ShakaUVM's Journal: Transposing ID into a scientific theory

Recently, I have been posting on the Slashdot article relating to the Kansas Board of Education voting to approve teaching Intelligent Design (ID) in schools. The Slashdot editor seeming to claim that intelligent, scientifically minded people have no business coming near Intelligent Design with a 10 foot pole.

I feel that ID is an interesting theory, whether or not it is actually true. I think that ID can be stated in such a way that it is a scientific theory, using the definition that in order for something to be scientific, it must be falsifiable. I make no claims about whether or not it is true.

First, I will address some of the commonly held notions about ID, many of which are wrong, then I will state ID in such a way that it is a scientific theory.

ID is a term with a wide collection of individual belief, the nexus of which is that a designer influenced evolution. This is the definition I will use, and will ignore the plethora of muddle headed arguments for ID, most of which are arguments from example ("Look at the pretty rose! Tell me it isn't the product of an intelligent creature!") or appeals to ignorance ("We don't know how evolution happened, so it couldn't have happened!"), neither one of which are valid forms of argumentation. One can just as easily claim that clouds that look like ships are designed, or that one day, as the literature grows, we will have a complete understanding of evolutionary mechanisms.

I rely heavily on statistics, and recommend anyone who hasn't gotten past the "mean, median, mode" bit to go out there and read up on t-tests, analysis of variance, and similar topics. I consider statistics to be the solution to the age old question of Epistemology: how do we know when we know anything? Answer -- when our confidence level in a statement exceeds 95% or 99%.

Commonly held false idea #1: ID is Creationism. This myth is repeated over and over. *ID is NOT Creationism.* Creationism (to use the common definition) is the belief in the literal word of the Bible found in the first creation story in Genesis (and, incidentally, not the second creation story). ID is contradictory with this belief as ID says that evolution happened, but was influenced by a designer.

Commonly held false idea #2: The designer is God. The Theory of ID is religion-neutral. *ID at its core does not care one whit who the designer is or why he influenced evolution.* These are all realms for speculation, but has nothing to do with ID. It is a common counter-argument to ask "Why did God do ?" and then look smug. However, this argument carries no weight at all since ID is not based on the Who or Why of the development of life, only the How (which, incidentally, is the same question Evolution answers). Additionally, it is common for atheists to attack ID because they assume it is a Christian idea. On the contrary, not only is ID religion-neutral, it is surprisingly common for atheists to believe in ID (though they often do not call it that). Theories regarding aliens influencing evolution, or even DNA blown in from outer space (Francis Crick's idea of panspermia) are also possible 'designers'. But as I said before, Who the designer is or Why he did it is completely immaterial. ID can be proven or disproven solely through math, without resorting to metaphysics.

Commonly held false idea #3: ID conflicts with evolution. This is an interesting debate to watch because ID states that evolution is true -- it simply was influenced by a designer. Stating things like proofs of genetic drift or even examples of speciation doesn't disprove ID because they are tenets of ID, as odd as that is to consider. When one does something like point to the famous moths of industrial England and state that it disproves ID, this is just another case of the "ID is Creationism" fallacy that so many people subscribe to. ID is Evolution, not Creationism.

Commonly held false idea #4: ID is not a "scientific" theory because it is not falsifiable. (Many people have the wrong idea on what falsifiability means. I recommend you read Bertrand Russell, or the wiki article on the subject.) Essentially, in order for a theory to be scientific, it must be possible via one means or other to show it is false. It is true that many of the arguments and theories made by IDers amount to nothing more than hand-waving, but it IS possible to state ID in such a way that it is falsifiable, and hence a scientific theory. I shall do so now.

-----

The Scientific Theory of Intelligent Design
by Bill Kerney

Summary of Evolution: New species emerge from the process of random mutations and selective pressures.

Summary of Intelligent Design: Bias existed in the random mutation component of Evolution.

All the hot air, court trials, ridiculous statements, and emotional debates aside, this is sole point of difference between the theories of Evolution and Intelligent Design.

When restated this way, it becomes obvious that Intelligent Design can be proven true or false simply by showing if there was or was not statistical bias in evolution. Intelligent Design claimed that a designer "leaned on" evolution to make the world turn out the way it did. And any time something influences a population on a large scale, statistics can easily, easily distill the truth out of the white noise. If I had a team of people pay everyone in New York making a call at a public phone booth to either talk longer, talk at a different time, or even just call a different person than they were intending too, stats could pluck the truth of it out of the phone company's call records.

