Intelligent Design is Creationism, just not Biblical (or Young Earth) Creationism

In their FAQ, the Discovery Institute write in response to the question "Is intelligent design theory the same as creationism?":

"No. Intelligent design theory is simply an effort to empirically detect whether the "apparent design" in nature acknowledged by virtually all biologists is genuine design (the product of an intelligent cause) or is simply the product of an undirected process such as natural selection acting on random variations. Creationism is focused on defending a literal reading of the Genesis account, usually including the creation of the earth by the Biblical God a few thousand years ago. Unlike creationism, the scientific theory of intelligent design is agnostic regarding the source of design and has no commitment to defending Genesis, the Bible or any other sacred text. Honest critics of intelligent design acknowledge the difference between intelligent design and creationism."

Well, I am an "honest critic" and I will acknowledge the difference between ID and the restrictive definition of Creationism that they choose to use but I will not acknowledge the difference between ID and Creationism in general. Creationism is the belief that some being outside nature (as we know it) created everything, as opposed to everything arising naturally without any causal agent or intervention. This totally encompasses ID.

The fact that they try to make claims that their designer need not be a deity - and, in particular, is not necessarily the god of the Bible - is irrelevant and demonstrates their intellectual paucity and/or dishonesty. The only ultimate conclusion that can be drawn from the ID "hypothesis" is that the Universe was created by a non-physical intelligence. That sounds a lot like a deity (and Creationism) to me. If "aliens did it" then ID also predicts that those aliens must be the product of ID and the problem is moved but not removed.

The only thing that could part ID from Creationism would be if they came out and stated in pure black and white that they are willing to accept that the proposed Designer of this Universe and/or life on Earth was itself the product of purely natural processes and devoid of input from an external Intelligence. In other words, state clearly that their extrapolation of design ONLY applies to the observed Universe. It wouldn't help their "scientific" claims at all but at least they could honestly cut the ties to their clear and documented Creationist ancestry. (I predict that they will not because I think that even they can see that making this statement would be tantamount to admitting that ID is a wholly unnecessary hypothesis - the only thing that keeps it alive is a stubborn refusal to let go of certain key (flawed) assumptions.)

Even should they take this extra step, the DI and their ID friends have a serious problem that cannot be ignored. The reason that so many critics make the link between ID and Creationism is that, when it comes to the scientific observations and interpretations, ID has the same core ideas as certain flavours of "Theistic evolution" Creationism, and thus all the same criticisms and problems apply.

Creationism is a spectrum with Young Earth Creationism at one end and an almost entirely naturalistic Theistic Evolution at the other. In the former, the Designer ("God") did essentially everything. In the latter, the Designer just kicked things off at the start - designing the Universe to be able to support life - and did nothing else. ID, as described, is indeed incompatible and different to both of these. (They do accept evolution - ruling out YEC - but do not accept that it was a purely naturalistic, unguided process - ruling out naturalistic Theistic Evolution.)

BUT...

There is a whole spectrum of Theistic Evolution Creationism in between that invokes an on-going intervention of the deity to a greater or lesser extent.

Possibilites include:
☛ intervening to start life by making the first replicators (abiogenesis). Note that this (and designing the Universe) is a wholly separate question as to whether evolution could occur by purely natural (unguided) means
☛ intervening for the "major transitions" in evolution. (The first cell, multicellularity, eukaryotes etc.)
☛ intervening at key points throughout to drive the evolution of complexity
☛ intervening to drive all "macroevolutionary" events but staying out of "microevolution". (A false dichotomy in itself but that's one for another post.)
☛ intervening to drive all evolution by directing all mutations

ID sits at some fuzzy point along this spectrum, as do Creationists. The fact that, for a Biblical Creationist, the Designer was God is largely irrelevant - unless they go the whole hog and deny evolution entirely as a Young Earth Creationist. (A much more intellectually honest position than ID but also so demonstrably wrong position that even the DI appears to disown it on their homepage.)

In fact, ID has a bigger problem than Theistic Evolution Creationism - the motives of the Designer. As ID advocates will be free to point out when critics point out the numerous apparent design flaws in nature, one can only really talk about "good" versus "bad" design if one knows what the design is for. Natural Selection provides an inherent discriminator for things that work better than others - that is how Natural Selection is able to facilitate the evolution of complex adaptations. Theists can argue from their holy books that the end-point was mankind (or whatever) and although I suspect they cannot really get a good handle on their Designer's objectives (why, for example, the inordinate fondness for beetles?), they can probably rule some things out. The ID crowd do not even have that.

