Intelligent Design theory

[undyingking]

I've been musing about this interesting 'theory' just lately. Essentially it claims that there are some things about life (in the biological sense) that are just too complicated to have evolved by natural selection, and so instead they must have been designed by some more powerful agent.

It's been claimed that this is just creationism in pseudo-respectable guise, and certainly it's seems to have been treated that way in the Kansas State Board of Education. But I guess we can do the proponents the politeness of taking at face value their claim that the Christian God is not a necessary component.

My interest is in the actual structure of the argument. It's actually very old (Thomas Aquinas I believe put it forward) and so presumably has a lasting appeal, but it seems to me to be impossibly weak. The weakness is that it seems to take the arguer's own paowers of imagination / reasoning as axiomatic of the system. It's saying "I can't imagine how this could have arisen by non-designed means, therefore it can't have." You would think it could automatically be refuted by someone else saying "Well, I can quite easily imagine it, so boo sucks to you." Although a philosopher would probably put that more elegantly.

In the 19th century opponents of Darwinism cited the eye as an example -- saying that part of an eye provided no benefit, therefore natural selection could not have evolved it gradually towards its current form as Darwinists suggested. This was quite easily shot down by showing that just by looking around the animal kingdom of today we can identify a whole spectrum of optical structures which are less complex than our own eyes but which provide benefit to their users.

Today's intelligent design advocates use things like the bombardier beetle, the blood clotting sequence, and the bacterial flagellum as examples of things which only work at all when fully realized. I don't know enough biology to be able to counter these examples, but presumably it can be done?

The more practical question though is about whether ID should be taught in schools. Richard Dawkins has said that this would be equivalent to teaching flat earth theory, and of course Flying Spaghetti Monsterism also has its advocates. However it seems to me that it would be useful if schools gave a bit of perspective on how science arose and the intellectual battles it had to fight, rather than just handing it down on stone tablets. The Victorians were presented with Darwinism as an alternative to the prevailing creationist theory, and they were intelligent enough to (mostly) see that Darwinism was more likely to be right. Won't our children understand natural selection better if they work out for themselves why it's superior to what came before, rather than just being told that it's right because the syllabus says so?

Comments

[waistcoatmark.livejournal.com]

Children already get taught about the scientific method and development of scientific theory with wave/particle duality of light. People thinking it was particles, Newton proving it was waves, Einstein proving it was both etc. I vaguely remember something about phlogiston in chemistry as well. If you're going to show progress, do it with something less contentious that isn't going to confuse children and/or encourage idiotic ideas.

To take your line of argument to a slightly further degree: why not teach holocaust denial as an alternative theory in history?

[dr-bob.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't have thought the blood clotting sequence is hard to imagine evolving. Start with a protein that forms clots under specific condiditions (eg exposure to air/seawater). then gradually extra proteins evolve that prevent it clotting at the wrong times, to make it a more precisely controlled system. Really no leaps of the imagination there.

And while it is probably is reasonable to give time to ID, it should probably be proportionate to the evidence for it, rather than equal to the time given to ID as to evolution.

The lesson goes - here; read the start of Genesis. Now, about fossils, dinosaurs, speckled moths, cro-magnon etc. But that kind of approach does not pacify the christian right wing school boards of the Deep (dark) South.

[bibliogirl.livejournal.com]

While I would like to see more history of science taught in schools, there is probably some benefit to be gained from the "handed down on stone tablets" school of teaching it simply as a counter to "well, MY mummy and daddy say that the stork brought me and God created us all, and they're ALWAYS right". It's not a whole lot different from the way that various topics are taught differently in junior school, at GCSE, at A-level, on degree courses, etc.

I'm just trying to remember if/when I was taught about flat earth theory. Might've been history, might've been physics, entirely plausible it was both.

[metame.livejournal.com]

"However it seems to me that it would be useful if schools gave a bit of perspective on how science arose and the intellectual battles it had to fight"

agreed, but IMHO would be better to teach very generally (or about something we no longer really debate (such as flat earth)) rather than *just* when we look at evolution. The problem being that it makes people think that evolution is a special case, one where science 'may have got it wrong'. Which loses the fact that science always 'may have got it wrong' and explicitly welcomes falsifiability.

