Dennett on ID

Permalinked for your reference, Dan Dennett's excellent opinion piece on intelligent design. [NYT]

Via Chris of Mixing Memory.

Comments

[Andrew Cory]

Not bad! Not bad at all. It is most disheartening to see that his article has to include basic definitions of science along with his attack on Intelligent Design. Though, I suppose if he didn’t need to define science, Inelegant Design wouldn’t be a popular theory...

Now, if only I understood evolution better, I might be passing my class on the subject...

[Gary Sugar]

OK one more comment on this. Dennett and the ID folk both see a design in nature that leads to us as some kind of pinnacle. Afaik neither ID theory nor Dennett's theory is absolutely anthropocentric like the Bible; but both are trying to discover some kind of teleology and both assume some kind of special human greatness.

The visible universe contains around seventy-thousand million million million stars. It's such a big deal that one of them has little things like us nearby? Maybe I'm easy to please, but unadorned natural selection of natural variations is a good enough explanation for me.

[Kriston Capps]

Side note, but I think the link to the column will last longer if you link to the print version.

[publius]

i'm borderline suicidal/homicidal just because of the mere fact that he had to write this in the year 2005

[Flint]

Quick everyone should grab pots and pans and go out back this evening and bang them loudly. A demon has bitten off a piece of the moon!

[masaccio]

I have read several books by Dennett, and I have seen nothing to suggest that he thinks that humans are some kind of pinnacle, or that evolution is in any sense aimed at anything, least of all human beings. He clearly thinks that dead ends are just as likely as spectacular outcomes like Ivory-billed Woodpeckers, and that if it reran, no telling what would happen.

[Scott PM]

The visible universe contains around seventy-thousand million million million stars. It's such a big deal that one of them has little things like us nearby?

It's a big deal to me. I deny that the supergalactic point of view is relevant when judging the bigness of deals.

And I don't think Dennett would agree that natural selection 'leads to us', except in the trivial sense that whatever path you've taken has led to exactly where you are. He might assume that humans are special and great, I don't know, but he certainly wouldn't consider it a feature inherent in his version of darwinism. Where are you getting your information, Gary Sugar?

[Anodyne]

“In fact, my farfetched hypothesis has the advantage of being testable in principle: we could compare the human and chimpanzee genomes, looking for unmistakable signs of tampering by these genetic engineers from another galaxy. Finding some sort of user's manual neatly embedded in the apparently functionless "junk DNA" that makes up most of the human genome would be a Nobel Prize-winning coup for the intelligent design gang, but if they are looking at all, they haven't come up with anything to report.”

I think I just figured out the problem. The pointyheads have been looking in the wrong place. Daniel Dennett, meet http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/28/AR2005082800964.html”> Sally Jenkins.

“Athletes do things that seem transcendental -- and they can also do things that are transcendentally stupid. They choke, trip and dope. Nevertheless, they possess a deep physical knowledge the rest of us can learn from, bound as we are by our ordinary, trudging, cumbersome selves. Ever get the feeling that they are in touch with something that we aren't? What is that thing? Could it be their random, mutant talent, or could it be evidence of, gulp, intelligent design?"

Anyone have a scalpel handy?

[Anodyne]

Missing link, excuse the pun.

Sally Jenkins

[Lindsay Beyerstein]

Thanks, Kriston. Unfortunately, I think the http://nytimes.blogspace.com/genlink>NYT permalink generator automatically takes you to the non-print version these days. On the upside, the links seem to be equally durable. Downside is that you have to look at the ads forever, too. The NYT link generator is still a terrific free service that I encourage everyone to use and support.

[Nancy]

OK one more comment on this. Dennett and the ID folk both see a design in nature that leads to us as some kind of pinnacle. Afaik neither ID theory nor Dennett's theory is absolutely anthropocentric like the Bible; but both are trying to discover some kind of teleology and both assume some kind of special human greatness.

Thank you Gary Sugar. It's nice to know others have problems with Dennett. Niles Eldredge also made that point about the extreme adaptationists - their mistake is in representing evolution as an active force in the universe rather than, as Gould said "a record of what worked best."

I think the key is Dennett's focus on evolution as an algorithm - as if it's this semi-mystical force, sort of like Schopenhauer's concept of Will.

H. Allen Orr, who refuted Dennett's extreme adaptationist model in his review of Darwin's Dangerous Idea, also wrote a much better debunking of Intelligent Design in the New Yorker back in May - it has a much better light:heat ratio than Dennett's piece.

Compare for yourself:

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/050530fa_fact

But I guess Dennett is the Time's go-to guy. But after all, they are inordinately fond of evolutionary psychology at the Times.

[Jason Malloy]

http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge166.html>More content on this Dennett article over at Edge.

[Gary Sugar]

"I have seen nothing to suggest that he thinks that humans are some kind of pinnacle, or that evolution is in any sense aimed at anything." (masaccio)

I haven't read Dennett's books on this topic. I admit that what I read in his NYT article is ambiguous and that I emphasized the side of the ambiguity that I disagree with.

