At Last, What Intelligent Design Theory Advocates!

 
Over at the Intelligent Design site Uncommon Descent, a commenter called Jerad has been asking what ID theory advocates for the origin of life and development of species.

His requests are often polite and specific:

I am not asking you for the designer’s name or address, just your idea about the methods and timing. We know quite a lot about the people who built Stonehenge: what they ate, some of their rituals, stuff you can’t get from just studying Stonehenge itself. There are lots of good books about prehistoric Britain if you’re interested. AND we do ask: why did they build Stonehenge? When? In stages or all at once? Why? Always WHY?? It’s what science does. Asks questions.

You asked me a few weeks ago about finding Stonehenge on Mars and I said: you bet I’d think it was designed. And then I’d immediately start asking those questions and looking for answers and more evidence. I couldn’t just let the deign inference sit there and be happy. I’d start digging. Quite literally in that instance in fact. I’d do some archaeology and look for the designer’s trash heap. I’d ramp up SETI trying to find a signal. I’d try and date the structure. I’d hypothesise (based on careful examination of the thing) about construction techniques. If someone left a Stonehenge on Mars I’d bet they left some other traces and evidence.

Here's a second statement clarifying what Jerad wants to know about ID:

I won’t ask about the designer but, surely, a core part of ID is when; when did the designer intervene. That at least should be answerable. That is the core difference isn’t it: Darwinism says: the ‘gaps’ were bridged by natural, observable processes. ID says: the designer bridged those gaps with knowledge and abilities we extrapolate from our own currently inadequate abilities. BUT, you haven’t said which gaps or when.

Although in that thread none of the ID proponents sketches out the narrative for origin of life and development of species, the comments give enough for a reconstruction. Here, then, is my summary of ID's theory of life:

Intelligent Design is a theory of common design. At some point in the distant past, an intelligent being released one or more organismic "seeds" on earth. Each seed presumably had been designed by this being--although I am not sure we can assume this--and introduced to earth for the purpose of living here. Although each seed is crafted to give rise to organisms with common features--such as teeth, eyes, brains, and so forth--they all represent different life forms. Some seeds are for plants or plant types. Some are for humans, some are for ostriches, some are for bears, some are for ants, some are for salamanders, some are for swordfish. And so on.  The evidence of design is found at the microbiological level, where cells and cell processes indicate that they should have resulted only from a prior engineering and manufacturing process. The cells and processes of living organisms must have been planned by a being, then assembled and finished into an integrated whole. These integrated wholes were used to seed the earth with life. Without these seeds, earth would have remained forever a lifeless planet of water and rock. Following the initial seeding, the organisms reproduced. Generation after generation, they grew in number and established various ecological balances in diverging populations across the planet. These balances shifted according to climate changes, as well as according to the dynamics of different populations growing, strengthening, migrating in or out, or contracting disease. Today, many of these populations are identified as species and subspecies, and various relationships among the species can be shown scientifically. Current biology mistakenly views the relationships between species as the result of (1) common descent and (2) evolution via natural selection. Current biology errs because the level of microbiological complexity required for life to appear on earth could not have happened without an intelligent being placing seeds here. Therefore, common design better explains all of the evidence.

I hope the account above accurately reflects the theory. I expect I have the broad outlines but am off in particulars. I appreciate correction. Nevertheless, it's important to have an articulated ID theory because I, for one, am not satisfied with the following:

When we see a known adequate process that leads to reliable signs, we have every good reason to infer that like causes like, and to hold that in the teeth of any and all contrary metaphysical speculations and doctrines that do not have that sort of empirical warrant. In other worlds [sic], we are well within our scientific rights to insist on the credibility of inductive generalisation on signs that reliably point to known adequate cause.

That is what design theory is about, and it is why in the end, once people realise what is at stake in rejecting it — driving the proverbial stake through the heart of scientific methods and empirical reasoning — it will prevail.

The above defends ID, claiming it makes reasonable extrapolations from observed reality. It also attacks modern science for being driven by unsupported assumptions about reality. For all I know, these arguments have merit; unfortunately, they do not answer the questions people want science to address: What actually happened way back then? How did it occur? What were the conditions and how else might things have turned out?

It is not enough to claim only "I infer design" because to infer design is to invoke a narrative. If X is the result of design, then some designer made X and brought X into being at a certain point in time. What's more, design implies intent: to some degree, X fulfills the designer's intentions both for what X is and what X does. It's not enough, then, to conclude design without also articulating the designer, the designer's purposes, and the historical conditions under which the design first appeared. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that design cannot be offered or accepted as a serious hypothesis unless it affirms a designer, argues purposes, and establishes historical conditions and parameters.

Because ID proponents tend not to provide the sorts of details that Jerad asks for, ID continually comes across as incomplete and pallid criticism. From the thread I link to, anyone might question how much experience Jerad has with the biological data. Nevertheless, one clearly sees that his position is one that encompasses a totality of known data. ID rests on almost pure induction and seeks--seemingly--to keep design from being entirely ruled out.

