The Discovery Institute, a conservative think tank based in Seattle, has become the global headquarters for anti-Darwin agitation. The Institute has groomed a roster of credentialed commentators who are more than happy to explain how and why Darwin got it wrong. In its place, they offer a concept called “intelligent design.” The idea is that someone (they carefully avoid saying who) must have guided the process of evolution (they carefully avoided saying how) in order to produce the life we see around us today.
As the centerpiece of their argument, they point to examples of what they regard as “irreducible complexity.” These are structures such as eyes, wings, or bacterial flagella that, they claim, could not have arisen via a gradual process of evolution. They suggest, for example, that there’s no way an eye could have evolved gradually. After all, a halfway-developed eye would be worse than useless. So either a full-blown eye emerged in one step (a fantastically unlikely event) or evolution must have had help from an “intelligent designer.”
The problem with this argument is that the premise isn’t true: nature is actually full of examples of “proto-eyes” at various stages of development. Richard Dawkins has a particularly lucid explanation in Climbing Mount Improbable. And Wikipedia also does a decent job of explaining the likely stages of eye evolution. Moreover, there’s evidence that eyes evolved several different times in different parts of the animal kingdom—many different animals have eyes that work in ways that are functionally similar but different in subtle ways that suggest separate evolution.
Richard Dawkins
Similar explanations have been made of other phenomena generally offered as examples of “irreducible complexity”; Dawkins offers a detailed explanation for how wings might have evolved in Mount Improbable. Here is an explanation of where flagella could have come from.
So on the merits, this argument isn’t very strong. Biologists do, in fact, have plausible explanations for how most of the commonly-cited examples examples of “irreducible complexity” could have developed gradually. However, I don’t think scientific credibility is really the point. The theory of intelligent design isn’t designed to win scientific arguments so much as exploit a common cognitive bias among non-scientists. As I argued on Thursday: people are used to thinking about the world in terms of direct cause-and-effect relationships. If they see an orderly result, they assume that some specific person or thing must have orchestrated that result.
I think there’s a deep connection between the mistaken intuition that drives support for intelligent design and Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger’s mistakes in building Nupedia. They’re really two sides of the same coin: Intelligent design proponents see an complex, orderly outcome and they conclude that there must have been someone overseeing the process. Wales and Sanger wanted a complex, orderly outcome, and they believed that they needed someone overseeing the process in order to get there.
My friend Julian Sanchez once called this phenomenon the “intelligent design fallacy,” and it’s a term I plan to use regularly on this blog. Once you start thinking about the intelligent design fallacy as a systematic cognitive error, you start to see it everywhere you look. A lot of conspiracy theories are just special cases of the intelligent design fallacy: a phenomenon (like AIDS or the collapse of the towers on 9/11) may have a plausible naturalistic explanation, but people seem to leap to the conclusion that there must have been a human being orchestrating it. On the other side of the coin, there are lots of examples where people want to produce some outcome (like an encyclopedia or an operating system) and mistakenly assume that that outcome can only be achieved if a hierarchical institution supervises the entire process.
The intelligent design fallacy, which I understand to be a faulty belief in the effectiveness of central planning, seems to explain a lot (most?) of the epic failures in human history. Is there ever a case where some centrally planned system wasn’t eventually thwarted by a system that developed more organically?
Daniel Dennett talks about something similar in much of his writing, calling it the “intentional stance.” He argues that the human brain is wired to see intent where there isn’t any because doing so is evolutionarily advantageous. If I hear a sound behind me in the tall grass, it can either be the wind or a tiger. Thinking it’s a tiger, taking preventative action, and then finding out it was the wind costs me a little time. Thinking it’s the wind, not taking action, and finding out it’s a tiger costs me my life. Humans have moved out of the grasslands to a world of much greater complexity, but we haven’t abandoned the intentional stance.
Nic epost, but I think this part goes pretty far afield:
A lot of conspiracy theories are just special cases of the intelligent design fallacy: a phenomenon (like AIDS or the collapse of the towers on 9/11) may have a plausible naturalistic explanation, but people seem to leap to the conclusion that there must have been a human being orchestrating it.
AIDS:
All diseases are equally mysterious to the layman, but nobody thinks that all diseases are the product of human beings actively engineering disease. There is something special about AIDS that makes it susceptible to conspiracy theorists, and this something has nothing to do with the complexity of AIDS relative to other diseases. It may be a fallacy to believe that AIDS was purposely engineered, but it is not “intelligent design fallacy” (as I understand The Sanch’s term anyways).
It should be noted that there are human beings actively engaged in engineering diseases, and their work is kept secret. Would I be engaging in any sort of fallacy if I believed that the anthrax came from a US army base and was purposefully sent by a scientist there? Didn’t think so. Thinking AIDS is a conspiracy certainly was a valid suspicion. Maybe there is enough data at this time to rule out that suspicion, but the suspicion itself was no fallacy, and certainly not “intelligent design fallacy.”
