"Boston Review"
Summer 2002

Review: No Free Lunch: Why Specified Complexity Cannot Be Purchased without
Intelligence by William A. Dembski, Rowman & Littlefield, $35 (cloth) 

by H. Allen Orr 

"All science, even the divine science, is a sublime detective story. Only it is not
set to detect why a man is dead; but the darker secret of why he is alive." 

G. K. Chesterton 1 

Nothing evolves as surely as anti-evolutionism. The anti-Darwin movement, at
least in its popular form, began in the primitive whoops and hollers of
young-earthers and seven-day literalists. Their claims, as you might guess, were
short on science and long on Genesis. But somewhat higher in the strata we find a
thoroughly transformed, though recognizably related, beast: the scientific
creationist. While still relying on some scriptural sources (many believed the fossil
record reflected a certain forty-day deluge), these creatures did talk science,
disputing radioactive dating and making lots of interesting claims about
hydrology, pH, and sedimentation. Following their extinction, the strata reveal yet
another and far more advanced form, the Intelligent Design champion. Compared
to this modern species, its predecessors look downright primordial. Indeed the
Intelligent Design advocate is characterized by at least three novel traits: i)
advanced academic degrees; ii) sophisticated arguments accompanied by expert
knowledge; and iii) strict avoidance of religious language, including any
speculation on just who the designer might be.

While usually admitting that life on earth is billions of years old and that people,
pigs, and petunias are related by common descent, the Intelligent Design (ID)
movement maintains that some bits of biology show the unmistakable handiwork
of an intelligent agent. And while this agent may not wholly displace Darwin, the
two at least stand shoulder to shoulder. The ID movement further maintains that
intelligent design, as a legitimate scientific hypothesis, deserves a place alongside
blind evolution in public schools and that students should, at the least, be
exposed to both sides of the debate. Indeed Ohio, which is revising its curricular
standards, is currently embroiled in a dispute over the possible introduction of
intelligent design into its biology classes. (Texas, which dominates the U.S.
textbook market, is gearing up for a similar dispute next year.) 2 The ID movement
is led by four tireless academics or ex-academics: Michael Behe (professor of
biochemistry at Lehigh University), Jonathan Wells (biologist and senior fellow at
the Discovery Institute, a Seattle think tank concerned with the "renewal of
science and culture"), Phillip Johnson (professor emeritus of law at Berkeley), and
William Dembski (associate research professor in the conceptual foundations of
science at Baylor University and senior fellow at the Discovery Institute).3 

Dembski whose new book, No Free Lunch, is sure to ignite new firestorms over
design vs. Darwin is perhaps the most impressively credentialed of the lot. He
wields a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Chicago, another in
philosophy from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and a Master of Divinity
degree from Princeton Theological Seminary. He is also author of seven books,
including The Design Inference, a fairly technical work that laid out a statistical
method allegedly allowing reliable detection of design.4 He is also an able writer, a
skilled polemicist, and an indisputably bold thinker. And, yes, he
believes contrary to everything biologists told us for the last 150 years that an
intelligent agent helped shaped you and me.

To appreciate the magnitude of Dembski's claims in No Free Lunch you need to
appreciate the relative modesty of Darwin's claims in the Origin of Species. Darwin
did not rule out the formal possibility of a designer. Instead, he showed that the
(apparent) design residing in organisms could be explained naturally, without
recourse to a designer. And while he marshaled great masses of evidence for the
role of his natural mechanism (natural selection) and against the role of a designer,
Darwin made no claims about the impossibility of the latter hypothesis. Dembski's
claims are more ambitious. Darwinism, he says, is formally incapable of explaining
certain features of organisms. This is not to say that Darwinian mechanisms might
not act now and then Dembski agrees they might but it is to say that
Darwinism is mathematically barred from explaining certain things we always
thought it could explain. And unfortunately for evolutionary biology, these things
are not trivial arcana but the characteristic features of organisms: their
staggeringly complex designs. (We'll sharpen the sense of "complex" below.)
Dembski does not mince words: "[I]ntelligent design utterly rejects natural
selection as a creative force capable of bringing about the specified complexity we
see in organisms." 