*  *  *  *  *

Years ago, as a theist starting to buy into the arguments for atheism, I looked to Intelligent Design for a reasonable alternative to atheism. I thought ID might give good reasons to think our world was not without God or gods.

But Intelligent Design failed right away. I realized quickly that it would not give me what I wanted, which was a plausible, clear, evidence-based explanation of the world--including reasons for keeping the idea of God/gods. After all, if there were a good reason to think intentional design was part of life's origins, then there was also good reason to think God could have been the designer.

Unfortunately, ID's proponents, sites, and books provided no scientific development of the theory. Few people, least of all biologists, were applying ID to a full range of data from fossils, genetics, biogeography, morpohology, and so on. One could not enroll in a biology program at a university and study with an ID theorist. One could not open an academic biological journal and read about current findings in ID.

I saw, then, that ID was marginal and almost completely static. In its efforts not to identify explicitly with religion and creationism, it offered no definite theory of anything. It argued that "Darwinism" had failed and that "materialism" had thoroughly corrupted the practice of modern science. But it gave no explanation or narrative of the first design processes and subsequent processes.

Well, now we have an explanation and narrative. Once it's properly tweaked by ID advocates, we can have a real basis for assessing which accounts of life on earth best fit all the data. One final takeaway, then, is that ID postulates not a simple creationism. In the end, it is creationism and an argument that creationism can be rationally and scientifically warranted.

I suspect that people who buy into ID do so because they want to hold onto creationism. Sure, I suppose there is reason to dislike or be unimpressed with evolutionary science, but I find it hard to believe that one accepts ID simply because one is anti-evolution. No, I think one accepts ID out of rational necessity: these are people who know the Bible falls short of truth, who despise the middling ground of agnosticism, and who are repulsed by atheism.

These are, I imagine, some very conflicted conservatives--people whose intellects are at war with their values.

The Medieval Castle of Intelligent Design

Château d’Angers

Lawyer and ID proponent Barry Arrington has recently taken to defending the ID fort with the standby accusation that opponents of ID fail to understand the theory properly.

What, then, is the proper understanding of ID? Arrington lays out the case:

ID is not, as its opponents suggest, a purely negative argument that material forces are insufficient to account for IC and FSCI. At its root ID is an abductive conclusion (i.e., inference to best explanation) concerning the data. This conclusion may be stated in summary as follows:

1. Living things display IC [irreducible complexity] and FSCI [functional specified complex information].

2. Material forces have never been shown to produce IC and FSCI.

3. Intelligent agents routinely produce IC and FSCI.

4. Therefore, based on the evidence that we have in front of us, the best explanation for the presence of IC and FSCI in living things is that they are the result of acts of an intelligent agent.

Sigh. Not very good reasoning, I'm afraid. It may look like a decent argument at first blush, but then look at each premise on its own.

Item #1 cannot be granted at all. IC is a highly dubious concept, as Kenneth Miller and many others have demonstrated amply. FSCI has not been defined in a mathematically rigorous way, either. So, we have no clear, testable understanding of IC and FSCI. Much less do we have clarity on how living things "display" them. Finally, it remains unclear whether living things necessarily display both or one or the other.

Item #2 just seems wrong factually. Were we to grant that all living things exhibit IC and FSCI, then surely some living things would reproduce and thereby generate offspring that also exhibit IC and FSCI. Reproduction is a material force, is it not?

Item #3 is irrelevant. We are not talking in #1 and #2 about artificial productions of IC and FSCI, whatever they are. We're talking about organic production, about producing IC and FSCI in living things. The term "produce" is left unexplained, so it's hard to get a good reading of the point here.

Item #4 flies in the face of careful reading, as item #2 (properly adjusted to match reality) actually gives the most cogent explanation. Material forces so far seem to be the only thing that produces IC and FSCI. But definition is all, and the language of the four items stinks, if we are being honest.

Beyond a very bad argument, what do we have here? I think Arrington's reasoning is best explained as a protective construct. It's a medieval castle. It's a Hummer H3. It defends against attack and asserts the self. It's a declaration that "I believe that God/Jesus is God and none o' you jackwagons is going to change my mind!"

I think that's it, actually. Folks like Arrington prefer their belief. In contemporary science and in the growing popular acceptance of New Atheism, they see an "intellectual elite" that has come to supplant the comfortable Cold War mentality that gave shape to their world. Arrington and company make, in other words, a political stand from a position that seems to lose ever more standing as the years go by.

If I am an ID opponent, then what I oppose is an incoherent argument. In principle, I have no objection to the idea of "design" for living things or for elements which constitute living things. But I don't like seeing a bad case made--such as what Arrington offers in his summary--for another view (i.e., natural evolution) having a bad case.

Where's the 'Ski?

Have you seen me?

Over at the intelligent design website Uncommon Descent, the virtual community has been universally stumped by a commenter, and now posting contributor, called MathGrrl.

