"Skeptical Inquirer" magazine
September 2001

Massimo Pigliucci
Design Yes, Intelligent No
A Critique of Intelligent Design Theory and Neocreationism

The claims by Behe, Dembski, and other "intelligent design" creationists that 
science should be opened to supernatural explanations and that these should be 
allowed in academic as well as public school curricula are unfounded and based 
on a misunderstanding of both design in nature and of what the neo-Darwinian 
theory of evolution is all about.
Massimo Pigliucci 
------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A new brand of creationism has appeared on the scene in the last few years. 
The so-called neocreationists largely do not believe in a young Earth or in a 
too literal interpretation of the Bible. While still mostly propelled by a 
religious agenda and financed by mainly Christian sources such as the 
Templeton Foundation and the Discovery Institute, the intellectual challenge 
posed by neocreationism is sophisticated enough to require detailed 
consideration (see Edis 2001; Roche 2001).

Among the chief exponents of Intelligent Design (ID) theory, as this new brand 
of creationism is called, is William Dembski, a mathematical philosopher and 
author of The Design Inference (1998a). In that book he attempts to show that 
there must be an intelligent designer behind natural phenomena such as 
evolution and the very origin of the universe (see Pigliucci 2000 for a 
detailed critique). Dembki's (1998b) argument is that modern science ever 
since Francis Bacon has illicitly dropped two of Aristotle's famous four types 
of causes from consideration altogether, thereby unnecessarily restricting its 
own explanatory power. Science is thus incomplete, and intelligent design 
theory will rectify this sorry state of affairs, if only close-minded 
evolutionists would allow Dembski and company to do the job.

Aristotle's Four Causes in Science
Aristotle identified material causes, what something is made of; formal 
causes, the structure of the thing or phenomenon; efficient causes, the 
immediate activity producing a phenomenon or object; and final causes, the 
purpose of whatever object we are investigating. For example, let's say we 
want to investigate the "causes" of the Brooklyn Bridge. Its material cause 
would be encompassed by a description of the physical materials that went into 
its construction. The formal cause is the fact that it is a bridge across a 
stretch of water, and not either a random assembly of pieces or another kind 
of orderly structure (such as a skyscraper). The efficient causes were the 
blueprints drawn by engineers and the labor of men and machines that actually 
assembled the physical materials and put them into place. The final cause of 
the Brooklyn Bridge was the necessity for people to walk and ride between two 
landmasses without getting wet.

Dembski maintains that Bacon and his followers did away with both formal and 
final causes (the so-called teleonomic causes, because they answer the 
question of why something is) in order to free science from philosophical 
speculation and ground it firmly into empirically verifiable statements. That 
may be so, but things certainly changed with the work of Charles Darwin 
(1859). Darwin was addressing a complex scientific question in an 
unprecedented fashion: he recognized that living organisms are clearly 
designed in order to survive and reproduce in the world they inhabit; yet, as 
a scientist, he worked within the framework of naturalistic explanations of 
such design. Darwin found the answer in his well-known theory of natural 
selection. Natural selection, combined with the basic process of mutation, 
makes design possible in nature without recourse to a supernatural explanation 
because selection is definitely nonrandom, and therefore has "creative" 
(albeit nonconscious) power. Creationists usually do not understand this point 
and think that selection can only eliminate the less fit; but Darwin's 
powerful insight was that selection is also a cumulative process-analogous to 
a ratchet-which can build things over time, as long as the intermediate steps 
are also advantageous.

Darwin made it possible to put all four Aristotelian causes back into science. 
For example, if we were to ask what are the causes of a tiger's teeth within a 
Darwinian framework, we would answer in the following manner. The material 
cause is provided by the biological materials that make up the teeth; the 
formal cause is the genetic and developmental machinery that distinguishes a 
tiger's teeth from any other kind of biological structure; the efficient cause 
is natural selection promoting some genetic variants of the tiger's ancestor 
over their competitors; and the final cause is provided by the fact that 
having teeth structured in a certain way makes it easier for a tiger to 
procure its prey and therefore to survive and reproduce-the only "goals" of 
every living being.