This is a big claim. And it explains why Dembski gets so much attention. You
might whip up a bit of applause if you say that a designer can explain biology. But
you'll bring down the house if you say that Darwinism can't and only a designer
can. Especially if this claim gets dressed up in fancy mathematics of the sort that
presumably intimidates biologists but snows the general reader. And this is
precisely how Dembski dresses his claims. Borrowing results from computing
theory the so-called No Free Lunch theorems Dembski claims to prove that
Darwinism is utterly impotent before organismic complexity. Hence a designer.
Unfortunately, Dembski's proof has nothing whatsoever to do with Darwinism and
his claim to the contrary is hopelessly silly.

To show this, I need to back up and do two things. First, explain what kind of
biological complexity Dembski is so worked up about and, second, explain why he
thinks the No Free Lunch theorems stand in the way of Darwinism accounting for
it. Doing this will require getting slightly technical for a moment. But don't
worry things will get simple again quick.

No free lunch

Not all complexity is a thumb in the eye of Darwinism. The problem, Dembski tells
us, comes from a particular variety he calls "specified complexity":

An object, event, or structure exhibits specified complexity if it is both complex
(i.e., one of many live possibilities) and specified (i.e., displays an independently
given pattern). A long sequence of randomly strewn Scrabble pieces is complex
without being specified. A short sequence spelling the word "the" is specified
without being complex. A sequence corresponding to a Shakespearean sonnet is
both complex and specified.

Dembski argues that biology is replete with specified complexity. It is certainly true
that organisms are fantastically complex. It is also true that in some ways (but not
others this will become an issue) they are specified. It is clear for instance that
the various parts of an organism are fitted to each other: the curvature of the lens
is fitted to the distance to the retina so as to produce a sharp image. Dembski
spends a great deal of time formalizing specified complexity in the language of
information theory. Roughly speaking, we know we have a case of complex
specified information if out of all possible ways of putting together a set of
elements say, all possible sequences of a set of letters and blank spaces only a
small subset represents a prespecified target and the actual outcome belongs to
this target. Meaningful English phrases, for instance, represent a small target: the
overwhelming majority of random combinations of English letters and blank
spaces yield gibberish. So if you see a meaningful phrase (as you hopefully are
now), you're seeing complex specified information.5

Now it's obvious how we go about making meaningful phrases: we use intelligence
and crank them out at will. But how do biologists explain the complexity that
resides in organisms? By Darwinism. To get a feel for what this means, consider
the following caricature of Darwinism offered by Richard Dawkins and discussed
at length by Dembski. Our target will be Hamlet's line, METHINKS IT IS LIKE A
WEASEL. (Real evolution occurs in a sequence space that uses the four DNA
"letters" A, G, C, and T but this is a distinction that doesn't make a difference.)
First consider the odds of forming this target sequence by blind chance, i.e., with
monkeys at word-processors. Draw a random letter from the alphabet for the first
position in the phrase; now another for the second position, and so on. The odds
that you've spelled out the phrase METHINKS are essentially nil: in fact, with
twenty-six letters plus a blank space, the odds of getting the word METHINKS
alone are already less than one in 280 billion. But now consider the following
"evolutionary algorithm." Start with a random sequence as before but i) randomly
change each character that doesn't match the target sequence; ii) if a resulting
character matches the target keep it and in the next round change only those
characters that don't match. So, if we start with SATHINKS, at the next step we'll
randomly change only the first two letters; and if those changes yield
MQTHINKS, then at the next step we'll randomly change only the second letter.
This two-step evolutionary algorithm of mutation plus selection arrives at the
phrase METHINKS with surprising speed.

