What is Intelligent Design?

This screed came out of my pen in reaction to an article on Intelligent Design theory, which was sent to me by a very good friend.

I have believed both sides of this argument: I started out believing in Darwinian evolution, converted to ID, and have re-converted to belief in evolution.  To me, it seems abundantly clear (1) that change happens all the time, (2) that there is a significant degree of randomness involved in change, and (3) that people systematically underestimate the randomness (or overestimate their ability to understand it).  This does not mean that I think that everything Darwin said is true: it isn't, and current ideas about biological evolution look significantly different from what he put forward in On the Origin of Species.  In the future, theories will continue to evolve: it is not in the nature of things for permanent knowledge to exist.  Real knowledge depends on context, which is constantly changing.  Useful knowledge does not assert itself as something absolute, unchanging, non-evolving.

One problem that people on the ID side have (from my perspective) is that they fail to understand how design really works.  Take Paley's analogy: you find a watch on the beach (watch = universe) and presume that some watchmaker (= God) made it.  In real life, however, watchmakers don't make watches on their own, with untutored intelligence!  The original watch was a clock, which came into existence at multiple times in history in various formats: engineers took those formats and tweaked them, and tweaked them, and tweaked them, and continue to tweak them, creating all kinds of different watches.  No one individual ever invented a Platonic form of the watch ("one watch to time them all").  Someone came up with a gizmo that gave someone else an idea for another gizmo, and so on.  The watch is evolving as I write this.  Watchmakers are noticing random things in their old blueprints, in their customer base, in the work of other watchmakers, and they are building new watches (including some very different from an early Benedictine clock).  The original watchmakers did not come up with their watch out of thin air: the gizmos they built were likewise inspired by earlier gizmos (and a crowd of engineering ideas that no single historical individual is responsible for).  The way that "intelligent design" actually works in human terms is actually very much like the way modern biologists imagine biological evolution taking place.  Engineers share ideas and create multiple gizmos (which become prototypes for more gizmos) just as organisms share DNA and create multiple offspring (which become prototypes for more organisms).  One person is not responsible for creating watches (which are a collective phenomenon).  One thing is not responsible for creating biological life (which is a collective phenomenon).

Another problem with ID is that it does not really say anything about how we are to understand things.  The modern biologist's story of evolution doesn't just give you a fun myth for science class: it explains how diseases happen (as bacteria and viruses evolve to become better predators), how speciation happens (as isolated pockets of organisms develop apart from their parent populations), how ecosystems exist (as multiple populations of living things evolve together) -- and thus how our actions as human beings influence the prevalence of disease and living species.  It gives practical answers (that actually work sometimes!) to practical questions (should I build a house here? what kind of house? should I have a pet? what kind? what should I eat? what medicine should I take for a particular illness or infection?).  ID, on the other hand, just points out that the whole thing is a mystery.  "The universe is the product of an otherwise unknown and perhaps unknowable intelligent designer" (who for some reason left no business card on the beach with Paley's watch).  Can I ask the designer what to do when I am sick, when I want to build a house?  I can.  What does he say?  Nothing at all, until I remember that he is also known as God.  Then he says all kinds of stuff: 

"You are sick?  Sacrifice a lamb, or a goat, or two turtle doves, and leave an offering of incense with the priest (who must be paid handsomely to officiate).  That didn't work?  Well, maybe you can try dedicating a small statue of me (complete with thunderbolts in hand) at your local temple?  That didn't work?  How about a cast of the affected body part?  Still no dice?  Well, I suppose you could try burning or cutting yourself: remember that weird dream you had about being on fire the other night?  I sometimes talk to people in dreams.  Maybe you should ask the local madman what he thinks; I love schizophrenics: they always hear me so loud and clear!"  

Historically speaking, God has many conflicting faces (all of them suspiciously human, to my eye), and he offers all kinds of contradictory prescriptions for human life, contradictory prescriptions that are about as reliable as medicine before germ theory.  (By saying all kinds of different things over time, God occasionally offered somebody something that worked, much as some pre-modern doctors occasionally cured people with panaceas like quinine.  If I give quinine to every sick person I meet, the malaria patients will be cured; some people will get better on their own; and everyone else will die.  Old time medicine, like old time religion, worked, but it was not really reliable.  Sometimes, avoiding the consumption of pig meat may help society prosper; other times, not so much.  God is either really bad at seeing the difference or really bad at communicating it to his acolytes.)  The ID people have no practical advice to offer except the outworn ideas presented by God: some of these ideas work (perhaps even very well), and others don't, but it takes an evolutionist to see the difference.  The evolutionist may give you some of God's medicine, but he will follow up with you when it doesn't work, and will even invent new medicine (which won't always work, either).  The ID guy just hands you over to the priest, who gives you the divine panacea du jour and then lets you survive or die without bothering to think of anything new (and heretical: we have to stick to the tried and true, even when history shows us that it doesn't really work). 

