Re: [asa] Innate design detector?

The paper doesn't seem terribly interesting. We're hard-wired to infer
purpose from certain perceptual patterns; sometimes our inferences are
correct, sometimes they're not. Whether the perception of purpose in
biology is a correct inference is an open question. So what?

On 11/1/06, Pim van Meurs <pimvanmeurs@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> 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 13:36:14 2006