I.D.'ers

[woodchip]

I.D. as in intelligent design. Seems to be the newest iteration of creationism. The ID'ers are trying to foment the idea that how life seems to have a sense of organisation about it, that such life must be intelligently created. I disagree. To get where life is today and taking in all the epochs that have passed to get here, here's my take.
Imagine a super large container that holds trillions of marbles. Marbles of varying colors and various sizes. Marbles made of different density material. Some marbles are made of long lasting material and some are made of materials that will degrade over varying periods of time. The container is held over a table miles square in dimension. The table varies in height with the highest point directly under the marble container. The container has a drop chute on the bottom and will open letting all the marbles fall down onto the table. Just before the container opens it will be shaken vigorously.
The table also has side board to hold the marbles from falling off. The table also has sections that will move up and down in no particular order and do so ten different times. some of the side boards will rot away over time causing some unknown number of marbles to fall off the table.
According to the ID'ers, before the marble container opens some sort of intelligence can control where all the marbles will wind up after 10 arbitrary height adjustments, how they will clump together by color,size and density, and which marbles will remain on the table.
I have a hard time believing that.

[Lothar]

Your analogy demonstrates very little understanding of what ID is actually about...

I.D. as in intelligent design. Seems to be the newest iteration of creationism.

Not really. That's the way it's often characterized, and it's creationists who most often latch on to it, but the theory is broad enough as to encompass everything from creationism to space-alien hypotheses to directed evolution. And, of course, when you apply it outside of the study of origins (as one might do when studying electrical signals) it has nothing to do with religion and everything to do with detecting intelligence.

The ID'ers are trying to foment the idea that how life seems to have a sense of organisation about it, that such life must be intelligently created.

"Designed" not "created". The actual creative process need not be particularly intelligent, so long as whatever designer is involved has the ability to shape the direction of the process intelligently. For example, a process like evolution could be the actual mechanism of creation, and the designer might not do any creation, but only selection.

In fact, this is the very process that's been applied for the past 100 years to corn crops. They've been intelligently designed to have larger yields, because farmers have carefully selected only the best crops to use to plant the next generation. They're not doing *any* creation; all they're doing is design.

Of course, most of ID is concerned with all life, rather than just corn crops... but the same principle applies. One can postuate a form of ID wherein evolution is the driving force, and a powerful intelligence modifies weather and other environmental forces in order to influence the direction of evolution. (So, the Greek gods or very powerful space aliens could be the "intelligence" in this case.)

Imagine a super large container that holds trillions of marbles.... [snip: description of a chaotic phenomenon.] I have a hard time believing that.

Well, first of all, ID doesn't necessarily propose that the designer of life pre-designed it. Some intelligence could be interfering after the marbles hit the table, intentionally clumping certain colored marbles together and ignoring other clumps. But that is a common position some ID'ers take, so let me interact with your objection.

Your objection is, essentially, that there's so much "randomness" involved in the process that nobody could possibly predict the outcome. It's like if I tossed a die a bunch times and tried to tell you exactly what numbers would come up. You'd have a hard time believing it was possible.

But, what if I was super-duper smart and knew everything there was to know about the laws of physics, and furthermore, had perfect measurements about the die, the table it was going to land on, the mechanism throwing it, every air current and dust particle in the room, etc. and I had a big supercomputer? Well, then I can predict each individual throw perfectly. It might take my supercomputer a very long time to make the prediction, because there's so much to account for, but it could be done.

The reason is, the dice throw isn't really random -- it follows the laws of physics. It only APPEARS random because none of us can measure the way we're throwing the die accurately enough to be able to predict the landing. Now, if the same is true in your example (ie, there's a law that says how the marbles degrade, how the table moves, etc.) then it's not so hard to believe that a powerful-enough intelligence would be able to predict the exact outcome.

There are two ways you can take the argument:
1) You can claim it's not possible for an intelligence *that* powerful to exist. I deny this claim, since I don't have any good reason to believe intelligence is capped.
2) You can claim there is no law that determines how the marbles degrade, how the table moves, etc. In other words, those things are truly "random" and exempt from the laws of physics (or, possibly, you can claim the laws of physics are, themselves, truly random.) You are free to make that claim, but I disagree with it.

Your scenario, and the origin of life, can both be predicted by a sufficiently smart intelligence with sufficiently detailed observations (provided you believe the laws of physics function as advertized.) Even something that exhibits "chaotic" behavior is entirely predictable if your measurements are perfect (the key driving force of "Chaos" is the idea that, if your measurement has a tiny error, that error will grow. Perfect measurement, with zero error, still gives a perfect prediction.) The only question, then, is whether or not a sufficiently smart intelligence can / does exist. ID seeks to analyze the evidence in order to determine if it points to such an intelligence. What they actually uncover is, of course, subject to interpretation...

[Lobber]

I think you've lost your marbles.

[Genghis]

"Designed" not "created". The actual creative process need not be particularly intelligent, so long as whatever designer is involved has the ability to shape the direction of the process intelligently. For example, a process like evolution could be the actual mechanism of creation, and the designer might not do any creation, but only selection.

I know that you know that evolution doesn't address the issue of creation. So I'm wondering why you posted the above. The concept of ID is ineed meant to be a direct "competitor" to evolution.

Sorry to be picky, but we don't want to give any more folks the impression that evolution is about the origin of life.

[Drakona]

Hmm, I'm not sure you understand the ID debate very well, Woodchip. For one thing, origins (creation/evolution) is sort of like politics: you can't really trust what anybody says about anybody else. Saying intelligent design is regurgitated creationism is roughly as in touch with reality as saying Republicans are, by nature, racists. It's something that people from the opposite side say about them sometimes, and it may be true of some of them, to a degree, and it certainly makes sense taht certain people would think that... but it's not really true.

ID is bigger than origins, though it's heavily focused on origins. The essential question is more abstract, though: How rigorously can you say, "Someone must have done this?" I've been following it for a couple years now, and don't really have time to go into it here, but here are some brain-teasers...

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Suppose Woodchip's bucket full of marbles was dumped out onto the table, and the marbles bounce around for a while. When they all come to rest, some are in the shape of an 240x200 grid, and the colors make a perfect image the viewpoint of a D1 pyro spawning in Nysa. Does that require explanation? Despite the fact that the process appears random (we just dumped out some marbles on a table)... must somebody really be controlling it?

Suppose that some months later, Lothar comes on the DBB and announces that he isn't married--the person who's been posting under then name 'Drakona' isn't a person at all. Instead, a computer in his basement has been logged on to the 'net for years, userless, but a cat occasionally plays with the keyboard. From what you've seen on the DBB, must there be a mind behind the character strings of 'Drakona'? Or is that explanation a reasonable one?

Suppose that you're walking in the forest and you see a ring of rocks, arranged around some clear ground. It looks like a campfire ring, though it hasn't been burned in the middle. Let's say you assume that's what it is. Now suppose that sometime later you're reading online, and you find out that certain erosion patterns can deposit rocks in rings that look like firepits. Were you irrational to suppose a person built the firepit? Would you be irrational to believe that still?

Suppose you're driving by a hillside, and you see some large irregularly shaped boulders. This is nothing odd, they look natural... except they're all standing up on edge. You can't think of a natural force that would stand them up that way, but you can't see any other evidences of people at work. Does that require explanation? Would it be irrational to suppose that some people--who you see no evidence of--put the rocks like that? Would it be irrational to suppose that some natural law--which you don't know--caused them to stand up that way?

-------

ID's a fun topic, and despite people who say otherwise, there is much to study and think about here. Though IDers themselves seem to think they have good answers to these questions, others think not. I'm inclined to think they've made good progress and have some good observations, but are quite a ways away from a sound method. There are some good observations, though, and it's fun stuff to think about.

Though ID is not, itself, about origins, it's heavily applied to origins--and indeed, it came out of origins--because it is in origins that people want the most to make the case for design or naturalism. Nature looks awfully designed. Is it? Can you make that assertion? How complete does a natural explanation have to be to be rational--is it good enough to say something must have randomly evolved 'somehow' because it evidently provides an advantage? Do you need intermediate steps? How many, before it becomes irrational to suppose that something is designed? Or on the other hand, how 'designed' does something have to look before you can rationally conclude it is? Does it have to be as complex as the space shuttle, or only as complex as a model airplane? Does it need to have "Made by Yahweh" inscribed in proteins shaped like Hebrew letters in every cell?

People fall all over the spectrum. Some say that the mere possibility of a natural explanation is enough to preclude design. Some say that the mere suggestion of meaning forces design, if you apply the argument recursively enough. It's a hot topic, no doubt, and certainly worthy of scholastic consideration. In fact, a month ago, when the famous atheist philosopher Anthony Flew announced that he had changed his mind and now believed in a god, he credited the intelligent design argument as the thing that changed his mind. That doesn't necessarily mean the argument's right, but it does mean that it's worth considering seriously.

...

On a more lighthearted note, one of my favorite online comic strips has a storyline that perfectly captures the essence of the debate between intelligent design and naturalism. Start here and read about 40 strips for the whole story, or here and read about 20 strips for just the end, or here for the last two strips that give a summary.

[Lothar]

... a process like evolution could be the actual mechanism of creation, and the designer might not do any creation, but only selection.

I know that you know that evolution doesn't address the issue of creation. So I'm wondering why you posted the above... we don't want to give any more folks the impression that evolution is about the origin of life.

I was pointing out the mistaken view that ID must include a creator. It doesn't have to -- it only requires a designer (it's "intelligent design" not "intelligent creation".)

