This article continues looking at answers to common questions and challenges faced by proponents of Intelligent Design as put forth by leading design theorist William Dembski in his book "The Design Revolution."
Is there a way of detecting design present in an object or system? Design theorists propose Specified Complexity.
The most important concept in the current Intelligent Design debate is that of "Complex Specified Information", or "Specified Complexity." Many people on all sides of the debate remain ignorant of what exactly the term means. Opponents of ID theory often label ID as a "god-of-the-gaps" approach because they mistakenly assume that ID makes no positive claims and simply critiques Darwinian evolutionary mechanisms' ability to produce information. While the latter part is correct (ID proponents do critique the traditional mutation-selection mechanism's ability to generate all biodiversity!), the former is not. ID theorists propose that design can be determined through observation and inference based upon Specified Complexity. Here are excerpts from Dembski's summary of the question "What is specified complexity, and how does one determine whether something exhibits specified complexity?"
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The term specified complexity is about thirty years old. To my knowledge, origin-of-life researcher Leslie Orgel was the first to use it. The term appeared in his 1973 book The Origins of Life, where he wrote, “Living organisms are distinguished by their specified complexity. Crystals such as granite fail to qualify as living because they lack complexity; mixtures of random polymers fail to qualify because they lack specificity.” More recently, in his 1999 book The Fifth Miracle, Paul Davies identified specified complexity as the key to resolving the problem of life’s origin:Living organisms are mysterious not for their complexity per se, but for their tightly specified complexity. To comprehend fully how life arose from nonlife, we need to know not only how biological information was concentrated, but also how biologically useful information came to be specified.Neither Orgel nor Davies, however, provided a precise analytic account of specified complexity. I provide such an account in 'The Design Inference' (1998) and its sequel 'No Free Lunch' (2002)...Specified complexity, as I develop it, incorporates five main ingredients:• a probabilistic version of complexity applicable to events• conditionally independent patterns• probabilistic resources, which come in two forms: replicational and specificational• a specificational version of complexity applicable to patterns• a universal probability boundLet’s consider these briefly.Probabilistic complexity. Probability can be viewed as a form of complexity. To see this, consider a combination lock. The more possible combinations of the lock, the more complex the mechanism and, correspondingly, the more improbable that the mechanism can be opened by chance. For instance, a combination lock whose dial is numbered from zero to thirty-nine and that must be turned in three alternating directions will have 64,000 (i.e., 40 × 40 × 40) possible combinations. This number gives a measure of complexity for the combination lock but also corresponds to a 1 in 64,000 probability of the lock being opened by chance (assuming zero prior knowledge of the lock combination)...Complexity and probability therefore vary inversely: the greater the complexity, the smaller the probability. The complexity in specified complexity refers to improbability.Conditionally independent patterns. The patterns that in the presence of complexity or improbability implicate a designing intelligence must be independent of the event whose design is in question. Crucial here is that patterns not be artificially imposed on events after the fact. For instance, if an archer shoots arrows at a wall and we then paint targets around the arrows so that they stick squarely in the bull’s-eyes, we impose a pattern after the fact. Any such pattern is not independent of the arrow’s trajectory. On the other hand, if the targets are set up in advance (“specified”) and then the archer hits them accurately, we know it was not by chance but rather by design (provided, of course, that hitting the targets is sufficiently improbable). The way to characterize this independence of patterns is via the probabilistic notion of conditional independence. A pattern is conditionally independent of an event if adding our knowledge of the pattern to a chance hypothesis does not alter the event’s probability under that hypothesis. The specified in specified complexity refers to such conditionally independent patterns. These are the specifications.Probabilistic resources. Probabilistic resources refer to the number of opportunities for an event to occur or be specified. A seemingly improbable event can become quite probable once enough probabilistic resources are factored in. On the other hand, such an event may remain improbable even after all the available probabilistic resources have been factored in. Think of trying to deal yourself a royal flush. Depending on how many hands you can