Highlights from Mike Gene’s THE DESIGN MATRIX
| December 19, 2007 | Posted by William Dembski under Intelligent Design |
A friend of mine emailed me the following quotes from Mike Gene’s new book THE DESIGN MATRIX, available from Amazon.com here.
“The vast majority of scientists do not view Intelligent Design as science and I happen to agree with them.” (pg. xi)
“I should make it explicitly clear from the start that I did not write this book to help those seeking to change the way we teach science to our kids. I do not argue that design deserves to be known as science. At best, Intelligent Design may only be a nascent proto-science and thus does not belong in the public school curriculum. Nor does this book argue that evolution is false and deserves to be criticized in the public school curriculum. If the truth is to be told, I oppose such actions.” (pg. xi)
“Unlike the Face on Mars, the biotic face of design remains at the highest relevant resolution.” (pg. 17)
“If living processes are the products of design, it comes as no surprise that so much of biology is more akin to the study of engineering than to chemistry or physics. … Biology, and the language of biology, is not behaving in a manner similar to the relate sciences of chemistry, physics, geology, meteorology, etc.” (pgs. 58, 60)
“the concept of design can be useful as a research guide.” (pg. 83)
“We do not normally infer non-teleological causes when confronted with machinery … The existence of a machine is not something we would expect, or predict, from non-teleological causes. A non-teleological perspective that is confronted with the reality of molecular machines reacts by insisting non-teleological causes could possibly explain their origin. But this is not the way the inferential winds are blowing.” (pgs. 97-98)
“molecular machines conform to a rigorous definition of machine.” (pg. 102)
“[C]ooption and preadaptation do not necessarily follow from random variability culled by maximizing fitness. Cooption and preadaptation are phenomena that follow from the architecture of life itself. … In contrast, it is very difficult to imagine front-loaded evolution without multi-functionality, gene duplication, cooption, and preadaptation, as these are just the type of mechanisms that one would use to unmask secondary designs buried in primary designs. In fact, the hypothesis of front-loaded evolution predicts the existence of such mechanisms of evolution. Life itself, and its stem parts, was designed such that cooption and preadaptation would be made available to Darwinian evolution.” (pg. 178-179)
“the truth of any design inference does not entail that we should be able to uncover independent evidence of the designer.” (pg. 189)
“[T]he hallmark of evolution is the modification of pre-existing parts. What if we find structures that lack this hallmark? What if we find something that does not appear as a modification of a pre-existing structure? This would hint of that ‘clean sheet of paper’ and count against borrowing. With this criterion, we may not only have something that helps us better assess our design suspicion, but we may actually have a clue to help distinguish between front-loading and intelligent intervention.” (pg. 210)
“When we are dealing with molecular machines, (which are composed of functionally indivisible parts), many of the most well documented examples of Darwinian evolution become irrelevant. None of these data amount to evidence that irreducibly complex machines likewise evolved through Darwinian mechanisms. This is a significant point.” (pgs. 214-215)
“If the machine evolved through cooption, we would then expect to find remnants of this evolution in the form of simpler precursors, a myriad of permutations, and functions existing apart from the irreducibly complex system. If, however, the machine did not come into existence through cooption, we would expect to find the system to be composed of largely system-dependent parts, with little or no evidence of any precursor states that predate the machine in question.” (pg. 232)
“Good planning not only requires the use of reason and knowledge, but it also involves an element of foresight. Foresight, which is essentially rationality applied to prediction, is something the blind watchmaker cannot possibly have.” (pg. 254)
35 Responses to Highlights from Mike Gene’s THE DESIGN MATRIX
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I am sorry but there is already a very extensive ID program being carried out by scientists all around the world. It is just not identified as such. All the work Behe pointed to in the Edge of Evolution is ID research. Just because the researcher’s intent is something else, the data has implications and there can be more than one conclusion from a set of data. If ID people mine the data and add conclusions consistent with the findings, then so be it. There is nothing wrong with that.
There is also tons of scientists who are out there with their PCR analysis of genomes collecting data about the gene pools in various species. Each such study is also ID research though no one identifies it as such. The data has implications and if it supports an ID conclusion that novelty does not arise in speciation then that supports ID. That is why Behe said Lenski’s research is the type of thing that is ID research. Lenski, I am sure, would cringe to know that he is doing research supporting ID.
We are on Dembski’s site but that does not mean his approach is the only research line that is ID. There may be many other lines of research we do not know of yet but to say there is no ID oriented research currently available is nonsense.
Mike Gene is a shrinking violet. He carefully hides his identity so his notions about ID can’t be used to blemish his reputation (whatever that reputation might be). While I admire his thinking on the subject to some extent I don’t have any respect for the man (or possibly woman) himself. His rejection of ID as science is par for the course – my guess is he’s covering his ass in case his boss or peers find out what he’s been doing in his secret life. No doubt he appeals to many Western Europeans. Western Europe has lost its backbone and has become a continent full of shrinking violets. I’m guessing the United States will have to rescue it yet again in the not too distant future when the Muslim horde successfully takes it over.
ari-Instead of trying to get schools to do something they don’t want,
Unfortunately, sometimes what they don’t want to do is not teach the controversy or ID or even flat out the existence of a creator who endows us with inalienable rights.
And political strategies — not scientific arguments — keep them from doing this.
Which means we are stuck being involved with politics.
1. For the first quote, perhaps Mike Gene is referring to this topic?
http://www.uncommondescent.com.....actor-act/
ID theory at its core is about design detection. Now there are many ID-compatible hypotheses, which are supported by various groups in the “big tent”.
For example, there are multiple variants of “front loading”.
1. Design was implemented in the universe itself. Everything is deterministic, and a plan rolled out from the initial implementation.
2. Design is not only in the universe and its laws but in the Origin Of Life (OOL). Darwinian mechanisms are taken into account by the Designer(s) and the architecture of life itself is configured to be modular, so that multi-functionality, gene duplication, cooption, and preadaptation, etc. are able to unmask secondary information. Of course, this presumes that Darwinian mechanisms are capable of this task, for which we have no positive evidence.
3. Same as 2 except there is a specific plan encoded into the original life and Darwinian mechanisms play less of a role, only being capable of producing minor variation.
4. Same as 2 or 3 except that there are multiple instances of Design (multiple Origins Of Life) occurring at the level of kingdom or phylum.
5. Essentially 2 – 4 except with the addition of Designer Intervention for certain information that is/was not modular but specific to a particular organism.
He might want ID to “officially” incorporate a particular ID-compatible hypothesis in order to be considered “science”. Personally I think that research into all the hypotheses should be encouraged and it’s way too early to be declaring one to BE ID.
2. The rest of the quotes seem to be indicating that he thinks that design can be limited to OOL and that the system was set up to take into account Darwinian mechanisms by being modular (the system is configured properly for modification).
Well, we have to understand why Darwinism was adopted in the first place. There was a theory of ID at the time, Paley’s principle, and it was very powerful. Darwin didn’t exactly have a plausible mechanism at the time.
But what Darwin did was say that while life appeared to be designed, no reasonable designer would design life in the way it appears.
Therefore since we “know” it can’t ID…it must be some natural selection mechanism, whatever that may be, because we know selection can come up with nonrandom results.
And today we see that one of the leading darwinist websites is named “Panda’s Thumb” after Gould’s book on this reasoning.