More on Common Design
by MikeGeneI continue to explore the hypothesis of Common Design at The Design Matrix site. This is a topic that is not likely to please people on either side the aisle. Most non-teleologists and critics won't like it because they don't like any attempt to treat a teleological perspective as something other than dangerous nonsense. Most creationists won't like it because my initial attempt to better flesh out this type of hypothesis means that you can't use it to explain any similarity.
December 26th, 2006 at 5:06 pm
Mike, just curious if your book is coming out any time soon.
Comment by Bilbo — December 26, 2006 @ 5:06 pm
December 26th, 2006 at 8:02 pm
Hi Bilbo,
Like I mentioned to someone else, it's out of my hands. I thought it would be out late Nov, so I'm reluctant to make another faulty guess/prediction. As soon as I hear something solid, I'll blog about it.
Comment by MikeGene — December 26, 2006 @ 8:02 pm
December 26th, 2006 at 8:08 pm
Mike,
Is Natural Selection not being kind to you? Or is the publishing world overrun with Randomness? Would it help if I offered to write a review? You could quote-mine me on the back cover.
Comment by Douglas — December 26, 2006 @ 8:08 pm
December 28th, 2006 at 12:19 pm
The teleological perspective requires some definition of what the teleological goal is. If the teleological goal is merely some sort of survival, then sure, we might expect common designs to be explained in terms of utility. Howver if the teleological goal is some sort of Biotic Message written into the bio-polymers for later generations to decode like some hieroglyphic, then we might expect the designs to be organized under a different organizing principle.
I refrain from using the common design argument in terms of pure utility. The more educated ones like Todd Wood (recall the guy from BSG who wrote a letter saying Sternberg was not a YEC?) attempt to leave it an open question in many cases.
Wood cautioned creationists on the fact of Chimpanzee/Human similarity. Common Ancesty (versus Common Design), Wood argues, would (at first glance) be the immediate solution to the problem of Chimpanzee/Human similarity. So then, he complains also the Common Design argument should not be used ad hoc, if the common ancestry argument seems on the surface more plausible.
One might reject common ancestry for personal and religious reasons (as Wood, I and most of BSG do), but an Ad Hoc common design argument just doesn't suffice in Wood's view, especially when it competes with a compelling Common Ancestry argument. Wood invites the creationist community to find good and reasonable criteria to make a compelling Common Design argument from physical evidence rather than just pound the old mantra: "the Word of God says so". He invites the creationist community to find a compelling reason why God would make creatures like the Chimpanzee which have so many features common to humans.
Rather than utility as the teleological goal, some of us in the creationist community speculate the teleological goal is a Biotic Message of some sort. That is the designer is using common architectures to:
1. make it easier to decode biology
2. make it obvious there was one designer
3. offer evidence of design that has no immediate functional significance, but will evidence an attempt at communication from the designer in the distant past to the modern world which would one day have the capacity to decode the message
For example, when I constrain a pattern to be repeated (like all coins heads), it suggests a design. I constrained the pattern not for any functional reason except to function as a message and signature of design. This is especially important when dealing with common designs in different species and when the design does not have immediate selective advantage.
The criteria to invoke common design is not similarity alone, but similarities that have no immediate functional significance nor selective advantage nor plausible evolutionary root (i.e. whatever phylogeny is described, convergences MUST be invoked somewhere to kluge the phylogeny).
The criteria for Common Design should not be because it leads to functional convergence, but rather the design was optimized to allow decoding of the steganography in biology (note: do a google search on Dembski and Steganography). Without that, then there is little reason for the God of the Creationist to make Chimpanzee's which at first glance could incline some to believe humans were evolved.
What caused Denton to abandon his creationist upbringing was his time in the dissection morgue an how shocked he was as he examined human and other primate anatomies. The sense of common ancestry was overwheliming to him and common design seemed too much an ad hoc explanation for the similarities. He eventually became a Darwinian for a brief time. Ironically, the design argument almost took him full circle as he would later reject Darwinian evolution, and now Denton places himself in the camp of common ancestry and some sort of telelogical defined biology.