This example also illustrates the idea of a fitness function. Fitness is a measure of
quality; high fitness is good and low is bad. (In biology the only kind of quality
that matters is how good you are at having kids. High fitness means you have a lot
of kids and low means you have few.) A fitness function is just a mathematical
function that assigns a fitness value to each possible sequence. In our Hamlet
example, the best sequence is the phrase METHINKS , so the fitness function
assigns it the highest value. A sequence that matches METHINKS at every
position but one gets a slightly lower fitness, and one that matches METHINKS 
at every position but two gets a yet lower fitness, and so on. A random sequence
typically suffers a quite low fitness. If we now pretend that all possible sequences
sit in a plane, we could plot their corresponding fitness values above this plane,
forming a 3-D plot.6Evolutionists thus sometimes speak of fitness "surfaces" or
"landscapes." Because evolution always moves from a sequence to another
having higher fitness, natural selection can be thought of as moving populations
uphill on fitness surfaces. In Dawkins's example this process ultimately arrives at
the sequence METHINKS , which sits atop a fitness peak.

Dembski's chief argument is that Dawkins's algorithm and Darwinism
generally does not do what it seems. Indeed despite our unerring arrival at
METHINKS , the "Darwinian mechanism does not generate actual specified
complexity but only its appearance." How can Dembski possibly claim such a
thing? Enter the No Free Lunch theorems. 

The NFL theorems compare the efficiency of evolutionary algorithms; roughly
speaking, they ask how often different search algorithms reach a target within
some number of steps.7Because the NFL theorems are deeply counterintuitive, it'll
help to start with an informal rendition. It runs like this: If algorithm A beats
algorithm B at some class of problems there will always be another class of
problems at which B beats A. Further, one can show that A and B are equally
efficient when averaging over all possible problems. The NFL theorems thus show
that there's no such thing as a universally efficient algorithm: when faced with all
problems, any algorithm is as good as any other.  To appreciate Dembski's
"generic" form of the NFL theorems, you need to appreciate that reaching a
prespecified target with a particular fitness function is an example of a problem.
Reaching the target with a different fitness function is a different problem. The
NFL theorems thus say that if we average over all possible fitness
functions where some lead directly uphill to the target and others don't, and
some are smooth and others rugged no evolutionary algorithm outperforms any
other. But one allowable algorithm is blind search, where we randomly move to a
neighboring sequence regardless of its fitness (remember our monkey with a
word-processor). The NFL theorems thus prove that no evolutionary algorithm
beats blind search when averaging over all fitness functions. A surprising result. 

The apparent success of Dawkins's algorithm at getting to METHINKS must
therefore be just that, an appearance. If Dawkins tried reaching his target when
averaging over all fitness functions, he'd find he does no better than blind search.
So why does Dawkins's algorithm seem to work? The answer is that it subtly
cheats: it starts not only with a target but also with a fitness function that leads
straight to it. Everything's been cooked into the fitness function. Algorithms like
Dawkins's thus "fail to generate specified complexity because they smuggle it in
during construction of the fitness function."8

Hence Dembski's big claim: "Darwinian mechanisms of any kind, whether in nature
or in silico, are in principle incapable of generating specified complexity." At best,
Darwinism just shuffles around preexisting specified complexity, using up that
available in the fitness function to give the appearance of producing it de novo.

We can now complete the Dembskian Syllogism: Organisms show specified
complexity; Darwinism can't make it; therefore, something else does. You won't be
surprised to learn that that something else is intelligence. Indeed the "great myth
of contemporary evolutionary biology is that the information needed to explain
complex biological structures can be purchased without intelligence."

Nice answer, wrong question

The problem with all this is so simple that I hate to bring it up. But here goes:
Darwinism isn't trying to reach a prespecified target. Darwinism, I regret to report,
is sheer cold demographics. Darwinism says that my sequence has more kids than
your sequence and so my sequence gets common and yours gets rare. If there's
another sequence out there that has more kids than mine, it'll displace me. But
there's no pre-set target in this game. (Why would evolution care about a pre-set
place? Are we to believe that evolution is just inordinately fond of
ATGGCAGGCAGT ?) Dembski can pick a prespecified target, average over all
fitness functions, and show that no algorithm beats blind search until he's blue in
the face. The calculation is irrelevant. Evolution isn't searching for anything and
Darwinism is not therefore a search algorithm. The bottom line is not that the NFL
theorems are wrong. They're not. The bottom line is that they ask the wrong
question for what Dembski wants to do. More precisely, the proper conclusion
isn't that the NFL theorems derail Darwinism. The proper conclusion is that
evolutionary algorithms are flawed analogies for Darwinism.9