Instead, ID is just "God of the gaps" rebranded as "Designer of the gaps". They refuse (but not refute, for their rebuttals are all flawed) possible natural explanations for certain observed phenomena - a Universe "fine-tuned" for life, complex macromolecular machines in biology, and life itself - and make an alternative proposal that is based on unproven and erroneous extrapolations combined with a woeful ignorance of information theory and biology - all cloaked in pseudoscientific language. (Another post for another day.) They then try to find examples of where the theoretical natural explanations for specific phenomena (such as a specific protein complex or specific past evolutionary event) have not been demonstrably proven (despite having a sound theoretical explanation) and insert their Designer with no clue as to its motives or rationale for intervening at that particular point in time and space.

That certainly sounds a lot like traditional Creationism to me. (And whatever it is, it sure ain't science.)

[Edit note: although most YEC and ID leaders are clearly at odds, it should be noted that ID does not actually rule out a Young Earth, it just does not promote it. Given the overwhelming scientific evidence for an old Earth and lack of Biblical Flood, the fact that the ID movement does not explicitly reject these is another indication of its utter lack of scientific motivation. Then, of course, there is Of Pandas and People, a Creationist text that similarly neither accepts nor rejects YEC and is famous for doing a find and replace for "Creationism" (and similar words), replacing them with "Intelligent Design". How can you have a coherent view of biological origins if you can't even decide on something of such fundamental importance?]

The 2nd Law of Rocking

The 2nd Law is the 6th album of Muse and my initial reaction after a few listens is that it is one of the best. It's a pretty eclectic miss.

Supremacy is a good a Muse song as you will find anywhere, full of orchestral/classical influences as well as their rock genius. Madness is Lady Gaga meets Queen (plus Muse, of course). In Panic Station, they out-Darkness The Darkness. For me, it's the difference between being great musicians and being great song writers (and musicians). Survival was one that I had already heard from its Olympics release but it actually sounds much better in context, I think. (The previous track, Prelude, sets it up nicely, as the name suggests.)

I've always thought that Muse had a touch of Radiohead about them and this is never more obvious than in Explorers, which has more than a little No Surprises about it in my book. (Not a bad thing.) Another band that I really enjoy is The Qemists and The 2nd Law: Unsustainable reminds me a bit of them, in a good way. It is a bit of a departure for Muse vocally, as they seem to have a Cylon doing guest vocals. I like it, though! (I think their interpretation of the 2nd law of thermodynamics is a bit flawed though - it's the same mistake that the Creationists make: the Earth is not a closed system. All the time that we get energy from the Sun, continued growth is indeed sustainable (in theory)!)

Overall, in The 2nd Law, I think Muse have achieved something quite unusual. Somehow, it contains both a wide range of styles but also an overall coherence that all fits together well. And it rocks! A definite contender for my favourite Muse album to date.

Why? Why? There is no why!

One of the oft-repeated claims of those who maintain that religion provides something that science/materialism cannot is that religion can answer "why" questions. The standard re-used metaphor seems to be that used by theologian John Haught about making tea. In response to the question of "why is the kettle boiling?", the argument goes, the scientific answer will be something about heat, energy and the motion of water molecules inside the kettle, whereas there could be an equally valid answer of "because I want a cup of tea". In other words, science tells us what the Universe is like whereas religion can tell us why.

I have lots of problems with John Haught's metaphor and might give it a post of its own one day but it is already dealt with quite nicely elsewhere, such as this Skeptico blog post. In essence, though, the problem is this: none of the answers to the "why?" question that Haught proposes are outside the remit of science. Yes, there were several possible levels of causation that could be correctly introduced as explanations but science could address them all.

It's really just a problem of the recursive "why?" One could go on to ask, why did you want a cup of tea? And there would be a potential scientific explanation for that too. Perhaps you were thirsty. Why were you thirsty? Well, the body loses water through respiration, perspiration and excretion and that needs to be replaced? Why? We are mostly water and our bodily functions all need to be performed in a primarily aqueous environment. Why? Life originated in an aqueous environment. Why? And so and so forth.

Anyone who has spent any time around young children will be familiar with the recursive why problem - you can answer any response to the question "why?" with another question "why?" until, eventually, the answerer reaches the end of their patience and/or knowledge. At the end of the line, there is no why - there is just "because". And while religion claims that the "why" is their domain, they have the same problem. It may be true that they can insert a god in there near the end so that the answer is "God wanted it that way", there is still a "why?" And we end up with "because that's what God is like" rather than "because that's how things are" as our final "answer". It's just like the Origin of Life/The Universe question: if God made the Universe then who made God? If God always existed or popped into existence, then why not the Universe? It doesn't answer anything - it just increases the "unknowable" layer before you give up.