In this case, I wasn't using "creation" to refer to the origins of life from non-life, but rather, to the process of generating new DNA sequences. Nothing I said addressed the question of the origins of life. My point was that ID doesn't necessarily require an intelligence forming ("creating") those new DNA sequences; it only postulates an intelligence somehow designing some aspect of the system. One ID-compatible situation would be where a process like evolution forms new sequences and then an intelligence selects the best from among them. This is the *exact* process used in corn farming for the last hundred years or so.

A more correct way to say what I intended to say is that a mechanism like mutation could be coupled with intelligent selection (rather than natural selection) in ID. The point is, the intelligence doesn't have to be a "creator" of anything. The corn farmer in the example I gave never *creates* any new DNA sequence. He simply selects those plants that grow the tallest and uses them to seed the next generation of plants, and repeats the process. In this case, mutation is the creative process and selection is the design process, and there is an intelligence involved in the design phase. Evolution by artificial selection is a form of intelligent design.

One could also postulate a creator who is also a designer, in which case, a process like evolution by natural selection (where the creator/designer designed the rules of selection) would, itself, be compatible with ID.

The concept of ID is ineed meant to be a direct "competitor" to evolution.

No, it's not. It's a direct competitor to naturalism. Many people have *used* ID theory as a competitor to evolution (by linking it with creationism, as woodchip erroneously did above), but the concept itself is entirely compatible with evolution. Many of the ID theorists who work at Discovery Institute believe evolution is the mechanism by which ID was enacted.

One thing you have to be careful of... whenever you're talking about anything that can even be remotely connected to evolution or creationism, you get a situation similar to what you see in politics. You can't trust what one side says the other one is about. ID is neither creationism nor evolution, which means you can't trust what either creationists or evolutionists say about it -- you have to look at what the ID people are actually saying, not what everybody else thinks or wishes they were saying.

[Genghis]

Drakona, good post.

Lothar, now that you've defined what you meant by "creation" I understand the statement of yours I quoted. The problem I had (and was afraid others would have) is that using the standard definition of creation, the statement is very misleading. So I guess we're OK on that one.

It's a direct competitor to naturalism.

And evolution is the incarnation of naturalism in speciation. Or are you saying that ID is a competitor for all naturalism? If so, how would you use ID to explain things like gravitation or Boyle's Law?

One thing you have to be careful of... whenever you're talking about anything that can even be remotely connected to evolution or creationism, you get a situation similar to what you see in politics. You can't trust what one side says the other one is about. ID is neither creationism nor evolution, which means you can't trust what either creationists or evolutionists say about it -- you have to look at what the ID people are actually saying, not what everybody else thinks or wishes they were saying.

Thanks for bolding your last sentence so I wouldn't miss your pedantry. Now you're right about reading from primary sources. I think I'm read up on the tenents of ID, but if you have any "impartial" sources I'd be happy to review them.

You're also right about relating this to politics, however I would go further. Not only can't you trust what either side is saying about ID, but you can't take what ID says about itself at face value. ID was originally thought up as an alternative to evolution, but has since been massaged to appear "more scientific" in an attempt to gain credibility. This newfangled ID is indeed marketed as a flexible philosophy that can play nicely with evolution. But a thinking person who is aware of the context can see the actual intent.

[Birdseye]

If so, how would you use ID to explain things like gravitation or Boyle's Law?

What's so hard about answering this? God is god. he can do anything. He created all this stuff, including all observed scientific principles such as evolution, chemistry, and physics.

Wow, I can't believe I remember anything about the ideal gas law...it's been years!!

[Lothar]

using the standard definition of creation, the statement is very misleading.

If I'd said "creationism" you'd be correct. But you have to go to definition #4 to get "creation" to refer to what you thought it did. My hope was that the words "creative process" would make it clear what I was referring to, but unfortunately, some people reflexively react to the word "create" in the same way others react to the word "evolve"...

It's a direct competitor to naturalism.

And evolution is the incarnation of naturalism in speciation.

No, it's not. Evolution is often *linked with* naturalism, but it need not be treated as a purely naturalistic process.

are you saying that ID is a competitor for all naturalism?

ID isn't a direct competitor to every natural process (like gravity, Boyle's Law, etc.) It's a direct competitor to the naturalistic paradigm. There's nothing in ID that says there can't be natural processes -- it's just a theory that seeks to detect when a process isn't entirely natural, which makes it a direct competitor to the philosophy that says all processes are entirely natural.

you have to look at what the ID people are actually saying, not what everybody else thinks or wishes they were saying.

Now you're right about reading from primary sources. I think I'm read up on the tenents of ID.... Not only can't you trust what either side is saying about ID, but you can't take what ID says about itself at face value.

I'm not saying you should. What I'm saying is, if you want to know what the theory actually claims, you have to read the theory itself. This means reading something like Dembski's "The Design Inference" (which, admittedly, I haven't -- though I have had a number of conversations with my wife about it, and she's studied it in great detail.)

Far too many people read an article about ID, or an article about the people involved in ID, and think they understand ID. But you simply can't get a clear picture of the central tenets of the theory unless you have a good idea of what's actually in the major books. Reading pop-level articles about ID, whether written from a pro- or anti- direction, don't give you a clear picture of what the theory is actually about.

ID was originally thought up as an alternative to evolution

No, it wasn't. It was originally thought up as an alternative to *naturalism*, especially naturalism as the dominant paradigm in the life sciences (because, in the life sciences, naturalism did not appear to ID's founders to be adequate to explain everything it needed to explain.) Many of the original ID theorists are still evolutionists, they just think evolution is a process involving some form of intelligence.

You seem awfully confident in the assertions you make about ID -- about its history and its major tenets -- but it sounds like your information is coming from pop-level articles on talkorigins. Have you actually read TDI or any of the other landmark works of ID, or discussed them with anyone who has?

[woodchip]

Too much to pick apart so I'll pick this one item from Drakonas post:


"A more correct way to say what I intended to say is that a mechanism like mutation could be coupled with intelligent selection (rather than natural selection) in ID." Drakona

So would it be fair to say the possibility exists that manipulation of the environment may have occured on more than one occasion for the earth to be at the stage it is in now? If that is true than we can assume mankind may have been developed (or helped along) by outside manipulators. Doesn't this then smack of an alien intelligence pushing us along for a reason we can not fathom? Might explain a lot about how Cro Magnon man suddenly (geologically speaking) appeared on the scene.

[Foil]

I don't have much to add to the discussion, as I'm clearly not as familiar with the tenets of I.D. as the three of you (Lothar, Drakona, Genghis).

I just wanted to say how much I appreciate a truly reasonable discussion of the topic. When I saw the first post, I thought, "Oh, no... this is gonna dissolve into a classic creation/evolution fracas (with all the usual irrational attacks and arguments from both sides)." I have been very pleasantly surprised, thank you all!

I've even learned a bit more about I.D. just from your posts, and I imagine I'll be checking into some more in-depth resources about it... any suggestions on where to start?

As far as the basic concept, I just have a couple of questions:

Does I.D suppose only a purposeful design from a certain point in time (i.e. the designer set things in motion, and they are just playing themselves out, like the marbles illustration)?

Or is it more of a 'directional' design (i.e. the designer may not know exactly how things play out, but has set up factors which affect the eventual outcomes, or is still actively involved in the process)?

In the first scenario, I think I might have some philosophical problems with it, as it seems analogous to a secular form of Deism that I can't really reconcile with my beliefs about free will.

I know I don't know as much about it as I should; I also know I'm associating religious themes with theories that aren't inherently religious. There's a lot of religious "talk" surrounding the I.D. concepts, so I just want to raise some good questions for those who immediately equate "intelligent designer" with "God/Creator".

[Lothar]

"A more correct way to say what I intended to say is that a mechanism like mutation could be coupled with intelligent selection (rather than natural selection) in ID." Drakona

Actually that was me.

So would it be fair to say the possibility exists that manipulation of the environment may have occured on more than one occasion for the earth to be at the stage it is in now?

The possibility has always existed, however remote. What we're dealing with, though, is a discussion of the rationality of believing such a thing. In general, in ID, you're looking at the question of whether it's rational to believe an intelligence was involved in some activity (be it biological, electrical, or whatever.) Specifically, is there *good reason* to believe the environment and/or life itself has been manipulated by some intelligent force, in particular, prior to man's own meddling?

If so, the outside intelligence could be anything from God to space aliens. But we don't actually have solid evidence on which we can say that mankind was helped along by any sort of outside agent. This is where ID gets really shaky... it's a nice theory with some good philosophical ideas, and it should be useful for discovering intelligent influences in a lot of areas. It's a powerful idea for spying or for a program like SETI (trying to detect intelligent influence in intercepted signals.) But, it's not very practical to apply it to historical phenomena like the appearance of Cro Magnon. There simply isn't enough information about the appearence of Cro Magnon, or any other evolutionary-history event, for ID to be able to really say the sort of things people want to use it to say.

[Lothar]

any suggestions on where to start?

You're a mathematician, so you could probably jump right in to a book like TDI. Really, if you want to know what the theory is all about, that's the cornerstone work. Or, you could just pick Drakona's brain for a while ;)

Does I.D suppose only a purposeful design from a certain point in time... Or is it more of a 'directional' design (i.e. the designer may not know exactly how things play out...)?

As evidenced by my above "corn farmer" / "artificial selection" scenario, ID does indeed allow for directional design. It allows for basically any intelligent action -- an intelligence may completely specify a whole system from start to finish (as might be done in a computer animation), or it may only be manipulating a few items very indirectly. It's probably easier to detect more blatant / complete control by an intelligence than it is to detect subtle, slight manipulation, but the whole spectrum can be studied in ID.

