into a plant, animal, fungus, or protist completely because of random processes? Those are all extremely complex organisms, after all!). I think that the other evolutionary forces should have been addressed at least a bit more.

Wow. This turned into a really long post! Thanks for bearing with me, and I hope it mostly made sense (if not let me know!). I still have more to say, but I'm done for now. I think I'll post more on this tomorrow, more on the spiritual rather than scientific side.