A Swing and a Miss

February 29th, 2008 The Lone Beagle Posted in News |

HOLY HOT DOGS batman, it’s the bottom of the ninth and the Mighty Casey is coming up to bat.

Grab your popcorn folks, pop your beer and come witness the spectacle that is Casey Luskin as he gracefully falls flat on his face in his attempt to hit one out of the park.

The fun all happens below the fold.

A few days ago, Casey Luskin posted “Wired Magazine Makes Biological Design Inference” on the Discover Institute’s Blog. In his article Casey crows about the success of National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) scientists in deciphering the code Dr. Craig Venter placed in an artificial Mycoplasma genome as if that in some way validates the version of Intelligent Design shamelessly promoted by the DI. Unfortunately for the program hawked by the Discovery Institute, the ignorance of their chosen mouthpiece is laid bare by his conflation of the methods used successfully by science to determine design with the methods the Discovery Institute has been flapping about since Phillip Johnson leapt off his one trick pony and strode into town carrying the railway tie of Methodological Naturalism on his shoulder. It appears that Luskin has never read the works of Bill “The Pope of Probability, The Deacon of Design, and the Vicar of Verbosity” Dembski where he claims nothing needs to be known about the designer before we can infer design. (1)

Here’s a clue Luskin. Dembski, and the rest of your cronies at the DI have been claiming that design can be uncovered through the use of an explanatory filter where regularity and chance are ruled out and design inferred by the existence of Complex Specified Information (CSI) and that this can be accomplished with no prior knowledge of the designer.

According to Dembski, this determination can be made without knowledge of the designer’s methods or intent. This is affirmed by the comments made by Dembski and his moderation team on Dembski’s Blog, Uncommon Descent . In fact “Intelligent Design” uses this method to infer the existence of the designer.

But here’s the difference. In deciphering Venter’s code, not only is the identity of the designer known, but his methods, his capabilities, his intentions, and even the language he used were all well known beforehand. In what is the biggest strike against the Inference Engine, the investigators were explicitly told the code was there. This is a far cry from determining the existence of design independent of knowledge of the designer. And at no time did these scientists use any of the methods developed by the fellows at The Discovery Institute. Now, can the DI use “intelligent design” to examine this synthetic genome and prove the existence of Craig Venter

Oh Noes! Looks like Casey has selected his weapon and is warming up. OMG, he’s swinging a hockey stick. Good luck with that Casey.

What inning is it again?

Oh yes. Bottom of the ninth, and it looks like the mighty Casey can’t even find the batter’s box!

(1) It may seem like a rather large jump to go from discussing the methods used by science and those used by the DI to talking about the necessity of knowledge of the designer, but that is a fundamental difference between the two methods. Science, particularly such sciences as Archaeology, heavily incorporates knowledge of the designer into their methods. In contrast, although the DI’s methods, designed primarily by William Dembski, do not exclude the possibility of knowledge of the designer, specifically stress that they do not need to know the designer. In fact they prefer to not know the designer. This methodology independent of knowledge of the designer is vital to their cause because they use the discovery of design to infer the existence of the designer.

What does this have to do with Luskin’s claim? Everything. Luskin claims that the scientists successful in discovering Venter’s code have used a ‘design inference’ methodology that gives the Intelligent Design movement a boost. However for the accomplishment of the NCBI scientists to in some way support the DI’s version of design recognition, the methods used have to be equivalent to the DI’s methodology. This is not the case. Those scientists did use a form of design inference, but what they used resembles the DI version in only one respect, the ability to differentiate intent (DI’s design) from ‘chance and regularity’. Everything else about the two is different.

Dembski, in an effort to make his methods independent from ‘a priori’ knowledge of a designer, relies heavily on statistical methods, stealing from Shannon Information Theory, but reversing its definition. In Dembski’s world, if an event has a probability below his (admittedly ‘homemade’) probability bound of 10 ^-150 , it can not be a chance nor deterministic (which he calls regularity) event . To him complexity is the same as low probability, the lower the probability the higher the complexity and vice-versa. Complexity is essential to his method.

(Dembski’s method is far more convoluted and complex than I just presented here but I’m afraid a complete discussion is impossible for a short Blog entry.)

Current science does not rely solely on statistical methods to determine if an artefact is man made but analyzes the object within the context of human habits. Complexity, especially as the DI describes it, has nothing to do with current science methods. The object is examined for human tool marks, compared to known human design and manufacture methods, and the discovery location examined for other signs of human activity. This works for something as simple as a hand axe or as complex as a Rolex watch.

The NCBI scientists did not calculate the probability of a specific string of DNA, nor use any other method suggested by Dembski. What they did do, was, with full knowledge of the language Venter was most likely to use, and knowledge that humans have assigned names to amino acids where the first letters of those names can be used to spell out words, converted as much of the written representation of the genome as necessary to those letters and simply read the string looking for English words.

Unless the scientists at the DI consider all defined design inference methods to be equivalent, which I doubt, since only Dembski’s can be used to infer the existence of a designer, what the NCBI scientists accomplished did nothing what-so-ever to give support to their movement. That Luskin does believe they are equivalent doesn’t reflect well on Luskin. Tsk, tsk.

An interesting point to be made is that Bill Dembski explicitly claims that the entire genome shows CSI and is therefore intelligently designed (“No Free Lunch: Why Specified Complexity Cannot Be Purchased Without Intelligence”, pp 151) but he does not describe any method of determining if one event is ‘more’ designed than any other, nor has he developed any method to differentiate between two separate designers, so the NCBI scientists could not possibly have used the Intelligent Design movement’s Design Inference.