There's a lot of religious "talk" surrounding the I.D. concepts, so I just want to raise some good questions for those who immediately equate "intelligent designer" with "God/Creator".

Yeah... it's really unfortunate, as ID would be most useful in circumstances like spying or SETI (where the intelligence is a human or an alien.) But, as we know is often the case with anything that can be tied to evolution, ID gets latched on to by people who want their beliefs to be validated by scientists, and it often gets phrased in strongly religious terms. That's one reason I'm careful to only speak of intelligences or designers, rather than God / Creator, when discussing ID -- I don't want to give anyone the idea that it's a "God in Genesis 1, King James Version" theory.

[Drakona]

I think I'm read up on the tenents of ID, but if you have any "impartial" sources I'd be happy to review them.

Well, not for the sake of debate, but if you're curious about ID, I can recommend some good sources.

If you want to know ID well, there are a couple of ways you can go. William Dembski's stuff is the best for the philosophical rigor. There are three major books by him: "The Design Inference," "No Free Lunch," and "The Design Revolution." TDI is an honestly academic book (Camberidge University Press, peer reviewed), and somewhat technical (watch for deductive arguments with symbols, two page long mathematical proofs). It's a bit dated, but still the place to go for the best ID philosophical rigor. The next book, NFL, is only worth reading if you want to study ID as a movement, not be convinced by it. It introduces some clever ideas, but the arguments are CRAP. The last is what IDers are recommending as the best summary of the philosophical position. It's recent (2004), but from what I understand somewhat popular, too. I haven't read it.

I personally don't think Dembski succeeds at what he's trying to accomplish in any of the above books--the establisment of a rigorous framework for detecting design. His application of the developed framework to the evolution of the bacterial flagellum in NFL is particularly revealing and bad. But as it stands right now, ID doesn't have anything better. They're good reading if you want the background to jump into the philosophical argument, and they do contain some good ideas, examples, and brainteasers about ID. All three are well worth reading in that respect.

At the technical scientific level, there's actually a way to get up to speed very quickly. Stephen C. Meyer wrote an article summarizing the ID position within the sciences, just six months ago. It was published in the peer-reviewed journal "Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington," which caused a huge stink at the time (and flames are still flying these days about it...) The article doesn't introduce anything substantially new to the ID position, but rather gives a very good summary. I highly recommend it as a quick way to get up to speed, and see what sorts of arguments the ID people are making. It's a bit technical as far as the biology goes, but since its a summary article, you can gloss over most of that without substantial loss.

Beyond that, Discovery Institute maintains a list of essential readings on ID. It's a good list, for the post part, though many of the books on it are at the popular level--and as with anything from Discovery, watch out for a low content:polemics ratio. Wells' "Icons of Evolution" is particularly bad there--though he scores some good points about current errors in textbooks, he can't seem to get past the whole "SEE, EVOLUTIONSTS ARE EVIL AND REPRESSIVE! LET US INTO THE SCIENCES!" thing. Also watch out for very weird books (E.g., "Priveledged Planet" tries to make the case that the most habitible places in the universe are also the best suitied to scientific research. Verrrrrry odd.) The articles are pretty good, though.

Off that list, I myself would recommend "Darwin's Black Box" as a starting place. You've probably already heard of it if you follow origins--there was a major stink about it when it came out in 1995. The book itself is friendly and worth reading--it gives you a quick and easy taste of what ID is like. It's popular level stuff, though technical level arguments. There's some microbio stuff in it, but it's explained extensively with analogies and such, to make it very accessible. Behe makes a number of nascent ID arguments in the book, and of course the irreducible complexity idea he introduced has been the focus of heated debate ever since the book came out. (For a fairly good pro-ID up-to-date article on the IC debate, see here.)

The best source for pro-ID news and articles is www.discovery.org. The Discovery Institute is sort of the hub and a major sponsor of the movement.

Anti-ID, I can't recommend much in the way of books. There are criticisms of ID that are valid, but by and large they don't seem to make their way into the books. But Kenneth Miller and Elliot Sober are names to look for, for scientific and philosophical criticism. Also, www.talkreason.org has some good anti-ID articles, including a very stinging refutation of No Free Lunch by the mathematician who proved the No Free Lunch Theorems Dembski invokes.

You're also right about relating this to politics, however I would go further. Not only can't you trust what either side is saying about ID, but you can't take what ID says about itself at face value.

True. ID positions itself as a scientific discipline unfairly barred from the sciences, and that's a notion that's utterly false. ID is too young and its methods to hasty to be honest science. I myself am dissatisfied with it in this respect--they spend too much time on application and polemics, and not nearly enough time on theoretical development. Not that they alone commit that sin, mind you: origins is a hot topic, and it's hard for anyone to proceed honestly. But that doesn't excuse ID.

In fact, the analogy to politics is appropriate across all of origins. You can't trust what ID says about itself: it claims to be a science and it clearly isn't, really. You can't trust what ID says about naturalistic evolution and the scientific community: it's claimed they're overly repressive, and though there are some cases... they aren't, really. You can't trust what the hardcore naturalists say about ID--they say it's reheated creationisim, and perhaps for some people it is... but it's not, really. You can't trust what the creationists say about evolution--they make it sound like a rediculous and simple theory, barely hanging on. It's not. In fact, in origins, just about everybody claims to be something they aren't, or that someone else is something they aren't. Everybody wants certainty they don't have, and everybody is afraid to admit weakness because of the war with other theories. Lothar was telling me recently that the comparison to politics continues even within evolution--that the advocates of one method of constructing trees of similarity (I forget what that's called... phylogony?) had a decades-long all out flame war with the proponents of another method, saying they were abandoning the scientific method (!).

Origins is just like that. It's like religion, or politics... most people care about it to a degree way out of proportion with what they know. Zeal exceeds education a lot of the time. It's awfully rare to find someone who honestly understands positions other than their own. Hot topic. Very hot topic. And thusly difficult to study.

[Drakona]

So would it be fair to say the possibility exists that manipulation of the environment may have occured on more than one occasion for the earth to be at the stage it is in now?

Does I.D suppose only a purposeful design from a certain point in time (i.e. the designer set things in motion, and they are just playing themselves out, like the marbles illustration)?

Or is it more of a 'directional' design (i.e. the designer may not know exactly how things play out, but has set up factors which affect the eventual outcomes, or is still actively involved in the process)?

ID in a vacuum--the philosophical study--is just about detecting intelligent activity. From this point of view, the interpretation of text, art/music criticism, forensics, and archeology are all applied forms of ID.

With respect to the origin & evolution of life, there are a lot of theories that qualify as ID positions. The idea that God created the world, everything in it, and every individual kind of animal within 6 days is an ID position. The idea that evolution occured, but the mutations were not random, but rather controlled and intended by some deity is also an ID position. The idea that the universe is deterministic but was intentionally designed to accomodate and bring about life--the deist's universe--is also an ID position. Directed panspermia--the idea that life was engineered and 'seeded' on earth by an alien civilization is also an ID position. (This last is not as farfetched of an idea as it sounds: Mobius adopts it. And some random Francis Crick guy... ) ID with relation to origins only states that life was apparently designed and intended--however directly or indirectly. The only position that isn't ID is the one that says life came about and evolved through undirected, unintended processes (or that if it was designed, that design is not detectible).

At the cosmology level, the options narrow a bit. If the universe is designed for life, or apparently designed in some other respect, you could make an argument about it being designed by some sort of alien civilization in the multiverse... but in reality any being powerful enough to design a universe can safely be regaurded as a god (though not necessarily the Christian God).


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Off topic, Foil, you and I will have to have a theological/philosophical debate about free will at some point. Lothar and I are philosophical determinists who believe in free will.

[Drakona]

are you saying that ID is a competitor for all naturalism?

Naturalism (would it be better if I said materialsm?) has two explanative options available to it: natural law and random chance. (Well, and any combination of those two). ID has three: natural law, random chance, intelligent design (again, along with any combination of those three.)

For the purpose of a fixed study, 'intelligent design' is considered supernatural--despite the fact that the detected intelligence may be human, and so entirely natural. It's sort of like 'random chance' is often a model for natural laws that are too complicated to represent as laws. Minds may well be reducible to chance and law, but not easily so... so for a fixed problem, they're regaurded as a third mode of explanation.

In general, an inference to intelligent design is a way of saying "natural laws alone can't account for this." A very good example is a forum post. If you read a post online, you infer that there is a mind behind it. Sure, the post came about by processes that (in the context of the example) count as laws--the server received a sequence of bits, the script updated the HTML files in a predictable way. The post might have even been cut-and-pasted into the submit window. You aren't sure exactly how far back it happened, but somewhere along the line, you know somebody wrote it.

Such an inference is necessarily at war with all strictly naturalistic explanations--i.e., ultimate explanations of the origin of the post that don't invoke a mind. The design inference is fine with the explanation that the post was an old research paper accidentally copied by a virus, a string of random letters drawn from a hat and then accepted or rejected one at a time by the author, or created by a speech-to-text program from a recording. All of these are fine, because the post finds its ultimate origin in the mind of the author, however mechanistic the intermediate steps are. But ID cannot tolerate an explanation that does not invoke a mind somewhere--i.e., the explanation that the post is the result of a cat walking on a keyboard.