The other thing that really annoys me about religious claims to the "why" questions, though, is that religion really sucks at providing reasons for things. Take "The Problem of Evil" for example. This one still gives theologians major headaches. For science, on the other hand, there is no problem. The "why?" is simply a feature of the natural world - albeit one that we'd rather did not exist. Evolution is another one. Theistic evolutionists can come up with contrived reasons as to why a divine being might want to use the extremely lengthy, wasteful and unpleasant mechanism of Natural Selection to generate the complex life-form that is Homo sapiens but they are no where near as convincing as the more obvious answer to the question as to why did it take over 4.5 billion years for humans to appear - long, slow evolution and Natural Selection is the only way that something complex like humans could appear.

I have not encountered a single question regarding the physical or metaphysical Universe where religion provides a more satisfactory answer to the question "why?" than science and materialism. That's probably because science remains the only way we have of finding out if a given answer is right. (Or, at least, less wrong than our previous answer.) And that is my other problem with the how/what versus why claims: religion can suggest answers but it does not actually provide any way of knowing whether any of them are true.

Avenged Sevenfold - my kind of Nightmare for Halloween

Not as cute as black cats but it seemed appropriate to make a Halloween post about an album with death and graves and stuff on the cover. I've already covered Rage (although I notice that Blogpress has eaten my pictures) so now is the turn of a band that are a much more recent discovery for me but remind me somewhat of the Scandinavian riffmonster rockers: Avenged Sevenfold and their most recent offering, Nightmare, which is my album of the moment. (I only got it last week.)

Avenged Sevenfold (or A7x to fans, as I now consider myself,) were recommended to me by a good friend. I was a little put off by the first album I got through emusic, Waken The Fallen as the vocals tend a bit too much towards screaming for my tastes in places (although the music still rocks) but I was reliably informed that it gets more rocky and less metalcore as the albums progress. It's true, and Nightmare is a fantastic collection of tunes for those who like crazy drums and wild fret-wanking guitar riffs - as well as good tunes, of course. (I do!)

Besides, how can you go wrong with a band whose lineup consists of M. Shadows (vocalist), Synyster Gates (lead guitarist), Zacky Vengeance (rhythm guitarist) and Johnny Christ (bassist). Their (replacement) drummer for Nightmare, Mike Portnoy, needs to do something about his name if he's going to join the band on a permanent basis!

A couple of black cats for Halloween

And if Halloween is not your thing, the latest Henri video might be for you. This is not a happy time of year for a black cat who does not suffer fools.

(The pumpkins are getting a lot of love from the trick-or-treaters this year, which is gratifying.)

Is evolution random?

In a recent perusal of The Blogosphere, my eye was caught by a post at A Tippling Philosopher entitled Far from random, evolution follows a predictable genetic pattern, Princeton researchers find. As I suspect most evolutionary biologists would, I got rather annoyed by this title. I should point out, however, that the Tippling Philosopher is not to blame - this is the title of the original Princeton press release.

Unfortunately, my VPN is playing up so I cannot access the original article (Zhen Y, Aardema ML, Medina EM, Schumer M & Andolfatto P (2012). Parallel molecular evolution in an herbivore community. Science 37(6102):1634-7) but I am a bit short of time anyway and don't want to do an in depth study. I suspect the press release actually does a fairly good job of summarising the main points as does the abstract:

Numerous insects have independently evolved the ability to feed on plants that produce toxic secondary compounds called cardenolides and can sequester these compounds for use in their defense. We surveyed the protein target for cardenolides, the alpha subunit of the sodium pump, Na+,K+-ATPase (ATPα), in 14 species that feed on cardenolide-producing plants and 15 outgroups spanning three insect orders. Despite the large number of potential targets for modulating cardenolide sensitivity, amino acid substitutions associated with host-plant specialization are highly clustered, with many parallel substitutions. Additionally, we document four independent duplications of ATPα with convergent tissue-specific expression patterns. We find that unique substitutions are disproportionately associated with recent duplications relative to parallel substitutions. Together, these findings support the hypothesis that adaptation tends to take evolutionary paths that minimize negative pleiotropy.

This is all very interesting and very cool - the power of evolution by Natural Selection demonstrated in replicate. The thing that irked me, though - and the focus of this (probably too hasty) post - is the title and the first paragraph of the Princeton press release:

Far from random, evolution follows a predictable genetic pattern, Princeton researchers find

Evolution, often perceived as a series of random changes, might in fact be driven by a simple and repeated genetic solution to an environmental pressure that a broad range of species happen to share, according to new research.

Evolution is not a series of random changes. At least, adaptive evolution, which is the subject of this paper, is not. Neutral evolution largely is random but that's only one part of evolution as a whole and to imply otherwise is rather misleading. The raw material for evolution is indeed random mutation but this is not the full picture. There was a clever chap who realised that heritable random variation in a trait, if it produced differential survival and/or reproduction, could result in the non-random change of that trait. Good ("fit") traits would increase in frequency and eventually dominate the population, while bad traits would be removed. He realised this over 150 years ago and called it Natural Selection. His name was Charles Darwin and his book is free on Kindle if you want to read it. (Yes, I know, this is a gross simplification of history!)