In sum, I agree ad hoc usage of Common Design is a poor and unconvincing argument from the creationists. I would however say, that if one claims a teleleoligcal perspective as an explanation for a particular achitecture, it becomes a more compelling argument if one can suggest what the teleological goal is and then argue why the architectures satisfy that goal.
The creationists suggest the teleological goal is not survival utility, but some sort of Biotic Message. Dembski (not a creationist) suggest also some sort of Biotic Message, but he uses the phrase "Steganography". These actually to some exciting and testable hypotheses!
Comment by Salvador T. Cordova — December 28, 2006 @ 12:19 pm
December 28th, 2006 at 12:27 pm
I must add, when Francis Collins visited George Mason University a couple months back and spoke, during the Q&A a creationist got in his face and began pounding the Bible and railing agains Collins position on common ancestry. Collins astutely replied, "how do you explain Chromosome 2".
The creationist gave an ad hoc common design argument. I was embarassed for my side
.
Comment by Salvador T. Cordova — December 28, 2006 @ 12:27 pm
December 29th, 2006 at 5:02 pm
Sal, I appreciate your comments. On a different, off-topic note, I am curious if you're familiar with Gerald Schroeder's view on the age of the universe being relative to position: 6,000 years on Earth; 13.5 billion years from some other position in the universe. And if you are familiar with it, do you think it's plausible?
Comment by Bilbo — December 29, 2006 @ 5:02 pm
December 30th, 2006 at 2:46 pm
Bilbo,
Glad to hear from you. I'm not that familiar with Schroeder's work (I have his books and read some of the chapters), although he is highly respected in ID circles. It was his writings that influenced Antony Flew.
I'm not averse to Schroeder's interpretation or most Old-Earth interpretations. If I had to pick an Old-Earth interpretation it would be the "throne room view" which is outlined here: Is the Universe Young?
The current reason I lean toward YEC is based on problems in physics. At least 3 professors from my school question the Big Bang including a Department head with a PhD in Physics from MIT. He's certainly no one to sneeze at….
Unlike most YEC's I'm really not that dogmatic about the age of the Earth. However old it really is, is however old it really is.
Sal
Comment by Salvador T. Cordova — December 30, 2006 @ 2:46 pm
December 30th, 2006 at 3:44 pm
The creationists suggest the teleological goal is not survival utility, but some sort of Biotic Message. Dembski (not a creationist) suggest also some sort of Biotic Message, but he uses the phrase "Steganography". These actually to some exciting and testable hypotheses!
Salvador, would you specify what these hypotheses are?
Comment by Nathan — December 30, 2006 @ 3:44 pm
December 30th, 2006 at 4:51 pm
Sure. There is the theological statement of the hypotheses as well as the scientific statement of the hypotheses.
The basic theological statement of the hypothesis of the Biotic Message is that life is created to be a message to Humankind from God, that God and only God created life. That is of course a theological statement of the hypothesis. It is a highly creationist-oriented framing of ID, and is somewhat at variance with other ID conceptions such those you find at Telic Thoughts where adaptation and survival are the higher priority in the design. In the Biotic Message, adaptation and survival are very much secondary considerations, whereas its message to human kind is the primary consideration in Biotic Message theory.
Think of it this way. Let's say YOU were the Intelligent Designer and you wanted your creatures to one day realize YOU existed and created them. You could of course be rather blatant and make some dazzling demonstrations of your power and existence. But, let's say hypothetically you wanted a far more subtle approach? What sort of artifacts would you make to impress upon you creation that YOU existed? Furthermore, you don't want to be exactly blatant about it (like building stonehenge), but rather subtle, and still yet powerful. This is consistent with Judeo-Christian theology, by the way:
Jesus also points out reasons for subtlety and parables in the Gospels.
Theologically speaking, it says, life's primary purpose is not to merely survive and adapt, but rather to be a symbol, a sign to mankind that God exists and is the author of life. This is consistent with Paley's conception of design and much of traditional Christian theology regarding creation.
But that is theology, not science. So can we frame a similar hypothesis in purely scientific terms? Yes.
