Just what IS a design inference?
Bill Dembski wrote a book for a Cambridge University Press series called The Design Inference - yes, just the sort of title that scares most of us back to guessing who gets voted off the Island.
One way of understanding “design inference”, as it relates to intelligent design, is remembering 9-11:
If you can remember September 11, 2001, and you were watching TV, a design inference is what happened when the second plane hit the World Trade Center. At the time, people looked at each other, and we knew it wasn’t an accident.
Of course, later that day one frantic news story followed another. But that second hit was a design inference.
Design inferences play an important role in investigations. For example, an excerpt from a recent Canadian Broadcasting Corporation report on corruption in lotteries in the Canadian province of Ontario revealed:
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The CBC report, which aired Wednesday night, says of the roughly 60,000 lottery ticket sellers in Ontario, retailers won nearly 200 times in the past seven years, with an average prize of $500,000.
A statistician with the University of Toronto called those numbers a statistical anomaly, saying there is a "one in a trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion" chance of that many retailers winning. Dr. Jeffrey Rosenthal said the number of wins should be closer to 57.
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If you were an investigator, what would you think? Would you investigate? Or would you say it was just chance and ignore the statistician’s concerns?
The intelligent design controversy turns, in part, on the question of whether design inferences can be applied to nature. If not, why not?
Note: In fact, an investigation was held in Ontaio and a number of persons were later charged.
Denyse
On that morning, I was called by my wife who announced a plane crash into a WTC tower. I thought of the bomber that crashed into the Empire State Building in was it 1944, and suggested: accident.
A bit later, she called back in to tell me of a second crash.
I replied in three words:
"That's bin Laden."
Thus:
1] natural regularity/contingency -- contingency
2] complexity, specification and context -- design and by a likely specific agent.
[I inferred not only to design but the most likely designer, based on characteristics of what had happened. A lot of people doubted me on that day. A few months later, UBL confirmed the inference in the infamous captured videotape.]
GEM of TKI
PS: nice editing features!
Is this really a design inference? It sounds more like an "intentionality" inference - the fact that this event happened at a rate that was significantly higher than the expected rate allowed you to safely infer that these were intentional rather than accidental acts?
I'm not sure how you apply the theory of "specified complexity" to a criminal act - I do recall Dr. Dembski using the term other than in the quite strictly defined sense that he uses in his biological and mathematical research.
Bob,
The key distinction to understand is the difference between directed and undirected causes.
If an effect can be explained as a result of undirected causes (e.g. "It was an accident"), that explanation has preference and priority. It is only when combinations of the undirected operation of law and chance as causes are inadequate that we infer a directed cause -- in other words, intelligent causation, i.e. intelligent design.
This distinction does indeed apply to any context in which there could be either undirected or directed causes. Maybe a crash into one of the two towers could be explained as an accident, e.g. a plane malfunction. But that both towers would be similarly hit immediately exceeded the allowance for the accidental (i.e. undirected) scenario.
It was not simply that the odds were against it. Shuffle any deck of cards and the particular arrangement you get is rare, but it is also unspecified. Many combinations of events that happen every day are rare but unspecified. There is no pattern.
But if you found a deck of cards arranged in a meaningful order, that combines improbability with specification. Likewise, the pattern of both towers being hit in the same way on the same day implies this is not just an accident.
It was origin of life researcher Leslie Orgel who first coined the term "specified complexity", long before the ID community addressed the topic. He pointed out that living organisms are distinct because they not only have complex (i.e. improbable, rare) arrangements -- other things in nature have that minimal quality -- but that the arrangement was specified, i.e. not random.
What Dembski is attempting to do is to try to provide a quantitative way for science to employ design inferences in an objective manner. But it is still true that people have always been making design inferences informally. Design inference did not begin with Dembski.
But if you found a deck of cards arranged in a meaningful order, that combines improbability with specification. Likewise, the pattern of both towers being hit in the same way on the same day implies this is not just an accident.
Do you think that arrangements of cards might have intrinsic meaning or is meaning something that can only be recognized by human intelligence?
BobMort: "Do you think that arrangements of cards might have intrinsic meaning or is meaning something that can only be recognized by human intelligence?"
In the case of a "likeness" such as a statue of someone, it might be said that the likeness has an intrinsic meaning, although even then it may require intelligence to recognize and understand it.
In the case of "symbols", a symbol represents something other than itself according to some convention. The meaning comes from the convention, not from the symbol itself. So the meaning is extrinsic to the symbol.
For example, among languages that share at least some of the same letters, there are words that mean different things in those different languages. The conventions of each language attach a meaning to the symbol.
In a computer, the same pattern of bits in its memory might be part of a picture, a text document, a music or sound file, the instructions for executing some program, or something else. The binary pattern is symbolic. Its meaning depends on the convention providing the interpretation. The convention is extrinsic to the symbols themselves.
Likewise, the same pattern of DNA nucleotides could represent different amino acids depending on which genetic code is applied to interpret them. Not everyone realizes yet that not all creatures use the same genetic code. Some use alternate or non-canonical genetic codes. (This is another puzzle for the evolutionary view.) A particular genetic code is the external convention that gives meaning to the sequence of bases/nucleotides.
[Tip on The Origin of Life Prize: One can never solve the problem just by looking at how blind chemistry and physics moves around objects that could become symbols. One needs to explain the origin and implementation of the extrinsic convention that gives functional meaning to symbols. This is done by the mechanisms of translation that allow encoding and decoding of messages between symbolic and functional forms.]
Finally, with regard to "patterns" such as of card arrangements, even if we don't understand the meaning of symbols, it may be possible for humans to recognize the existence of patterns that are not random. If we picked up an alien deck of cards, we might not understand the symbols, but we might still notice "This one happens every Nth card." and so on.
I should add that with regular, periodic patterns, one must take care that they are not the result of physical laws before drawing a design inference. The placement of atoms in an object in a regular, periodic pattern might be the result of chemical laws, not design. But a sequence of symbolic information is by nature aperiodic. To distinguish it from a random, meaningless sequence, one needs to understand more about its meaning, e.g. to see how it represents assembly instructions and not just gibberish.
Excellent post!
Excellent post!