I certainly agree that ‘good’ design should not be a necessary assumption of ID, as we can observe a large number of examples of designed objects that are very poorly designed. However, since it is not my impression that many (or any) ID advocates are suggesting an incompetent designer…
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Its not sound against some brands of creationism, but against YEC and maybe OEC which posits God literally made everything good, it is.
The GULO pseudogene is my favorite in this regard. It is vestigial and is distributed among primates in a manner consistent with common descent.
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Um, no, we have not found a large number of examples very poorly designed biological artifacts, at least not in any scientifically rigorous way. There is not a scientifically rigorous definition of “poorly design”. If you try to make one, you might start sounding a lot like Behe trying to define “design.”
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It is poor design to give us a sun which helps with vitamin D biosynthesis, but also increases the risk of skin malignancies on exposure to it.
Biological artifacts? Sorry, you’ve badly misread my comment. I mean to say that people have made stuff, and much of it they have made badly. So clearly actual designers make stuff badly, so why shouldn’t the ‘designer’ of ID? Hence, not a necessary assumption.
Since we can know the examples in question are designed by, ya know, watching people do it, I’m not worried about the scientific rigor of ‘design’ as I used it. The fact that the ID camp can’t define ‘design’ rigorously as they use it sounds like a problem for the ID camp.
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The problem of God-talk in academic biology is far more pervasive than I have time to elaborate here.
But, contra Puck – who plausibly advances the “it’s only a reductio for creationist silliness” rejoinder – one can find theological claims in genres and contexts where the creationists have long since departed. Encyclopedia articles on evolution, for example, or public school biology textbooks. This analysis of Dobzhansky’s famous 1973 article, “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution,” by philosopher of science Steve Dilley, is worth a look:
The article is paywalled, but if anyone contacts me (paul.alfredp@gmail.com) and gives me an email to use, I’ll send them a copy. Fair use and all that.
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Apparently I did. I was discussing the bad design argument against creation.
I don’t think so. There are two opposing classes of arguments that, as far as I can see, really do rather accurately describe (and thus contradict) each other.
If we can see that there is a disadvantage or sub-optimality to some structure that could be rather easily fixed with some foresight (which evolution lacks) and biochemical/developmental knowledge, then it really does matter to the validity of a certain opposing class of arguments whether this is in fact a disadvantage.
And if someone is of the opinion that their preferred designer wouldn’t ever deign to create something sub-optimal, or otherwise disadvantageous that some mere human can see how could quickly be improved, then that sub-optimal design, if it really is sub-optimal, is evidence against that kind of conception of design.
That there are other people with different conceptions of design doesn’t mean these two arguments aren’t strictly (and accurately) contradictory.
I would agree with you that there are people on both sides who appear to be overstating their cases. It would be wrong to say that some sort of sub-optimality is evidence against design of any form, just as it would be wrong to say that the optimality (or nearly so) of some structure necessarily is evidence against evolution.
Some things just don’t make sense as the product of a sort of ex nihilo special creation because they have flaws in them that really do look like the contingent products of a historical process that doesn’t have a sort of bird’s eye view of the internal wiring of an organism, and can’t see into the future to plan the development of future descendants of the organism. This is because there really are people with very specific, grandiose views of what this ex nihilo special creation apparently entails.
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How about a design that has a quick and obvious improvement? How about not requiring braces to get your teeth aligned properly when you grow up? Or not having deteriorating eyesight with age?
I’m sorry but your argument is just not good at all. Even if there isn’t really an objective dividing line between good and bad (I don’t care about the label “poor” or “good”), it is rather easy to see that there are relative differences in function and performance of innumerable biological structures and attributes and that some things really can be improved.
Is one thing more robust or stable or flexible or wasteful than another? Can we see how this one thing could be made to function just as well by using less material, or remain stable even at higher temperatures, and so on? Well yes we can.
So what is a good explanation for why they haven’t been further improved? I mean if we can see that they can be, why haven’t they been if they were designed? The designer just doesn’t care? Oddly enough I know of no actual believer in design who would agree that the designer just doesn’t care.