The astonishing thing is that Dembski knows all this. In a remarkable
revelation and one that follows two hundred pages of technical
mumbo-jumbo Dembski suddenly announces that Darwinists won't find his NFL
objection terribly relevant. And why not? For the very reason I just gave. Dembski
even quotes Richard Dawkins at length, who, it turns out, warned all along that his
METHINKS example is misleading in important ways. One of these is that, in each generation of
selective "breeding," the mutant "progeny" phrases were judged according to the
criterion of resemblance to a distant ideal target, the phrase METHINKS IT IS
LIKE A WEASEL. Life isn't like that. Evolution has no long-term goal. There is no
long-distance target, no final perfection to serve as a criterion for selection .In
real life, the criterion for selection is always short-term, either simple survival or,
more generally, reproductive success.10  At this point the reader of Dembski's book is a tad
confused. Why, given the above revelation, is the book entitled No Free Lunch? Why
is its dust jacket lined with blurbs from physicists attesting that Dembski has
done something big? And, most important, why did I spend two nights reading about
a theorem that reports an irrelevant result? The reader at this point has some
right to know what Dembski's real problem with Darwinism is. And he comes
through. After two hundred pages, Dembski finally unveils his
Über-Objection: Darwinism does "not guarantee that anything interesting will happen." (I'm
not making this up.) Darwinism, he admits, will work on a small scale it will
make bacteria resistant to antibiotics and insects resistant to insecticide but it
might not work on a big scale, yielding complex critters and the breathtaking
biological diversity that envelops the earth. Dembski's problem isn't then with
Darwinism per se. Like the scientific creationists before him, it's with Darwinism
writ large. He's worried about the proper limits of extrapolation. And the
non-extrapolationist evolution he ends up allowing one that tinkers but doesn't innovate is
"certainly not a form of Darwinism that is worth spilling any ink over."

There are so many problems with this view that it's hard to know where to start.
For one thing, it's wholly subjective. Though Dembski enjoys dressing up his
claims in mathematical garb, his key objection to Darwinism ends up being a tad
less rigorous than set theory: whether he finds the likely products of natural
selection "interesting." For two of the 3.5 billion years of life, nothing fancier than
bacteria lived on earth. Is this interesting? A virus might only have four genes. Is
this interesting? Just where does one draw the line between beasts or changes
that are sufficiently uninteresting that they can be subsumed under a Darwinian
mechanism and those that are sufficiently interesting that they can't? Dembski's
equations are silent here. For another thing, Dembski's anti-extrapolationist view
leads him into some formal muddy waters. If, as he oddly continues to claim, the
NFL theorems pose a problem for Darwinism, why don't they pose a problem for a
little Darwinism? The NFL theorems don't say anything about scale. To say then,
as Dembski does, that a little bit of Darwinism is okay (despite NFL) but a lot is
bad (because of NFL) is to say something odd. Dembski comes precariously close
here to saying that while there's no such thing as a free lunch, you can help
yourself to brunch. Last, surely it's the refusal to extrapolate Darwinism from the
small to the large scale that needs justifying. If Darwinism can explain small
changes in organisms over the last fifty years (antibiotic resistance, say), surely it
can explain progressively bigger changes over the last 500, 5000, or 50,000 years.
The cumulative effects of mutation and selection aren't going to get smaller.
Dembski's anti-extrapolationism seems a lot like saying that, while Kepler's laws
might hold on any given day, they don't hold over whole years. Such a position is,
I suppose, formally possible but it and not extrapolation requires special
justification.

