[asa] Innate design detector?

Since we are on the topic of innate morality and ethics, I want to
point the readers of ASA to an interesting thesis by one of Allen
MacNeill's students. Remember Allen? He started what some called an
Intelligent Design course at Cornell during the summer. Many good
discussions took place and his students were tasked with writing a
paper. One of his students, E. Broadus, wrote a paper on the
Detection of Agency and Intentionality in Nature.

Allen's announcement of the work can be found at http://
evolutionlist.blogspot.com/2006/08/on-detection-of-agency-and.html
E Broadus's paper can be found http://
evolutionanddesign.googlepages.com/BioEE_467_Broaddus_Research_Paper.pdf

Her argument, and supported by Allen, is that humans have an innate
ability to detect agency in nature. This ability has evolutionary
roots and may help us understand why humans are so quick to detect
agency, sometimes even in places where none exists.

<quote>This is precisely what Broaddus argues for in her paper: that
the human mind (and, by extension, the vertebrate “mind” in general)
has a module that is adapted specifically for the precise and rapid
inference of intentionality in nature. That such an “agency
detector” (to use the commonly accepted term for such a module) would
have immense adaptive value is obvious. In an environment in which
other entities do indeed have “intentions” (i.e. predators,
competitors, potential mates, etc.), the ability to detect and infer
the possible consequences of acting upon such intentions would confer
immense adaptive value on any organism with such an ability.

Furthermore, as Broaddus points out (and as we discussed briefly in
the seminar), to be most effective such a detector should be tuned in
such a way as to detect virtually all such “intention-indicating”
behaviors. This would have the effect of producing a significant
number of “false positives,” as any detector that is tuned high
enough to detect all actual cases would have such a side-effect.</quote>

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Received on Wed Nov 1 12:55:44 2006