deal, that outcome, which by itself is quite improbable, may remain improbable or become quite probable. If you can only deal yourself a few dozen hands, then in all likelihood you won’t see a royal flush. But if you can deal yourself millions of hands, then you’ll be quite likely to see it.Probabilistic resources come in two varieties: replicational and specificational. Replicational resources refer to the number of opportunities for an event to occur. Specificational resources refer to the number of opportunities to specify an event. To see what’s at stake with these two types of probabilistic resources, imagine a large wall with N identically sized, nonoverlapping targets painted on it and M arrows in your quiver. Let’s say that your probability of hitting any one of these targets, taken individually, with a single arrow by chance is p. Then the probability of hitting any one of these N targets, taken collectively, with a single arrow by chance is bounded by Np (i.e., N and p multiplied); and the probability of hitting any of these N targets with at least one of your M arrows by chance is bounded by MNp (i.e., M and N and p multiplied). In this case, the number of replicational resources corresponds to M (the number of arrows in your quiver), the number of specificational resources corresponds to N (the number of targets on the wall), and the total number probabilistic resources corresponds to the product MN. For a specified event of probability p to be reasonably attributed to chance, the number MNp must not be too small.Specificational complexity. Because they are patterns, specifications exhibit varying degrees of complexity. A specification’s degree of complexity determines how many specificational resources must be factored in when gauging the level of improbability needed to preclude chance (see the previous point). The more complex the pattern, the more specificational resources must be factored in. The details are technical and involve a generalization of what mathematicians call Kolmogorov complexity. Nevertheless, the basic intuition is straightforward. Low specificational complexity is important in detecting design because it ensures that an event whose design is in question was not simply described after the fact and then dressed up as though it could have been described before the fact.To see what’s at stake, consider the following two sequences of ten coin tosses: HHHHHHHHHH and HHTHTTTHTH. Which of these would you be more inclined to attribute to chance? Both sequences have the same probability, approximately 1 in 1,000. Nevertheless, the pattern that specifies the first sequence is much simpler than the second. For the first sequence the pattern can be specified with the simple statement “ten heads in a row.” For the second sequence, on the other hand, specifying the pattern requires a considerably longer statement, for instance, “two heads, then a tail, then a head, then three tails, then heads followed by tails and heads.” Think of specificational complexity (not to be confused with specified complexity) as minimum description length. (For more on this, see <www.mdl-research.org>.)For something to exhibit specified complexity it must have low specificational complexity (as with the sequence HHHHHHHHHH, consisting of ten heads in a row) but high probabilistic complexity (i.e., its probability must be small). It’s this combination of low specificational complexity (a pattern easy to describe in relatively short order) and high probabilistic complexity (something highly unlikely) that makes specified complexity such an effective triangulator of intelligence. But specified complexity’s significance doesn’t end there.Besides its crucial place in the design inference, specified complexity has also been implicit in much of the self-organizational literature, a field that studies how complex systems emerge from the structure and dynamics of their parts. Because specified complexity balances low specificational complexity with high probabilistic complexity, specified complexity sits at that boundary between order and chaos commonly referred to as the “edge of chaos.” The problem with pure order (low specificational complexity) is that it is predictable and thus largely uninteresting. An example here is a crystal that keeps repeating the same simple pattern over and over. The problem with pure chaos (high probabilistic complexity) is that it is so disordered that it is also uninteresting. (No meaningful patterns emerge from pure chaos. An example here is the debris strewn by a tornado or avalanche.) Rather, it’s at the edge of chaos, neatly ensconced between order and chaos, that interesting things happen. That’s where specified complexity sits.Universal probability bound. In the observable universe, probabilistic resources come in limited supplies. Scientists estimate that within the known physical universe, there are around 1080 elementary particles. Moreover, the properties of matter are such that transitions from one physical state to another cannot occur at a rate faster than 1045 times per second. This frequency corresponds to the Planck time, which constitutes the smallest physically