This is compounded by the title: "Far from being random, evolution follows a predictable genetic pattern, Princeton researchers find". Well, yes, sometimes it does (and in this case) but we've also known that for years. The argument about the predictability of evolution is one that has been going on for a long time. (Read Gould's "A Wonderful Life", for example.) If you were to rewind the clock and let evolution run again, how much would history repeat itself? We know the answer is not "always" and we know the answer is not "never" but we do not know where on the continuum between "always" and "never" reality lies. (Major catastrophic events notwithstanding. These are another role of chance but somewhat different to the one determining evolutionary trajectory.)

In evolution, the opposite of "predictable" is not completely "random". One has to be clear that even if we cannot predict a precise evolutionary trajectory due to the complexity (and, yes, randomness) in the system, trajectories that give rise to exquisite adaptations always have a large non-random component (selection). This may seem like a trivial thing but it's not, for this is the kind of language that feeds the misconceptions spread my advocates of Intelligent Design and other forms of Creationism. (Of course, this study also nicely blows such nonsense out of the water.) If it is "often perceived as a series of random changes", it is only because of misconceptions like this being repeated.

For me, it is the last line of the abstract that is most intriguing and possibly the big discovery:

"Together, these findings support the hypothesis that adaptation tends to take evolutionary paths that minimize negative pleiotropy."

The authors cite "the large number of potential targets for modulating cardenolide sensitivity". It seems that they think that the other possible target genes are more prone to affect other systems as well in a bad way. (I am not sure how they rule out the possibility that the selective advantage of changes in this particular pump are just much, much greater than the other genes and its just driven by the probability and rates of positive selection.) If this turns out to be a widespread phenomenon, it could indeed have implications for the predictability of future adaptation, which could be useful in our changing world!

This is just one example, of course. Another recent paper on parallel and convergent evolution in Proc. R. Soc. B (free this time), "The probability of genetic parallelism and convergence in natural populations" by Gina Conte, Matthew Arnegard, Catherine Peichel and Dolph Schluter, looked at a bunch of studies and concluded that "estimates [of the probability of gene reuse in parallel and convergent phenotypic evolution in nature] using data from published studies. The estimates are surprisingly high, with mean probabilities of 0.32 for genetic mapping studies and 0.55 for candidate gene studies".

I'm sure there's a bit of ascertainment bias towards traits under strong selection (as these are more obvious and thus more studied) but it confirms the Andolfatto study that in the right circumstances convergent evolution can make use of the same gene(s). (They also cite counter-examples, so be quite clear that this is not universal.) It's not a surprise that it happens but given the amount of diversity between genomes - and numbers of genes affecting many traits - the level is possibly surprising. To be honest, I can't decide if I am surprised or not as it is so hard to generate a reasonable a priori expectation.

I still don't think that all this means that evolution in general is predictable (we still need more studies) but it certainly does hammer yet another nail in the coffin of the old Creationist chestnut about evolution being random. Natural Selection is NOT random - that's the whole point!

Footnote: I must concede that in writing this post I realised that explaining the role (and meaning) of "random" in the context of evolution is not quite as simple as I thought. "Random" commonly does mean a lack of predictability but I maintain that it is not helpful to use this language for evolution without some serious explanation of what you mean by random. Random mutation plus Selection means that we are talking about a lack of determinism, not a lack of direction. (This was also supposed to be a quick/short post!)

h/t: A Tippling Philosopher and WEIT

It's pumpkin time!

Halloween is approaching and, thanks to an unexpected work trip for my wife, we have had to accelerate our preparations slightly. Last night, therefore, was pumpkin-carving time! We never really did anything for Halloween when I was a kind, so my first pumpkin carving experience had to wait until a few years ago.

In the past, we have made use of hand-drawn designs inspired by the internet. (For my first pumpkin, I was only involved in the design and my girlfriend (now wife) did the actual carving.) This year we got a pumpkin carving kit from Ocado that cam we a few designs, so we decided to use a couple of those. They were quite big but we got a couple of "monster" pumpkins from Sainsburys. Sitting on our dining room table, I think my "monster" lived up to its name!

I was a bit lazy and did not scoop the inside out as much as I should have done but I think the end result (below, left) was still pretty good. The carving tools in the pumpkin kit were pretty effective and a little less scary that hacking away with a knife or scalpel, although we still used one of the sharp pointy tools from Cait's Uni dissection kit to poke the outline of the designs. My wife remains the pumpkin champ of our house, though, as her haunted house (below, right) shows. (I'll try to get some better pictures on the night but these were just quick iPhone snaps should any evil befall our pumpkins in the meantime!)