Group
Part 3 of Dembski's 4-part post.
Steve
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5. Can Specified Complexity Even Have a Mechanism?
What are the candidates here for something in nature that is
nonetheless beyond nature? In my view the most promising candidate is
specified complexity. The term "specified complexity" has been in use
for about 30 years. The first reference to it with which I'm familiar
is from Leslie Orgel's 1973 book _The Origins of Life_, where
specified complexity is treated as a feature of biological systems
distinct from inorganic systems. Richard Dawkins also employs the
notion in _The Blind Watchmaker_, though he doesn't use the actual
term (he refers to complex systems that are independently specified).
In his most recent book, _The Fifth Miracle_, Paul Davies (p. 112)
claims that life isn't mysterious because of its complexity per se
but because of its "tightly specified complexity." Stuart Kauffman in
his just published _Investigations_ (October 2000) proposes a "fourth
law" of thermodynamics to account for specified complexity. Specified
complexity is a form of information, though one richer than Shannon
information, which focuses exclusively on the complexity of
information without reference to its specification. A repetitive
sequence of bits is specified without being complex. A random
sequence of bits is complex without being specified. A sequence of
bits representing, say, a progression of prime numbers will be both
complex and specified. In _The Design Inference_ I show how inferring
design is equivalent to identifying specified complexity
(significantly, this means that intelligent design can be conceived
as a branch of information theory).
Most scientists familiar with specified complexity think that the
Darwinian mechanism is adequate to account for it once one has
differential reproduction and survival (in _No Free Lunch_ I'll show
that the Darwinian mechanism has no such power, though for now let's
let it ride). But outside a context that includes replicators, no one
has a clue how specified complexity occurs by naturalistic means.
This is not to say there hasn't been plenty of speculation (e.g.,
clay templates, hydrothermic vents, and hypercycles), but none of
this speculation has come close to solving the problem. Unfortunately
for naturalistic origin-of-life researchers, this problem seems not
to be eliminable since the simplest replicators we know require
specified complexity. Consequently Paul Davies suggests that the
explanation of specified complexity will require some fundamentally
new kinds of natural laws. But so far these laws are completely
unknown. Kauffman's reference to a "fourth law," for instance, merely
cloaks the scientific community's ignorance about the naturalistic
mechanisms supposedly responsible for the specified complexity in
nature.
Van Till agrees that specified complexity is an open problem for
science. At a recent symposium on intelligent design at the
University of New Brunswick sponsored by the Center for Theology and
the Natural Sciences (15-16 September 2000), Van Till and I took part
in a panel discussion. When I asked him how he accounts for specified
complexity in nature, he called it a mystery that he hopes further
scientific inquiry will resolve. But resolve in what sense? On Van
Till's Robust Formation Economy Principle, there must be some causal
mechanism in nature that accounts for any instance of specified
complexity. We may not know it and we may never know it, but surely
it is there. For the design theorist to invoke a non-natural
intelligence is therefore out of bounds. But what happens once some
causal mechanism is found that accounts for a given instance of
specified complexity? Something that's specified and complex is by
definition highly improbable with respect to all causal mechanisms
currently known. Consequently, for a causal mechanism to come along
and explain something that previously was regarded as specified and
complex means that the item in question is in fact no longer
specified and complex with respect to the newly found causal
mechanism. The task of causal mechanisms is to render probable what
otherwise seems highly improbable. Consequently, the way naturalism
explains specified complexity is by dissolving it. Intelligent design
makes specified complexity a starting point for inquiry. Naturalism
regards it as a problem to be eliminated. (That's why, for instance,
Richard Dawkins wrote _Climbing Mount Improbable_. To climb Mount
Improbable one needs to find a gradual route that breaks a horrendous
improbability into a sequence manageable probabilities each one of
which is easily bridged by a natural mechanism.)
Lord Kelvin once remarked, "If I can make a mechanical model, then I
can understand; if I cannot make one, I do not understand."
