Question: How could you tell if Intelligent Design research was helpful to mainstream science?
1 Like
Iâm not sure what ID research is, and I mean that as a serious question not an insult⌠we could mean âresearch by people who embrace IDâ or we could mean âresearch that purports to bolster the case for IDâ or maybe even âresearch on the nature of IDâ. We can skip it for now I guess.
Iâll suggest one way ID research has been detectably helpful to real science, IMO: asking interesting questions that direct attention to perhaps overlooked concepts or areas of inquiry. This is a position that seems to be expressed in a 2014 paper from Joanna Masel and colleagues, with âirreducible complexityâ in the title (with scare quotes). I think that Richard Dawkins has also credited ID apologists (Behe specifically) with asking a good question.
The pathetic Axe paper is perhaps another example of a contribution to an interesting question. I judge that contribution to be so flawed as to be a net negative, but the question is worthy and important.
1 Like
Answer: You can tell Intelligent Design research is helpful to mainstream science because publications by ID proponents discuss this research and include citations to mainstream scientific articles.
See A Positive, Testable Case for Intelligent Design | Intelligent Design
I donât immediately see any ID research being discussed in that âpublicationâ. But I do see this:
So much wrong there. First, it repeats a common misunderstanding of how junk DNA is defined and how we know itâs junk. Second, IDers canât agree on whether the absence of junk DNA is an expectation of ID. Third, the supposed expectation is pretty well falsified by the data, avoided only by cherry-picking and quote-mining. Fourth, this is not a characteristic of design but of human design. Unless Casey wants to claim that the hypothetical designer is limited in the ways humans are, the human design model isnât relevant.
Anyway, I donât see how the fact that Casey cites a few real publications (not including the one quoted here) makes this helpful to mainstream science. Thoughts?
1 Like
It doesnât.
Scientists citing ID work would be ID helping science. This is the other way around.
2 Likes
Now Iâm confused. Was I perhaps missing the intended sarcasm?
No, just absurdity and futility of ID.
Iâm highlighting the ID articleâs vacuity. Though I donât know if itâs Luskinâs failure or if he doesnât think his readers will spot the flaw.
It is laugh-out-loud vacuous now, just as it was 15 years ago when it was first written. Because itâs so old, itâs perhaps not the best illustration of your pointâŚ
1 Like
I believe we have enough experience here in this forum with members of his readership to know that they will not spot the flaw. Even if it was spelled out for them in letters a mile high.
2 Likes
Check out one of the journals referenced there:
And check out the list of appropriate topics. Whatever is this?
The link I gave works fine for me. Here:
!
One of the ways in which intelligent design (ID) could be helpful to mainstream science is by producing methods, hypotheses, models, datasets, predictions, or conceptual distinctions that improve inquiry in fields such as biology, biochemistry, genetics, origin-of-life studies, information theory, paleontology, or systems biology.
The key indicators would be things like uptake (mainstream researchers citing ID work and using it constructively), predictive fruitfulness (ID research that leads scientists to expect things they would not otherwise have looked for), experimental or methodological contribution (ID producing lab work, computational tools, classification methods, or measurable criteria that help distinguish functional organization from noise, degradation, or incidental structure), and so on.
But there is also problem generation. Good science doesnât just answer questions; crucially, it creates better questions. On that note, ID would be helping mainstream science if it forced more precise accounts of biological information, irreducible organization, molecular machines, coordinated mutations, or protein search spaces. Even hostile engagement could be useful if it raises the standard of argument. For example, the relationship between the bacterial flagellum and Type III secretion systems became a major locus of analysis. Pallen and Matzkeâs (2006) review explicitly framed the flagellum as a case where arguments for evolution rather than design needed to be explored in detail.