She makes an eminently reasonable request of the ID proponents:

In the abstract of Specification: The Pattern That Signifies Intelligence, William Dembski asks “Can objects, even if nothing is known about how they arose, exhibit features that reliably signal the action of an intelligent cause?” Many ID proponents answer this question emphatically in the affirmative, claiming that Complex Specified Information is a metric that clearly indicates intelligent agency. As someone with a strong interest in computational biology, evolutionary algorithms, and genetic programming, this strikes me as the most readily testable claim made by ID proponents. For some time I’ve been trying to learn enough about CSI to be able to measure it objectively and to determine whether or not known evolutionary mechanisms are capable of generating it. Unfortunately, what I’ve found is quite a bit of confusion about the details of CSI, even among its strongest advocates.

My first detailed discussion was with UD regular gpuccio, in a series of four threads hosted by Mark Frank. While we didn’t come to any resolution, we did cover a number of details that might be of interest to others following the topic.

CSI came up again in a recent thread here on UD. I asked the participants there to assist me in better understanding CSI by providing a rigorous mathematical definition and showing how to calculate it for four scenarios:

1. A simple gene duplication, without subsequent modification, that increases production of a particular protein from less than X to greater than X. The specification of this scenario is “Produces at least X amount of protein Y.”
2. Tom Schneider’s ev evolves genomes using only simplified forms of known, observed evolutionary mechanisms, that meet the specification of “A nucleotide that binds to exactly N sites within the genome.” The length of the genome required to meet this specification can be quite long, depending on the value of N. (ev is particularly interesting because it is based directly on Schneider’s PhD work with real biological organisms.)
3. Tom Ray’s Tierra routinely results in digital organisms with a number of specifications. One I find interesting is “Acts as a parasite on other digital organisms in the simulation.” The length of the shortest parasite is at least 22 bytes, but takes thousands of generations to evolve.
4. The various Steiner Problem solutions from a programming challenge a few years ago have genomes that can easily be hundreds of bits. The specification for these genomes is “Computes a close approximation to the shortest connected path between a set of points.”

The ID-ers seem unable to provide MathGrrl with what should be very simple to provide. Nevertheless, the obvious question is where is the presiding ID mathematician William Dembski? His absence is now conspicuous.

I predict that he is busy furiously writing a carefully worded response to MathGrrl, in which he says she has misunderstood his work

Signs, Signs, Everywhere There's Signs

Blocking out the scenery, breaking my mind

Old friend GEM of TKI wonders why no one has challenged his post on signs and the design inference.

[T]his Jan 16 post was foundational, and the silence from objectors is interesting, especially given the significance of symbolic communication....

GEM leaves us to guess what he finds interesting in the “silence from objectors.” Perhaps he takes it as consent or befuddlement.  I rather think people simply shrugged their shoulders in apathy.

In the end, GEM justifies intelligent design creationism by arguing that "symbolic messages" and "physical media" for message encoding/transmitting/decoding appear in nature. Therefore, as these messages and tools support a "design inference" in human social contexts, so too do they warrant a design inference in biological and origins of life/universe contexts.

The central analogy that guides GEM's argument has been around long enough, at least in my experience. I don't share the opinion that it supports a strong case, and I'll have a bit more to say on this later. For now, however, I want to focus on some oddities in GEM's post, mostly as they relate to semiotics. One oddity is how GEM describes an observer’s actions with signs:

Signs: I observe one or more signs [in a pattern], and infer the signified object, on a warrant:

I: [si] –> O, on W

The oddity here is the term “infer," which is inappropriate to most signs. The usual term is “interpret,” and in Peircean semiotics--GEM states he is following Peirce--the interpretans is one of three fundamental parts of the sign: there’s the signifier (the sound or word), the signified object (the real-world thing), and the interpretans (the observer’s mental translation of how the object is represented by the signifier.

Now, Peirce did invoke a rule of inference for a special class of signs that he called delome signs, but the rule doesn't apply universally. Inference is a focused activity: to infer is to go from the known to the hidden or from the apparent to the latent. It is to reveal what’s implicit.

In the context of the sign, however, there’s typically no need for inference because by definition a sign already includes a signified object. The signified object is already “there,” not hidden or latent. The meaning of most signs is known and shared between speaker and auditor before communication takes place; indeed, it's an important condition that makes linguistic communication possible. This shared knowledge is the warrant that GEM mentions.

Thus, when one observes a sign or a set of signs, one normally does not need to infer the signified object. Rather, one understands or interprets the signified object--which is to say that one knows (of) the object to which the signifier is referring.

GEM's use of "infer" is most certainly rhetorical, a tactic to connect interpreting signs, on the one hand, with inferring design from the structure of living things, on the other hand. I don’t begrudge his attempt, but at this point the analogy does not hold. Interpreting the meaning of signs is not at all like reasoning that Thing ABC was created by a person or some other entity of person-like or above intelligence and capability.