meaningful unit of time. Finally, the universe itself is about a billion times younger than 1025 seconds (assuming the universe is between 10 and 20 billion years old). If we now assume that any specification of an event within the known physical universe requires at least one elementary particle to specify it and that such specifications cannot be generated any faster than the Planck time, then these cosmological constraints imply that the total number of specified events throughout cosmic history cannot exceed 1080 × 1045 × 1025 = 10150. Thus, any specified event of probability less than 1 in 10150 will remain improbable even after all conceivable probabilistic resources from the observable universe have been factored in. A probability of 1 in 10150 is therefore a universal probability bound...A universal probability bound is impervious to all available probabilistic resources that may be brought against it. Indeed, all the probabilistic resources in the known physical world cannot conspire to render remotely probable an event whose probability is less than this universal probability bound.For something to exhibit specified complexity therefore means that it matches a conditionally independent pattern (i.e., specification) of low specificational complexity, but where the event corresponding to that pattern has a probability less than the universal probability bound and therefore high probabilistic complexity.Specified complexity is a widely used criterion for detecting design. For instance, when researchers in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) look for signs of intelligence from outer space, they are looking for specified complexity. (Recall the movie Contact in which SETI detects an intelligent signal pattern when a long sequence of prime numbers comes in from outer space. Such a sequence exhibits specified complexity.)
[From: William A. Dembski, The Design Revolution: Answering the Toughest Questions About Intelligent Design (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2004), 81.]
For more from Dembski's "Design Revolution", see the following:
Intelligent Design debunked by 'flaws' in design?
Intelligent Design - what practical use might it have (part 1)
Intelligent Design - what practical use might it have (part 2)
Comments
Thanks for posting this, I had never seen the details of Dembski's specified complexity argument before.
It sounds like he's using this term to mean the same thing as Kolmogorov complexity, so why use this unrecognized term? How has the science/mathematics community responded to his ideas?
And finally, it sounds like Dembski is using low Kolmogorov complexity as an indicator of design - Kolmogorov complexity is a measure of information content, so he's saying that he can recognize design by something having a combination of low probability and low information content.
But didn't Stephen Meyer just write a book about how he recognizes design by its *high* information content? I think these guys should get together and settle it between themselves before trying to get it taught in public schools.
The basis of many of Dembski's arguments are probability. Unfortunately, he often pulls large numbers out of thin air, and tries to convince us it's a real probability of something happening. What's worse, he front-loads his argument by trying to determine the probability of something happening exactly the way it did some time in the past. This, of course, is logically invalid and mathematically unacceptable. In a game of poker, the odds of everyone getting the exact cards that they did in the exact same order is VERY low, yet it happened. Thus Dembski's probability argument is rendered useless.
This sort of argument falls under the, "She blinded me... With Science!" category.
Specified complexity means exactly bollocks, and there's nothing in evolutionary theory that prevents such a thing from developing in a completely naturalistic manner. Unless, of course, you come in with the a priori conviction that evolution is impossible.
Picking out things from the natural world and arguing that they're impossible is a terrible way of doing science.
Bob L,
The hands everyone is dealt are complex, but not specified. Reread the article.
Curt,
I don't see where he's arguing for low information content. Where do you see that?
I love the fractal-like image you put with this article. Great information, and very thorough. Great job!
The other commenters have already pointed out some of the failings of Dembski's mathematical sleight of hand. The next question is, if this is supposed to be science, how do we test this proposition? At BEST he has some argument that there is something going on in the universe that we humans do not understand. How do we test the alternative that it is some "Designer" when the IDeologists refuse to speculate who the designer is; what abilities he/she/it has; when he/she/it did what ever he/she/it did; or what motives he/she/it had?
And why do IDers say that it might be natural beings, such as extraterrestrials? Who would have designed THEM? It's all smoke and mirrors.
John,
See the previous articles "Intelligent Design - What practical use might it have?"