Evolution is practical because it changes (mimicking the growth we see in life, and in God, for that matter).  ID is impractical because it does not change (mimicking the stagnation we see in death, and in many churches).  The people who believe in evolution are engaging in useful thought whenever they ask how changes occur.  The people who believe in ID are not, since they have no positive theory of change.  I reconverted to belief in evolution when I realized that in my experience (1) change is real, and (2) engaging it practically requires something more than uncritical acceptance of ancient mythology.  This is not because the mythology is worthless, but because it contains a lot of chaff mixed in with the wheat, chaff that needs to be sifted out if I am to avoid poisoning myself every time I take something from God's medicine cabinet (which we all do at some point: no one claims to know everything, except for some crazy fanatics, and we all fall back on "common sense" whose usefulness is open to question).        

Confession of a Dumb Bird-Watcher

Nassim Nicholas Taleb.  Fooled By Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets.  New York: Random House, 2004.  ISBN 0812975219.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb.  The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable.  New York: Random House, 2007.  ISBN 1400063515.

This essay takes me a little distance down memory lane, since I encountered Nassim Taleb before my crisis of faith had become truly critical.  Still not really concerned by the cognitive dissonance that would eventually become unbearable, I was happily engaged in my graduate school work, taking classes and preparing for examinations.  As an outlet for stress, I maintained an active lifestyle and sought the best information I could find on human health and performance.  I had knocked around enough to know that the people from whom I had the most to learn were older athletes who maintained high activity levels: they had something I wanted.  So I found myself visiting the web site of Clarence Bass, who introduced me (figuratively speaking) to economist Arthur De Vany and his brain-child "Evolutionary Fitness".  De Vany's ideas about complex systems (of which the human body provides one instance) are very interesting and changed my thinking in many ways (before his blog became available by subscription only; as a poor student, I have little cash to spare).  It was on De Vany's blog that I first learned of Taleb, whom (as I recall) De Vany approved as presenting a useful model for understanding how the real world works.  I was intrigued enough that I tracked down some cheap copies of Taleb's books and began reading.

In both of his books, Taleb outlines a world very different from the over-determined one in which I grew up.  Who can say when my dalliance with determinism began?  I remember my mother putting me to bed one night, back when I was about four years old.  I looked up at her and asked, with real emotion, "Mama, why does everybody do what they do?"  Maybe that was the beginning.  In any case, I spent the next several years learning from a deterministic point of view.  When I studied palaeontology as a nine-year-old, I tended to assume that dinosaurs (and other extinct life-forms) evolved a certain way out of necessity, adapting in some definite way to meet a definite need.  When I read the Book of Mormon as an eleven-year-old and experienced a very powerful emotional conversion, dinosaurs and evolution receded into the background (for several years I rejected evolution entirely!), but deterministic thinking remained: God had a plan which he played out in human life; free will in this plan existed from our point of view (since we were not coerced into making decisions), but not really from his (since he knew in advance what decisions we would make).  So life was controlled by prophecies.  There was the uncomfortable fact that many of these prophecies seemed to come "true" in so many different times, and in so many different ways.  Could God really have deliberately intended so much?  Taleb makes it really hard to think he did, particularly if you think of God as a glorified man, which as a good Mormon (and Christian, though some will doubtless protest) I once did.