But I should clarify some more because GEM’s argument has little concern with meaning per se. His real point rests on the premise that in interpreting signs, we infer that their ultimate source is a conscious being. This is, of course, proper and standard use of the term "infer." So too, in interpreting cells of living beings as machines (GEM equates cells with von Neumann self-replicators [VNSR]), we infer their ultimate source as a being of great skill and subtlety. For GEM, living cells have the added bonus of also being sign encoding, transmitting, and decoding machines. The genetic code and the processes of protein building are part of the larger cellular machine, adding further support to the idea that the ultimate source of life is an intelligent being, putatively the god of Christianity.

Now, GEM’s argument is obviously all sound and fury, signifying nothing. Cells are not actually machines, after all. People too are not machines. GEM is overly invested in his personal reading of the VNSR's significance for an inference to intelligent design creationism.

Let us remember that the VNSR is a human contrivance based on organic models. Human contraptions, generally, seek to emulate and simulate organic systems. And organic systems are often far more intricate and complex than their human-made counterparts. Thus, it does little good to point out banally that every watch has a watchmaker because watches are structurally and environmentally too unlike cells for a useful comparison. Make a watch that's more cell-like. Then we can talk.

The watchmaker analogy fails for another reason. Take a look at your own watch right now. Maybe it was assembled by a single person in China. Where did that person get the gears? Where did that person get the electronics? They each came, assembled by others, from elsewhere. And where did the raw materials come from? How were the metals obtained, smelted, forged, and shaped? Others did that, too. We might say more accurately, then, that every watch has many watchmakers and every watch has a history tied to those watchmakers and their particular environments and available resources.

I dare say that no Christian theologian is currently arguing that God and his Supernatural Friends are the designers of life and that they interacted over time to forge organic existence. Usually, the learned theologians postulate that there was only one Big Boss, one designer, who simply poofed life into existence at once. But if there was only one designer and one design moment, then the theologian needs a new analogy to use because in real life many different people in different contingent circumstances have a direct and indirect impact on the construction of machines.

---

We should return to the subject of oddities in GEM’s argument concerning signs.

I mentioned before that GEM departs from Peircean semiotics when he employs the loaded term “infer” and thereby both downplays and skews the role of the interpretans in sign operation.

GEM departs again from Peirce in another oddity: artificially separating symbolic signs from indexical and iconic signs. GEM previously had given us his analysis of signs, and in that analysis he discussed indexical (e.g., smoke as an index of fire) and iconic signs (e.g., a natural formation that resembles a human face). He then focuses on symbols specifically, and uses different language to discuss the semiotic operation:

Symbols: I observe a {set} of one or more symbols, and infer the/a signified meaning, on a warrant:

I: {sy} –> M, on W

But symbols are not a different species of sign. Rather, symbols lie on a continuum that encompasses indexical, iconic, and symbolic signs. As Albert Atkin reports, Peirce himself was aware of this continuity --

by 1903 Peirce was aware that it would be hard, if not impossible, to find any pure instances of icons and indices. Rather, he began to suspect that icons and indices were always partly symbolic or conventional.

Thus, it is not so easy to separate "naturally occurring" signs from "mind-made" signs. All signs are to some extent "mind made." The question is "Whose mind?"

The answer to this question is "The sign observer's mind." The observer of an indexical, iconic, or symbolic sign determines--through interpretation--the integrity of the sign and makes it meaningful. I cannot exaggerate the importance of this point: the observer makes meaning from the sign.

The idea that the observer’s understanding of signs is active and productive is critical to Peirce. His interpretans denotes how someone understands the signifier-signified relationship, and the interpretans is another sign. The interpretans is the observer's personal spin on the conventional association between the signifier and signified. As we discussed before, that association or meaning of signs is known and shared between speaker/writer and observer in advance of communication taking place. At the same time, individual observers translate signs in a way unique to their idiolect and to the situation. The idiosyncratic element of this translation is what made Peirce's interpretans so innovative in its time.

The point is, however, that part of making meaning from the sign includes making an idiosyncratic interpretation of the sign's "author." In other words: the author, the conscious mind that issues the sign, is partly a creation of the observer (cf. Michel Foucault). Thus, what GEM calls "an inference to intentionally and intelligently directed configuration"--whether the inference is made with regard to a text or an observation of the workings in a living cell--is always a personal mental construct of the observer.

From the observer's point of view, it's easy and helpful to assume an intelligent agency as a singular source of signs, messages, systems, and so on. But that assumption is interpretive, it's an interpretans. The assumption need not have any resemblance to the actual source(s), causes, and circumstances of transmission. We can therefore clearly see the error in GEM's concluding specification of a certain class of (biological) signs:

signs that are believed to warrant the conclusion that they are best explained on design rather than a spontaneous natural process tracing to undirected forces and circumstances of chance and/or mechanical necessity.

GEM here conflates two acts of interpretation. In the first act, an organic entity is taken as a sign or a set of signs. In the second, that sign or set of signs is taken to have a meaning bearing explanation. In both cases, we learn more about the observer making the interpretations than we do about the supposed "source" of the signs. Indeed, we never approach that "source" at all.