Repeatedly, critics of design have asked design theorists to provide
a causal mechanism whereby a non-natural designer inputs specified
complexity into the world. This question presupposes a self-defeating
conception of design and tries to force design onto a Procrustean bed
sure to kill it. _Intelligent design is not a mechanistic theory!_
Intelligent design regards Lord Kelvin's dictum about mechanical
models not as a sound regulative principle for science but as a
straitjacket that artificially constricts science. SETI researchers
are not invoking a mechanism when they explain a radio transmission
from outer space as the result of an extraterrestrial intelligence.
To ask for a mechanism to explain the effect of an intelligence
(leaving aside derived intentionality) is like Aristotelians asking
Newton what it is that keeps bodies in rectilinear motion at a
constant velocity (for Aristotle the crucial distinction was between
motion and rest; for Newton it was between accelerated and
unaccelerated motion). This is simply not a question that arises
within Newtonian mechanics. Newtonian mechanics proposes an entirely
different problematic from Aristotelian physics. Similarly,
intelligent design proposes a far richer problematic than science
committed to naturalism. Intelligent design is fully capable of
accommodating mechanistic explanations. Intelligent design has no
interest in dismissing mechanistic explanations. Such explanations
are wonderful as far as they go. But they only go so far, and they
are incapable of accounting for specified complexity.
In rejecting mechanical accounts of specified complexity, design
theorists are not arguing from ignorance. Arguments from ignorance
have the form "Not X, therefore Y." Design theorists are not saying
that for a given natural object exhibiting specified complexity, all
the natural causal mechanisms so far considered have failed to
account for it and therefore it had to be designed. Rather they are
saying that the specified complexity exhibited by a natural object
can be such that there are compelling reasons to think that no
natural causal mechanism is capable of producing it. Usually these
"compelling reasons" take the form of an argument from contingency in
which the object exhibiting specified complexity is compatible with
but in no way determined by the natural laws relevant to its
occurrence. For instance, for polynucleotides and polypeptides there
are no physical laws that account for why one nucleotide base is next
to another or one amino acid is next to another. The laws of
chemistry allow any possible sequence of nucleotide bases (joined
along a sugar-phosphate backbone) as well as any possible sequence of
L-amino acids (joined by peptide bonds).
Design theorists are attempting to make the same sort of argument
against mechanistic accounts of specified complexity that modern
chemistry makes against alchemy. Alchemy sought to transform base
into precious metals using very limited means like furnaces and
potions (though not particle accelerators). Now we rightly do not
regard the contemporary rejection of alchemy as an argument from
ignorance. For instance, we don't charge the National Science
Foundation with committing an argument from ignorance for refusing to
fund alchemical research. Now it's evident that not every combination
of furnaces and potions has been tried to transform lead into gold.
But that's no reason to think that some combination of furnaces and
potions might still constitute a promising avenue for effecting the
desired transformation. We now know enough about atomic physics to
preclude this transformation. So too, we are fast approaching the
place where the transformation of a biological system that doesn't
exhibit an instance of specified complexity (say a bacterium without
a flagellum) to one that does (say a bacterium with a flagellum)
cannot be accomplished by purely natural means but also requires
intelligence.
There are a lot of details to be filled in, and design theorists are
working overtime to fill them in. What I'm offering here is not the
details but an overview of the design research program as it tries to
justify the inability of natural mechanisms to account for specified
complexity. This part of its program is properly viewed as belonging
to science. Science is in the business of establishing not only the
causal mechanisms capable of accounting for an object having certain
characteristics but also the inability of causal mechanisms to
account for such an object, or what Stephen Meyer calls "proscriptive
generalizations." There are no causal mechanisms that can account for
perpetual motion machines. This is a proscriptive generalization.
Perpetual motion machines violate the second law of thermodynamics
and can thus on theoretical grounds be eliminated. Design theorists
are likewise offering in principle theoretical objections for why the
specified complexity in biological systems cannot be accounted for in
terms of purely natural causal mechanisms. They are seeking to
establish proscriptive generalizations. Proscriptive generalizations
are not arguments from ignorance.
