We’re (Badly) Designed

Mano Singham sums it up succinctly in God vs. Darwin (2009, p. 101):

“Intelligent design” (ID) can best be understood as a carefully crafted theory designed to eliminate those features that had led to the defeat (because of the Establishment Clause) of prior efforts to combat the teaching of evolution in public schools.

In short, ID is really just Creationism by stealth. Interviewed by the Washington Post in 2005, law professor (and born-again christian) Phillip Johnson, the instigator of the modern recrudescence of ID theory, more or less admitted as much: “I realized that if the pure Darwinist account was accurate and life is all about an undirected material process, then christian metaphysics and religious belief are fantasy.”1 Untold millions of dollars and billions of man-hours have been wasted in the US because Johnson didn’t fully consider the latter option.

Even in the immediate aftermath of the publication of Origin of Species there were those who subscribed to some form of ID. One was the astronomer Sir John Herschel, who proposed that an Intelligence might control the course of evolution, although following scientific laws in so doing; the obvious counterargument would be that, since this situation is indistinguishable from the scientific laws operating without guidance, why invoke the Intelligence? The US botanist Asa Gray, a friend of Darwin’s, accepted evolution but insisted on the directedness that Darwin had specifically rejected; in Gray’s view, useful new variations were created by God, natural selection’s role being merely to preserve these after their establishment.

Another important early IDer was charles Hodge, who in books like What Is Darwinism? (1874) equated evolution with atheism, which meant it was obviously false.

The UK philosopher and theologian (and zealous crusader against slavery) William Paley is best remembered today for his book Natural Theology, or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity (1802), in which he presented what is now technically known as the teleological argument from design—in other words, the contention that examination of the universe around us reveals countless examples of beauties, complexities, and concordances that can only be attributable to their having been designed; this implies the existence of a Designer. In his text, Paley showed all the observational traits one could desire in a naturalist, and he was not afraid to spell out fairly arguments that opposed his own. The book was a great bestseller all through the nineteenth century, even after the publication in 1859 of Origin of Species, whose author cheerfully admitted that on his own first encounter with Natural Theology he’d been convinced by Paley’s arguments.

The most famous of these was the watchmaker argument homaged much more recently by Richard Dawkins in the title of his book The Blind Watchmaker (1986). Paley set this argument out right at the beginning of his book:

In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there; I might possibly answer, that, for any thing I knew to the contrary, it had lain there for ever: nor would it perhaps be very easy to show the absurdity of this answer. But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place; I should hardly think of the answer which I had before given, that, for any thing I knew, the watch might have always been there. Yet why should not this answer serve for the watch as well as for the stone? why is it not as admissible in the second case, as in the first? For this reason, and for no other, viz. that, when we come to inspect the watch, we perceive (what we could not discover in the stone) that its several parts are framed and put together for a purpose. . . . This mechanism being observed . . . , the inference, we think, is inevitable, that the watch must have had a maker.2

The reason Paley and his Natural Theology are anything more than a philosophical curio to us today is the rise of the ID movement. And it’s more than a tad depressing that, even though the specifics may have changed, the arguments he produced in 1802 are essentially identical with those being advanced by the IDers in 2011. His watchmaker argument is, after all, little different from the argument from irreducible complexity.

Design ideas can be traced back far beyond Paley, to ancient Greek philosophers like Aristotle and Romans like Cicero. In the christian tradition, the argument from design began in the writings of Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century; it was one of his celebrated five proofs of the existence of God.

Curiously, the argument from design was born out of the same mechanistic view of the universe and of life that modern IDers so decry. This is evident in the work of Sir Isaac Newton, the scientist who, despite his own spiritual explorations into alchemy and the like, more than any established our mechanistic view of the universe. Here he is with a piece of argument from design:

Atheism is so senseless & odious to mankind that it never had many professors. Can it be by accident that all birds beasts & men have their right side & left side alike shaped (except in their bowells) & just two eyes & no more on either side the face & just two ears on either side the head & a nose with two holes & no more between the eyes & one mouth under the nose & either two fore leggs or two wings or two arms on the sholders & two leggs on the hipps one on either side & no more? Whence arises this uniformity in all their outward shapes but from the counsel & contrivance of an Author?3

It’s but a short step from here to Paley’s watchmaker. So here we have what we might call the IDer’s Dilemma: Do we revile Newton as the ubermaterialist father of the mechanistic view of the universe, or do we praise him as one of the great early progenitors of ID theory?

