Critic in the Matrix
by MikeGeneSince some of you have read The Design Matrix, or are in the process of reading it, I thought I would use this time window to wink at y'all. And to facilitate my friendly winking, I will use a recent essay from Mac Johnson. Johnson a writer and medical researcher in Cambridge, Mass. and is a regular contributor to HUMAN EVENTS. The title of his essay is Intelligent Design, and Other Dumb Ideas. If you have read the Design Matrix, I encourage you to read Johnson' s essay and come back here to survey the terrain.
If you have read the Matrix, you will quickly realize the impotence of Johnson's complaints. Here is how Johnson characterizes ID:
According to the mindset of ID leaves could have been green or they could have been blue. But God chose green because he was feeling a bit green that day. Or maybe he thought green would really bring out the color of Adam's eyes; it's hard to say really. But it definitely had nothing to with the unguided selection of the chlorophyll molecule to best utilize atmospherically filtered sunlight as an adenosine triphosphate producing energy source.
Biology (already burdened with the study of the most complex phenomenon known to man) is reduced by Intelligent Design to a meaningless cataloguing service for divine handicrafts. It can no longer seek to understand so much as a sniffle or a dandelion seed without endlessly recycling the same useless answer: must be how God wanted it!
Compare this to what you have read in the Matrix. You will immediately come away with the impression that Johnson is fundamentally uninformed. And it is not a good idea to begin your critique from a position that is easily detected as fundamentally uninformed.
Johnson's whole argument is premised on a simplistic perspective where not only is evolution played against intelligent design, but where we face a simple binary of choice of Everything Designed or Evolved. Yet it is this very premise that is shattered by the Matrix. And once shattered, Johnson's entire anti-ID argument collapses with a thud. It was as quick, simple, and final as that.
But it gets better. As you survey the remnants of the collapsed argument, note that not only did Johnson's primary argument fail against the Matrix, but some of the subsidiary arguments actually strengthen the Matrix. Oh, oh. Consider these key moments of perception from Johnson:
I see the most incredible collection of biochemical happenstance and half measures imaginable -a cobbled together assortment of "good enoughs" and "why nots.""¦ Hey, whatever gets you through the Pliocene"¦..Darwinism is usually described as "survival of the fittest," but "survival of the sufficiently fit" might be a better shorthand. Any biologist could give many such examples of flawed "designs". Blood vessels running in front of your retina decrease visual acuity. Wouldn't a designer have run them behind the retina, as wires in a camera are run behind the film?
Johnson has stuck his big toe into the warm waters of the Matrix. Will he ease the rest of the way in and continue contributing to the investigation or quickly pull back to re-posture in the Battle? Either way, I suspect readers of The Design Matrix 
December 8th, 2007 at 5:21 am
Hey, I just opened my fancy camera and I see no wires. But wait, there is no film either!
Comment by inunison — December 8, 2007 @ 5:21 am
December 8th, 2007 at 5:14 pm
I happen to think Johnson's point about the backward wiring is a good one for two reasons.
First, something like this does count against ID, which is one reason why teleologists attempt to account for this type of design. Johnson's mistake is in thinking that it not only refutes ID, but that it refutes ID everywhere.
Second, it helps us appreciate that the blind watchmaker is only "concerned" about making things "work." He writes: Darwinism is usually described as "survival of the fittest," but "survival of the sufficiently fit" might be a better shorthand.
Indeed.
Comment by MikeGene — December 8, 2007 @ 5:14 pm
December 8th, 2007 at 10:35 pm
"Any biologist could give many such examples of flawed "designs". Blood vessels running in front of your retina decrease visual acuity. Wouldn't a designer have run them behind the retina, as wires in a camera are run behind the film?"
I think it is at least arguable that the vertebrate eye is instead an optimal design considering all the different tradeoffs. It's a biological system, not a video camera. The inverted retina places the photoreceptor ends of the rod and cone layer in direct contact with the choriocapillaris (capillary layer) behind it, which supplies it very efficiently with blood and oxygen. Such close contact is necessary because the photoreceptors have very high energy demands (very high metabolic rate) and need a lot of oxygen and food and immediate evacuation of waste products. If the rod and cone cell layer were reversed with the active photoreceptor ends on the outside, the blood vessel choriocapillaris layer would have to be between the light and the photoreceptors, and because the blood vessels highly absorb light this would drastically reduce both sensitivity and resolution.
The ganglion and optic nerve layer being in front of the photoreceptors still would reduce sensitivity and acuity, so it turns out that there are multitudes of radial Mueller (glial) cells going through the entire retinal thickness in the direction of light propagation, acting as low absorbtion light guides through the nerve layers. So (at least for mammals and reptiles with high metabolic rates) the existing design appears to be highly optimal for achieving maximum resolution combined with maximum sensitivity. This mostly is a summarization of Denton's argument.
This inverted retina design seems only to be optimal for higher and warm-blooded vertebrates with high metabolic rates, so then the question is why it originated in primitive ancestral cold-blooded forms that presumably didn't need it? Just the luck of the draw, or intentional preadaptation (front-loading)?
Comment by magnan — December 8, 2007 @ 10:35 pm
December 9th, 2007 at 6:31 am
Hi Mike,
I don't think Johnson has a point about backward wiring at all.
All questions about Designer's motives are ultimately Theological/Philosophical. Just because Johnson's god would not design "inverted retina" in humans, has no bearing whatsoever on ID.
This way of thinking about biological features also exposes bankruptcy of this ultra reductionist world-view. "Inverted retina" is part of visual system that works very well in humans and birds, so on what basis does Johnson call this "bad design". For reasonable person to conclude this is indeed a bad one, he would need to show that existing design does not work very well and to demonstrate an improved design. I am afraid my imagination is not good enough to see how could this hypothetical new design be scientifically demonstrated.
But even if we agree, for argument sake, that this is bad design and demonstrate that new design would work better, that would still be a bad argument against ID. As far as I know, ID does not say Designer directly designed biological features and it does not argue against evolution.
This seams to me like Johnson is merely parroting the likes of Dawkins and Miller and also showing ignorance about our visual system.
Comment by inunison — December 9, 2007 @ 6:31 am