That is the heart of ID. That is a design inference: the conviction that something had to originate with a mind, that some intelligent designer is the cause of something. ID doesn't claim much about the actual method by which the thing was made, or how the designer influenced it, nor does it claim that none of the thing is due to chance or law. All it claims is that there is substantial evidence of an intelligent mind at work.

So ID is at war with strict naturalism. They aren't so much exact explanations as they are categories of explanation--naturalism cannot accept any theory that invokes a supernatural agent or an outside mind; ID, once it has made a design inference, cannot accept any theory that does not.

[Foil]

... ID with relation to origins only states that life was apparently designed and intended--however directly or indirectly. The only position that isn't ID is the one that says life came about and evolved through undirected, unintended processes (or that if it was designed, that design is not detectible).

What would I.D.ers say if I suggested the following: a universe where some designer put everything together, has gotten bored and left it to "play out" according to its design, but this design is undetectable for some reason. Would they acknowledge the possibility? Or do they make the assumption that if there is a design, it would be ultimately detectable?

...Off topic, Foil, you and I will have to have a theological/philosophical debate about free will at some point. Lothar and I are philosophical determinists who believe in free will.

Hmmm... sounds intriguing. You used the word "debate", so are you assuming that we have opposing viewpoints?

[Lothar]

What would I.D.ers say if I suggested the following: a universe where some designer put everything together, has gotten bored and left it to "play out" according to its design, but this design is undetectable for some reason. Would they acknowledge the possibility?

It's widely acknowledged in ID that not all design is detectable. For example, design which is not very complex isn't detectable. Also, design which appears the same as natural law isn't detectable (if I very carefully design an arrangement of rocks to appear exactly like the arrangement of rocks you'd get from a natural phenomenon, you probably can't detect my design.) These are not rejected by ID.

What ID would say in a case like that is "there might be an intelligence, but we can't detect it." Remember that ID is about detecting the influence of intelligent agents, and therefore, undetectable agents aren't really a part of ID. ID doesn't reject their existance, but it doesn't try to verify it either.

In other words, ID isn't particularly applicable when discussing (certain forms of) Deism.

...Off topic, Foil, you and I will have to have a theological/philosophical debate about free will at some point. Lothar and I are philosophical determinists who believe in free will. :)

Hmmm... sounds intriguing. You used the word "debate", so are you assuming that we have opposing viewpoints? ;)

I suppose that depends on what you meant when you said you can't reconcile Deism with free will. It also depends on your thoughts on foreknowledge...

[Tetrad]

I just wanted to say how much I appreciate a truly reasonable discussion of the topic.

ID is nothing more than the religious co-opting scientific-sounding vocabulary and trying to force their predetermined worldview on the masses with a new spin.

If you want to discuss it on a philosophical term, that's one thing. Scientifically, well, that's something else entirely.

[Stryker]

It is impossible to prove or disprove scientifically what has happened in the past. Thus, the theory of evolution itself is mostly philisophical.

[dissent]

That evolution has occurred is a fact, as evidenced by the known record. Now HOW that evolution has occurred are the subjects of the THEORIES for it, like natural selection, ID, god(s), aliens, etc.

Actually, the whole thing is all Murray the trilobite's fault. I warned him, but after the Pre-Cambrian explosion things just got out of hand.

Sorry.

So if Britney Spears is not your idea of a higher life form, get over it. Evolution is about adaptation, not improvement.

[Lothar]

ID is nothing more than the religious co-opting scientific-sounding vocabulary and trying to force their predetermined worldview on the masses with a new spin.

I just wanted to say how much I appreciate everyone but Tetrad having a reasonable discussion, and how much I appreciate everyone but Tetrad reading the content of the previous posts.

I also want to ridicule Tetrad for repeating fallacies that have already been discussed in the previous posts, for giving a knee-jerk reaction, and for generally displaying his ignorance of the subject at hand.

ID is often co-opted by the religious in an attempt to force their preconceptions on the masses -- but that's not what ID *is*. That's just the way it's often characterized by people who don't understand the theory. The characterization is no less stupid, and no less false, than the one that says "evolution is just atheists trying to sound scientific while they force their preconceived notions on everyone else." It's a blatant mischaracterization by people who don't know what they're talking about. If you hold this warped view of ID, do not come into this thread making assertions -- instead, ask questions and learn from those of us who have actually studied it. Unless, of course, you *like* making a spectacle of yourself...

It is impossible to prove or disprove scientifically what has happened in the past.

But it's entirely possible to observe patterns and analyze the mechanisms thought to be involved in their generation. While we don't have a time machine, we do have data about the past.

Think about forensic science for a minute. If someone dies, the police investigate. They look at the data, and they look for patterns, and they look for explanations of the patterns they find. If they're careful in their analysis, they can reconstruct what happened with a reasonable degree of certainty.

As Tetrad should be learning, ID applies to far more than the life sciences. Forensics is actually a form of ID (though it's not often viewed in those terms.) The police want to determine: was this death accidental, or intentional? "Intentional" means they've detected an intelligence that planned or executed the death -- they've detected signs that some intelligent agent intentionally caused the death. "Accidental" means they did not find (enough) signs that anybody intentionally caused the death.

In this context, ID is clearly scientific -- attempting to determine if an intelligence designed (or planned) a death is a well-studied science. And in this context, the past can be studied in a purely scientific way.

Now, recall that one of the major criticisms Drakona gave to ID is that they've rushed too quickly to try to apply it to biology without really having a solid theory -- "ID is too young and its methods to hasty to be honest science." But it's got some solid philosophy, and there are some scientific contexts where it's a solid science as well. It's just not ready to be used the way people try to use it.

That evolution has occurred is a fact, as evidenced by the known record. Now HOW that evolution has occurred are the subjects of the THEORIES for it, like natural selection, ID, god(s), aliens, etc.... Evolution is about adaptation, not improvement.

True, but with one caveat: evolution has occurred, but it's not completely established that it occurred in all of the ways the current theory says it did. There are still some issues with cladogenesis and speciation (the splitting of one species into two, or the transforming of one into another) that need worked out. The DNA-level models and the population-level models don't match up too well. I'm hoping to do my doctoral thesis on closing the gap between the two, but that work is still a couple years out at best.

[Drakona]

What would I.D.ers say if I suggested the following: a universe where some designer put everything together, has gotten bored and left it to "play out" according to its design, but this design is undetectable for some reason. Would they acknowledge the possibility? Or do they make the assumption that if there is a design, it would be ultimately detectable?

From the perspective of ID as a philosophical pursuit, design isn't always detectable. And even when something looks designed, it isn't always improbable enough to really rule out chance. In fact, the number they cite right now as the probability bound beyond which design is certain is 10^-150 (The idea of such a "certain" probability bound is not one that sits well with me, mind you. I'm just passing on what they say.). That's a very low probability indeed. Most of us would intuitively call design much, much sooner than that. So it's very easy for something to look designed, or be designed, and slip through undetected. Such a universe is quite consistent with ID as a method for detecting design.

Now, ID as a position on origins thinks not only that design is a valid hypothesis, but also that it actually is evident in this universe, so from that perspective, though an undetectably designed universe is possible, it isn't this one.

It is impossible to prove or disprove scientifically what has happened in the past.

The paper I linked to above talked about this a bit, actually. Meyer here notes that historical theories don't predict things in the laboratory so much as they predict what evidence will emerge in the future (though their assumptions about general cause and effect can be tested in the lab). It's still prediction and testing, though a weaker sort: they have an easier time adapting to new data.

Theories in the historical sciences typically make claims about what happened in the past, or what happened in the past to cause particular events to occur (Meyer 1991:57-72). For this reason, historical scientific theories are rarely tested by making predictions about what will occur under controlled laboratory conditions (Cleland 2001:987, 2002:474-496). Instead, such theories are usually tested by comparing their explanatory power against that of their competitors with respect to already known facts. Even in the case in which historical theories make claims about past causes they usually do so on the basis of preexisting knowledge of cause and effect relationships. Nevertheless, prediction may play a limited role in testing historical scientific theories since such theories may have implications as to what kind of evidence is likely to emerge in the future. For example, neo-Darwinism affirms that new functional sections of the genome arise by trial and error process of mutation and subsequent selection. For this reason, historically many neo-Darwinists expected or predicted that the large non-coding regions of the genome--so-called "junk DNA"--would lack function altogether (Orgel & Crick 1980). On this line of thinking, the nonfunctional sections of the genome represent nature's failed experiments that remain in the genome as a kind of artifact of the past activity of the mutation and selection process. Advocates of the design hypotheses on the other hand, would have predicted that non-coding regions of the genome might well reveal hidden functions, not only because design theorists do not think that new genetic information arises by a trial and error process of mutation and selection, but also because designed systems are often functionally polyvalent. Even so, as new studies reveal more about the functions performed by the non-coding regions of the genome (Gibbs 2003), the design hypothesis can no longer be said to make this claim in the form of a specifically future-oriented prediction. Instead, the design hypothesis might be said to gain confirmation or support from its ability to explain this now known evidence, albeit after the fact. Of course, neo Darwinists might also amend their original prediction using various auxiliary hypotheses to explain away the presence of newly discovered functions in the non-coding regions of DNA. In both cases, considerations of ex post facto explanatory power reemerge as central to assessing and testing competing historical theories.

[Tetrad]

Think about forensic science for a minute. If someone dies, the police investigate. They look at the data, and they look for patterns, and they look for explanations of the patterns they find. If they're careful in their analysis, they can reconstruct what happened with a reasonable degree of certainty.