The scientific statement of the Biotic Message hypothesis is that life is architected to prevent evolutionary interpretations from succeeding as a scientific explanation, and that only special creation by a single Intelligent Designer will be the most scientifically consistent explanation. The scientific framing of the Biotic Message does not identify the Designer as the Christian God. I point out, one can postulate an Intelligent Designer from first principles of physics without reference to theology : here. In like manner, one can construct the entire forensic hypothesis with no reference or appeal to theological authority whatsoever. It flows from the hypothesis that if such a Designer exists (and physics suggests He does exist), that we can postulate the manner which the Designer put life together. Was it via special creation or Darwinian evolution or some other evolutionary mechanism?
It may sound a bit funny that Christians would want to take this sort of approach. But to help give insight as to why, the reason is that if their creationist ideas can be derived completely free of their own theology, it will give them a greater assurance that their theology is in line with empirical and theoretical facts. It is of central imporatance to many, whether a belief system is in line with the brute facts of the physical world. If not, one has to question whether the theology is worth believing in the first place.
The approach of the Biotic Message is in stark contrast to the somewhat circularly reasoned approach that Ken Ham uses to argue for special creation. Frankly, his approach gives YECs a bad image, imho….
Even though the inspiration might be theological, the Biotic Message leads to scientifically testable hypotheses and methodologies. For example, the propoenents of the Biotic Message make the basic claim that every proposed macro evolutionary mechanism that does not have a component of Intelligen Design will lead to a contradiction. Some examples of proposed mechanism which lead to a fatal contradiction are Haldane's Dilemma, Nachman's U-Paradox, the molecular clock hypothesis. So far so good, for the theory.
That is why, it is important that ad hoc dismissals of common ancestry in favor of common design simply will not do. The dismissal can not be based because of theological fiat or personal bias, but only through evidential and theoretical scientific arguments. Biotic Message theory predicts the architecture will eventually allow such arguements to be discovered and effectively stated.
What is very telling about ReMine's book is that he make absolutely no explicit appeal to Christian Theology! In fact, it would be pretty hard to read his published work and conclude for sure he is even a Christian! See: The Biotic Message
Regarding a more postive hypothesis aside from ReMine's Biotic Message is Dembski's Steganography. I describe this here: How IDers Can Win the War. I highly encourage you to read that thread as I covered it more in detail there.
regards,
Sal
Comment by Salvador T. Cordova — December 30, 2006 @ 4:51 pm
December 30th, 2006 at 5:27 pm
It's been nearly a year since I've read Schroeder's books, but the "throne room view" you refer to sounds rather similar to what Schroeder said, if I remember correctly. I hope you get to read Schroeder some time. He has a very good, uplifting spirit, which may have affected Flew as much as the content.
So the three guys who question the Big Bang…do they think the universe is younger or older than the roughly 13 billion years?
Comment by Bilbo — December 30, 2006 @ 5:27 pm
December 30th, 2006 at 5:35 pm
I think they believe the universe could be eternal. However, their proposed alternatives have fatal flaws. Still their objections to Big Bang Theory have enough merit that I began to seriously consider YEC as a possibility. The case for YEC is best argued by Walter Brown: http://www.creationscience.com
The speed of light issue and radiometric dating were nicely addressed by the Brown-Setterfield cosmology.
The case against the big bang can be found at http://www.cosmologystatement.org You'll find the names of the 3 professors from George Mason there.
I don't argue that vigorously for YEC yet as I think we really need more data at this time. My feelings about ID are quite a bit stronger. I think the data in favor of ID is almost impossible to refute.
The case for common design (which this thread is about) requires a lot more work. Todd Wood makes a good case as to why creationists should be a bit more circumspect before arguing common design. As of now, the arguments seem a bit too much ad hoc….
Sal
Comment by Salvador T. Cordova — December 30, 2006 @ 5:35 pm
December 31st, 2006 at 4:26 pm
Sal…so you think three physicists who want to prove that the universe is eternal, instead of having a beginning — as Genesis teaches — is better than Big Bang cosmology? And did you ever notice that Big Bang cosmology matches up pretty well with Jesus' parable of the mustard seed?
Comment by Bilbo — December 31, 2006 @ 4:26 pm