All arguments along the lines of specific examples (eyes, knees, etc.) are useless simply because you can't really argue from example. Just as if I can't claim there was a widespread effort to disrupt the phone network in New York just because someone paid me $20 to dial the operator, proof or disproof of a single example is actually, interestingly enough, almost entirely irrelevant to the debate. Hence you won't find any discussion of irreducable complexity or arguments from ignorance here -- ID simply claims that a designer introduced a bias in evolution, and that is the *only thing* that needs to be considered to show ID true or false.

(Commonly held false idea #5: You can never absolutely show one side or the other to be right. But statistics are a wonderful thing. With enough data, you gain confidence in your conclusions to state whether something is true or not. Generally speaking, a statement is "true" in science when it is 95%+ or 99%+ likely to be correct (the most common p-values used). It's always amusing when supporters of 'science' claim they would need ID to be 100% proven correct when science itself doesn't work that way.)

The Casino Analogy: I think that the best statistical analogy for Intelligent Design is that of a person in a shady casino playing a game. He is winning (or losing) a lot more than what he thinks he really should be. How does that player know if the game is rigged or not? In a nutshell, he usually can't know. He doesn't have enough information; his sample size is too small. At one casino I was at, after a hot winning streak, they switched dealers and I lost 17 straight hands of 5$ blackjack before I finally got aggravated and left. Was the casino cheating? While it's fun to contemplate, again, you just can't really know.

However, this is where most people's thought processes stop when it comes to statistical analysis.

The fact it, it's possible to detect bias in casino games -- it's actually an easy problem that readily succumbs to math. You simply have to have enough observations in order to gain a confidence level in your statement that "the game is rigged" is correct. The less the bias, the more observations you have to make in order to gain a 95% or 99% confidence level. Contrawise, the greater the bias (say, a slot machine that pays a one-in-a-million jackpot with every pull) the less observations you have to make. But for every bias, there is a number of observations that will reveal it, for any confidence level you choose. Bias simply cannot hide from statistical analysis.

Coming back to the Intelligent Design issue. ID claims that the random mutations in evolution has someone "rigging the dice" making life turn out in a fashion unaccountably complicated for something sheerly the result of random processes and selection. (Again, ID claims this, not me. I'm tired of being flamed for stating other peoples' beliefs.) The surprising thing is, this is now a scientific theory. It may be wrong -- but it is a falsifiable claim. I actually consider it likely that it will be conclusively proven or disproven one day (and again, to all of you pendantists, 'conclusively' means within a given level of confidence).

Join me in a thought experiment to show how easy it is to prove or disprove.

Thought experiment: Scientists don't have anywhere close to an exact number, but there is somewhere between 1 million and 100 million species on the planet, the majorty of which are insects. Approximately 300,000 of them are the so-called "interesting species" (pandas, marmots, supermodels) that we care about and wish to observe. Let's assume the British model of security has been adopted worldwide and we have cameras blanketing every inch of the world and crack teams of scientists standing by, who repeatedly sample the DNA of every creature and embryo on the planet.

All that needs to be done to prove or disporve ID is:
1) Quantify random mutations types and rates (before selection pressures).
2) Observe the random mutations in each population (before selection pressures)
3) New "interesting species" are expected to emerge at a rate of between one per three years to 30 per year (the expected value changes depending on how long you consider the average time for a new species to evolve, from 1 million years to 10,000 years).
4) See if a bias exists/existed.

That's it. ID can be shown to be true or false. The same experiment could be done on evolution in the past with archaic DNA if (ala Jurassic Park) we could get a DNA record, with the requisite detail. On the other hand, if no new species emerge, even with global information, then the confidence level that Evolution is false will rise over time until the theory is discarded.

Of course, any given designer might have given up designing and taken a day off, but if species emerge through statistically normal events, then most reasonable people would assume that the rest of evolution could have happened through similarly unshocking means.

Conclusion:

Simply stated, ID claims that the dice were rigged in evolution. Math provides us with a powerful tool to discover bias. Hence, ID is a falsifiable claim. Hence, ID is a scientific claim -- though the strong possibility exists it might be completely wrong.