Alas, Dembski's attempts to explain why Darwinism won't extrapolate don't wash.
He offers two reasons. The first is that things get simpler not fancier under
Darwinism. "Simplicity by definition always entails a lower cost in raw
materials than increases in complexity, and so there is an inherent tendency in
evolving systems for selection pressures to force such systems toward
simplicity." Darwinism thus chokes when confronting a biological world that's so
baroque. This is an ancient argument and the replies to it are equally old. Even if
selection favors simplicity, note that the history of life must show a trend of
increasing complexity. The reason is this history starts at zero complexity. On
average it can only go up (where we cannot see the descendants of lineages that
crashed and burned back into zero complexity). There are also good reasons for
thinking that organisms get stuck at higher levels of complexity. John Maynard
Smith and Eörs Szathmáry argue at book length that the formation of complex
assemblies is often irreversible.11 When free living mitochrondria and early cells
came together, for instance, to make the first eukaryotic (true) cells, they swapped
genes, so that mitochondrial proteins are now encoded by nuclear genes and
vice-versa. At this point, things are essentially irreversible and the two partners
can't go their separate, simpler ways. Dembski seems unaware of this well known
point. Dembski's it-just-gets-simpler argument also relies on an erroneous
assumption that natural selection cares primarily about the cost of raw materials.
But selection cares only about how many kids you have. If I use more raw
materials but have more kids than you, my type gets more common, period. Last,
Dembski's argument is betrayed by his own examples of admitted Darwinism.
When Salmonella evolved penicillin resistance and the mosquito Anopheles
evolved DDT resistance just how did they get simpler? The answer is they
didn't.12 

Dembski's second anti-extrapolationist argument is that Darwinism could explain
the fantastic range of biological diversity only if  fitness functions are
well-behaved. As he puts it, "the fitness function induced by differential survival
and reproduction [may not be] sufficiently smooth for the Darwinian mechanism to
drive large-scale biological evolution." If not, natural selection can't gradually
ascend lofty fitness peaks and "there is no reason to think you will get anything
interesting." Dembski tries here to reconnect his argument with the NFL
world you have to sneak in a fitness function that's just right. But the argument
doesn't fly. To see this, consider fitness functions that are as unsmooth as you
like, i.e., rugged ones, having lots of peaks and few long paths up high hills.
(These are the best studied of all fitness landscapes.13) Now drop many
geographically separate populations on these landscapes and let them evolve
independently. Each will quickly get stuck atop a nearby peak. You might think
then that Dembski's right; we don't get much that's interesting. But now change
the environment. This shifts the landscape's topography: a sequence's fitness isn't
cast in stone but depends on the environment it finds itself in. Each population
may now find it's no longer at the best sequence and so can evolve somewhat
even if the new landscape is still rugged. Different populations will go to different
sequences as they live in different environments. Now repeat this for 3.5 billion
years. Will this process yield interesting products? Will we get different looking
beasts, living different kinds of lives? My guess is yes. Dembski's is no. And that
is, I suppose, fine. He's entitled to his guess. But don't let him tell you that it
follows ineluctably from some mathematical theorem because it doesn't. The
troubling thing is that the above scenario isn't some contrived attempt to sidestep
Dembski. It's the standard explanation of why organisms don't get permanently
stuck on local peaks. For one brief moment Dembski seems to realize that changing
environments might matter, pulling the rug out from under his
it-won't-go-anywhere argument. But the worry is quickly dispatched with a
footnote: "More precisely, f needs to be an evolving fitness function indexed by
time. My argument, however, remains intact." Unfortunately it doesn't.

Irreducible complexity: once more with feeling

In the last half of his book, Dembski gets specific. He turns to an example of
biological structures that is allegedly inaccessible to Darwinism. It would be more
accurate to say he returns to the example as it's one that's been worked to death in
ID circles. The idea comes from Michael Behe, the ID biochemist and author of
Darwin's Black Box.14 Behe's argument was that some structures are "irreducibly
complex": remove any part and the whole thing stops working. His favorite
example was the mousetrap. Take away any part spring or hammer, say and
function collapses. You won't catch mice. Behe claimed the biological cell is also
loaded with irreducibly complex structures. His pet example, and one Dembski
loves, was the bacterial flagellum, which sports a dizzying number of proteins that
have to be arrayed in just the right way. 

The importance of irreducibly complex structures is that they cannot, Behe
assured us, be built by Darwinism. Darwinism demands that each step in the long
walk to the present structure be functional. But that can't be: since all parts are
required for function natural selection couldn't possibly have added them one at a
time. Irreducible complexity is therefore a reliable marker of intelligent design. This
argument sold a lot of books and got tremendous media airplay.

