Well, I continue to peruse The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design in anticipation of the debate tonight. (11 pm ET, the Alan Colmes Show, website here.) By this point in the text, Wells is done debunking evolution; now he's on to promoting intelligent design. In the "debunk evolution" section, he tried to undermine evidence from the fossil record, embryology, molecular phylogeny, and speciation. None of these attacks were convincing, but what's even more illuminating are the strands of evolutionary evidence that got completely ignored: biogeography, DNA evidence, homology, and so on. Not that we want to give Wells any ideas, of course.
Anyway, now the defense of ID begins, and instead of running roughshod over the scientific literature, we suddenly get all the arguments by all of the people affiliated with the Discovery Institute (which are almost never in the scientific literature): Behe, Meyer, Dembski, Minnich, Gonzalez, etc. Somebody really ought to do a social network analysis of these guys. Could we get Congressman Barton to arrange that?
Anyway, it all seems a rehash; if you weren't convinced before, you won't be this time. Still, let's cruise down memory lane by recapping some of the traditional ID arguments:
1. Intelligence does not imply a violation of the laws of nature. When I choose to write this paragraph, I did not violate any laws of nature. I used natural physiological processes to move my fingers and natural mechanical and electronic processes to record the words. Intelligent design does not suspend natural laws, it supplements them. (p. 87)
2. Do living things contain irreducibly complex features? If they do, then they pose a challenge to Darwinian evolution. Natural selection cannot assemble parts for the purpose of producing future functions; it can only preserve features that already have functions. So a feature that is irreducibly complex--that does not function until all of its parts are in place--cannot be assembled by natural selection. (p. 109-110)
3. The properties of the elements follow from the universal constants, so cosmic fine-tuning results not only in a habitable universe, but also in elements uniquely suited for life. Some people have attempted to explain these remarkable coincidences by invoking "the anthropic principle." We should not be surprised by fine-tuning, they say, because if the universe were not fine-tuned for life we would not be here to observe it. This hardly counts as an explanation. (p. 121-122)
The last argument is slightly more intellectually interesting, at least to me. Unlike with the semblance of design in nature--where we know how this semblance has been produced, aka evolution--the semblance of design in the cosmos is not really explained and perhaps cannot ever be. Of course, whether that implies God or some other kind of designer is quite another matter.
Once Wells gets into the pro-ID mode, there's quite a lot of "help, help, I'm being repressed!" Virtually every chapter ends with another case study of mean Darwinists suppressing poor revolutionary IDistas. You know the stories: Dembski and Baylor, Behe at Lehigh, etc. Somehow, thinking about the schoolchildren and their families who have to live through these divisive evolution fights at the state level allowed me to get through these sections without shedding a tear for the ID crowd....
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The last argument is old news; IDists published this in "The Privileged Planet". The NCSE reviewed it here:
http://www.ncseweb.org/resources/articles/784_review_of_emthe_privilege…
Choice quote:
"One wonders what Gonzalez and Richards would say if the evidence were otherwise. They talk about the fantastically small probability that our universe would give rise to intelligent, inquisitive life, but what if it were the opposite? What if we had observed that the universe was actually quite conducive to the existence of intelligent, inquisitive life? Would Gonzalez and Richards then conclude that the probability of observing such a universe, given that it was designed by an "intelligent designer", was small? I hardly think so."
In other words, because we don't currently know whether any set of physical constants are more or less probable, we can't concluded anything about whether our universe is more or less probable than any other. If it turns out it is very probable, will Wells abandon the idea of a designer? If he says no, then it's a belief, not something supported by evidence.
Chris, your sacrifice is greatly appreciated.
For #1, it makes me wonder why they rail against materialism so much if intelligence does not violate the laws of nature. Also, why would Behe testify that one would have to change the rules of science to admit ID?
For #2, he's making a false dichotomy. This is still an anti-evolutionary argument. Even if IC structures did pose a problem for evolution, it would not necessarily mean positive support for ID.