The ambiguity lies in his frequent and obviously considered use of all this teleological, anthropomorphic, and anthropocentric vocabulary while in the next sentence insisting that he's talking about impersonal principles in nature.

Suppose that all you knew about Dennett was that according to him surviving natural variations are "improvements," and anatomical structures are "ingenious designs," and "wings are for flying," and "eyes are for seeing."

A consistent theory that includes these sayings would have to be as teleological and semi-anthropocentric as ID. But again, Dennett is trying to have it both ways; and I should acknowledge his other, correct way. So I'll back off from saying that he's trying to discover a teleology and just say that he's trying to justify a teleological vocabulary.

[Ginger Yellow]

The confusion comes, I think, from the fact that Dennett views evolution very much as a design process. It's just that instead of the top down, intelligence driven design we know, Dennett's idea of evolution is as a bottom-up, trial and error, distributed algorithmic design process. It, ie evolution, is doing actual design, ie designing things that can see better and so on, but that design is "unintelligent". He speaks of phenotypes exploring design space. But it's important to realise that when he uses such teleological language it's just a convenient metaphor - a fantastic eye design may be "rejected" in favour of another because of the shape of the adaptive landscape. He credits his readers with enough intelligence to know that organisms don't will evolution to happen. Perhaps for a newspaper article about ID that's an assumption too far.

[Webern Thwombley]

from my point of view, Dennett is just not getting it. yes, his presentation on how the id'ers don't understand science is well done.
But it doesn't get to the heart of the thing and that is: the fundamental point of view of science is different from and irreconcilable with religion's point of view.
Science holds that a scheme of rules explains physical reality.
fundamentalists hold that what explains reality as a whole, including rules, is that it arises from the will of some anthropomorphic entity who can at anytime contravene the rules which he has made.
so far as Science explains the nature of reality as a whole, it will be a physical reality based upon the empirical and the sensual.
no amount of explanation or argument or propaganda is going to budge either side.
and they really have nothing to do with each other---
Science does not ask or seek to answer ultimate questions as does religion: why is there anything at all? or what is the source of existence itself?
instead it asks, how does it work?
and then posits a rules based physical mechanism or entity, for a physical phenomenon, that can be tested physically, empirically, to determine its validity.
whether there is or is not some entity who made the mechanism and rules and who has a plan-- is irrelevant and superfluous to this process.
supposing some god or other made it all come about, the scientist still must perform the experiments to determine the validity of the posited mechanism. this is the fundament of Science.
the force of gravity is a basic abstract Scientific entity but neither it, nor any other scientific entity, is the source of all,( and neither is the big bang, which is simply the birth of the physical) and gravity could potentially be discarded if another entity with obviously greater scientific explanatory power came along. by contrast, for the fundamentalist, his god is simply presumed to be-- nothing can dethrone the omnipotent, non-physical christian deity as the wellspring of all.

an overarching spiritual entity, even if presumed by a scientist to be the source of existence as a whole, still has no role to play in physical scientific theory; "God did it" is not (at least not since the dark ages) held to be a sufficient explanation of physical phenomena, nor a necessary one; nor does some god replace a physical mechanism to fill the explanatory gaps in scientific theory.
introduction of "intelligent design" into school biology is a result, purely, of the politics of dominance and imposition as practiced by a vocal arrogant, ignorant and aggressively bigoted extremist group, in order to intimidate school administrators into foisting fundamentalists' favorite christian mythical entities- god and biblical genesis-- thinly veiled as intelligent design-- into the midst of school science, and more to the point, into the gap between church and state. fundamentalists are happy to enjoy the benefits of science while hypocritically undermining the foundation of thought which makes it possible.
the basic fundamentalist tenet is: "how dare you teach something that does not mention my primary christian deity nor my sacred creation myths - and dare to teach my child a different way to think about the world". behind this, is: " i fear you will nullify the biblical god centered brainwashing i have given junior, brainwashing upon which our view of the world depends" fundamentalists, to keep their myth alive, necessarily must continuously sweep back the threatening tide of dark godless rationality, most obviously science, but clear thinking in general, that threatens to unblinker junior so he flees the fold.
Evolution is the most logical point of fundamentalist attack upon the body of science, as evolutionary theory is most explicitly and plainly at odds with the biblical account of genesis and this facilitates the pastor's efforts to line up the minions in opposition. Science is a fundamentalist synonym for the devil.
despite their differences, there is no reason that science and religion cannot coexist peacefully, and separately, with the religious seeing science as part of god's creation--but for the fundamentalists taking genesis, and the bible as a whole, literally, as though some sort of historical fiat, instead of as a rich source of instructive spirital metaphor.
Science has its share of arrogance and presumption, weak or confused premises--but Science appears unimpeachably sane next to the arbitrary lunacy of christian fundmentalism.
fundamentalists are attacking biology (not to mention reproductive rights) and i fear physics is next --- get those damned fundamentalists out of the science classroom!
Science has nothing to do with religion.