There's one small problem with your forensic analogy. With forensics, you have many, many different points of data that you can draw your assertions from. Person X died by a certain method, and person Y shows the same signs as X, so we can say that the're probably the same, and whatever. With ID you have a single point, the human race as a whole (or the whole world or whatever your universe is). You're looking at a problem that's an entire order different from forensics.

[Lothar]

There's one small problem with your forensic analogy. With forensics, you have many, many different points of data that you can draw your assertions from. Person X died by a certain method, and person Y shows the same signs as X, so we can say that the're probably the same, and whatever. With ID you have a single point, the human race as a whole (or the whole world or whatever your universe is).

You still fundamentally misunderstand ID. You still think it's a theory about evolution/creation. It's not; it's just often applied in that area.

ID is a general scientific/philosophical framework for detecting the influence of intelligence in *anything*. In the very next paragraph after the one you quoted, I said "Forensics is actually a form of ID." So when I bring up forensics, it's not as an analogy to ID -- it's as an example of ID. In forensics, you're trying to identify intelligent influences in a death (or other crime / bad event). It's a specific case of ID.

ID, by its very nature, is the science and philosophy of trying to detect the influence of an intelligence. In some cases, it's more of a science (like, in forensics) whereas in other cases it's more of an unrefined philosophy (like in biology).

Let me say this one more time: ID is a general way to detect intelligence in anything. It's not specific to biology / evolution, and it's really unfortunate that people (including many of its creators) focus so much on that particular field. Now that I've explained that, you might want to look back over the thread. There's a good chance most of us weren't saying anything even remotely resembling what you thought we were saying.

Now, you did identify a critical weakness of ID as applied to biology, and why that particular subset of ID is different from the subset of ID called forensics -- we only have one planet, and that only gives us one set of data to work from. When we infer design in other fields (like forensics) we actually have a good idea of what's "natural" vs. what's "designed". When we attempt to infer design in biology, we don't really have anything to compare to -- we don't have any other sets of life that we know for sure were designed or were not designed. A lot of the most powerful ideas in ID don't work to their full effect in the biological context, because we simply don't have enough sets of life to look at.

Personally, I think ID has some philosophically powerful ideas, and some scientifically powerful ideas, but it shouldn't be applied to biology. "It's just not ready to be used the way people try to use it."

[Tetrad]

This newfangled ID is indeed marketed as a flexible philosophy that can play nicely with evolution. But a thinking person who is aware of the context can see the actual intent.

I'm going to reiterate this, and pose one question for you. What use does intelligent design (and the study thereof) have other than the obvious trying to prove that "there must be some outside force that brought us to where we are today to at least some extent"?

I still say it's little more than a philosophical circle jerk among creationists.

[Lothar]

This newfangled ID is indeed marketed as a flexible philosophy that can play nicely with evolution. But a thinking person who is aware of the context can see the actual intent.

I'm going to reiterate this

As long as we're reiterating things:

I also want to ridicule Tetrad for repeating fallacies that have already been discussed in the previous posts, for giving a knee-jerk reaction, and for generally displaying his ignorance of the subject at hand.

Let me ask a counter-question of Genghis' quote: he says that any thinking person aware of context can see "the actual intent". So, whose "intent" do the two of you claim to be able to see? Mine? Dembski's? Meyer's? Random uneducated creationists who cite ID as "the next big thing"? Intent must be associated with a mind, after all (which makes the quote wonderfully ironic.)

With evolution, many people have many intents. Some (like many I work with) just want to know the truth. Some (like Rican) want to disprove religion. Some just want a paycheck and happen to be good at it. This goes for both the scientists and the people who believe their theories. With ID, it's the same way -- some theorists are in it because they're creationists; others are in it because they just want to know the truth about origins; others are in it because they think it's philosophically interesting in areas other than origins; still others are in it for a paycheck. So, if you're going to talk "intent" you have to pin down whose intent you're talking about.

You and Genghis *might* be able to clearly identify the intent of the average schmoe on the internet who happens to have heard of ID and decided to endorse it. But it's pretty doubtful that you (plural) have actually looked hard enough at ID to be able to determine the intent of any of the theorists, and judging from your (singular) reading comprehension thus far in this thread, it's doubtful you've properly judged my intent either. That's part of the purpose of my arguing in this thread -- to demonstrate that what you've seen of ID from arguing on the internet or reading popular-level articles has very little relation to what's actually going on in the ID community (of which I'm not a part, by the way.) If you're going to argue about what ID is, you should at least know whether you're talking about the founders' version of ID or the pop-internet version of ID.

What use does intelligent design (and the study thereof) have other than the obvious trying to prove that "there must be some outside force that brought us to where we are today to at least some extent"?

Forensics. SETI. Signal processing. Determining the intent of people when they bring up ID The concept of detecting intelligence is widely applicable. But many people have a knee-jerk reaction to it because it *might* also be applied in ways that would hint at the existance of higher beings. "Oh no, the source of this idea might have an ulterior motive, therefore we should dismiss the idea without ever actually considering it or looking at its merits." That's basically what you're saying in your last post...

I still say it's little more than a philosophical circle jerk among creationists.

You should see the nasty things hard-core creationists write about ID. They think it's a philosophical circle-jerk among theistic/deistic evolutionists who are trying to sugar-coat Darwinism and feed it to the church.

It wouldn't surprise me if your only interaction with ID (outside of this thread) has been with creationists citing it as "the next big thing", and it also wouldn't surprise me if you stereotyped me right in with them. Suffice it to say, you don't have a clear picture of what it's about, and you can't from those sources -- no more than you could get a clear picture of the state of evolutionary theory from Rican, or a clear picture of technology from Mobi, or a clear picture of Republicans from woodchip. If you want to know what ID is about, you have to either look at it for its own sake, or listen to those of us who have.

[Sligar]

I have to admit that I haven't read everything in this lengthy and verbose thread, so maybe this has been covered already. Skimming over the posts above what bothers me is that ID seems way too vague. Apparently ID can include everything from a fundamentalist the-world-is-5000-years-old view to the belief that people selectively breed domestic animals and plants. Even a hard core atheist will admit that people breed animals and plants, and therefore intelligence has played a role in the development of these organisms as they are today. But to make view that view part of ID seems like a political maneuver.

ID as presented above is so all inclusive that one can hardly help but admit to holding a view that is included in ID. But, if one does admit to such a thing, then one is subject to being lumped in with the creationists and alien abductionists. To me it seems like a rhetorical device to allow creationists to say "look, scientist A admits to believing in ID, therefore A must believe that god created the world and etc."

So the overly broad definition of ID to me seems to serve to confuse the issue with terminology, and allow people who don't know any better to think that prominent scientists or ordinary evolutionists believe something they don't. Why have such an all inclusive term? Lets have some terminology that is specific enough to be meaningful and not confusing.

[Pandora]

I admit that I am not fully convinced that the picture that Lothar & Drakona paint is in reality as pretty as it seems. But still, the study of intelligent design as such seems interesting. Could you outline a little bit of the methodology of detecting intelligent design?

As far as I see it, one can only be sure of the involvement of a 'designer', if all other explanations are ruled out. I have two (closely related) problems with this:

1. I am wary of conclusion by exclusion, such as: it is not A, not B, ... not Y, so it must be Z. But can I ever be sure that it truly is Z? There might be other theories I have not even considered...
2. The competing theories I can exclude depend on my knowledge and my understanding. Given mankinds limited understanding, I can never be sure that I excluded the correct theories?

However, such a strategy may be worthwile, not for I.D.ers but for the rest of the scientific community. The I.D'ers provide new 'unexplainable phenomena' that must be proven explainable ... so I.D. may inspire new research and experiments. However, on the other hand, this way of making progress should make the I.D.ers deeply afraid of new scientific insights --- which is not a good thing.

But maybe there are other ways of detecting 'intelligent design"? Please clarify.

[Tetrad]

To answer your question of "who" Lothar, any group that promotes ID as proper scientific theory, especially in the biological sense.

You should see the nasty things hard-core creationists write about ID.

Well so one crackpot group vehemently opposes I.D. If that's not a blessing of good health I don't know what is. (Of course I wasn't being all-inclusive when I said "creationists".)

ID as presented above is so all inclusive that one can hardly help but admit to holding a view that is included in ID... To me it seems like a rhetorical device to allow creationists to say "look, scientist A admits to believing in ID, therefore A must believe that god created the world and etc."

I agree with this, and would like to say that I am not convinced at all about your (Lothar's) list of other uses of I.D. You can't just group together chaos theory, pattern matching, or any of a series of fundamental mathematical and scientific processes under the umbrella of "Intelligent Design" and then say any other field that uses those same constructs are by extension using I.D.

Has there been any sort of conclusion or theory drawn out of the I.D. community that has been directly referenced by any of the scientific communities you listed above?

[Genghis]

Wow, a lot has happened here in 48 hours! I'm sorry I can't possibly address it all, but Lothar and Drakona do a great job of explaining things. But I've been called out so I'll try to explain myself better, particularly regarding the "intent" and "context" of ID. Below I present my understanding and opinions; I'm sure blatant errors will be pointed out to me!

Modern ID has its roots in books published in the 1980's and early '90s. These books were explicitly written as attacks on Darwinism and evolution, proffering ID as the alternative. I don't know of any works back then that treated ID as a discipline unto itself, worthwhile for things like signal processing and forensics. That's what I mean by intent: the original intent of the people who first proposed and disseminated ID.