Unfortunately it was all wrong. Behe's claim was refuted and in at least two
ways. Both showed how irreducibly complex systems could be reached via
gradual, Darwinian paths. Dembski calls the first path "scaffolding." At each step,
a part gets added that improves a structure's function. At some point, however, a
substructure might appear that no longer needs the remaining parts. These useless
parts could then fall away. The key point is that the substructure we're left with
might be irreducibly complex. Remove any part now and all hell breaks loose. The
second path was one that I championed. Dembski calls it "incremental
indispensability." Here's the argument:

An irreducibly complex system can be built gradually by adding parts that, while
initially just advantageous, become because of later changes essential. The
logic is very simple. Some part (A) initially does some job (and not very well,
perhaps). Another part (B) later gets added because it helps A. This new part isn't
essential, it merely improves things. But later on, A (or something else) may
change in such a way that B now becomes indispensable. This process continues
as further parts get folded into the system. And at the end of the day, many parts
may all be required.15 

Dembski more or less concedes that the above paths show that irreducibly
complex machines can be built via Darwinism.16 Despite this, however, he bizarrely
concludes that "[t]he challenge of irreducible complexity to Darwinian evolution is
real, and to claim that Behe's ideas have been refuted is false." I must admit that I
re-read this sentence four or five times, searching for signs it reflected multiple
typos. But concluding that Dembski meant what he said, I tried to piece together
why he still thinks irreducible complexity is a bone in the throat of Darwinism.

The answer is "causal specificity." The scaffolding and incremental
indispensability arguments are not, Dembski says, causally specific. This means
they have not, in any particular biological example, been fleshed out in sufficiently
gory detail that Dembski can judge their validity. You might think scaffolding, say,
can account for the bacterial flagellum but no one has told Dembski just which
protein came first and which second:

Indeed, there is no way to argue against a putative transmutation that seems
plausible enough to our imaginations but has yet to be concretely specified .This
is of course another way of saying that the scaffolding objection has yet to
demonstrate causal specificity when applied to actual irreducibly complex
biochemical systems. The absence of detailed models in the biological literature
that employ scaffoldings to generate irreducibly complex biochemical systems is
therefore reason to be skeptical of such models.

This argument is more than a little annoying. Though Behe griped that
evolutionists hadn't faced up to particular biochemical machines, his chief claim
was that Darwinism just couldn't get here from there. He asked "What type of
biological system could not be formed by 'numerous, successive, slight
modifications'?" and answered "a system that is irreducibly complex." He
announced that "[i]rreducibly complex systems are nasty roadblocks for Darwinian
evolution" and spoke of "unbridgeable chasms." That's what all the hoopla was
about, that's why Behe got in Newsweek, and that turned out to be dead wrong.
So now the argument shifts. Now the problem is historical concreteness. But to
leave readers with the vague impression that nothing's changed, Dembski brands
his point "causal specificity." But this is a category mistake of the first magnitude.
His point has nothing to do with causation. It's got to do with historical
narrative. Which gene begat which protein in which order? Dembski's bait and
switch here is transparent and puerile. If the ID community wishes to be taken
seriously as honest intellectuals seeking truth (even if they're wrong; the two are
not incompatible) they must plainly say: "Behe's chief claim was wrong. Irreducible
complexity is accessible to Darwinism." 

The causal specificity argument is also an exercise in nerve. We are, recall, trying
to choose between two theories. One says bacterial flagella were built by mutation
and selection and the other says they were built by an intelligent designer. And
Dembski concludes the first theory lacks historical concreteness? Darwinism
suffers a shortage of specificity? When, after all, did Dembski's designer come up
with plans for flagella? Just how did he reach out and shape that flagellum? Which
protein did he move first or did he touch them all at once? It is the height of
hypocrisy for Dembski to complain that Darwinism lacks causal specificity when
his own theory lacks any specificity, including one atom of historical
concreteness. Dembski may not have much of an argument, but you've got to
admit he's got chutzpah. 