Detecting design does not necessitate identifying the designer. Cryptography and forensics often objectively determine design without knowing the specific nature of those who did the designing. ID theory is a starting point, not a full-blown discipline.
James, that's a rather deceitful way to put things. We do know something about the creator of a cryptographic message: we know for certain he or she is a human being, and the message contains something one human being would communicate to another. Within the wide range of data one could collect about the universe, that's an exceptionally narrow specification, and one which fits the definition of "information" as specified in Information Theory.
Dembski's definitions do not fit Information Theory. This is why mathematicians reject Dembski's work: it is prone to false positives and false negatives in a way that Shannon Information Theory is not. If it cannot reliably produce results, it is not science.
recursed.blogspot.com/2007/08/discovery-institute-lies-again.html
Jeffrey Shallit on an earlier Dembski book, "No Free Lunch":
"The DI is touting William Dembski's No Free Lunch as "essential reading". But there is no mention that the book has received uniformly negative reviews from biologists and mathematicians, nor that the centerpiece calculation of the book, an estimate of a probability associated with the bacterial flagellum, is off by about 65 orders of magnitude. There is no mention that the definition of "complex specified information" is nonsensical and does not have the properties claimed for it. There is no mention that David Wolpert, co-discoverer of the "No Free Lunch" theorems mentioned in Dembski's book, criticized Dembski's argument as hopelessly imprecise."
(The original contains links for all those claims.)
talkreason.org/articles/eandsdembski.pdf
Information Theory, Evolutionary Computation, and Dembski's "Complex Specified Information"
Wesley Elsberry and Jeffrey Shallit
November 16, 2003
Wrong again!
Specified Complexity is just a jargonized argument for "God of the gaps" and "personal incredulity" Dembski can't figure out how information can be added to DNA naturally to encode for more and more complex creatures. Since he can't figure this out it can't happen and must have been caused by a God or the euphemistic "intelligent agent"
For a postive argument, why not find out who the designer is. Is there one, or more than one? At what point was information added to the system and what was this info? Answering these questions would be helpful to science. Dembski adds none with his arguments.
Otherwise CSI remains just a negative argument against complexity evolving through the preservation of useful information through random DNA replication errors
In addition their group makes the totally unsupported claim that once a speciation occurs information is progressively lost until presumably the creator steps in and adds some more coplexity to the creature
James-Michael:
Elf has pointed out the problem with the claim that we can test design in the absence of knowing something about the alleged designer. Quite simply, without limitations on the "designer," literally ANY result can attributed to he/she/it. There is no test by which we can say: 'this is design and that is not'. You seem to have an inkling of the problem by calling ID "a starting point, not a full-blown discipline." Starting points that rely on methods that science does not recognize are not science. Get back to us when ID has some way of being science.
John, I disagree. If SETI picks up a signal, ala Sagan's "Contact", without knowing a thing about the source or designers it could be objectively determined that the signal was the product of intelligence. That would be the initial key discovery that would then guide research in the proper direction (as any theory of non-intelligent sources could be set aside in that case).
James-Michael wrote:
"I don't see where he's arguing for low information content. Where do you see that?"
When Dembski says "It’s this combination of low specificational complexity (a pattern easy to describe in relatively short order) and high probabilistic complexity (something highly unlikely) that makes specified complexity such an effective triangulator of intelligence." He already equated his specificational complexity to Kolmogorov complexity, and that is a measure of information content. To illustrate, he even shows the example of the HHHHHHHHHH coin sequence as contrasted with HHTHTTTHTH. The HHHHHHHHHH one has obviously lower information content, and he says that's a marker for detecting design.
BTW, I agree that low information content is usually an indicator for design. For example, a rock has way higher information content that a ping-pong ball, which is a way to tell that the rock was natural.
But what about Meyer? I guess he was just wrong.
