Intelligent Design

The term is often used a shorhand for the hypothesis that some aspect of life as we know it was designed by intelligent agents.

In the latter sense, the term is often linked to the views of those religious fundamentalists - who often believe that the world and man were created by some sort of supreme being.

These folks have made a bad name for themselves in America, by insiting that their views are taught to children in schools.

I don't have much to say here about intelligent design - except to note that some intelligent design theories remain on the cards.

Unfortunately, vast quantities of nonsense is written about intelligent design.

These days the nonsense is coming from both opponents and proponents of intelligent design. The latest drivel comes from its opponents comes from direction of the American courts.

In Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District (2005) United States federal court judge John E. Jones III ruled that intelligent design is not science - and is essentially religious in nature.

That is not really correct. There are specific hypotheses of intelligent design, just as there are specific hypotheses of origin through natural means. Not all such theories have been refuted - so there remains the possibiltity that life on earth contains elements that were designed by an advanced intelligence.

In deciding Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District on December 20, 2005, Judge John E. Jones III ruled that "we have addressed the seminal question of whether ID is science. We have concluded that it is not, and moreover that ID cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents."

My council to scientists would be to ignore this ruling.

Judges are clearly poorly qualified to rule on scientific subjects.

The remaining viable scientific hypotheses of intelligent design should be decided on their merits.

Viable Intelligent Design Hypotheses

By popular demand, here is my list of the most sensible intelligent design hypotheses that may help explain the origin of life or man.

• Panspermia

  Panspermia involves the idea that life on earth actually evolved elsewhere in the universe before making its way here. If that scenario is accurate, elements of life may have been engineered by intelligent designers on other worlds.

  The element of modern organisms most likely to have been designed in this way appears to have been the genetic substrate.

  As an example of a specific viable intelligent design hypothesis, consider the idea that the earth was seeded with RNA-based organisms about four billion years ago - and that these organisms originally came from a nearby star.

  What happened to the intelligent ancestors of these organisms? There are a number of possibilites - including the one discussed by Robin Hanson in his paper: Burning the Cosmic Commons:. Evolutionary Strategies for Interstellar Colonization.

  Richard Dawkins has discussed this idea recently Gods and earthlings. He writes: "Unrealistic as the space alien hypothesis is, it constitutes intelligent design's best shot.". Both of these points are debatable.

• Simulism

  Simulism is the idea that reality as we perceive it is an illusion - and the world as we know it is a simulation.

  While speculating about the containing world is not easy, looking at our own universe, many simulations mimic the real world, and are performed for entertainment purposes, or sometimes educational ones. The most common types of simulated entertainment involve games, movies and pornography.

  The simulation could be a simulation of the universe known by science - or it could be a simulation of one person's personal universe.

  Humans are probabaly non-player characters, in the former scenario, and the player character in the latter one.

  The evidence for simulism is rather weak. The universe does seem to have a lot of sex and violence in it - and seems generally entertaining - but that is not very conclusive.

• Optimisationverse

  The idea that the world is an optimisation algorithm is rather like Simulism - in that it postulates that the world exists inside a computer.

  However, the purpose of an optimisationverse is not entertainment - rather it is to solve some optimisation problem using a genetic algorithm.

  The genetic algorithm is a sophisticated one, that evolves its own recombination operators, discoveres engineering design - and so on.

  If this hypothesis is correct, it is not currently known what the problem to be solved is - or even whether it has been presented to anyone yet.

• The adapted universe

  Lastly there is the possibility that the laws of physics are an adaptation. The laws do seem to exhibit "adaptive fit" - though this can be partly explained on anthropic grounds.

  This idea is associated with Lee Smolin: The Life of the Cosmos. Lee presents an unworkable version of the idea based on black holes.

  There is also the work of by James Gardner: Biocosm and Intelligent-Universe.

  In these books Gardner proposes that our universe has been deliberately engineered to promote life and intelligence - and requires these attributes in order to mediate the reproduction of the cosmos.

  This places life in the universe as the product of previous intelligent agents, in our universe's ancestor.

Also, the universe exhibits microscopic reversibility. This property would be useful, if someone was paying for its power supply and heat dissipation requirements - or if they ever wanted to pause events and rewind them.

The universe's net energy appears to be zero. This makes sense if one assumes that someone had to pay for the universe.

Similarly the universe's initial conditions appear to have been very simple. Also, the laws of physics appear to be simple, local and uniform. Again, this all makes sense if one assumes that someone had to pay for setting up the initial conditions.

These observations are suggestive - but not conclusive. There is not much evidence against these hypotheses either - but unless more concrete evidence is found which favours them, they must eventually be discarded - on grounds of Occam's razor.

The role of intelligent agents in evolution

Sexual selection allows the choices made by intelligent agents to influence the pattern of the next generation.

Also, the Baldwin effect allows material which is repeatedly learned by intelligent agents to become permanent heritable adaptations.

Humans are largely the product of intelligence - according to all the theories of our origins which are on the table.