Last, I can't help but wonder why Dembski's so worked up about irreducible
complexity in the first place. Irreducibly complex systems do show specified
complexity, but so do non-irreducibly complex ones. METHINKS IT IS LIKE A
WEASEL is specifically complex (at least if it were longer) but it's not irreducibly
so. So why the special treatment? Dembski seems to imply that irreducible
complexity is special because it shows some structures can't be reached by
smooth fitness functions. But this is refuted by scaffolding and incremental
indispensability. The fact is that irreducible complexity plays no definable role in
Dembski's view specifically and poses no challenge to Darwinism generally. The
idea is dead and it's time the ID community gave it a proper burial. 

ID'ing the designer 

Dembski devotes some time at the close of his book to what ID as a practicing
"science" might look like. This is one of the more interesting parts of the book.
Dembski knows a fair amount about the history and philosophy of science and his
observations here are on the whole worth hearing. It's also here that we learn
Dembski's thoughts not on design, but the designer. Dembski considers two
questions that reside in the No Man's Land between science and theology: Is the
designer embodied or unembodied? And is design front-loaded in the universe
(e.g., at the Big Bang and is now playing itself out) or periodically injected
throughout cosmic history?17

Dembski's treatment of the second question is the more interesting as it leaves him
in an especially awkward position. To be fair, Dembski admits that there are no
grounds for excluding either front-loading or intervention. But it's clear where his
heart lies. He seems less than crazy about the former idea and perceptibly leans to
the latter. At the very least he defends intervention with gusto.18

What's odd about this is that Dembski goes out of his way here to make the
slightest whiff of design maximally unpalatable to scientists. Plenty of scientists
have, after all, been attracted to the notion that natural laws reflect (in some way
that's necessarily poorly articulated) an intelligence or aesthetic sensibility. This is
the religion of Einstein, who spoke of "the grandeur of reason incarnate in
existence" and of the scientist's "religious feeling [that] takes the form of a
rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law." (This or something like it is
also the religion of the young Chesterton with whom I began this essay.) This mild
mysticism is fairly common among scientists, especially physicists and
mathematicians. What's attractive about this view which is of course thoroughly
religious, not scientific is that it at least requires no violation of methodological
naturalism. The miraculous is not some alleged departure from natural law but the
law itself. 

Given that Dembski pays lip service to Duhem's claim that questions of coherence
with existing theory invariably enter when choosing between views that explain
the data equally well, you'd guess he'd rush to embrace Einsteinian front-loading.
History shows it lives peaceably with science's remaining intellectual
commitments. So why doesn't he? Why does Dembski work so hard to prop up
interventionism?

I can only guess but the guess seems plain: Dembski's defense of interventionism
reveals, I suspect, both the ID's movement's ideological roots and its political
agenda. The movement emerged, after all, out of a Judeo-Christian tradition that
demands, or at least historically favors, an interventionist deity. But more
important, I suspect Dembski and much of the ID community are turned off by the
fact that the Einsteinian view demands no change, much less revolution, in our
practice of science. The Einsteinian view is insufficiently radical too tame, too
palatable, and too inconsequential for Dembski and his fellow travelers. It is one
thing to stand in awe before the harmony of natural law. It is quite another to
topple methodological naturalism, puncture materialism, and re-write the textbooks
of Ohio and Texas. I can guess which Dembski prefers.< 



H. Allen Orr is professor of biology at University of Rochester. He is writing a
book on the origin of species. 




1 G. K. Chesterton, The Thing (New York: Dodd, Dead and Co., 1930), 72.

2 See Francis X. Clines, "Ohio Board Hears Debate on an Alternative to
Darwinism," The New York Times, 12 March 2002. See also Trisha Gura, "Evolution
critics seek role for unseen hand in education," Nature 416 (2002): 250. 

3 For links describing their publications, as well as those of other ID advocates,
see the Discovery Institute on-line, www.discovery.org. For a critical analysis of
the creationist/intelligent design movement, see Robert T. Pennock, Tower of
Babel:The Evidence Against the New Creationism (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
1999). For a recent collection of papers defending and attacking intelligent design,
see Pennock, Intelligent Design Creationism and Its Critics (Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT Press, 2001).

4 The Design Inference: Eliminating Chance Through Small Probabilities
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

5 Strictly speaking, Dembski says we can infer complex specified information only
if a phrase is long enough that the probability it would arise by chance falls below
a "universal probability bound" of 10-150. So we'll assume throughout that target
phrases are long. 