Richard Dawkins’s The Blind Watchmaker, mentioned above, effectively demolished—at length—any residues that might still have been lurking in the popular mind of the argument from design. What Dawkins couldn’t have predicted is that his book would be responsible—along with Michael Denton’s attack on Darwinism, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (1985)—for kicking off the latest resurgence of the argument from design. In response to reading these two works, Phillip Johnson wrote his Creationist tract Darwin on Trial (1991), the book that launched the ID movement.

It seems likely Johnson didn’t get to the end of Dawkins’s book, because in its final chapter, “Doomed Rivals,” Dawkins demonstrates not that natural selection happens to be the correct mechanism for evolution—he’s already done so—but that “Darwinism is the only known theory that is in principle capable of explaining certain aspects of life” (p. 408). What he shows, in other words, is not just that the other hypotheses aren’t true but that they couldn’t be true. As part of this argument, he considers what the IDers would call irreducible complexity. Dawkins’s refutation of this conceit is very lucid; as I say, it’s hard to believe Johnson read it.

The idea of irreducible complexity is inextricably associated with the inventor of that term, US biochemistry professor Michael Behe. In his book Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical challenge to Evolution (1996) he defined an irreducibly complex system (p. 39) as a “single system composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning.”

Behe presented a number of examples of biological and biochemical systems that he claimed were irreducibly complex, like the bacterial flagellum (a feature that acts like a cute little propeller to drive bacteria around) and the human eye. Although subsequent editions of Darwin’s Black Box mysteriously fail to bear corresponding amendments, Behe was forced in the witness box at the 2005 Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District trial to admit that satisfactory evolutionary mechanisms have been worked out for many if not all of the systems he claimed as irreducibly complex. Even dedicated IDers are now displaying caution when advancing irreducible complexity as a mainstay of their pseudoscience.

It’s Behe’s claim that “[n]o one on earth has the vaguest idea how the [blood] coagulation cascade came to be.”4 We’re reminded of Behe’s claim at the Dover trial that science has “no answers to the origin of the immune system”; on being presented in court with a stack of peer-reviewed papers, books, and book chapters offering exactly those answers, he both admitted he hadn’t read any of them and protested that, anyway, none of the evidence they offered was good enough. Not only is the evolution of mammalian blood clotting very well understood, Nature—or, rather, natural selection—has solved the clotting problem more than once, and in different ways. Lobsters, for example, enjoy the benefits of a different (and simpler) clotting mechanism than ours. If natural selection can find several different ways of solving a problem, this hardly argues in favor of one in particular being irreducibly complex. Quite the contrary: Any clotting mechanism more complex than the simplest on offer can be considered evidence favoring natural selection, whose structures and mechanisms often have a Rube Goldbergish quality through having evolved from pre-existing elements whose purposes were something else.

One of Behe’s many precursors in calling attention to the “design” of the human eye was Paley. In fact, Paley’s discussion of the subject was among several in which he came agonizingly close to evolutionary ideas before backing off.

The first eyes may have evolved as long ago as 530 million years, if traces in the fossil record are being read correctly. Even before that, there were species possessing light-sensitive cells—even if unable to see, they’d have had the advantage of knowing which direction light was coming from. There have been at least forty separate evolutionary emergences of a functional eye. Definitions vary, but it is frequently said that there are ten different basic “designs” of animal eyes, from the compound eyes found in the insect world to the various types of lensed eyes, such as ours. Lensed eyes are known to have evolved on at least seven different occasions. The “design” shared by humans and many other mammals (but not, for example, cats) is just one—and, for that matter, not necessarily the best “designed”: The squid eye, though it cannot perceive color, has greater acuity than ours and no blind spot. Birds have the most acute vision of any.