Therefore, design is very much a part of modern science, at least whenever 
there is a need to explain an apparently designed structure (such as a living 
organism). All four Aristotelian causes are fully reinstated within the realm 
of scientific investigation, and science is not maimed by the disregard of 
some of the causes acting in the world. What then is left of the argument of 
Dembski and of other proponents of ID? They, like William Paley (1831) well 
before them, make the mistake of confusing natural design and intelligent 
design by rejecting the possibility of the former and concluding that any 
design must by definition be intelligent.

One is left with the lingering feeling that Dembski is being disingenuous 
about ancient philosophy. It is quite clear, for example, that Aristotle 
himself never meant his teleonomic causes to imply intelligent design in 
nature (Cohen 2000). His mentor, Plato (in Timaeus), had already concluded 
that the designer of the universe could not be an omnipotent god, but at most 
what he called a Demiurge, a lesser god who evidently messes around with the 
universe with mixed results. Aristotle believed that the scope of god was even 
more limited, essentially to the role of prime mover of the universe, with no 
additional direct interaction with his creation (i.e., he was one of the first 
deists). In Physics, where he discusses the four causes, Aristotle treats 
nature itself as a craftsman, but clearly devoid of forethought and 
intelligence. A tiger develops into a tiger because it is in its nature to do 
so, and this nature is due to some physical essence given to it by its father 
(we would call it DNA) which starts the process out. Aristotle makes clear 
this rejection of god as a final cause (Cohen 2000) when he says that causes 
are not external to the organism (such as a designer would be) but internal to 
it (as modern developmental biology clearly shows). In other words, the final 
cause of a living being is not a plan, intention, or purpose, but simply 
intrinsic in the developmental changes of that organism. Which means that 
Aristotle identified final causes with formal causes as far as living 
organisms are concerned. He rejected chance and randomness (as do modern 
biologists) but did not invoke an intelligent designer in its place, contra 
Dembski. We had to wait until Darwin for a further advance on Aristotle's 
conception of the final cause of living organisms and for modern molecular 
biology to achieve an understanding of their formal cause.

Irreducible Complexity
There are two additional arguments proposed by ID theorists to demonstrate 
intelligent design in the universe: the con-cept of "irreducible complexity" 
and the "complexity-specification" criterion. Irreducible complexity is a term 
introduced in this context by molecular biologist Michael Behe in his book 
Darwin's Black Box (1996). The idea is that the difference between a natural 
phenomenon and an intelligent designer is that a designed object is planned in 
advance, with forethought. While an intelligent agent is not constrained by a 
step-by-step evolutionary process, an evolutionary process is the only way 
nature itself can proceed given that it has no planning capacity (this may be 
referred to as incremental complexity). Irreducible complexity then arises 
whenever all the parts of a structure have to be present and functional 
simultaneously for it to work, indicating-according to Behe-that the structure 
was designed and could not possibly have been gradually built by natural 
selection.

Behe's example of an irreducibly complex object is a mousetrap. If you take 
away any of the minimal elements that make the trap work it will lose its 
function; on the other hand, there is no way to assemble a mousetrap gradually 
from a natural phenomenon, because it won't work until the last piece is 
assembled. Forethought, and therefore intelligent design, is necessary. Of 
course it is. After all, mousetraps as purchased in hardware stores are indeed 
human products; we know that they are intelligently designed. But what of 
biological structures? Behe claims that, while evolution can explain a lot of 
the visible diversity among living organisms, it is not enough when we come to 
the molecular level. The cell and several of its fundamental components and 
biochemical pathways are, according to him, irreducibly complex.