So, I personally am put off by GEM's "foundational" post. It abuses Peircean semiotics, and it fails to make its primary case. Quite simply, there is no inference to design that can be had--at least, not on a foundation of semiotics. At best, there's an interpretation of design, but we already knew that.

Keep This Link Close

[White tatonka. It's a miracle]

I mean: keep this here link in your "review again and again" file.

Vincent Torley, according to the resume posted on-line, is a Philosophy Ph.D. and teacher living in Japan. I have read some of his work at the ID site, Uncommon Descent. Like many philosophers and humanities wonks, he is careful with his words, which means that if you read closely you'll see that nothing very controversial is ever being said.

Torley comments from a distance on a recent debate between two biologists and super-Atheists, Jerry Coyne and P. Z. Myers. The debate is very interesting and worth checking out; it actually began as the two scientists took different views on the Steve Zara article that I had discussed here.

Torley sees the debate, which is over whether we can find any evidence for a god (notice the italicized and boldfaced words), as an opportunity to present a list of apologetic and philosophical arguments for his god. Addressing Coyne (but not Myers, since Coyne thinks that there is at least a theoretical possibility for evidence of gods), Torley rhapsodizes:

Well, Professor, I'm something of a magpie. I collect good articles. The 200 or so articles I’ve listed below are the "creme-de-la-creme" so to speak, of what’s available on the Web. Taken together, they make a strong cumulative case, on philosophical and empirical grounds, that God does indeed exist, and that the benefits of religion vastly outweigh the multitude of harms inflicted in its name. (There’s even a case where an amputee gets healed! Curious? Thought you might be.) I’ve also included some good articles on God, morality and evil, which will interest you. The arguments for the immateriality of the mind are also significant: they serve to undermine the materialist argument that there can never be a good argument for the existence of an immaterial Intelligence, since all the minds we know of are embodied and complex. Interested? Please read on.

Torley's list is worth checking out but it also must be noted that it contains virtually no first-hand science. Some of the folks seem sciency or almost sciency, like Don Johnson, but I'm not sure if their works are works of science. Torley's list mainly consists of arguments and interpretations, which really misses the point. The problem with arguments and interpretations, as Myers aptly puts it, is that unless they are expressed in evidence and in resulting sets of data, they are really just stories:

We can have the logical possibility of finding phenomena in the natural world that have been traditionally hidden from explanation by sweeping them into the category of "the gods did it," but I say that gods have never been and never can be an adequate answer. Once you've got evidence for something, it's no longer a member of the set of mysteries under godly purview.

It's like the old joke, "What do you call alternative medicines that have been shown to work? Medicine." What I'm asking here is what should you call supernatural explanations that actually work and lead to deeper understanding of the universe…and the answer is science. All gods vanish in the first puff of understanding.

To see that Torley is probably talking past Coyne and Myers, have a look at Coyne's statements below, which try to put the focus on--da da-dah dah!--evidence!

Here are two sorts of evidence. In one, a man appears on earth (let’s say he claims to be Jesus returning) who is able to perform all sorts of “miracles.” Let’s say, for instance, that he heals amputees and all manner of illnesses and mutilations, claiming that he’s channeling God’s power. These healings are fully documented by physicians. And the being can also do other stuff that doesn’t seem to have a natural explanation, like turning water into wine at long distance (this, of course, would be supervised not just by chemists, but by magicians). You could of course impute these results to space aliens, but even aliens have to work through understandable natural mechanisms. If they don’t, then they’re equivalent to gods.

Here’s another: a rigorous double-blind experiment provides strong evidence that prayer works. (That is, the people prayed for are almost always healed, while those who are not recover at control rates.) But it works only when praying to God and Jesus, not Allah or Vishnu or anyone else. Is that not evidence for an omniscient and omnipotent being? Granted, we know that prayer doesn’t work, but it could have.

Interestingly, Torley does give us a Wikipedia reference to the Miracle of Calanda, a report of a 17th century Spanish farmer's leg being returned to him after it had been amputated two years earlier. It's a rather dodgy report, certainly not fully documented. I think we would all prefer to have more data and verification, and I think we'd all like to have similar events that are more recent than 370 years ago. Most importantly, we should remember and take to heart the advice of David Hume:

No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavors to establish....

But it's a neat story and I welcome anyone to hang their religious hat on it. Such folk may also want to consider the Hindu Milk Miracle, the psychic powers of the Buddha, Muhammad's splitting the Moon, or perhaps the miraculous white buffalo.

---

UPDATE: Jerry Coyne has made note of Torley's list. I think Coyne treats it properly.

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UPDATE 2: Torley must be reading the comments over at Coyne's site. He's recently added the following note beneath the Miracle of Calanda link:

PLEASE NOTE: The miracle of Calanda is well-documented, but hardly compelling. I have included it as a counter-example to the commonly heard claim that God never heals amputees. There is good reason to believe that on at least one occasion, he did. However, the evidence for St. Joseph of Cupertino's miracles is absolutely compelling, making it reasonable for believers to take seriously accounts of miracles for which the evidence is strong, but not compelling. To suppose that thousands of people, including skeptics, who witnessed St. Joseph of Cupertino's flights on thousands of occasions, could have been mistaken about the saint's ability to fly, is absurd.