ID has become a very hot topic in the last few years, with a flurry of new work on it. It appears that most (all?) of the work Lothar and Drakona refer to is recent (late 90's and beyond). I am aware of the new nature of ID theory that Lothar and Drakona have been voluminously posting here, if not all the details. It sounds like ID'ers have been fairly successful at developing ID beyond its origins into a full-fledged philosophy/discipline. No doubt much of this work is by legitimate answer-seekers, but I believe that a lot of it is by creationists trying to legitimize ID.

Of course you know where I'm leading: the Discovery Institute's Wedge Strategy. ID is a centerpiece of the wedge strategy, and many (most?) of the recent articles and books on ID are written members of the Discovery Institute. There is a definite and stated agenda at work here, and I find it difficult to trust authors with such an agenda. Anyway, that's what I mean by context.

I guess I'm saying that the story of ID is not that of a pure, isolated philosophy that got co-opted and misrepresented by creationists. Instead, it's the story of a philosophy that originated with creationists to fight Darwinism, and has since been expanded to cover additional territory and therefore appear benign and gain credibility.

Tetrad and Sligar clarified a point that has been bugging me but I couldn't put my finger on it. ID does seem to be one of these "all things to all people" concepts. It's possible to make a strong case for just some parts of ID, then incorrectly generalize and extrapolate and suddenly it's being indiscriminately wielded like a club.

So that's where I'm coming from. Lothar does a great job of explaining what I'd call "neo-ID." I'm just taking a step back from the microanalysis to look at the big picture as I see it. Sorry if I'm making a spectacle of myself!

[woodchip]

Could you outline a little bit of the methodology of detecting intelligent design?

While Lothar make a good case for human intelligent design, just what are ID'ers specifically seeing that would lead them to think something other than a couple billion years of evolution has produced what we know as reality? (I'm looking for a consise example so I don't have to read a whole treatsie on it.)

[Lothar]

Apparently ID can include everything from a fundamentalist the-world-is-5000-years-old view to the belief that people selectively breed domestic animals and plants.... ID as presented above is so all inclusive that one can hardly help but admit to holding a view that is included in ID.

True. It can also include the belief that a death was intentional rather than accidental, or the belief that my post was not randomly generated. It *is* so all-inclusive that everybody holds some ID belief (except those who deny the existance of minds.) It's not just a theory about origins (though that's where a lot of the work focuses, and I think they make a mistake by making that their focus.)

The ID movement is, at least in part, an attempt to create definite rules for detecting intelligence. We all do it intuitively on a regular basis -- we get e-mail, and we look at the "from" address and the subject line and try to decide if it was written by a person or a spambot. ID seeks to determine an actual, scientific process by which we can do that. It's still a fledgeling science, so it's not very good at it yet, but they've got some interesting ideas that can and should be applied to a lot more than biology questions. (I think, right now, they're wasting their time trying to apply it mostly to biology -- it needs to be better developed on smaller problems first. The focus *should be* 90% not-biology, instead of 90% biology.)

But, if one does admit to such a thing, then one is subject to being lumped in with the creationists and alien abductionists.

If you admit to having an ID position *on origins*, that's true (or if you just say "ID" and you don't clarify, people will assume you're making an origins claim.) Same with having an "old earth" position on origins. It's a broad classification, and you tend to get lumped in with a lot of people you don't agree with in any broad classification.

If you have an ID position on something unrelated to origins, Tetrad might keep lumping you in with creationists, but only because he's stubborn

To me it seems like a rhetorical device to allow creationists to say "look, scientist A admits to believing in ID, therefore A must believe that god created the world and etc."

That is, unfortunately, the way most people view ID -- because most people's exposure to ID has been in hearing some uneducated creationist say "ID proves the Bible right!" That's why I'm here trying to correct that misunderstanding.

the overly broad definition of ID to me seems to serve to confuse the issue with terminology, and allow people who don't know any better to think that prominent scientists or ordinary evolutionists believe something they don't. Why have such an all inclusive term?

You could say the same thing about "evolution". It encompasses everything from mutation to the neo-Darwinian synthesis. It allows people who don't know any better to think all sorts of crazy stuff. Similarly, "old earth", "Christian", "Democrat", etc. are broad terms that allow people who don't know any better to think certain smart people agree with them because they fall under the same label.

The reason we have such an all-inclusive term is because it's a proper descriptive term for the science as a whole. The fact that n00bs misunderstand it isn't really a major concern, except when they insist on misusing it in conversation with me.

But still, the study of intelligent design as such seems interesting. Could you outline a little bit of the methodology of detecting intelligent design?

It's still a pretty new field, and a lot of the methodology is weak. I'll leave it to my wife to describe it, though, since she's studied it pretty thoroughly.

one can only be sure of the involvement of a 'designer', if all other explanations are ruled out.
There might be other theories I have not even considered...
The competing theories I can exclude depend on my knowledge and my understanding.

Yep. All good points. If I decide an intelligence wrote this post, but then I discover a program called LotharBot (TM) running on the server, I may have to re-evaluate my claim. ID does make some attempts to eliminate "all" possible hypotheses, but they don't do a very good job of it yet. This means theories are subject to revision -- which is not a bad thing, when you think about it.

such a strategy may be worthwile, not for I.D.ers but for the rest of the scientific community..... so I.D. may inspire new research and experiments [but] this way of making progress should make the I.D.ers deeply afraid of new scientific insights

ID should inspire new research, but new insights shouldn't make ID'ers afraid. It just provides them with opportunity to refine the theory. It's only those who become emotionally attached to their conclusions that fear them being overturned.

To answer your question of "who" Lothar, any group that promotes ID as proper scientific theory, especially in the biological sense.

Maybe you should refine that to "only in the biological sense". As I've said above, I think ID is weak when applied to biology. I think its proper place is in the other fields I mentioned, at least for now. When it's more developed, maybe it will be decent when applied to biology, but right now it's pretty weak.

You can't just group together chaos theory, pattern matching, or any of a series of fundamental mathematical and scientific processes under the umbrella of "Intelligent Design" and then say any other field that uses those same constructs are by extension using I.D.

Yes, you can.

You can't say they're using Dembski's formulation of ID, or the Discovery Institute's formulation of ID, or Dembski's or DI's methods, or ID as applied to biology, but you can say they're doing ID. They're trying to detect intelligences.

Has there been any sort of conclusion or theory drawn out of the I.D. community that has been directly referenced by any of the scientific communities you listed above?

I don't know. I don't follow it that closely, but it's doubtful. Right now, it's a baby science -- it doesn't yet have enough of anything for *any* community to be referencing it much. Most of what they've done is asked some good questions and made a few first-cut attempts to come up with possible avenues of study.

People usually fall into two opposite errors with ID:
1) Thinking it's already proven something (specifically, about origins)
2) Thinking it's not a science
It is a science, it's just a baby science without many good results yet. One of my biggest complaints about Discovery Institute is that they've got too much hype and too much activism with too few results. They seriously need to spend more time working on making ID solidly applicable, and less time working on problems that are far too big to be tackled by an underdeveloped theory.

[Drakona]

Please understand that I'm not defending ID as a science, nor am I saying that they've produced much that I'm convinced of. Quite the opposite, I have some resounding criticisms of the movement--you'll see them in my post above, and I'll outline some more below. -But- I do think the movement is centered around legitimate questions, and the study is a legitimate one. And I think it's foolish for people to blow it off, look for weaknesses, try to debate without trying to understand. For all its flaws, ID asks a good question, and so I'm watching with interest to see if they ever answer it.

Let me distinguish between ID as a general pursuit, and ID as a position on something.

ID as a general pursuit allows for "design" as an explanation for things, along with "law" and "chance," and looks for good principles to use to establish design. In this sense, ID is huge and far-reaching. When we separate spam from email, we're practicing ID--detecting which words have minds behind them, and which are script-generated garbage. When we detect bugs in software, we're practicing ID--detecting which features were intended and which were accidental. Archeology practices ID in this sense, distinguishing manmade things from natural ones. Forensics practices ID in this sense, distinguishing accidental death from murder. Interpretation of text very heavily practices ID--detecting the author's intent from the words. In this sense, ID is ubiquitous, but fuzzy and intuitive: nobody has good, general rules for detecting design. We just do it, and for everyday situations, intuition is enough; technical situations often have their own rules (i.e., archeologists look for evidence of human production, forensics looks for method, motive, opportunity, etc.), but there is no real overarching, scientific, philosophically grounded way to judge these rules. ID seeks to establish one.

It would be nice to have one. It would be nice to have something we could apply to, say, Biblical prophecy and say, "Ok, here's the prophecy, here's the supposed fulfillment... according to this Magic ID Formula, here's how impressive that really is. It was probably [design/chance fulfillment]." My dad was talking to me about something in the Bible recently, talking about a numeric sequence the ages of three patriarchs made--5*5*9, 6*6*8, and 7*7*9... or something like that. And my ID instincts immediately kicked in--was that a "good" pattern for evidencing design? Or was it just chance--a pattern mined after the fact from really meaningless data? It would be nice to have methods and principles. At present there are none. We just use our intuition ("Well, that seems improbable, but it's kind of a weird pattern..."). ID, if it developed well as a theory, could have great application in clarifying these sorts of things.

ID as a position on a topic is to say that there is evidence of design there--that is, to choose "design" out of the "design", "chance", "law" trichotomy. So an ID position on a Bible prophecy would be to say, "I think someone fulfilled this on purpose--it matches too well to have happened by chance." An ID position on a forum post would be to say, "I think someone wrote this--it makes too much sense to have come about without a mind." An ID position on origins says, "I think someone made this universe--it's too cool to have come about without a mind."