James-Michael: "If SETI picks up a signal, ala Sagan's "Contact", without knowing a thing about the source or designers it could be objectively determined that the signal was the product of intelligence."
NO. This scenario is not entirely hypothetical or fictional. This is how pulsars were discovered. A regular oscillating radio signal was picked up. But it did not turn out to be the product of intelligence.
Reginald, it could never be certain, but in Contact it was something that we figure would be really really unlikely for a natural process to generate: a sequence of prime numbers. We can't imagine any natural phenomenon that would spit out primes, so that would be a good indication that it's some intelligence out there. It's never proof, because you always have to consider which is more likely: intelligent life sending a signal, or that there's a natural prime-generating mechanism that we haven't thought of.
On the other hand, a long sequence of primes has a fairly high information content, so it opposes Dembski's own thesis. But he apparently does that a lot, just read the Wikipedia article on Specified Complexity:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specified_complexity
Curt Cameron: "Reginald, it could never be certain, but in Contact it was something that we figure would be really really unlikely for a natural process to generate: a sequence of prime numbers..."
Right. And Contact was a work of fiction. The discovery of pulsars actually happened. So which does James-Michael Smith choose for a comparison?
Reginald,
Pulsars signals don't contain complex specified information. Were a signal like that in Contact (a fictional work written by an expert in astronomy to illustrate a hypothetical situation) discovered, its nature would be such that it would immediately be recognized as having been designed. That is precisely what SETI looks for. If discovering intelligent design is completely pseudoscientific and useless (as many opponents declare it to be), then SETI should be shut down immediately and repudiated by all true scientists.
James-Michael, SETI is privately funded, so I guess they can do what they want. I personally think the chance of their finding something is vanishingly small, but if they did find it, it would be the most exciting discovery ever.
Similarly, if the Discovery Institute wants to find long sequences of primes encoded in our genome, or define some other test for intelligence, I fully support their right to do so.
However, that's not what they're doing. They're producing shoddy work, and saying that they have already found signatures of intelligence. When experts critique their methods (where there are any methods), they whine like crybabies. And then they want to teach this stuff in public schools.
That's what I'm opposed to. They need to do the work first. I don't think they'll ever find anything, but would welcome real results, and I know all scientists would as well. Just don't give us **** and tell us it's ice cream.
This first piece alone shows how poor the science behind I.D. is. He tries to sneak by huge leaps of logic to make his argument. For example, in the second paragraph of the Specificational Probbability section, he says >>"HHHHHHHHHH and HHTHTTTHTH. Which of these would you be more inclined to attribute to chance? Both sequences have the same probability, approximately 1 in 1,000. Nevertheless, the pattern that specifies the first sequence is much simpler than the second.<< That is an incorrect statemement, but one you must believe to make his argument valid. HHHHHHHHHH is no simpler, nor more complex, than HHTHTTTHTH. They are the same. Just because one takes longer to describe in a different language or syntax, does not make them different. When both described in their simplest terms, the HTH syntax, they are exactly the same. This exposes the whole argument for the fraud that it was begun as.
"Pulsars signals don't contain complex specified information."
Glad that you recognize this. And yet pulsars were first detected by a SETI effort.
"Were a signal like that in Contact (a fictional work written by an expert in astronomy to illustrate a hypothetical situation) discovered, its nature would be such that it would immediately be recognized as having been designed."
Right. It's fiction.
"That is precisely what SETI looks for."
SETI looks for any signals. See the multiply-mentioned bit where they detected pulsars.
"If discovering intelligent design is completely pseudoscientific and useless (as many opponents declare it to be), then SETI should be shut down immediately and repudiated by all true scientists."
Curt Cameron responded to this already.
SETI researchers deny the comparison to the Intelligent Design Wedge movement:
www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/06-02-16
"Can Intelligent Design be considered scientific in the same way that SETI is?"
by Robert Camp
"To summarize, the analogy of ID to forensics, SETI, and science in general fails for the following reasons:
1. For ID, differentiation between natural processes and intelligence is an end, for the scientific disciplines it is just a beginning.