This is fantastic backtracking. Ah, but I wish Torley had thought it worthy to include the accounts of the cephalophoric saints.

Evolution's Gaps versus Creationism's

We are all connected.

I recently had a conversation in which I was taken to task for talking about evolution as if it were a fact. My excuse, of course, is that evolution is very well attested. I agree with the scholarly consensus that asserts evolution rises to the level of fact. In our exchange, my conversational partner reminded me that "there are huge gaps in evolution." I may agree with the proposition of there being gaps, however large, in evolution, and I probably should have articulated my opinions on evolution with greater humility.

Nevertheless, I've been thinking about the premise that evolution has huge gaps. From this initial premise, the reasoning usually proceeds to then state that the huge gaps mean the figurative jury is still out on evolution. Therefore, if evolution remains an unresolved question, then one is justified to maintain his or her preferred religious beliefs--in particular, one may comfortably hold onto the doctrine that people were created by God. One assumption running around in this reasoning is that evolution contradicts the teachings of the Bible, so if evolution is accurate, then the teachings of the Bible are false. The resulting implication, then, is that if this one core teaching of the Bible is false, then every other teaching that follows is similarly suspect and open to question.

I want to talk here about the "gaps" reasoning by looking at the theory of evolution and how a gaps charge against it is made. My intention is to show that the charge isn't very strong and to conclude finally with some thoughts on the implications for the Bible's teachings.

Let me declare up front that I have no training at all in the biological sciences beyond high school and my own reading on the subject. I will not, therefore, try to champion or to explain the scientific merits of evolution. What I would like to do, however, is present some of the key claims or hypotheses of evolution and then relate what I see.

To start, let's take a definition of evolution from the University of California, Berkeley:

The definition
Biological evolution, simply put, is descent with modification. This definition encompasses small-scale evolution (changes in gene frequency in a population from one generation to the next) and large-scale evolution (the descent of different species from a common ancestor over many generations). Evolution helps us to understand the history of life.

The explanation
Biological evolution is not simply a matter of change over time. Lots of things change over time: trees lose their leaves, mountain ranges rise and erode, but they aren't examples of biological evolution because they don't involve descent through genetic inheritance.

The central idea of biological evolution is that all life on Earth shares a common ancestor, just as you and your cousins share a common grandmother.

Through the process of descent with modification, the common ancestor of life on Earth gave rise to the fantastic diversity that we see documented in the fossil record and around us today. Evolution means that we're all distant cousins: humans and oak trees, hummingbirds and whales.

What strikes me immediately is the elegance of the definition and what it purports to explain. The theory is really quite simple and very beautiful, which of course is not a reason to think it's accurate or wrongheaded. For me, the strength of the theory lies in its specificity: gene frequencies, populations, generations, species. It tells me that I can look at gene frequencies across populations, generations, and species to confirm or to falsify the central idea of common ancestry.

What, then, are the sources of evidence for evolution? According to the same website, the main sources include:

• Fossil evidence -- Most commonly, an organism, a physical part of an organism, or an imprint of an organism that has been preserved from ancient times in rock, amber, or by some other means. New techniques have also revealed the existence of cellular and molecular fossils.
• Homologies -- Similarities between related organisms in anatomical, molecular or cellular features.
• Distribution in space and time -- Dating of fossils and elements, and population patterns of living things across all the Earth.
• Evidence by example -- Present-day organisms and recent history as sources of information about the past. Artificial selection, experiments, and nested hierarchies all provide additional information that sheds light on the development of life forms.

With the definition of evolution and identification of the main sources of evidence for evolution, we have a rudimentary sense of what evolution is and how we know what we know about it. The third and final element of evolution that I want to introduce is how evolution works, the mechanisms that drive the modifications in "descent with modification."

I like the explanation given by doctoral student Jeremy Yoder, who describes the "Big Four" processes of population genetics:

These are the four processes that account, in one way or another, for every change in the frequency of genes within natural populations. In other words, the Big Four account for much of evolution itself. They are:

• Natural selection, changes in gene frequencies due to fitness advantages, or disadvantages, associated with different genes.
• Mutation, the source of new forms of genes;
• Genetic drift, or changes in gene frequencies that arise from the way probability works in finite populations; and
• Migration, or changes in gene frequencies due to the movement of organisms from site to site.

Lay readers may be surprised both by what we know, and what we don't, about how these four processes operate in nature. Natural selection is relatively easy to measure, and apparently ubiquitous in natural populations—but we don't know how often the resulting short-term changes impact evolution over millions of years. Mutation, the source of variation on which natural selection acts, seems to vary widely among living things. Genetic drift means that a trait can come to dominate a population even if it has no fitness effect—or sometimes a deleterious one. Finally, migration across variable landscapes can interact with selection, drift, and mutation to completely alter their effects.

