Stupid design
The naturalist, J. B. S. Haldane, was asked by a cleric about what he might infer about the Creator, based on his wide ranging study of life. Haldane supposedly replied that the creator had "an inordinate fondness for beetles" based on the then current count of beetle species at around 400,000.The Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould wrote a famous essay, "The Panda's Thumb," about the animal's cumbersome and inefficient thumb-like structure, really just a tarted-up wrist bone. Why not a real thumb? Because whatever bones might have made better thumbs were already dedicated (by evolution, in Gould's view) to some other purpose. But if you had set out to design a panda from scratch, you would never design a "thumb" like this. It's stupid design.
For all the talk lately of "intelligent design," any biologist could offer many examples of stupid design in nature. I'd like to see everyone with an advanced degree in the life sciences--biologists, botanists, zoologists, physicians--take an hour or so to write up a few examples of stupid design and then submit them to a website dedicated to compiling such examples. Few argumentative techniques are more effective than the marshalling of many, many specific counterexamples.
The Achilles' heel of the "intelligent design" argument is that it invites us to assess the designer's intelligence. We are now being asked almost the same question Haldane was. And for every eye or whatever that "couldn't have" arisen without an intelligent designer, there are surely countless bits of design that would suggest any designer was an idiot. The panda has a thumb that, if it were the rearview mirror of a car, would be a flattened chrome door handle taped to the windshield. Even Yugos were designed better than that. I get a headache if I drink a milkshake too fast, and it helps to press my tongue against the roof of my mouth. What idiot thought that up?
With a "theory" like "intelligent design," there is little room for explaining examples of bad design. Proponents can't fall back on "the Lord works in mysterious ways" when they are trying to show from the creation that there must be a creator. (I could make a case that the phrase "intelligent design" is an example of begging the question, and in one sense redundant (as design implies a designer, who must, as such, be intelligent).) By contrast, the theory of evolution readily explains how we end up with makeshift, leftover and inefficient designs in nature.
Mainstream scientists are reluctant to engage people like the "intelligent design" crowd for fear of dignifying what appears, to most scientists, to be just the latest rhetorical tactic of creationists, who again and again have sought to drape their religiously-inspired views with a mantle that looks to laypeople like legitimate scientific discourse. But just this once it would be nice to just bury the "intelligent design" proponents in examples of patently, indefensibly stupid design in nature. To keep their position viable, it seems to me, they need to explain why the same intelligence responsible for the eye or whatever could have come up with so many boneheaded other designs.
Demanding explanations for all the bad design in nature should also dramatize that "intelligent design" is not a theoretical framework at all. It is a way of thinking that must address each example of design separately. Even the best explanation for why we get cold headaches will be sui generis, with absolutely nothing to say about the thumb situation in pandas. By contrast, explanations informed by an evolutionary perspective will most likely keep deploying a small number of basic principles--the concept of "fitness," the heritability of inborn traits, etc. This is the essence of a mature scientific theory, and the antithesis of what the "intelligent design" proponents present.
posted at 11:27 PM
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