Of course ID as an origins position is unbelievably broad--that's a consequence of the theory! To use that as a criticism is like saying the "old earth" position on origins is unbelievably broad (after all, it allows old earth creationists, directed panspermia-ists, theistic evolutionists, naturalistic evolutionists... actually, pretty much anybody except the young earth creationists). Of course it's broad--it only makes a single, specific claim. Anybody who adopts that claim is compatible with the position.

ID as an origins position says only that certain things--biological things, life in general, or the universe (depends on the topic--see above where I outlined possible ID positions at different levels)--looks designed, and moreover that design is not only apparent but real. ID is to look at the inner workings of a cell and say, "This is too cool to have come about by chance; someone must have done it."

I know people are anxious to discard ID as a position on origins. I know people want to discard ID as a general pursuit because of the position on origins (an intellectually dishonest mistake--if ID as a general pursuit succeeds, and origins really are naturalistic, it will show that.) I know the responses. Lack of detail in a particular piece of a naturalistic theory isn't the same as saying no naturalistic theory will account for something. IDers should just be patient, naturalists will explain everything in time. Stuff with the anthropic principle. Stuff about science studying nature, not the supernatural. There are responses to all of these--lack of a naturalistic theory, in the face of something that looks designed, is itself evidence for design. Patience is only good when an outcome seems likely. The anthropic principle explains only why we see things, not why they are there. Science may study nature, but it studies minds, too--an intellectually honest scholar would not discard design out of hand. Things get more complicated, and we want to go down that road, we can. And ID has its flaws, I'll make no bones about that--it's overly political and its methods don't work. But at the end of the day, ID asks a good and reasonable question, and it would be foolish to get so caught up in the game of debate that we ignore the question.

Just how designed does something have to look before you can say it is? Woodpeckers' beaks are well suited to pecking holes in things--are they just well adapted, or is that design? (The clear answer is natural adaptation.) Fusion cannon is well-suited to taking out robot generators--is that clever usage or design? (Probably clever usage, though it might be design). Birds' wings are well-suited to flight--is that adaptation or design? (People start to diverge here...) And what of the other things we find in nature--what of the outright machinery within the cell? Assembly lines, pumps, motors, libraries--is this impressive enough that the design inference is valid? What if we found a probe on mars that could do all the things a cell can? We'd certain infer design, wouldn't we? So are we being intellectually honest if we keep looking for naturalistic theories to explain the origin of life--or are there principled distinctions? Is all design an illusion? What if DNA contained a book, or a computer program? Would it be okay to infer design then?

People are inclined to brush off the questions, and go with what they already believe. "Of course birds' wings aren't designed--evolution explains them. Mostly." "Of course this horoscope matches my life by design. It looks designed... mostly." We don't have any rigorous accounting for if that "mostly" is enough, or if it's a crock; we don't have any rigorous accounting for if that "design" is enough or if it's an illusion. We have no way to compare the two--looking for a principled way to do so is a genuiine and good pursuit. To ignore such a valid question and simply go with prior belief is intellectually sloppy.

==========

As far as methods, it would take a whole book--actually three whole books--to outline their current best guess at a method, and overall observations. So I'll tell you what I'll do. I've give some of the basic observations as a teaser, and then just plunk down the technical desription as a teaser for those with the math/philosophy background.

The only attempt I know of at a philosophically rigorous attempt to clarify design inferences is found in William Dembski's "The Design Inference" and subsequent books. That's the method I'll describe.

His most basic observation is that, at the least, a design inference requires two things, which he calls "specification" and "complexity." Specification is a pattern to which the observation must conform. Complexity just means improbability. Something must be both improbable and meaningful to trigger a design inference. In the classic example, suppose we see Scrabble tiles arranged on a tabletop. If we see two tiles next to each other that spell "IT", that is specified--it's a meaningful word--but not complex. It doesn't trigger a design inference, because it could have easily come about by chance. If we see a set of tiles that spell "XPVWN AGON AWMD GNGPFING WK," that is complex without being specified. That exact sequence of tiles is improbable--it's unlikely we'll ever see it again--but it is meaningless. Again, no design inference. But if the tiles spell "THE DESCENT BULLETIN BOARD," that is both specified (it's meaningful on several levels) and complex (it's a lot of tiles). We assume, without a second thought, that someone arranged them that way. That is, we make a design inference.

Really, we approach design inferences with a pattern in hand--something like, "This is a sequence of prime numbers" or "That was the name of an internet forum I visit." This pattern has to be good in several ways. It has to be meaningful, it has to be simple, it has to be something we could come up with independantly (i.e., it's not "I see XNWGAPID in Scrabble tiles on the table.") Dembski rigorizes this a bit, by requiring that patterns for design inferences come from probabilistically independant side information, and that they be "not too difficult" for a person to formulate from that information.

We also approach design inferences with some knowledge about the world in which they happen. Really, we have some competing naturalistic explanations--different chance hypotheses that yield different probability measures. What we'd like, for a design inference to go through, is for an event to occur that matches a meaningful pattern--a pattern which is very unlikely under any of the relevant chance hypotheses. (And a pattern so unlikely that it's still unlikely to occur even given the number of chances the universes has had to achieve it.) These restrictions are rigorized into calculation of the probability of the image of the pattern under all of the relevant chance hypotheses, taking into account the available probabilistic resources.

[Begin super-technical section. Skim if you aren't comfortable arguing math with Lothar. ]

In its full-blown technical glory, a design inference requires a subject S, an event e in an event space E, a set of chance hypotheses H* with associated probability measures M*, a pattern D in a pattern space, a partial mapping D* from the pattern space onto the event space, some probabilisticaly independant side information I, a bounded complexity measure Phi that represents S's problem-solving ability, and probabilistic resources Omega. The probability of D*(D) under all M in M* must be "small" with respect to the probabilistic resources Omega. The pattern D must be possible for S to formulate under Phi from I. I must be independant of E under all M in M*.

[End super-technical section.]

Pandora, your objection's a good one: we can never be sure we've accounted for all the possible natural causes of something. That's okay, though: the design inference is only about telling us what it's rational to believe, given what we know. It isn't a mathematical proof, it's an assessment of the available evidence. If what we know changes, our conclusions might change. So something that looks natural might later look designed when we learn new things about it, or vice versa. When you think about it, that's entirely natural.

As far as proof of this goes, Dembski's argument for the method is long, technical, subtle, ingenious... and flawed. (I found the hole in the proof, and furthermore I have a counterexample ). It still has some merit, though, in justifying some of the definitions and restrictions on design inferences. I won't begin to describe it here--it took me six months to absorb it, another three to find a counterexample, and three more to conclude the flaw was essential, not spurious. Suffice it to say, there's a lot of math and philosophy. An awful lot.

But there are some accessible criticisms of the method. The most common is that it's inapplicable to anything bigger than a toy problem. People both inside and outside of ID complain about that. Dembski himself tried to apply his method to the origin of the bacterial flagellum and failed BADLY--he wound up re-calculating the probability that the thing would assemble at random in one generation, and used some non-functional logic to try to make that mean something relevant. It was scandalously bad.

So for all of that work, ID really only has a few considerations and points out a few pitfalls. Its intuitive arguments remain the most appealing. I myself sort of watch curiously and hope they make progress, because I think they're asking a good question.

One thing's for sure--ID's far too young to be a rigorous position on origins. It's at best an intuitive one, though the intuition is appealing (I again highly recommend Meyer's paper above to get up to speed on that.) Despite the fact that the argument's not as rigorous as it should be, it's a powerful one. I again point out that Anthony Flew credited it with changing his mind--so it's at least worth looking at.

But I myself am hestitant and skeptical about ID as an origins position, and though it has come the closest of any origins position to convincing me... I think it needs work. Others think it's garbage doomed to fail, still others think it's a scientific revolution waiting to happen. I guess time will tell.

[Stryker]

Yowch... there's too much for one person to read here, but let me throw something in that I believe has bearing on the current discussion:

The Mendelian (sp?) model of genetics, commonly accepted as fact, tends to prove this. Let's take this as an example:

SL------------------------------SL
C1 = SS; C2 = SL; C3 = LS; C4 = LL

To describe this--S and L are genes for long and short hair in dogs, respectively. One of the genes will be dominant; let's assume it's the long-haired gene.

The two parents both have genes of SL. They will both be long-haired, since each of them have one short and one long gene, but the long one is dominant. The two parents breed and have 4 children. Chances are 3/4 that the offspring will have long hair, because of these three simple facts:

The long hair gene is dominant, thus any child with a long-haired gene will have long hair.

The genes are pretty much distributed randomly; a simple probability equation will show the probability of each combination of genes.

When there is no dominant gene, the recessive gene (in our case the short-haired gene) will display its trait in the child.

Thus, C1, or Child 1, will have short hair, while all the other 3 dogs will have long hair. But let's carry this a bit farther: say the two parents breed again, and have the same types of 4 children.

Now we have 2 SS children, 4 SL/LS children (doesn't make any difference whether it is SL or LS, really) and 2 LL children.

The two LL children have lost their ability to have children with short hair! Since both their genes are L's, and the L gene is dominant, even if they bred with a short-haired dog (SS), they would end up with long-haired children.

LL-----------SS
C1: LS C2: LS, C3: LS, C4: LS

The long-haired parent will always pass on a long-haired gene, the short-haired parent will always pass a short-haired gene, but the net result is 4 long-haired dogs, each one with LS genes.

Now, for the 2 SS dogs, if they breed together, they will only have SS children.

SS----------SS
C1: SS C2: SS C3: SS C4: SS etc.