I highly recommend Yoder's series of blogs on the Big Four, and his blog is quite excellent generally.

Although I think we have here a pretty good sketch of what we're talking about when we talk about evolution, I also want to devote some time and space to the idea of the "gaps" in evolution. Let me say up front that I have no doubt that there probably are "gaps," if that means unknown or unresolved elements in our picture of the historical origins and development of particular species. I don't have a problem with gaps in principle because there are a lot of species on Earth (5 to 100 million; science has identified 2 million) and there's a huge amount of time to work with. The Earth may be about 4.6 billion years old, and "[i]t is estimated that the first life forms on earth were primitive, one-celled creatures that appeared about 3 billion years ago" (extremescience.com). I don't expect minute-by-minute accounts of the development of every single population on Earth going back 3 billion years.

However, I do expect that some elements of evolutionary theory--its central claims, lines of evidence, identified processes, and the relationship between them all--would receive careful scrutiny from scientific experts and laypeople alike. Here, for example, is a description by an organization called Answers in Genesis that discusses "Gaps in the Fossil Record":

The most glaring problem with the belief that all life arose from a common ancestor is the lack of fossil evidence of the millions of transitional forms that should be evident if evolution had happened.

It must be noted that this argument is often dismissed through two lines of reasoning: 1) the lack of a complete fossil record and 2) the problems inherent in identifying what is transitional. However, this does not diminish the problem, as some evolutionists suppose, since the types of changes evolution requires to give rise to the various animal kinds over millions of years would be expected to provide ample examples in virtually every layer of the geologic record. This is not the case.

Instead, most of the geologic record is better explained by the catastrophic processes during the global Flood and the subsequent localized catastrophes after the Flood (e.g., that formed the Grand Canyon).

I must say that the above passage is rather offensive because it is quite flagrantly using rhetoric and emotional language to muddy what might be a real argument. The first paragraph frames the question about the fossil record as a "problem," and a "glaring" one at that. It also characterizes (misleadingly, I would say) the hypothesis of common ancestry as a "belief." I see this particular case as an instance of trying to equate a belief derived from scientific method with one derived from traditional teachings. The first emerges as a conclusion based on observable facts, study, and experimentation. the second emerges as a sense of intellectual satisfaction based on received stories, dialogues, and personal experience. My point is, however, that before we get to the real substance of the "gaps" challenge, the writer or authorizing agent of the challenge is trying to cheat by framing the matter as one of traditional belief.

But what of the substance of the "gaps" challenge? The basic objection is the hypothesis that if evolution had happened, then there should be millions of fossils corresponding to "transitional forms." What are transitional forms? According to the International Society for Complexity, Information, and Design, a transitional form is:

An organism with features that it holds in common with organisms presumed to be its ancestor and descendant but that neither of these hold in common. For instance, archaeopteryx has feathers in common with birds and scales in common with reptiles, but neither of these features belong to both birds and reptiles.

A second definition comes from the UCal Berkeley site:

Fossils or organisms that show the transformation from an ancestral form to descendant species' form. For example, there is a well-documented fossil record of transitional forms for the evolution of whales from their amphibious ancestor.

So, the Answers in Genesis charge is that there are more gaps in the fossil record than we should expect. With the caveats that I'm not a biologist and not familiar with all of the evidence that we actually do or don't have for evolution, I must say that I'm not impressed with AiG's charge. My main reason for this, however, is logical: I would expect the common ancestry hypothesis to be based on the fossils that we have, not the ones we don't have. I would also expect that the fossils we have fit with the other sources of evidence. I'm not terribly concerned about missing fossils because of the number of species and the vast amount of time involved. If the two definitions above of transitional forms can be trusted, then we have at least two examples of transitional forms, so we know that in some cases we can see it. I would like to know why we wouldn't see it in other populations and species over time.

I also don't find the final paragraph of the AiG charge as helpful as it could be. There, a counter hypothesis is made that "most of the geologic record is better explained by the catastrophic processes during the global Flood and the subsequent localized catastrophes after the Flood (e.g., that formed the Grand Canyon)."

First, it seems to me that we have abruptly switched gears. In evolution, fossils are one source of evidence. The fossil record shows evolution over time. In the AiG formulation, however, fossils are not a source of evidence but instead the thing to be explained. Could the location of particular fossils be the result of certain catastrophes? Why yes, I don't see why not. But catastrophism does not tell us anything about the relationship of different fossil specimens to one another, if there is a relationship.

This is the second element that makes the AiG charge unhelpful for me: the lack of a coherent formulation of the hypothesis set up as the alternate to evolution. Combining the explanation of evolution given before and the AiG charge given above, I imagine that the alternate hypothesis is:

Through the catastrophic processes during the global Flood and the subsequent localized catastrophes after the Flood, God made life on Earth and gave rise to the fantastic diversity that we see documented in the fossil record and around us today.

If this is an accurate representation of the special creation hypothesis, or at least a part of it, then I think it's clearly weaker than the descent with modification hypothesis. Why? Because the hypothesis will not work if

(1) We don't have positive evidence of a worldwide deluge.
(2) We don't have positive evidence of [a] God.
(3) We cannot explain what it means to use a term like "made" in the context of life formation.