The problem with this statement is that it is contradicted by the available 
literature on comparative studies in microbiology and molecular biology, which 
Behe conveniently ignores (Miller 1996). For example, geneticists are 
continuously showing that biochemical pathways are partly redundant. 
Redundancy is a common feature of living organisms where different genes are 
involved in the same or in partially overlapping functions. While this may 
seem a waste, mathematical models show that evolution by natural selection has 
to produce molecular redundancy because when a new function is necessary it 
cannot be carried out by a gene that is already doing something else, without 
compromising the original function. On the other hand, if the gene gets 
duplicated (by mutation), one copy is freed from immediate constraints and can 
slowly diverge in structure from the original, eventually taking over new 
functions. This process leads to the formation of gene "families," groups of 
genes clearly originated from a single ancestral DNA sequence, and that now 
are diversified and perform a variety of functions (e.g., the globins, which 
vary from proteins allowing muscle contraction to those involved in the 
exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide in the blood). As a result of 
redundancy, mutations can knock down individual components of biochemical 
pathways without compromising the overall function-contrary to the 
expectations of irreducible complexity.

(Notice that creationists, never ones to loose a bit, have also tried to claim 
that redundancy is yet another evidence of intelligent design, because an 
engineer would produce backup systems to minimize catastrophic failures should 
the primary components stop functioning. While very clever, this argument once 
again ignores the biology: the majority of duplicated genes end up as 
pseudogenes, literally pieces of molecular junk that are eventually lost 
forever to any biological utility [Max 1986].)

To be sure, there are several cases in which biologists do not know enough 
about the fundamental constituents of the cell to be able to hypothesize or 
demonstrate their gradual evolution. But this is rather an argument from 
ignorance, not positive evidence of irreducible complexity. William Paley 
advanced exactly the same argument to claim that it is impossible to explain 
the appearance of the eye by natural means. Yet, today biologists know of 
several examples of intermediate forms of the eye, and there is evidence that 
this structure evolved several times independently during the history of life 
on Earth (Gehring and Ikeo 1999). The answer to the classical creationist 
question, "What good is half an eye?" is "Much better than no eye at all"!

However, Behe does have a point concerning irreducible complexity. It is true 
that some structures simply cannot be explained by slow and cumulative 
processes of natural selection. From his mousetrap to Paley's watch to the 
Brooklyn Bridge, irreducible complexity is indeed associated with intelligent 
design. The problem for ID theory is that there is no evidence so far of 
irreducible complexity in living organisms.

The Complexity-Specification Criterion
William Dembski uses an approach similar to Behe to back up creationist 
claims, in that he also wants to demonstrate that intelligent design is 
necessary to explain the complexity of nature. His proposal, however, is both 
more general and more deeply flawed. In his book The Design Inference (Dembski 
1998a) he claims that there are three essential types of phenomena in nature: 
"regular," random, and designed (which he assumes to be intelligent). A 
regular phenomenon would be a simple repetition explainable by the fundamental 
laws of physics, for example the rotation of Earth around the Sun. Random 
phenomena are exemplified by the tossing of a coin. Design enters any time 
that two criteria are satisfied: complexity and specification (Dembski 1998b).
There are several problems with this neat scenario. First of all, leaving 
aside design for a moment, the remaining choices are not limited to regularity 
and randomness. Chaos and complexity theory have established the existence of 
self-organizing phenomena (Kauffman 1993; Shanks and Joplin 1999), situations 
in which order spontaneously appears as an emergent property of complex 
interactions among the parts of a system. And this class of phenomena, far 
from being only a figment of mathematical imagination as Behe maintains, are 
real. For example, certain meteorological phenomena such as tornados are 
neither regular nor random but are the result of self-organizing processes.

But let us go back to complexity-specification and take a closer look at these 
two fundamental criteria, allegedly capable of establishing intelligent agency 
in nature. Following one of Dembski's examples, if SETI (Search for 
Extraterrestrial Intelligence) researchers received a very short signal that 
may be interpreted as encoding the first three prime numbers, they would 
probably not rush to publish their findings. This is because even though such 
signal could be construed as due to some kind of intelligence, it is so short 
that its occurrence can just as easily be explained by chance. Given the 
choice, a sensible scientist would follow Ockham's razor and conclude that the 
signal does not constitute enough evidence for extraterrestrial intelligence. 
However, also according to Dembski, if the signal were long enough to encode 
all the prime numbers between 2 and 101, the SETI people would open the 
champagne and celebrate all night. Why? Because such signal would be both too 
complex to be explained by chance and would be specifiable, meaning that it is 
not just a random sequence of numbers, it is an intelligible message.

