Dembski is still missing the point

Hmm, I haven’t posted anything here for a while. And it is even longer since I last posted something about the Intelligent Design movement.

William Dembski now has a second edition of his book “The Design Inference” and this time Winston Ewert is listed as a co-author. I have not read the book. But I have read the excerpt that was posted at the Evolution News blog. And, from that excerpt, we can already see some of the ways that Dembski and Ewert are misunderstanding the theory of evolution.

Randomness

There are two common misunderstandings of evolution that we see coming from anti-evolutionists. The first of these has to do with the role of randomness.

The theory does talk of random mutations. The anti-evolutionists tend to see this as something like coin tossing, and having the good luck to come up with a suitable result. You can see this kind of thinking in Dembski’s subtitle “Eliminating Chance through Small Probabilities”. What Dembski argues, is that the probabilities are too small, and therefore there must have been a design.

That’s not how I look at random mutations.

Consider an analogy. Suppose we enter into a dark cave. We turn on a flashlight to look around and see if we can find something interesting. The flashlight is emitting a random spray of photons. But we don’t think of it as hoping that a lucky photon will hit the right spot. Rather, we see the flashlight as providing broad illumination and we then depend on human perception to find anything interesting.

I look at evolution as a system of trial and error. The biological organisms are trying small changes to see if they help. And then natural selection picks out those changes that produce useful results. The role of the random mutations here, is to provide a broad range of possible changes for future testing. It doesn’t actually matter whether they are random, as long as they provide a broad range.

We could, for example, imagine a system where the possible changes are tested systematically, with no dependence on randomness at all. But since this depends on an entire population of similar organisms, you would need a system of central coordination to do this systematically. The use of randomness avoids the need for that central coordination.

When looked at this way, the question of the probability of a particular mutation does not seem at all relevant. When using that flashlight in the cave, we don’t think about the probability of a particular photon hitting a particular part of the cave wall.

Dembski writes:

As far as Darwinists were concerned, however, all attempts to show such biological systems to be vastly improbable were misguided and irrelevant.

Well, of course they were irrelevant. The question of improbability completely misses the point.

Laziness

Apparently, Dawkins describe Michael Behe as lazy, when he said that the bacterial flagellum could not evolve so must have been designed. The “laziness” charge is because he failed to look hard enough to find ways that it could evolve.

The second common misunderstanding that we find among anti-evolutionists, is that they seem to believe that the outcome of evolution is pre-ordained to be to sort of biological life that we see today. This is illustrated in Dembski’s reaction:

The reaction of the ID community to Dawkins’s “laziness challenge” was that he might just as well have recommended to physicists that they keep trying to construct a perpetual motion machine. Yet why did one task seem futile (constructing a perpetual motion machine) but not the other (discovering Darwinian pathways to irreducibly complex biochemical machines)?

The way that I look at it, the physicists did keep trying. And they were successful. They came up with the theory of thermodynamics, which is an important part of physics.

Dembski apparently believes that the only possibly success here would have been to achieve perpetual motion. That’s where he is looking for a pre-ordained conclusion. But that’s not how science works, and it is not how evolution works. Any improvement counts as a success. Coming up with thermodynamics theory counts as a success for the physicists. And any successful evolutionary change counts as a success for evolutionary biology.