That makes me think of the Stated Clearly video series by Jon Perry on the evolution of the bacterial flagella. It is not âmainstream scienceâ itselfâit is science communicationâbut the reason that kind of video exists is that the bacterial flagellum became a focal test case in the ID-versus-evolution debate. Beheâs irreducible complexity argument forced defenders of evolutionary theory to go beyond just saying âcomplex systems evolveâ and articulate more granular accounts of co-option, exaptation, homologous parts, secretion systems, assembly order, modularity, and plausible evolutionary sequences.
The ID challenge inspired the explanation, âWhat, specifically, is the evolutionary route by which a coordinated molecular machine could arise?â That is the kind of pressure problem-generation produces. So it is an example of how ID can be helpful to mainstream science: by forcing evolutionary explanations to become more specific, more evidentially constrained, and less dependent on hand-waving generalities.
2 Likes
Right⌠itâs not as if trying to deduce specific mechanisms and evolutionary histories werenât already being actively pursued by âmainstreamâ science âŚ
The âID keeps science honest by asking unasked questionsâ scenario seems a stretch, like how YECers, flat earthers and moon landing deniers âkeep science honestâ by rabidly questioning anything that doesnât fit their preferred narrative.
By failing to create positive, science-advancing models for ID detection or the distinct patterns and timing a "âDesignerâ enacted in life (you know, the sort of thing that advances science), theyâre left with the âDesigner of the gapsâ, approach of reflexively denying evolutionary explanations and potential mechanisms. IDâs schtick remains a collection of anti-evolutionary reasoning like anti-old earth and anti-spherical earth proponents. Or how antivaxxers keep scientists honest by still insisting that the measles vaccine is behind increases in autism. Their ridiculousness ensures they are ignored, except by the credulous and fools, contributing little of substance to the furtherance of science.
5 Likes
There is a delightful (or depressing, depending on how one looks at itâŚ) irony I am struggling to find a witty metaphor to express, in using an AI chat bot to generate a response justifying the utility to science of something so openly opposed to it as cdesign proponentsism.
3 Likes
Agreed. But I would distinguish ID âresearchâ as carried out in practice by the religious extremists trying actively to undermine science, and what ID could be in principle if it was playing by the rules of science and not motivated as a socio-political issue and culture war.
And I do think the idea @John_Bauer brings up about the flagellum as a test case is valid. Though not so much that any ID hypothesis produced useful insights, but the fact that the conservative religious think tank put pressure on the biological community actually did make them go more seriously and specifically to work on a series of entirely valid questions within evolutionary biology. What would an evolutionary case for the flagellum look like? What reason do we have for thinking it evolved? And so on.
In an alternative version of history where the ID movement didnât occur, Matzke presumably wouldnât have written Evolution in Brownian space 2003, and while there would still have been research into flagella going on (they are important factors in immunology and microbiology), it would probably have taken many more decades before evolutionary biologists got around to taking such a focused look on that system specifically.
Not that this really excuses the ID movement (the Discovery Institute) in any way, given that their ultimate goals arenât scientific at all and they would rather see all the flagellum evolution research ultimately canceled, unfunded, and rejected. But thereâs definitely truth to the idea that pressure can drive progress in science. War drives innovation.
3 Likes
But while they might have âtaken many more decades before âŚ[getting] around to taking such a focused look on that system specificallyâ, they probably would have spent that time looking at other specific questions. So it ends up pretty much a zero-sum game.
A slight reordering of which specific questions that mainstream science answers would not appear to be of substantive help to mainstream science.
2 Likes
Perhaps, but also perhaps not. Creationists were writing about flagella before Behe expanded on their ideas, and without the ID movement they and he would likely have continued to ask about flagella in explicitly creationist publications.
Youâd need an alternative history without creationists of any form to delay flagellum research.
I fail to see why asking that question requires ID. More to the point, why doesnât anyone from the ID movement actually try answer that question? JAQing off is not generally a productive scientific endeavour.
5 Likes
Since the ID explanation for flagella (âthey were designedâ) is itself a hand-waving generality, it might encourage more specific evolutionary explanations, but it doesnât force them.
5 Likes