It’s a legitimate question as to why the Designer didn’t give the pinnacle of his Creation the best possible eye available. There are various design failures in the human eye, not least that in effect the retina is back-to-front: the photosensitive cells are at the rear. In order to reach those cells, the light has to pass through a litter of processing cells on the retina’s front surface. According to evolutionists, this back-to-front arrangement has come about because the eye developed, a very long time ago, from an optically sensitive outcrop of the cortex.

What then of the famous flagellum? There are all sorts of different “designs” of bacterial flagella, and some species swim around perfectly happily without any flagellum at all. Again, Nature has solved this propulsion problem several times and in different ways, some better than others—a clear sign of natural selection at work.

Another legitimate question to be asked of the IDers is why the Designer made such an incompetent job of us. We’re poorly adapted to our upright stance, even after all these millions of years. We have “bad backs” and “dodgy knees” because of it. Even hemorrhoids can be traced to our poorly adapted posture—in fact, as with sea cucumbers, wasps, and so much else, it’s hard to see why the Designer would have wanted to create hemorrhoids at all. childbirth is abominably painful and even dangerous, to no apparent purpose. It’s hard, too, to understand why we seem to be in so many ways poorly designed to withstand the rigors of the earth’s gravitational field: We can kill ourselves by falling down a flight of stairs, and even tripping over our own feet can result in a broken bone or two. And then there’s the matter of spontaneous abortion. The Designer terminates more pregnancies than does the abortion industry.

There are plenty of examples of bad “design.” Behe is aware of these, and in Darwin’s Black Box (p. 223) he tries to address them:

Clearly, designers who have the ability to make better designs do not necessarily do so. For example, in manufacturing, “built-in obsolescence” is not uncommon—a product is intentionally made so it will not last as long as it might. . . . Most people throughout history have thought that life was designed despite sickness, death, and other obvious imperfections.

That last throwaway line is rather like claiming that, since most people throughout history believed the sun went round the earth, we should consider the claim seriously.

The main point he seems to be making in the passage above is that, where structures, organs, or organisms appear to have been “designed” extremely well for their function or niche, we are to accept this as evidence of the Designer. Where, by contrast, they’re “designed” badly, we’re supposed to take that as evidence of the Designer as well; we’d recognize the “design” as good if we knew the Designer’s secret motives.

Behe’s argument is strongly reminiscent of one made decades earlier, in 1914, by Sunni theologian Abu al-Majid Muhammad Rida al-Isfahani in Naqd Falsafat Darwin (“Critique of Darwin’s Philosophy”), attacking the notion of vestigial organs:

Can we assume that because the function of the unused organs is unknown to us, they are non-functional? By so doing, we close the door to scientific investigations of the nature of these organs. Darwin himself was not sure of the function of the organs.5

One of the messages to be taken away from Niall Shanks’s God, the Devil, and Darwin (2006)—probably the best extant critique of ID—is that Behe has seen all the evidence in favor of natural selection and chosen to ignore it. Time after time Shanks goes to papers that Behe has cited and discovers their conclusions differ from those Behe claims to have drawn from them. It’s depressing to find a biochemist of Behe’s stature playing this game.

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Another argument used by IDers is a probabilistic one. They point out that the odds against a particular evolutionary outcome (us, for example) are mindbogglingly huge. Surely it couldn’t have happened without the intervention of the Designer. This is one of the approaches adopted by, among others, William Dembski, and it has two considerable flaws.

The first is a failure to understand that the odds against any particular outcome, evolutionary or otherwise, are often enormous. To point at a particular organ or feature and say the odds of it having developed are minuscule is to state a truth . . . but one that’s meaningless. The fact that you, dear reader, exist at all is a statistical nightmare: Who could count all the chances and coincidences throughout human history that have led to the outcome of the person reading these words being you? Same for anyone you meet on the street. Yet the likelihood of your meeting people as you walk down the street is high. Likewise, while the odds of that particular “design” of bacterial flagellum having occurred through natural selection alone are small, the odds of bacteria having developed flagella are much higher, and the odds of bacteria having developed propulsion higher still. The argument can be extended indefinitely.