Assuming such an in-principle argument can be made (and for the
sequel I will assume it can), the design theorist's inference to
design can no longer be considered an argument from ignorance. With
such an in-principle argument in hand, not only has the design
theorist excluded all natural causal mechanisms that might account
for the specified complexity of a natural object, but the design
theorist has also excluded all explanations that might in turn
exclude design. The design inference is therefore not purely an
eliminative argument, as is so frequently charged. Specified
complexity presupposes that the entire set of relevant chance
hypotheses has first been identified. This takes considerable
background knowledge. What's more, it takes considerable background
knowledge to come up with the right pattern (i.e., specification) for
eliminating all those chance hypotheses and thus for inferring
design. Design inferences that infer design by identifying specified
complexity are therefore not purely eliminative. They do not merely
exclude, but they exclude from an exhaustive set of hypotheses in
which design is all that remains once the inference has done its work
(this is not to say that the set is logically exhaustive; rather it
is exhaustive with respect to the inquiry in question -- that's all
we can ever do in science).
It follows that contrary to the frequently-leveled charge that design
is untestable, design is in fact eminently testable. Indeed,
specified complexity tests for design. Specified complexity is a
well-defined statistical notion. The only question is whether an
object in the real world exhibits specified complexity. Does it
correspond to an independently given pattern and is the event
delimited by that pattern highly improbable (i.e., complex)? These
questions admit a rigorous mathematical formulation and are readily
applicable in practice. Not only is design eminently testable, but to
deny that design is testable commits the fallacy of _petitio
principii_, that is, begging the question or arguing in a circle
(Robert Larmer developed this criticism effectively at the New
Brunswick symposium adverted to earlier). It may well be that the
evidence to justify that a designer acted to bring about a given
natural structure may be insufficient. But to claim that there could
never be enough evidence to justify that a designer acted to bring
about a given natural structure is insupportable. The only way to
justify the latter claim is by imposing on science a methodological
principle that deliberately excludes design from natural systems, to
wit, methodological naturalism. But to say that design is not
testable because we've defined it out of existence is hardly
satisfying or legitimate. Darwin claimed to have tested for design in
biology and found it wanting. Design theorists are now testing for
design in biology afresh and finding that biology is chock-full of
design.
Specified complexity is only a mystery so long as it must be
explained mechanistically. But the fact is that we attribute
specified complexity to intelligences (and therefore to entities that
are not mechanisms) all the time. The reason that attributing
specified complexity to intelligence for biological systems is
regarded as problematic is because such an intelligence would in all
likelihood have to be unembodied (though strictly speaking this is
not required of intelligent design -- the designer could in principle
be an embodied intelligence, as with the panspermia theories). But
how does an unembodied intelligence interact with natural objects and
get them to exhibit specified complexity. We are back to Van Till's
problem of extra-natural assembly.
6. How Can an Unembodied Intelligence Interact with the Natural World?
There is in fact no conceptual difficulty for an unembodied
intelligence to interact coherently with the natural world. We are
not in the situation of Descartes seeking a point of contact between
the material and the spiritual at the pineal gland. For Descartes the
physical world consisted of extended bodies that interacted only via
direct contact. Thus for a spiritual dimension to interact with the
physical world could only mean that the spiritual caused the physical
to move. In arguing for a substance dualism in which human beings
consist of both spirit and matter, Descartes therefore had to argue
for a point of contact between spirit and matter. He settled on the
pineal gland because it was the one place in the brain where symmetry
was broken and where everything seemed to converge (most parts of the
brain have right and left counterparts).
Although Descartes's argument doesn't work, the problem it tries to
solve is still with us. When I attended a Santa Fe symposium
sponsored by the Templeton Foundation in October 1999, Paul Davies
expressed his doubts about intelligent design this way: "At some
point God has to move the particles." The physical world consists of
physical stuff, and for a designer to influence the arrangement of
physical stuff seems to require that the designer intervene in,
meddle with, or in some way coerce this physical stuff. What's wrong
with this picture of supernatural action by a designer? The problem
is not a flat contradiction with the results of modern science. Take
for instance the law of conservation of energy. Although the law is
often stated in the form "energy can neither be created nor
destroyed," in fact all we have empirical evidence for is the much
weaker claim that "in an isolated system energy remains constant."
Thus a supernatural action that moves particles or creates new ones
is beyond the power of science to disprove because one can always
claim that the system under consideration was not isolated.