For #3, I agree with him that the antropic principle is not an explanation for why certain constants are what they are. It's just an observation of what is true. We are here, some things needed to happen for us to be here, and they did indeed happen. Big deal. Wells's statement, however, makes the assumption of fine-tuning and that the fine-tuning is the result of ID. I also find it funny that cosmological ID says that the universe is fine-tuned for life, while biological ID says that life can't arise without some sort of intelligent intervention. That seems a contradiction to me.
It's not a contradiction. It goes like this:
(a) there could be no life without intelligent intervention
(b) the universe is fine-tuned to permit life
(c) therefore, the universe was designed
It's not a good argument, but it's not contradictory.
Hector Avalos also has a good review of the Privileged Planet and its precedents in theology: http://www.talkreason.org/articles/Avalos.cfm
I think the one thing this book is sure to accomplish is making us all feel very old.
Reading it through it we'll think, "Wow! I heard this years ago. Man, am I that old?"
If one is going to use the "improbability argument", it cuts both ways.
If there was a "Designer" of life here on earth" and it was not the same as a "Designer of the universe", then that simply pushes the problem of origins back a notch.
If the probability of a universe with inteligent life is low to begin with, how does introducing a designer help increase the probability?
How probable is it that there was a "Designer of the universe" who knew precisely how to tweak all the physical constants at the getgo in order to produce a universe in which life could arise?
Or, perhaps the design did not all happen at the very start. Maybe the Designer of the Universe "fine-tuned" things as the universe developed. Why might that be? Were there mistakes in the initial design?
I don't understand why you find #3 "more intelletually interesting". I find it to be a simple case of confusing cause and effect. The joke about the puddle in the hole explains it. If some of the constants were different, then we would be little green things with (I don't know the science) chromium in our circulatory systems that inhaled carbon dioxide and exhaled oxygen - or something. The physical constants came first - because of atomic theory. As a result, we exist - not the other way around.
I'm sure that you know all this and agree with it, so, would you explain how naive I am - why do you find it interesting?
You were able to recognize a change? None of the 3 arguments presented is really an argument for Intelligent Design.
Natural selection cannot assemble parts for the purpose of producing future functions; it can only preserve features that already have functions. So a feature that is irreducibly complex--that does not function until all of its parts are in place--cannot be assembled by natural selection.
This is, of course, daft - it's entirely possible to get to an irreducibly-complex structure by a series of steps each of which boosts the organism's fitness. All that's required is that you be able to remove parts as well as add them. You'll note that Behe's model of evolution completely ignores this perfectly valid operation.
It's easy to produce an irreducibly complex structure - just take a reducibly complex structure and pull as many parts off it as you can. What you're left with is by definition IC, and in times of famine is likely to be fitter than its less minimalist competitors.
The properties of the elements follow from the universal constants, so cosmic fine-tuning results not only in a habitable universe, but also in elements uniquely suited for life.
The problem here is that people tend to see fine-tuning where none exists. For example, the reason why it's possible for carbon to form in Red Giants from an atom each of helium and beryllium is because the energy of one state of carbon is very close to the combined energies of beryllium and helium - a resonance. There's a state with energy 7.6549 MeV, which is just about perfect.
But not quite. There's a 4% gap between that and the combined energies of the beryllium and helium. Fortunately, the extra energy imparted by being stuck in a very hot star compensates perfectly for this. If Red Giants were a different temperature, or if that resonant energy for carbon was slightly different, carbon (and hence life as we know it) couldn't exist.
Or could it? Actually, it turns out that different properties for either the stars or the carbon would give the same result - there's effectively a feedback loop that controls for temperature. If the resonant state for carbon had a lower energy, for example, the production of carbon would heat the star up more, compensating for the larger energy gap.
Moral of the story: fine-tuning ain't always all it's cracked up to be.
A more interesting approach to answering this point might be to ask "so did the Intelligent Designer have to be fine-tuned to ensure he was willing and able to produce humans?"
(Hat-tip to "Science of Discworld II" for the carbon example)