6 Fitness landscapes are usually high dimensional, not three, but it's easiest,
though not quite right, to imagine a 3-D landscape. Note also that the target
evolution is shooting for needn't be a single sequence; it could include several.
But, overall, the target is small.

7 These theorems were introduced by David H. Wolpert and William G. Macready,
"No Free Lunch Theorems for Optimization," IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary
Computation 1 (1997): 67 82. Dembski's "generic" form of the NFL theorem is
loosely based on that of Joseph Culberson, "On the Futility of Blind Search: An
Algorithmic View of 'No Free Lunch,'" Evolutionary Computation 6 (1998):
109 27. 

8 To see that there's specified complexity in the fitness function, consider
Dembski's further point: picking the right fitness function out of all those that are
possible requires even more searching than picking the original target out of
sequence space. So evolutionary algorithms just displace the task of finding a
target back to the task of finding a desirable fitness function.

9 NFL theorems may well proscribe certain ways of talking about Darwinism (e.g.,
as a universally efficient optimizing algorithm) but that's a different matter.
Dembski, incidentally, claims that "evolutionary algorithms constitute the
mathematical underpinnings of Darwinism" and that by "assimilating the
Darwinian mechanism to evolutionary algorithms, [evolutionists] have invited a
mathematical assessment of the power of the Darwinian mechanism to generate
life's diversity." This is wrong. The mathematical underpinnings of Darwinism are
population genetics, which does not consider pre-set targets and about which
Dembski says nothing.

10 Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (New York: W. W. Norton &
Company, 1996), 50. Remarkably, Culberson on whom Dembski leans for his
interpretation of NFL makes a similar point. Asking how biological evolution is
possible given the NFL theorem, he speculates that perhaps "there is no global
requirement on life other than it survive. Evolution was not necessarily looking for
the human genome .We are not assuming the need for universal optimization,
only very localized advantage." Culberson, "On the Futility of Blind Search," 123.

11 John Maynard Smith and Eörs Szathmáry, The Major Transitions in Evolution
(Oxford: W. H. Freeman Spektrum, 1995).

12 In fact the evolution of antibiotic resistance often involves the gain of an
extrachromosomal plasmid, i.e., an increase in the organism's total genome and,
presumably, complexity.

13Stuart Kauffman and Simon Levin, "Towards a General Theory of Adaptive
Walks on Rugged Landscapes," Journal of Theoretical Biology 128 (1987): 11 45;
John H. Gillespie, "Molecular Evolution Over the Mutational Landscape,"
Evolution 38 (1984): 1116 29; H. Allen Orr, "The Population Genetics of
Adaptation: The Adaptation of DNA Sequences," Evolution (in press).

14 Michael J. Behe, Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution
(New York: The Free Press, 1996).

15 H. Allen Orr, "Darwin v. Intelligent Design (Again)," Boston Review, December
1996/January 1997, 28 31. See also the exchange that followed in the
February/March 1997 issue of Boston Review.

16 He says the "incremental indispensability objection is similar to the scaffolding
and co-optation [which I skipped] objections in offering a narrative scheme for
how an irreducibly complex system might conceivably have evolved by Darwinian
means". And "[c]ertainly there is no logical impossibility that prevents such
patchworks from forming irreducibly complex systems."

17 Dembski does not, though, consider another important question about the
designer: What's gained by replacing a mysterious material order with an equally
mysterious designer? This was one of Hume's objections to the argument from
design. As Philo explains to Cleanthes in the Dialogues Concerning Natural
Religion, "An ideal system, arranged of itself, without a precedent design, is not a
whit more explicable than a material one which attains its order in a like manner;
nor is there any more difficulty in the latter supposition than in the former."
Cleanthes didn't have much of a response. It would have been interesting to hear
Dembski's. 

18 For a similar conclusion, see Robert T. Pennock, "The Wizards of ID,"
Metaviews, 12 October 2000, <www.metanexus.net> [2 July 2002].

Originally published in Summer 2002 issue of Boston Review  http://bostonreview.mit.edu/BR27.3/orr.html