Dembski has shown some awareness of the criticism that the probability of a particular complex structure emerging varies considerably according to whether or not the structure has been specified in advance. He has therefore come up with the concept of “complex specified information” (CSI). If you could point at a bacterial flagellum, for example, and say, “That structure was specified in advance,” you would be making a very much stronger argument for the intervention of a Designer than otherwise. The trouble with CSI would seem to be that, in the natural world, the only complex structures you can point at are ones that already exist, which means it’s too late to say whether their designs were specified in advance. Since you can’t tell if CSI even exists, it seems pointless to speculate further.

Allied are notions concerning the fact that the universe seems to have been rather precisely tailored to permit the formation of carbon-based (and conceivably other) life forms. There are some basic constants built into the universe—indeed, into the Big Bang—that, had they been just a trifle different, would have made for a very different kind of universe and one in which life as we know it would have been impossible. Martin Rees explores these constants in his book Just Six Numbers (1999). The six are not something so simple as the gravitational constant, as one might expect. Instead . . . well, here’s a sample (p. 2):

The cosmos is so vast because there is one crucially important huge number N in nature, equal to 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. This number measures the strength of the electrical forces that hold atoms together, divided by the force of gravity between them. If N had a few less zeroes, only a short-lived miniature universe could exist: . . . there would be no time for biological evolution.

The sixth of Rees’s numbers is the one that’s most easily accessible to commonsense: the number of spatial dimensions, D. As we know, D = 3. No matter how many other, nonspatial dimensions might exist (e.g., time), and there may be many, “Life couldn’t exist if D were two or four.”

The odds against all six of Rees’s numbers—and the combination of them—being just right for the emergence of life forms such as ourselves are clearly, well, astronomical. Could it possibly be a product of coincidence? One school of thought regards that as a silly question: It’s only because we’re here to ask the question that the concept of coincidence arises; if the numbers were a bit different, we wouldn’t be here to do the asking. There’s no coincidence involved because that’s just the way things have turned out.

To the Creationist, this problem doesn’t arise, because the Creationist knows that isn’t how the universe works, since it has had only a few thousand years of existence. The supposedly more moderate IDer, conceding that the universe is billions of years old, will, if willing to accept the Big Bang theory, claim the happy concordance of the six numbers as obvious evidence of the Designer. Surely it’s inconceivable that things could have turned out this way simply by chance.

Many modern cosmologists agree, which is why the notion of the multiverse has emerged in recent years. For a long time we thought the earth was unique, and the rest of creation revolved around it; then we discovered differently. Next we thought the sun was the center of the universe. For a while we thought the contents of our galaxy constituted the entire universe. What if our universe, too, is only one among many? It’s not difficult to contemplate the possibility of there being countless other universes, big and small (whatever those terms might in context mean), alongside our own in a giant structure of which we can as yet see nothing, the multiverse. Clearly, the multiverse is as yet a highly speculative concept, yet it would serve to explain quite a number of things, not least the coincidence of the basic constants of our own universe (if there are billions of universes, then every now and then one of them’s going to turn out just right for folks like us), as well as the fact that our universe had a beginning: It’s much easier to countenance a universe of (so far) finite lifetime existing within an eternal structure than it is to explain how such a universe could exist in isolation.

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Within this first model, to postulate a non-material cause—such as an unevolved intelligence or vital force—for any event is to depart altogether from science and enter the territory of religion. For scientific materialists, this is equivalent to departing from objective reality into subjective belief. What we call intelligent design in biology is by this definition inherently antithetical to science, and so there cannot conceivably be evidence for it.6

What’s alarming is that the author of these words, Phillip Johnson, is not attempting to demolish the notion of ID. He’s offering this argument as justification.