Instead of writing about "the great chain of being" in some form, with all life ultimately determined by some Aristotelian unmoved mover (whether God or "nature" or anything else you please), Taleb writes about man, i.e. homo sapiens, though when you are knee-deep in Taleb's work he looks a lot more like homo stultus.  For Taleb's man is not the pinnacle of evolutionary history or the capstone of God's creation.  He is a garrulous fool with a penchant for telling stories to explain why things happen.  Caught between a rock and a hard place, Taleb's man does not reason our way out step by logical step: like any good cowboy, he takes a gut check and gets the hell out of Dodge!  Then, seated at a cozy table with friends, he tells the story of his escape as though he had calculated every step precisely, as though his salvation were determined by consummate skill (or calculated divine intervention) instead of dumb luck.  The rational element is here completely subservient to the emotional, which provides the real, unexamined, unexplained source for human action.  I was fascinated by this (for me) new vision of humanity, to the point that I decided to follow a hint from Taleb and take a special examination in ancient astrology, comparing it to modern economics as practiced by the big-shots that have been going broke recently (and using the government's muscle to take food from my children's mouths to get back on their feet). It is uncanny to me how similar ancient astrologers (still extant in old manuscripts that few people read) are to modern economists: both use the language of science (geometry, mathematics) to speak a kind of hyper-articulate gibberish that always makes perfect sense of the (determined) past but cannot say anything really telling about the (undetermined) future. The bogus nature of their predictions is revealed when something really unexpected happens (the unfolding economic crisis, for example): Taleb refers to these unlooked-for events as "black swans", drawing on the old European notion that all swans are white, a notion which persisted until the late 17th century, when black swans were discovered in western Australia. 

Someone has come up with a nice parable that illustrates what reading Taleb did for me.  Imagine the human mind as a house full of windows to the outside.  As long as you are in the house, your understanding of the outside is dependent on your access to the windows.  Assuming the outside is important to you, would you not want access to as many windows as possible, preferably clean ones?  Reading Taleb showed me (1) that there were many windows in my house, not just the one or two I had been using, and (2) that all of them were very dirty, such that it was better to talk about the potential rather than the actual when speaking of things outside.  Essentially, reading Taleb turned me into an epistemological agnostic: I became more aware of the powers and limitations of my mind, and consequently less certain of everything; some things dropped off my radar almost entirely.  Why talk seriously about saving the universe or some eternal essence of me long-term when I do not even know how to save the bacon here and now?  I began to shut up and listen even more than I used to; other points of view became valuable when they disagreed rationally with an emotional judgment of mine, and useless when they made emotional appeals against my rational judgment.  Returning to the parable of the house helps make sense of what was going on.  Before I knew about the multitude of windows, I had only one or two (that were really dirty, remember), so when someone said, "Look, there's a little pink unicorn in the garden!" I would peer through the glass, get a glimpse of something and think to myself, "Yeah, that could be a unicorn, and it does look rather pink."  After Taleb took me on the grand tour of the house, the process of verification became more complicated.  I had to visit all the windows before making a pronouncement.  Comparing one view with another, I would say something like this: "Yeah, the smudge on this window creates a blotch that makes whatever-it-is look horned, and the tinge of the dirt makes it seem pink, but that other window upstairs has a different pattern of smudges in different colors, and everyone up there is convinced we have a brown rabbit in the garden, rather than a pink unicorn.  Seen from the west wing it looks more like a blue panda."  A quicker way to convey this shift in perspective is to emend the famous quote from Descartes, who should have said cogito, ergo idiota sum ("I think, therefore I am an idiot").  Thinking no longer confirms what I already know (in my gut); instead, it provides evidence that I don't really know anything (because gut-sense is really nonsense; unfortunately, it is also the inalienable factor in most human decisions).

So, there you have it.  Before reading Taleb, I was living out my life as just another philosophical footnote to Plato, chasing a vision of "absolute truth" whose reality I was prepared to rationalize any way I could.  After reading Taleb, "absolute truth" disappeared as a meaningful variable on my epistemological map of the world. Though I still went through perfunctory motions of "believing" in it, I ceased using it as a heuristic in dealing with new data input: it became the relic of an irrecoverable past.  Little by little, I shed the persona of the know-it-all expert, crafted in the image of God with clear insight into eternal reality, and recognized that I was just a dumb bird-watcher with a knack for leaping to unjustified (and unjustifiable) conclusions.  Like many prognosticators before, I looked around and saw omens: eagles, meteors, planetary conjunctions, stock quotes, sacred books, a burning in the bosom, etc.  Sometimes I read the omens "correctly" (meaning I got the outcomes I wanted after seeing the holy birds and making the proper sacrifices), and sometimes I did not.  Then one day I saw a black swan.  I have never really looked at the world the same way since.