The specification criterion needs to be added because complexity by itself is 
a necessary but not sufficient condition for design (Roche 2001). To see this, 
imagine that the SETI staff receives a long but random sequence of signals. 
That sequence would be very complex, meaning that it would take a lot of 
information to actually archive or repeat the sequence (you have to know where 
all the 0s and 1s are), but it would not be specifiable because the sequence 
would be meaningless.

Dembski is absolutely correct that plenty of human activities, such as SETI, 
investigations into plagiarism, or encryption, depend on the ability to detect 
intelligent agency. Where he is wrong is in assuming only one kind of design. 
For him design equals intelligence and, even though he admitted that such an 
intelligence may be an advanced extraterrestrial civilization, his preference 
is for a god, possibly of the Christian variety.

The problem is that natural selection, a natural process, also fulfills the 
complexity-specification criterion, thereby demonstrating that it is possible 
to have unintelligent design in nature. Living organisms are indeed complex. 
They are also specifiable, meaning that they are not random assemblages of 
organic compounds, but are clearly formed in a way that enhances their chances 
of surviving and reproducing in a changing and complex environment. What, 
then, distinguishes organisms from the Brooklyn Bridge? Both meet Dembski's 
complexity-specification criterion, but only the bridge is irreducibly 
complex. This has important implications for design.

In response to some of his critics, Dembski (2000) claimed that intelligent 
design does not mean optimal design. The criticism of suboptimal design has 
often been advanced by evolutionists who ask why God would do such a sloppy 
job with creation that even a mere human engineer can easily determine where 
the flaws are. For example, why is it that human beings have hemorrhoids, 
varicose veins, backaches, and foot aches? If you assume that we were 
"intelligent-ly" designed, the answer must be that the designer was rather 
incompetent-something that would hardly please a creationist. Instead, 
evolutionary theory has a single answer to all these questions: humans evolved 
bipedalism (walking with an erect posture) only very recently, and natural 
selection has not yet fully adapted our body to the new condition (Olshansky 
et al. 2001). Our closest primate relatives, chimps, gorillas, and the like, 
are better adapted to their way of life, and therefore are less "imperfect" 
than ourselves!

Dembski is of course correct in saying that intelligent design does not mean 
optimal design. As much as the Brooklyn Bridge is a marvel of engineering, it 
is not perfect, meaning that it had to be constructed within the constraints 
and limitations of the available materials and technology, and it still is 
subject to natural laws and decay. The bridge's vulnerability to high winds 
and earthquakes, and its inadequacy to bear a volume of traffic for which it 
was not built can be seen as similar to the back pain caused by our recent 
evolutionary history. However, the imperfection of living organisms, already 
pointed out by Darwin, does do away with the idea that they were created by an 
omnipotent and omnibenevolent creator, who surely would not be limited by laws 
of physics that He Himself made up from scratch.


The Four Fundamental Types of Design and How to Recognize Them
Given these considerations, I would like to propose a system that includes 
both Behe's and Dembski's suggestions, while at the same time showing why they 
are both wrong in concluding that we have evidence for intelligent design in 
the universe. Figure 1 summarizes my proposal. Essentially, I think there are 
four possible kinds of design in nature which, together with Dembski's 
categories of "regular" and random phenomena, and the addition of chaotic and 
self-organizing phenomena, truly exhaust all possibilities known to us. 
Science recognizes regular, random, and self-organizing phenomena, as well as 
the first two types of design described in figure 1. The other two types of 
design are possible in principle, but I contend that there is neither 
empirical evidence nor logical reason to believe that they actually occur. 
The first kind of design is non-intelligent-natural, and it is exemplified by 
natural selection within Earth's biosphere (and possibly elsewhere in the 
universe). The results of this design, such as all living organisms on Earth, 
are not irreducibly complex, meaning that they can be produced by incremental, 
continuous (though not necessarily gradual) changes over time. These objects 
can be clearly attributed to natural processes also because of two other 
reasons: they are never optimal (in an engineering sense) and they are clearly 
the result of historical processes. For example, they are full of junk, 
nonutilized or underutilized parts, and they resemble similar objects 
occurring simultaneously or previously in time (see, for example, the fossil 
record). Notice that some scientists and philosophers of science feel 
uncomfortable in considering this "design" because they equate the term with 
intelligence. But I do not see any reason to embrace such limitation. If 
something is shaped over time-by whatever means-such that it fulfills a 
certain function, then it is designed and the question is simply of how such 
design happened to materialize. The teeth of a tiger are clearly designed to 
efficiently cut into the flesh of its prey and therefore to promote survival 
and reproduction of tigers bearing such teeth.

