Concrete Academic

I want to discuss the scientific status of Intelligent Design, but please note the specificity of my purpose. This is not about whether or not it should be taught in public school, or academic discrimination, or the origin of bacterial flagella. And when I say “Intelligent Design,” or ID, I don’t mean the Discovery Institute, nor the concomitant political and social movement, which are most certainly not scientific. I mean the over-arching hypothesis that the world at some level is designed by a mind.

The ID movement is officially agnostic about the identity of the D/designer, but that’s a bit disingenuous. None of them are working under the assumption that the designing mind will turn out to be just another biological life-form. As it puts us in an endless regression of designers, I’m going to speak to the capital-D theory. Much of the work done under the Intelligent Design label is scientific in some sense. A small handful of scientists have written books and papers that are at least academic enough that I don’t understand them, so I admit that investigating the question under ID does involve doing science. What I claim is that the hypothesis itself is not really scientific. Let me explain.

Criteria for scientific viability

There are three really good criteria for evaluating a potential science such as memetics, psychoanalysis, or Intelligent Design: explanatory power, experimental success, and fecundity.  Explanatory power is the ability of a theory to explain a breadth of phenomena. The atomic theory of magnetism has greater explanatory power than the tiny-invisible-purple-rope theory of magnetism (TIPR-theory, for short) because the latter is obviously ad hoc and unconnected to the rest of the world. It might explain why two pieces of metal are attracted to each other, but not much else. A scientific hypothesis should do more than answer a single question. It should provide an interpretive model of the world, even if only a small piece of it.

Experimental success as a criterion is obvious, and it goes without saying that a theory must be testable to be evaluated at all. Even though I made it up, I’m at a loss as to what kind of experiment would be a fitting test for TIPR-theory, particularly if I further qualified the tiny invisible purple rope as undetectable by modern means and not causally related to anything detectable. If it were testable, it would need to succeed in predicting the results of multiple experiments, or at least explain why it didn’t do so; and we’re back to explanatory power.

Fecundity is related to the first two criteria, and it has to do with the ability of a theory to generate new questions and experiments. The atom hypothesis leads both up and down the chain of hard sciences, to physics and chemistry, provoking questions and suggesting experiments. A classic example is the prescient ‘discovery’ of non-extant elements, filling in the periodic table with the identity and properties of materials known only through the model. TIPR-theory, in contrast, wishes simply to end the questioning. It suggests no new directions. Here’s the important part: This is because of the kind of thesis that it is, not because it’s wrong. And if it turns out to be right, remember that I came up with it. © Todor 2009.

So what about Intelligent Design? I think it’s a fantastic answer, of far-reaching explanatory power; but by its very nature it’s a poor question. Science thrives on questions, accepts answers only provisionally, and digs for deeper ones. If an ultimate answer is reached, science comes to an end, for there is no where else for it to go. This is precisely what finding Design, or the Designer, means. The capitals indicate an ultimate explanation, not a provisional one. This is not analogous to finding a watch and inferring a designer, because that answer to the question, Why is this as it is?, provokes the question, Where did the watchmaker come from? ID theorists stop at Design. It’s simply the nature of their thesis. Science may lead a researcher to the question, Is this Design?, but it cannot adjudicate an affirmative answer.

Here I have to revise an earlier statement. I’ve not yet seen ID people really investigate questions so much as debunk certain answers. They have done an excellent job at exposing the problems of the consensus view of the origin and diversity of life, but little has been done to build a rival hypothesis, a different interpretive model that makes better sense of the data. The explanatory power of ID is breathtaking, but there are no forthcoming experiments for it, and it doesn’t seem to be spawning other scientific work. This is not because there is no Designer, but because ID ends the scientific process.

Full-fledged ID science?

This is all a bit abstract, but I think it can be cleared up looking at it practically. What would we expect to see if ID were a science? Rather than just exposing holes in other theories, which itself is a big part of the process, there would be measurable work done in building rival models. I would think there is enough money in the social movement to set up think tanks, institutions (The Discovery Institute is more of  a public relations arm for the movement), or endowed fellowships (at a sufficiently conservative school), and a peer-reviewed journal where ID scientists would publish papers working out precisely where the Design is, how we know it when we see it, what experiments should be performed, and how the results of other experiments should be reinterpreted. Is Design at the level of species? phylum? DNA? Can there be multiple levels of Design? There are a lot of questions, and nothing resembling a consensus in the literature available to me. What is more, an emerging consensus should start to show greater experimental success than rival theories—it should simply work better.

Don’t get me wrong, what they’re doing now is ok. I’m happy to see anyone throw stones at Goliath—it’s better for everyone in the long run—and if the Discovery Institute and others can get him to fall, all the better. Maybe there’s an Einsteinian revolution in the offing for biology. But right now the Intelligent Design movement is pouting about being disrespected in the scientific community. If you’re doing good science the work speaks for itself, and you don’t need to be in the good graces of the National Academy of Sciences. So either do the science better than everybody else, or start playing a different game.