In a way, it’s a mistake to think of ID as a scientific movement at all. In reality, it’s a political movement, its agenda being the replacement, as a substrate of modern civilization, of rational—“materialistic”—thought by a sort of faith-based mélange. The prime mover behind the ID campaign is the conservative Discovery Institute, founded in 1996. The key to understanding the Discovery Institute’s agenda is the Wedge Document, compiled by Creationists within the Center for the Renewal of Science & Culture sometime in the late 1990s and soon thereafter leaked to the web. As Niall Shanks sums it up in God, the Devil, and Darwin (p. 12):

At the thinnest end of the wedge are questions about Darwinism. As the wedge thickens slightly, issues about the nature of intelligent causation are introduced. As the wedge thickens still further, the interest in intelligent causation evolves into an interest in supernatural intelligent causation. At the fat end of the wedge is a bloated evangelical theology.

Naturally, rationalists worldwide cried “Foul!” when this profoundly antidemocratic plan to march human knowledge back to the Middle Ages was revealed. And they were joined by many christian theologians, horrified by it not just as a negation of truth but as bad theology. In the Sydney Morning Herald for November 15, 2005, Dr. Neil Ormerod, professor of theology at Australian Catholic University, summed up the feelings of many theologians in an article called “How Design Supporters Insult God’s Intelligence,” describing ID as “an unnecessary hypothesis which should be consigned to the dustbin of scientific and theological history.”7 Another is John F. Haught. In God After Darwin (2000; expanded 2008), Haught identifies the three attributes that distinguish religion from science: that religion claims to have as its territory (a) the explanation of ultimate causes, (b) the exploration of inaccessible mystery, and (c) the appeal to a personal deity (or deities). He then demonstrates that ID matches all three of these characteristics. Moreover (p. 199),

[a] sure indication that ID is not science lies in the fact that its chief architects openly present ID as an alternative to naturalism or materialism rather than solely as an alternative to another scientific theory. In doing so they themselves rhetorically locate ID in the arena of belief systems rather than exclusively empirical science.

He adds that “Dembski, for example, explicitly states that ID is part of a program to defeat naturalism.”

There’s a curious sociological aspect to all this. Usually, when something like the Wedge Document is exposed, revealing the agenda of a particular pressure group to be quite different from the one its recruited supporters were led to believe, those supporters tend to back off, their ardor cooled by the realization they’ve been exploited as useful idiots. In the case of the ID movement, however, it seems to have made little difference.

In 2005 the Discovery Institute hired the public relations company CRC (Creative Response Concept). This company had come to prominence the year before through masterminding the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign, which had perpetrated not truth but falsehood about the Vietnam War career of presidential candidate John Kerry. It seems the Designer, while capable of tweaking an eye here or a flagellum there, requires mundane assistance when it comes to tweaking the truth.

ID’s status as science wasn’t helped when, in 2010, William Dembski made a public declaration to the effect that he was a biblical literalist. Statements such as “I believe that Adam and Eve were real people, that as the initial pair of humans they were the progenitors of the whole human race, that they were specially created by God, and thus that they were not the result of an evolutionary process from primate or hominid ancestors” are not the way to guarantee the continuation of constructive dialogue with scientists.8 Really, though, this was far from the first time Dembski had said something similar. In Intelligent Design: The Bridge Between Science and Theology (1999, p. 206), the book that brought his ID views to notice, he famously stated: “My thesis is that all disciplines find their completion in christ and cannot be properly understood apart from christ. . . . [A]ny view of the sciences that leaves christ out of the picture must be seen as fundamentally deficient.” This may or may not be good theology, but it most certainly isn’t a valid scientific approach. It becomes increasingly hard to see why anyone takes Dembski’s pronouncements on science seriously at all.

In an interview with Michelangelo D’Agostino in 2006, Phillip Johnson, the father of ID, seemed to admit the whole crusade had been based on, if not a hoax, then a false pretense: “I also don’t think that there is really a theory of intelligent design at the present time to propose as a comparable alternative to the Darwinian theory.”9 Yet, five years later, the Discovery Institute is still churning out its pseudoscience on a daily basis, still claiming ID is a scientific theory.