There is no logical contradiction here. Nor is there necessarily a
god-of-the-gaps problem here. It's certainly conceivable that a
supernatural agent could act in the world by moving particles so that
the resulting discontinuity in the chain of physical causality could
never be removed by appealing to purely physical forces. The "gaps"
in the god-of-the-gaps objection are meant to denote gaps of
ignorance about underlying physical mechanisms. But there's no reason
to think that all gaps must give way to ordinary physical
explanations once we know enough about the underlying physical
mechanisms. The mechanisms may simply not exist. Some gaps might
constitute ontic discontinuities in the chain of physical causes and
thus remain forever beyond the capacity of physical mechanisms.
Although a non-physical designer who "moves particles" is not
logically incoherent, such a designer nonetheless remains problematic
for science. The problem is that natural causes are fully capable of
moving particles. Thus for a designer also to move particles can only
seem like an arbitrary intrusion. The designer is merely doing
something that nature is already doing, and even if the designer is
doing it better, why didn't the designer make nature better in the
first place so that it can move the particles better? We are back to
Van Till's Robust Formational Economy Principle.
But what if the designer is not in the business of moving particles
but of imparting information? In that case nature moves its own
particles, but an intelligence nonetheless guides the arrangement
which those particles take. A designer in the business of moving
particles accords with the following world picture: The world is a
giant billiard table with balls in motion, and the designer
arbitrarily alters the motion of those balls, or even creates new
balls and then interposes them among the balls already present. On
the other hand, a designer in the business of imparting information
accords with a very different world picture: In that case the world
becomes an information processing system that is responsive to novel
information. Now the interesting thing about information is that it
can lead to massive effects even though the energy needed to
represent and impart the information can become infinitesimal (Frank
Tipler and Freeman Dyson have made precisely such arguments, namely,
that arbitrarily small amounts of energy are capable of information
processing -- in fact capable of sustaining information processing
indefinitely). For instance, the energy requirements to store and
transmit a launch code are minuscule, though getting the right code
can make the difference between starting World War III and
maintaining peace.
When a system is responsive to information, the dynamics of that
system will vary sharply with the information imparted and will
largely be immune to purely physical factors (e.g., mass, charge, or
kinetic energy). A medical doctor who utters the words "Your son is
going to die" might trigger a heart attack in a troubled father
whereas uttering the words "Your son is going to live" might prevent
it. Moreover, it doesn't much matter how loudly the doctor utters one
sentence or the other or what bodily gestures accompany the
utterance. Such physical factors are largely irrelevant. Consider
another example. After killing the Minotaur on Crete and setting sail
back for Athens, Theseus forgot to substitute a white flag for a
black flag. Theseus and his father Aegeus had agreed that a black
flag would signify that Theseus had been killed by the Minotaur
whereas a white flag would signify his success in destroying it.
Seeing the black flag hoisted on the ship at a distance, Aegeus
committed suicide. Or consider yet another nautical example, in this
case a steersman who guides a ship by controlling its rudder. The
energy imparted to the rudder is minuscule compared to the energy
inherent in the ship's motion, and yet the rudder guides its motion.
It was this analogy that prompted Norbert Wiener to introduce the
term "cybernetics," which is derived etymologically from the Greek
and means steersman. It is no coincidence that in his text on
cybernetics, Wiener writes about information as follows
(_Cybernetics_, 2nd ed., p. 132): "Information is information, not
matter or energy. No materialism which does not admit this can
survive at the present day."
How much energy is required to impart information? We have sensors
that can detect quantum events and amplify them to the macroscopic
level. What's more, the energy in quantum events is proportional to
frequency or inversely proportional to wavelength. And since there is
no upper limit to the wavelength of, for instance, electromagnetic
radiation, there is no lower limit to the energy required to impart
information. In the limit, a designer could therefore impart
information into the universe without inputting any energy at all.
Whether the designer works through quantum mechanical effects is not
ultimately the issue here. Certainly quantum mechanics is much more
hospitable to an information processing view of the universe than the
older mechanical models. All that's needed, however, is a universe
whose constitution and dynamics are not reducible to deterministic
natural laws. Such a universe will produce random events and thus
have the possibility of producing events that exhibit specified
complexity (i.e., events that stand out against the backdrop of
randomness). Now as I've already noted, specified complexity is a
form of information, albeit a richer form than Shannon information,
which trades purely in complexity (cf. chapter 6 of my book
_Intelligent Design_ as well as my forthcoming _No Free Lunch_).