Turns out there are perfectly good explanations for this in evolutionary biology though, where the explanations really do owe to some combination of historical developments and limitations in the efficacy of natural selection to further improve a trait.
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How does ‘no junk DNA disproves evolution’ rely on a theological assumption? Bad designs of course rely on theological assumptions, but that seems fair in response to ID advocates who are making those same assumptions.
The anti-evolution argument, I believe, originally relied on a poorly specified and badly out of date notion of evolution. More recent versions have been squarely targeted at Dan Graur’s claims – and they would have been sound arguments, had Graur not been mistaken, and had genomes really been junk-free. But even Graur does’t believe his argument now, and the genome really is full of junk.
On the other side… is there any model of design that isn’t poorly specified? But rather than rely on design models, which seem to be rather thin on the ground, we can look to at least one example of what design-proponents (including DI luminaries) do predict: they predict that the entire genome is functional. As far as I can tell, they base that on the most simplistic reasoning about efficiency and optimal design – exactly the kind of argument you’re dismissing as a straw man. Given their own stated expectations about design, the human genome is badly designed.
There are of course other kinds of design argument and other kinds of design advocates, but ‘bad design’ arguments are generally aimed at those advancing informal, non-rigorous claims about the evident design in biological systems. If design proponents don’t want ideas about design to be judged by the standard of ‘looks (un)designed to me’, they should stop offering that kind of argument.
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Theistic evolution, such as you personally hold to, is a model of design that is specified, is not?
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We can compare and contrast similar biological designs with each other, so we have an internal control.
An example is the far more intelligent design of ending than of beginning translation. Same process, and it’s easy to see the difference. A protein can end with any amino-acid residue, but must begin with methionine.
Consequently, there’s a massive amount of machinery devoted to replacing or adding stuff to N-termini that could easily have been avoided by having a start codon that does not specify an amino acid.
Not, I think. It’s just two words mashed together, vaguely referring to God somehow being involved. But if I’m mistaken and it actually is specified, could you specify it here, now?
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It could also be said that if life was designed then it was done so by a committee of rather limited designers. In addition, they would have had to artificially imposed a design process that would result in a nested hierarchy, perhaps something like a branching game of telephone. We could think of any number of tortured design scenarios that could explain the data, all of which would probably not be to the liking of ID/creationists. However, parsimony pushes us to favor the known and observed process that would naturally and necessarily produce the patterns we observe in biology.
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I think you raise an interesting question, and I have started a new topic here:
Please let me know if your position has been misrepresented in the opening post.
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What do you mean “depends” in this context @pnelson? What specifically depends on what, and in what sense? Logically? Causally? Empirically?
I didn’t use the verb “depends” in this thread. In any case, the relation in question is logical, as one can see by substituting conceptions of the deity other than those drawn from early 19th c. English natural theology.
A malevolent God, for instance, or an incompetent God. Hume played with such notions in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion.
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I think you are confusing platforms with contemporary arguments.
For example, a politician can use his Twitter account to lambaste his perceived opponents even if they are not on Twitter. This does not mean the politician and his perceived opponents are not having a discussion of sorts. It just means that they are using different platforms to make their arguments.
Many examples are found in the Bible, as well. Passages clearly take aim at themes in the cultural environment (Babylonian mythology, Egyptian hegemony, and the like), even though those themes were often not found among devout Jews. The ziggurat builders were nowhere in the Promised Land, for example, but they are surely addressed in Genesis 11.
That’s what’s happening in the passages you cite, I respectfully submit. Dobzhansky and Dilley are taking aim at arguments quite contemporary and widely held in the world writ large, even if those arguments are not found in textbooks or encyclopedias.
Does this distinction between presence on a platform (or phrased differently, in a medium) and presence in the cultural environment make sense to you, Paul? Do you think it might be relevant to reading Dobzhansky and Dilley well?
Best,
Chris
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I’m a devout theist who does not have a problem with junk DNA. I know many Christian biologists who do not have a problem with junk DNA, and some of them post regularly here at PS.
That said, I do note that the @Jesse_England quote references Discovery Institute, not theists, so he did not conflate DI with theism.
Best,
Chris
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