Nathan Lents: Bad Design of the Eye?

[swamidass (S. Joshua Swamidass)]

@NLENTS

So I am confused as to why you say that poor design arguments don’t work, while also acknowledging that biological quirks are best explained by common descent.

So @NLENTS, I’m going give a brief summary. There are several questions there. If you can humor me there, I think it will tease out some of the finer points.

Common Ground

First off, I think we are on agreement on several things.

@NLENTS

see these quirks as biological mysteries that often reveal evidence of common descent

Josh - That is precisely my point. I have resisted saying that my book is written as an argument against ID because it wasn’t written that way.

@NLENTS

So, much of the content of my book, I believe, challenges ID, but that doesn’t mean that it’s written as a direct challenge to ID. If that were my goal, just about every sentence of the book would be written differently and I would have chosen different examples. Many good books refuting ID have been written. My book was written for an audience that already accepts evolutionary theory.

This is an important point. It is unfortunate the main point of your book was lost in the acrimony.

@NLENTS

Although it wasn’t written to challenge ID, the content of the book does pose challenges because, as you note, these quirks are rather easily understood from the point of view of common descent. Without that perspective, they are conundrums. (Has an ID-based explanation for the crazy path of the recurrent laryngeal nerve been offered? What about GULO? What about other pseudogenes?)

That’s exactly right. There are range of weird features of biological systems that are best explained as common descent. Of course, God have de novo created us to be like this, but it wouldn’t explain why he did it this way.

So What Is the Problem?

I’ll try and map out the key issues here, at a high level.

1. It rhetorically argues that the beauty and complexity is “poorly” designed, which doesn’t even match our own experience as scientists as we are in awe of it all. In this way, it is a very hard argument to emotionally win.

2. Is our belly button an example of poor design? Not at all. Rather it bears testimony to an important function that our bodies once had, but no longer do. In the same way, a broken GLUO gene is not poor design if common descent is true, because it had a real function the past. So from an evolutionary point of view, is not actually bad design.

3. The fact that it requires adopting a non-evolutionary point of view, makes it susceptible to being a straw man, and in fact I think it is. It requires presuming a specific narrow range of design models to be valid (i.e. rejection of common descent).

4. Ultimately it is a theological argument because you have to come back to “what God would or wouldn’t have done.” Scientific arguments should stay out of careless theology (or maybe all theology) like this. If we are going to talk about God would have or wouldn’t have done, we need to start engaging other disciplines (philosophy, theology, etc.) and specifying which God we are talking about (Christian, Hindu, etc.). Messy territory for secular science. I oppose this sort of mixing of theology into scientific argumentation.

5. For people like me, that draw on the pre-ID concept of “creation” by common descent, as a the way God designed us, it puts us in an awkward position. We end up dodging between the rhetoric of both sides. Thankfully, scientists are smart enough to know we aren’t their opponents.

6. This adopts the biased rhetoric of anti-evolutionists. They want evolution to be incompatible with “design”/“creation” so they can rely heavily on a fallacy of an excluded middle. From a persuasion point of view, arguing “this is a better version of design” will always be more effective than “design is false.” Adopting there rhetoric, rather than turning it, ends up substantially weakening its persuasive power.

7. Perhaps most importantly, quite often this argument leads to lazy thinking about biology, and often the facts are fudged to serve the preacher-roll of the argument’s narrative. The eye is a good example of this. I’m not sure, for example, if your arguments about the eye being poorly designed are scientifically accurate.

8. Narrative’s like bad design can work against scientific curiosity. When we see an oddity in life, we should ask why? Perhaps it is neutral? Perhaps is positive? Perhaps it is negative? However, for the bad design argument, it only works if the quirk is negative. This by its nature constrains to an a priori view of mysteries in biology. This is not how science works, so it misrepresents the spirit of science to the public. In many ways, it can be as much a show stopper to scientific thought as ID arguments can be.

All these reasons, in my opinion, are why we should back away from both ID and bad design arguments in science. They seems to be a well-intentioned but misguided rhetoric for engaging the public.

Quirks, Seams, and Questions

I think there is a better way. In its place, I would suggest an alternate invitational rhetoric that better matches the spirit of science. For example, these make the same point, and make it more persuasively to religious audiences.

1. These are quirks and mysteries about how life is arranged we are trying to figure out. Here are many of them are explained by common descent.

2. These are seams or breadcrumbs, pointing to a deeper history of how things came into being though common descent.

3. There is an open question about the importance of this quirk and this is how we are trying to make sense of it. Maybe it is helpful, or maybe it is harmful, but perhaps it is most likely it is neutral

4. What might seem like bad design right now had a important purpose and role in a different context. Maybe this quirk is a lot like the belly button of our species as a whole.

This sort of language, still points to common descent and shared history. It avoids many of the pitfalls of the bad design approach.

Once again, I acknowledge that I am the outlier here. I still hope this can be making some sense.