What's more, as I've argued in _The Design Inference_, specified
complexity (or specified improbability as I call it there -- the
concepts are the same) is a reliable empirical marker of actual
design. Now the beauty is that we live in a non-deterministic
universe that is open to novel information, that exhibits specified
complexity, and that therefore gives clear evidence of a designer who
has imparted it with information.
It's at this point that critics of design throw up their hands in
disgust and charge that design theorists are merely evading the issue
of how a designer introduces design into the world. From the design
theorists perspective, however, there is no evasion here. Rather
there is a failure of imagination on the part of the critic (and this
is not meant as a compliment). In asking for a mechanistic account of
how the designer imparts information and thereby introduces design,
the critic of design is like a physicist trained only in Newtonian
mechanics and desperately looking for a mechanical account of how a
single particle like an electron can go through two slits
simultaneously to produce a diffraction pattern on a screen (cf. the
famous double-slit experiment). On a classical Newtonian view of
physics, only a mechanical account in terms of sharply localized and
individuated particles makes sense. And yet nature is unwilling to
oblige any such mechanical account of the double slit experiment
(note that the Bohmian approach to quantum mechanics merely shifts
what's problematic in the classical view to Bohm's quantum
potential). Richard Feynman was right when he remarked that no one
understands quantum mechanics. The "mechanics" in "quantum mechanics"
is nothing like the "mechanics" in "Newtonian mechanics." There are
no analogies that carry over from the dynamics of macroscopic objects
to the quantum level. In place of understanding we must content
ourselves with knowledge. We don't _understand_ how quantum mechanics
works, but we _know_ that it works. So too, we don't _understand_ how
a designer imparts information into the world, but we _know_ that a
designer imparts information.
It follows that Howard Van Till's riddle to design theorists is
ill-posed. Van Till asks whether the design that design theorists
claim to find in natural systems is strictly mind-like (i.e.,
conceptualized by a mind to accomplish a purpose) or also hand-like
(i.e., involving a coercive extra-natural mode of assembly). As with
many forced choices Van Till has ignored a _tertium quid_, namely,
that design can also be word-like (i.e., imparting information to a
receptive medium). In the liturgies of most Christian churches, the
faithful pray that God keep them from sinning in "thought, word, and
deed." Each element of this tripartite distinction is significant.
Thoughts left to themselves are inert and never accomplish anything
outside the mind of the individual who thinks them. Deeds, on the
other hand, are coercive, forcing physical stuff to move now this way
and now that way (it's no accident that the concept of _force_ plays
such a crucial role in the rise of modern science). But between
thoughts and deeds are words. Words mediate between thoughts and
deeds. Words give expression to thoughts and thus bring the self in
contact with the other. On the other hands, words by themselves are
never coercive (without deeds to back up words, words lose their
power to threaten). Nonetheless, words have the power to engender
deeds not by coercion but by persuasion. Process and openness-of-God
theologians will no doubt find these observations congenial.
Nonetheless, Christian theologians of a more traditional bent can
readily sign off on them as well.
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"In the final analysis, it is not any specific scientific evidence that convinces
me that Darwinism is a pseudoscience that will collapse once it becomes
possible for critics to get a fair hearing. It is the way the Darwinists argue
their case that makes it apparent that they are afraid to encounter the best
arguments against their theory. A real science does not employ propaganda
and legal barriers to prevent relevant questions from being asked, nor does
it rely on enforcing rules of reasoning that allow no alternative to the
official story. If the Darwinists had a good case to make, they would
welcome the critics to an academic forum for open debate, and they would
want to confront the best critical arguments rather than to caricature them
as straw men. Instead they have chosen to rely on the dishonorable
methods of power politics." (Johnson P.E., "The Wedge of Truth: Splitting
the Foundations of Naturalism," Intervarsity Press: Downers Grove IL.,
2000, p.141)
Stephen E. Jones | Ph. +61 8 9448 7439 | http://www.iinet.net.au/~sejones
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