Detecting Design

 


"Intelligent design" enthusiasts sometimes point to the fact that many serious investigators support the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (S.E.T.I.), so they claim that the attempt to detect design in biology is a respectable pursuit. 

Here's a clip from the film version of Carl Sagan's book, "Contact".

The excitement comes from the immediate recognition that the signal must be from an intelligent source. Why is it instantly recognisable? It is because of all the possible sources of extraterrestrial radio emissions, it would be very difficult to envisage a natural, dumb process that could generate a series of pulses in a prime number pattern. 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 11... repeatedly.

But caution is always called for. When the first precise, regular pulsar signals were detected, it opened up the possibility in people's minds that they might have an artificial origin. However, a natural explanation was looked for first, and it was found. By the way, pulsars disprove the young earth creationist notion that the speed of light has changed over time. If it had, it would be detectable by direct, repeatable observation in the here-and-now (Ken Ham's gold standard for acceptable scientific proof). 

But why do we try to find natural explanations first? Not because we are skeptical of the possibility of an intelligent source, but because of one of the guiding principles of science, parsimony. If there is a simpler account for any phenomenon, that one is preferred over the more complex and elaborate ones. 

So what about the Fibonacci sequence? It features as the basis of the code in Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code". It's the sequence of numbers, starting with 0 and 1, where the next number is determined by the sum of the two previous numbers, so it goes 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8,13, 21 and so on. Is the source of this sequence an intelligent one, or is there a more parsimonious explanation? The sequence, and the related Golden Ratio, are often misapplied or made more of than is warranted, but it is real. It flows from the way in which things naturally grow and build. The next stage of growth is a function of the stages that  precede it. There is no need to invoke some mysterious influence behind it, and the mechanism, unlike the "contact" code, does not require technology. Parsimony dictates that if you have a simple, mundane explanation for a phenomenon, why complicate it unnecessarily? Dull and unexciting, maybe, but it has served scientific enquiry well.

It was William Paley who, famously, and using the watchmaker analogy, argued for intelligent design in living forms by  appealing to their complexity. He was unable to find any explanation that could overcome his incredulity at the idea that they had not been intelligently designed. But then, evolution occurred to Darwin and Wallace. Dawkins pointed out that Paley's watch, found on the heath, was a poor argument for watchmaker-like design in living organisms, because a pocket watch stands out as being very different from undesigned nature and its living products. Watches do not reproduce themselves with heritable variations that are subject to selection. Dawkins called the superficial appearance of design in nature "designoid" and went on to discuss the whole business in his book "The Blind Watchmaker". Indeed, evolution is a superior explanation of the goofs in designoid products to the explanation that they are the work of designer, unless that designer is exceedingly dumb. 

Any argument for design has to meet the requirements of parsimony, and to account for all the available data. ID fails on both counts.