2. In those scientific disciplines it is following this point of departure that most of the science is conducted, with the motives and mechanisms of human (or ET) intelligence being of central concern. These questions are purposefully ignored by ID, leaving it with no analogous locus of scientific methodology.
3. ID and science address phenomena that are etiologically different. Comparison of ID with science is a category error.
..."
www.space.com/searchforlife/seti_intelligentdesign_051201.html
SETI and Intelligent Design
by Seth Shostak
"...In short, the champions of Intelligent Design make two mistakes when they claim that the SETI enterprise is logically similar to their own: First, they assume that we are looking for messages, and judging our discovery on the basis of message content, whether understood or not. In fact, we're on the lookout for very simple signals. That's mostly a technical misunderstanding. But their second assumption, derived from the first, that complexity would imply intelligence, is also wrong. We seek artificiality, which is an organized and optimized signal coming from an astronomical environment from which neither it nor anything like it is either expected or observed: Very modest complexity, found out of context. This is clearly nothing like looking at DNA's chemical makeup and deducing the work of a supernatural biochemist."
If the probability of hitting a target with arrows is 0.5, there are two targets on the wall, and I have 2 arrows, then Dumbski's upper bound on the probability of hitting at least one of the targets with one of the arrows is 2. Any moron who knows the slightest bit about probability knows that the upper bound for any probability is 1. Dumbski's upper bound is ridiculously stupid even if the probability of hitting one target is a lot smaller than 0.5. Any competent mathematician (which Dumbski is not) knows that multiplicative bounds on probability are useless. Dumbski's arguments lack depth, truth, and intelligence. Further, his theories are unscientific. Why do you post his drivel?
So that the true mathematical and scientific geniuses among my readers will enlighten us all as you have done, Zenith. ;)
Reginald, thanks for posting a link source and for your comments. Here's where I take issue though:
"We seek artificiality, which is an organized and optimized signal coming from an astronomical environment from which neither it nor anything like it is either expected or observed: Very modest complexity, found out of context."
This is just substituting one term, 'artificiality', for another "specified complexity." If "artificiality" is not "expected or observed" when looking in regions of space, why is it not "expected or observed" when looking at DNA sequences or biological structures...unless one assumes a priori that such complexity coming from outer space is evidence of design but coming from biological components is not? How is this not totally question-begging?
So... on the one hand we have 10,000 scientists backing evolution. On the other hand, we have some guy on the internet with zero qualifications defending ID creationism. Sweet.
*sigh*
Jay, are you trolling or just being obtuse? Hopefully it's the former.
James-Michael, I represent The Foundation For Thought and Ethics and would like to offer you a review copy of The Design of Life, written by Dr. Dembski. I have no other way of contacting you other than commenting on this forum. Thanks for your support of ID and let me know if you'd like a copy of the book.
Hi Jake,
Sure, I'd love a copy! You can contact me via my blog, The Discipleship Dojo. h t t p : / / gsdisciple.blogspot.com
Be blessed,
JMS
Of course, we've seen natural evolutionary processes add complexity without any intervention by a divine designer.
A natural, undirected process would make flipper out of a wing which was made out of an arm which was made out of a fin - whatever improved survival.
A designer would design a wing.
A natural, undirected process could morph a toe into a thumb, or a wrist bone into a thumb, or a clump of scales into a thumb - whatever was handy and improved survival.
A designer would design a thumb.
An unguided process would use trial and error, could take billions of years to get the process really going, and would likely result in more failure than success.
A process guided by a super intelligence would be a tad more efficient, wouldn't it?
Finally, even hard core creationists admit that the world is full of observable examples of what they call "micro-evolution". Where is just one teeny tiny example of "micro-design"?
There's a reason why ID is only supported in
That last sentence should have read:
"There's a reason why ID is only supported in the religious press or by religion columnists."
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