TOWERS:
First of all, WTC7 probably was brought down on purpose by explosives. But I assume that you mean Towers 1 and 2, the tall ones.
This conspiracy theory is caused by “intelligent design” and is not a fallacy caused by a false belief in intelligent design. What I mean is that if the Towers were built “stupidly” then they would have been built like a brick chimney. We have a good intuitive sense of how brick chimneys fall (and don’t fall) because their dynamics are relatively uncomplex. Thing is, when we see a building shaped like a gigagntic brick chimney, then we expect it to fall (or stay up) as a brick chimney would. However, the design of WTC1 and WTC2 was much more complex than that of a brick chimney. Human beings made that complexity. This complexity is what made the towers fall in a way completely like a brick chimney would ever hall. Now conspiracy theorists have mistaken the before-the-crash intelligent design of the buildings for after-the-crash intelligent design of demolitions experts, but this is not intelligent design fallacy. the towers looked like an orderly tumble because it was orderly compared to how less intelligently designed structures tumble.
–in a way completely unlike a brick chimney would ever fall–
This Matt Yglesias post reminded me of another example where the intelligent design fallacy applies: mixed use roadways.
I agree with him.
Aaron, that’s a great point. It’s been a few years since I read Dennett, but I think you’re right that Dennett’s “intentional stance” is closely related to what I’m calling the ID fallacy.
Dave, it might have been a mistake to toss off quick examples without explaining my thoughts more thoroughly. What I think I was trying to say was just this: when people lack what they regard as a plausible explanation for some complex phenomenon, they’re unduly susceptible to jump to the conclusion that the phenomenon must have been due to someone’s deliberate choice. Of course, other factors help to explain why they don’t find the non-conspiracy-theory explanation plausible. In the case of the WTC collapse, it’s probably due to a limited understanding of physics and engineering principles. But nevertheless, I think that peoples’ tendency to be persuaded by conspiracy theories (in this case, that there were explosives planted inside the WTC prior to the airplane impact) is due to a deep bias in the way people think about the world.
Christopher, that Yglesias link is a great example. Thanks for pointing it out!
I think that peoples’ tendency to be persuaded by conspiracy theories (in this case, that there were explosives planted inside the WTC prior to the airplane impact) is due to a deep bias in the way people think about the world.
I guess I get what you are saying, but lets do a thought experiment. Imagine that on 9/10/01, a small plane and and a large jet accidentally collided in the vicinity of Manhattan. The jet goes out of control and hits one of the towers in a similar way to the way the highjacked planes did in reality. Of course, the tower subsequently collapses in a similar way. there is good video of everything, the collapse, the crash, etc. so everyone can see that the building strike was not intentional on the part of the jet.
Do you think there would really be conspiracy theories about the collapse in that case?
I don’t.
Conspiracy theorists are ultimately motivated more by political biases than a search for solutions that comport with their intuitive sense of entropy and enthalpy. They dwell on the video of the collapses because this is the only forensic evidence they have any meaningful access to. When one looks at the irrational contempt in which conspiracy theorists are held by non-conspiracy-theorists, we see the opposite political bias — it is not like non-conspiracy theorists would do better on a pop quiz in physics as a class. Physics is a hobbyhorse ridden by both sides here.
Really, if the collapses were such a no brainer, from a physics standpoint, then a lot fewer firefighters and police would have in the tragedy perished.
The reason there still is a debate is because evolutionists refuse to actually put down this alleged heresy. All of the posturing about how it isn’t worthwhile to debate intelligent design proponents and ridiculing them is just a smoke and mirrors effort to mask the fact that most major proponents of evolution are actually not confident that they could prove their case beyond a reasonable doubt.
Biology is not a hard science like Physics. Anyone with an average IQ, especially an above average IQ, could easily follow a debate over the subject and examine the evidence put forth by both sides.
“nature is full of examples of ‘proto-eyes’ at various stages of development”
This statement begs the question. For it to be science, you have to prove that they are in fact “stages of development” and not completely separate developments.
The “just so” stories of Richard Dawkins just don’t stand up to a close reading or scientific investigation.
Brian, the point is that the existence of proto-eyes disproves the argument that eyes are “irreducibly complex.” Obviously, by itself that doesn’t prove Darwin’s theory. But it does suggest that the common examples of “irreducible complexity” are not as irreducible as commonly believed.
I’ve often called something else the Intelligent Design Fallacy. The whole premise of Intelligent Design is that failure to support theory A (Evolution), implies theory B (Intelligent Design). The only way for this to be true is if theories A and B are the only possible answers to the question of biological diversity.
While I personally feel that evolutionary theory is well supported, if it were disproved, it is still possible that additional, not design theories may explain it. I have sometimes described it in terms of probability theory. With a flipped coin, we can know that the incidence of a ‘heads’ implies “not tails” with 100% probability, but with a rolled dice, the incidence of a “two” doesn’t imply a “3” with 100% probability. The number of possible theories of biological diversity is certainly greater than two. So as I see it, the whole approach taken in Intelligent Design is fallacious.