Now let's say these dogs are in Egypt. It's hot. The long-haired dogs die out slowly, and eventually, there are no long-haired dogs in Egypt. Now, all of the dogs must have SS genes. There are no L genes in Egypt since all long-haired breeds died out; and thus the ability to have long-haired children has been totally lost.

A few important points here:

The dogs are still dogs. At no point did they become either chickens nor birds.
No new genetic information was created. Though the original parents were long-haired, and the end result is a bunch of short-haired dogs running around, since the parents had short-haired genes in the first place, the short-haired dog has come about through the loss of the long-haired gene. Let's say these dogs are taken to Antarctica. They won't live long, because of their lack of long hair. They have lost the ability to breed a long-haired dog among themselves, since they have lost all L genes.

On the other hand, let's say the LL dogs migrated north to a climate more suited to their particular genes. They breed, and soon we have a bunch of LL dogs running around all over the place. No SS--or short-haired--dogs will ever be seen again in that place, and if they are (due to 2 LS dogs surviving because of their long fur, then breeding a short-haired dog as 1/4 of their children) they will not live long, due to the colder climate and their lack of suitable fur. The extinction of the short-haired gene is more gradual, but it will be accomplished.

Now, we have dogs in the north that can only breed long-haired children, and dogs in the south that can only breed short-haired children. At no point did new genetic information for, say, feathers, appear in these dogs. Rather, the short-haired dogs, which were originally not even existent, were bred because they lost the L gene, and the L dogs because they lost the S genes.



Now this is all a very long rant here, but what does it really say, you might ask? Well, since no new information has been produced, and new genetic information has never been shown to come into existence through random chemical processes (one mistake in the chemical composition of these genes could cause a hairless dog to be born, which would die quickly in any circumstances--one slipup, and the entire thing goes to pot) one must come to the conclusion that something (or someOne) must be guiding the process.

I'm not a big fan of the ID theory, but it at least allows scientists to work from the perspective that maybe this stuff we're looking at was made by a logical being smarter than we could ever be.

[Drakona]

Genghis:

You're right about the history of ID. Despite my defense of it as a general philosophy, it did come out of origins, and remains almost entirely focused on origins. They cite Paley as their origin, though if I remember correctly, the beginning of ID as a modern movement was the book "Evolution: A Theory in Crisis" by Michael Denton--which I think was published in the 1960's. I think there were another few books around that addressed the insufficiency of evolution and tried to figure out what an alternative scientific theory would look like. That continued all the way up until the early 90's (TDI--the book I keep referencing--came out in 1991, though the dissertation it's based on is older.) Things only really got exciting with "Darwin's Black Box" in 1995. And of course, nobody's come up with that alternate ID-friendly theory, yet.

It is true that ID began as an origins position and became an abstract philosophy--not the other way around. I didn't mean to mislead, there. It wasn't an abstract philosophy in a historically prior sense. It is an abstract philosophy in a logically prior sense.

Anyway, make of the history what you will--whether it sounds like a facade or an intellectually honest movement to you. But the fact that ID began as opposition to naturalistic evolution--or the fact that it opposes it now--doesn't alone make it creationist. I myself am skeptical of evolution, but I am also skeptical of every brand of creationism I've every studied. I'm an "I don't know"-ist: I criticize different theories and accept limited claims that seem valid to me. ID is like that, too: it is only making a very limited claim.

In any case, it's a bad mental habit to substitute motive for material. I'm perpetually arguing with people who have--for example--long lists of Bible contradictions that they want me to respond to. Now, I know these people aren't arguing in good faith: they want nothing more than to tear the Bible apart, and will use any argument or excuse they can to accomplish that aim. I know they aren't interested in honestly studying anything for its own sake, nor are they even really listening to what I say in response. Despite that, I have an intellectual obligation to deal with their arguments on their own merits. Sometimes even badly-motivated or mean-spirited people say true things. (Indeed, even on the DBB, I've learned a lot about myself from criticisms leveled at me by people that clearly didn't follow what I said and didn't care anyway.)

So I guess... I don't know. You're right that ID started as an origins position and only later became an interesting philosophical pursuit. And it's still mostly focused on origins--that's one of my big criticisms of it, actually. I'm not even sure if, at the end of the day, anything they're currently saying has any merit at all. But I take serious issue with criticisms of ID that center around its history or its "hidden agenda." I think they're provably false, but even if they were true... leveling such criticisms is not a rational way to proceed. It muddies the waters, rather than clearing them. Winning a scientific debate, in the end, is not about having a good heart, but having good ideas and good evidence.

Origins is already far too political and hot-headed of a subject. It's almost impossible to talk about it dispassionately with anybody. I hate that, because it makes it really hard to fairly study, and I want to fairly study it. If you say to anyone "You know, I think evolution might not be sufficient to explain this," nobody says, "Oh? Let's have look at that..." They all immediately either glare at you and go, "You're one of THEM!!!" or beam at you and go "You're on my SIDE!!!" Nobody wants to dispassionately talk substance; everybody's got their theory to defend, their worldview to preserve. I really hate that. I want to pursue truth, and when it comes to origins, I often feel awfully alone in that.

Anyway, I can understand the suspicion. Truth be told, I'm not that enthralled with ID myself, and my disenchantment is mostly based on content, not agenda. But despite being unconvinced by them, and despite the fact that I think they're behaving foolishly and unscholastically in a lot of ways, I'm watching intently to see what progress they make because I think at the heart of the movement is a good and valid question. I want to see them succeed. I don't know if they will, or if it's all fluff and garbage. The best I can do is study and wait and evaluate.

[Drakona]

just what are ID'ers specifically seeing that would lead them to think something other than a couple billion years of evolution has produced what we know as reality?

Well, the Meyer paper I linked to above talks about a lot of different things, so for the full answer you could go there.

If you want a quick, concrete example, though, the bacterial flagellum is the "poster boy" of the ID movement, and provides a quick glance at what they're looking at.

[woodchip]

If you want a quick, concrete example, though, the bacterial flagellum is the "poster boy" of the ID movement, and provides a quick glance at what they're looking at.

Thanks Drakona. I looked at the representative pic and the term "anthropomorphism" in a mechanical sense comes to mind. One could use converse logic and say mankind is using engineering concepts learned from the natural world. There are many elegant designs in nature (as in hexagonal interlocking shapes in a bees honeycomb) that just because the resulting structure looks like something man would design for his/her own uses, doesn't mean that natural selection can't do the same thing.
I'm not arguing with you Drakona, just if the pic you linked to is representative of ID thought then I think they have a ways to go in their philosophy.

[Drakona]

Believe it or not, you're echoing a very famous philosopher, Woodchip. The original ID argument belongs to William Paley--it's the classic "watchmaker" argument. Paley compared complex and designed-looking things to watches, saying they required much explanation in terms of design. He made that argument in the 1850's, I think.

David Hume responded that just because certain biological things and watches are similar in some ways doesn't mean they're similar in every way. Watches are complex machinery; opposible thumbs are complex machinery. Watches serve a clear purpose; opposible thumbs serve a clear purpose. But just because watches require a designer doesn't mean opposible thumbs do! (Any more than the fact that watches break when they get wet means thumbs will... )

Likewise here: just because a natural structure looks like something people make doesn't necessarily mean it requires a designer. Stars in the night sky look a lot like cities after dark; one's a designed view, but that doesn't mean the other necessarily is.

ID folks respond that analogy isn't the intended mode of argument. They aren't saying natural things are like watches, and therefore they require a designer like a watch does. Rather, they are saying there are some natural things that share characteritics with watches--perhaps mechanicity, perhaps clear purpose (this point is still a little fuzzy)--that require as much explanation as watches do. The watch as an analogy is the illustration, not the argument.

The bacterial flagellum first entered the ID argument in 1995, as one of Behe's five complex microbiological machines, in "Darwin's Black Box." He describes it as functionally the same as an outboard motor--having many of its proteins named after the corresponding mechanical part. His argument proceeds somewhat differently (he's looking to show that it can't in principle evolve, by whatever method), but the intuitive ID argument here is that if this thing is functionally equivalent to an outboard motor, wouldn't it require as much explanation (complex-design-wise) as a motor would?

The flagellum next popped up in Dembski's book "No Free Lunch," in 2002, as his core example of a clearly ID system in nature. After spending much time lauding its complexity, he then settles down to make a calculation of just how designed this thing is... which is kind of a funny idea, and he fails badly. But the effect of that was that the flagellum became the central example of ID for everyone.

There was some ruckus later in 2002 (I think?), when it was discovered that the Type Three Secretory System (so widely referred to in the debate that it came to be abbreviated TTSS) was built of a subset of proteins of the bacterial flagellum--about a quarter of them. So many ID critics put it forth as a starting point for the flagellum to evolve (much of this centered around the IC debate as well, and what IC exactly meant.)

In 2003, an undergraduate in Biology finally puts together a model for the evolution of the bacterial flagellum from the TTSS as his senior thesis. The ID community responds with quick criticism to the article, and the debate wanders off into technical regions where nobody can follow it. (Even I can't follow it beyond this point, so I can't give an opinion as to which side (if any) won.)

Regaurdless, the flagellum remains the main symbol of the ID movement. It shows up on web sites, in avatars of ID-advocates on origins forums, and in glorious computer animation in various pro-ID videos. For all the technical controversy that nobody can follow, the thing does look a lot like an engine, and thus the powerful intuitive appeal of design as an explanation.

[Nightshade]

What it all boils down to is:

ID = Garbage.