As for 'how weird would something have to be to not be possible (or reasonable) to have evolved' - I'm similarly a bit stumped as to how you might ever draw a line.

[cardinalsin.livejournal.com]

Old theories such as phlogiston are now believed by nobody, and so can be comfortably taught, not as an alternative theory, but as a predecessor of modern theory.

Intelligent Design doesn't really fit this bill.

For a start, it isn't really a predecessor of evolutionary theory except in the loosest possible sense. The real predecessor is creationism, which was dogmatic, and not necessarily accompanied by any argument whatsoever. Some philosophers (e.g. Aquinas) did attempt it, but not just by argument from design; they also attempted the ontological argument and other such mumbo-jumbo. So we can't really legitimately teach Intelligent Design per se as history.

Secondly, some people still believe it. This might be seen as a good reason to teach it as current theory, except that AFAIK it is an unbelievably small minority of professional biologists who believe it, plus an unknown number of non-scientists. So teaching it would be rather like teaching the theory that life came from Mars - some people do believe it, but it isn't really a credible or interesting theory, and certainly isn't central to the corpus of modern biology.

Thirdly, it is a theory that cannot be disproved. Think about it; what evidence could possibly convince us that Intelligent Design was untrue? Even if evolutionary theory were to be categorically proven (not possible), the very fact of evolution could be a testament to the Designer's ingenuity. So it isn't really scientific at all, unlike phlogiston (and flat earth theory for that matter) which at least can succumb to evidence.

So I don't really see the rationale for teaching ID in science classes - perhaps it could be argued as a component of philosophy or religious studies classes (to go alongside Aquinas' arguments).

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

I think a good way to think about what's going on here is to look at Wikipedia with its "Neutral Point Of View" (NPOV) policy.

What one sees is that the policy simply shifts debate from the issues themselves and onto whether the points of view presented are indeed neutral. This frequently ends with a little red icon at the top of the article signifying disputed NPOV.

In schools, those little red icons are exactly what kids don't need. They confuse the concept of presenting a logical argument with the concept of holding an opinion. Example:

Bob: 1 + 1 = 2
Jack: 1 + 1 = 3

Which of these is right ? I prefer Bob's version, but I can only prove Jack wrong if he accepts my mechanisms of proof (which is unlikely given that he doesn't even accept 1 + 1 = 2).

Ultimately, a school's job is made much easier if they can present one complete system of thought before embarking on others. Most kids won't be ready for ideas like "competing philosophies" until well into their teens anyway. As such, the question of what is taught cannot - in my view - be resolved by talk of "scientific method" and suchlike.

It could be argued that parents with certain beliefs and lifestyles disadvantage their kids by passing them on. If true, this provides the basis for a very messy conflict between the parents' wish to bring up their kids as they choose and the wish of society to adopt preventative measures against problems which ultimately result in disadvantaged citizens (who may then require subsidy).

[fractalgeek.livejournal.com]

There was a very fine New scientist all about ID recently....

1) US poll - if I can remember the figures right
55% Americans believe God intervened in their evolution
30% believed humans were created directly
15% believed Man evolved without intervention(whether a creator started the world/universe or not).

I find these figures scary.

2) ID proponents use the term "theory" in its layman sense to give equal weight to the scientifically-termed theory of evolution - as in a testable, evidence based system of reasoning to explain how things are.

3) ID proponents are willing to concede evolution on the small short-term scale (eg drug resistance, colour of moths,...) but the big scale which isn't observable is somehow intrinsically different.... and fossils conveniently don't show enough detail to prove every single point of change

4) ID requires a director, who, when they let their guard down is invariably the Christian God.


I am a confirmed agnostic. Should it ever be proved to me that there is a creator, I will be much more impressed by one that just set the universe going, and we emerged from it, than either total determinism or "god the meddler".....

If ID is to be taught, it should be taught only as part of religious education as a belief framework. Pretending it has equal weight to science and logic damages education.