I imagine a real biologist could comment much more effectively on the relative weakness of the alternate hypothesis, but I think the point can safely be made that Occam's razor applies here and we are right to approach the alternate hypothesis with extreme skepticism.

I also imagine that my conversational partner meant more than the fossil record by "huge gaps" in evolution. I won't make any guesses as to what that might mean, but I'm already not predisposed to going through another AiG-type exercise where the objection to evolution is framed misleadingly, where the objection is of seemingly minor significance, and where the alternate hypothesis actually broadens the number and scope of items to be explained.

In sum, the difference between the definition of evolution and the alternate hypothesis is that the first gives a way to solve a problem while the second one gives more problems. The descent with modification hypothesis may ultimately fail, but the hypothesis itself articulates how to go about reinforcing or falsifying it. The special creation hypothesis is less clear in its articulation and depends on unestablished categories such as global Flood and God.

When we compare evolution to creationism, then, we can fairly conclude that

Whatever the gaps in evolution, the gaps in creationism are substantially bigger and badder.

Indeed, this conclusion seems to me so obviously sensible and accurate that I really wonder why anyone would prefer creationism to evolution. Can someone explain that to me?

I'll answer my own question by returning to the idea of biblical teachings. When a believer talks about biblical teachings, the matter includes both the substance of the story told and the "lessons," the articulation of right behavior derived from the story. The matter also includes doctrinal matters, such as teachings around the "Fall," sin, afterlife, and so forth, but I am not really concerned with doctrine.

Let's say, for instance, a church teaches that the biblical story of creation, particularly the creation of humankind, implies that each person is special and valuable to God. What happens to this teaching if the story is not true? My answer is that it does not necessarily make all of the teaching untrue. The essential lesson on human specialness and value can remain intact. Specialness and value, however, become re-contextualized: humans as special against other people and other living things (which are also special), and as valuable in reference to the family and societies to which people belong.

This post is already too long, so I may continue on the above line of thinking in a separate essay, but my point here is only that evolution contradicts the factual/historical/scientific claims of the creationist's Bible. It challenges some elements of the Bible's moral teachings but allows for the core of the teachings to retain their fullest expression.

Debunking Biocentrism

Over at Nirmukta, Vinod K. Wadhawan and Ajita Kamal have a must-read post that explains exactly what makes "biocentrism" nonsense. Biocentrism, according to Wikipedia, claims that "life creates the universe rather than the other way around."

I'm interested in biocentrism because on the surface it seems to make claims similar to social constructionism. Both assert that the universe is a human construction, a product of the interaction between mind and world.

However, biocentrism has a different messianic/eschatological trajectory than social constructionism. As I understand it, biocentrism promises heaven to its believers in the form of a holistic communion of science and supernaturalism.

Social constructionism is a radical form of skepticism. In its most extreme forms, it views science and supernaturalism on the same continuum - they're differing degrees of bullshit but not different in nature, as in one being objective and neutral and the other being subjective and ideological.

Fortunately, biocentrism and social constructionism can be successfully challenged in similar ways. The key is to distinguish experiential truth from objective reality. Experiential truths are subjective perceptions of pre-existing physical properties, as the experience of seeing color is the mind's "interpretation" of certain physical characteristics in light. Our vision, mind, and subjectivity don't create light but can (and do) arbitrarily attach cultural and social value to some general wavelengths.

The common mistake made by biocentrism and social constructionism is the naturalistic fallacy, which mistakes a representation of a phenomenon for a natural phenomenon. Our subjective experiences of color are not our minds creating light or its physical properties Biocentrism and social constructionism try to bring everything into the subjective, representational sphere.

Ironically, however, what both biocentrism and social constructionism seem to criticize is the opposite tendency: claiming that social, subjective things are natural. Social constructionist critiques of gender and race, for example, have rightly pointed out that often what are taken to be "natural" differences between people are based instead on cultural norms and the consensus of tradition. I think the idea of "marriage" is a decent enough example, although obviously imperfect. There's nothing natural about marriage, whether it be different-sex or same-sex.

Biocentrism seems to me an obvious scheme to use a legitimate postmodern critique and convert it into feel-good prescriptions that can be packaged and sold to a public with low self-esteem and plenty of spare cash. Social constructionism has actual intellectual value for demystifying seemingly timeless and normal cultural categories. It errs only when it seeks to collapse the world into subjectivity.

With the help of Wadhawan and Kamal, I think we can make a rather provocative reformulation of the oft-repeated post-structuralist tenet, "There is nothing outside the text." When we maintain the difference between experience and physical reality, and try to be clear (insofar as we can) about when one is collapsing into the other, we see that there is nothing inside the text. There's no objective truth we can pull from the text because all we have is our interpretive experience of it, which is subjective and unique to the reader's time, place and cultural context.

Related: See also the comments posted on Pharyngula.