The second type of design is intelligent-natural. These artifacts are usually 
irreducibly complex, such as a watch designed by a human. They are also not 
optimal, meaning that they clearly compromise between solutions to different 
problems (trade-offs) and they are subject to the constraints of physical 
laws, available materials, expertise of the designer, etc. Humans may not be 
the only ones to generate these objects, as the artifacts of any 
extraterrestrial civilization would fall into the same broad category.

The third kind of design, which is difficult, if not impossible, to 
distinguish from the second, is what I term intelligent-supernatural-sloppy. 
Objects created in this way are essentially indistinguishable from human or ET 
artifacts, except that they would be the result of what the Greeks called a 
Demiurge, a minor god with limited powers. Alternatively, they could be due to 
an evil omnipotent god that just amuses himself with suboptimal products. The 
reason intelligent-supernatural-sloppy design is not distinguishable from some 
instances (but by all means not all) of intelligent-natural design is Arthur 
C. Clarke's famous third law: from the point of view of a technologically less 
advanced civilization, the technology of a very advanced civilization is 
essentially indistinguishable from magic (such as the monolith in his 2001: A 
Space Odyssey). I would be very interested if someone could suggest a way 
around Clarke's law.

Finally, we have intelligent-supernatural-perfect design, which is the result 
of the activity of an omnipotent and omnibenevolent god. These artifacts would 
be both irreducibly complex and optimal. They would not be constrained by 
either trade-offs or physical laws (after all, God created the laws 
themselves). While this is the kind of god many Christian fundamentalists 
believe in (though some do away with the omnibenevolent part), it's quite 
clear from the existence of human evil as well as of natural catastrophes and 
diseases, that such god does not exist. Dembski recognizes this difficulty 
and, as I pointed out above, admits that his intelligent design could even be 
due to a very advanced extraterrestrial civilization, and not to a 
supernatural entity at all (Dembski 2000).


Conclusions
In summary, it seems to me that the major arguments of Intelligent Design 
theorists are neither new nor compelling:

It is simply not true that science does not address all Aristotelian causes, 
whenever design needs to be explained;

While irreducible complexity is indeed a valid criterion to distinguish 
between intelligent and non-intelligent design, these are not the only two 
possibilities, and living organisms are not irreducibly complex (e.g., see 
Shanks and Joplin 1999);

The complexity-specification criterion is actually met by natural selection, 
and cannot therefore provide a way to distinguish intelligent from 
non-intelligent design;

If supernatural design exists at all (but where is the evidence or compelling 
logic?), this is certainly not of the kind that most religionists would likely 
subscribe to, and it is indistinguishable from the technology of a very 
advanced civilization.

Therefore, Behe's, Dembski's, and other creationists' (e.g., Johnson 1997) 
claims that science should be opened to supernatural explanations and that 
these should be allowed in academic as well as public school curricula are 
unfounded and based on a misunderstanding of both design in nature and of what 
the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution (Mayr and Provine 1980) is all about.

Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Melissa Brenneman, Will Provine, and Niall Shanks for 
insightful comments on earlier versions of this article, as well as Michael 
Behe, William Dembski, Ken Miller, and Barry Palevitz for indulging in 
correspondence and discussions with me over these matters.

References

Behe, M.J. 1996. Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution. New York, N.Y.: Free Press. 

Cohen, S.M. 2000. The four causes. Accessed on 5/16/00 at faculty.washington.edu/smcohen. 

Darwin, C. [1859] 1910. The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection: 
Or, the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life. New York, N.Y.: A.L. Burt. 

Dembski, W.A. 1998a. The Design Inference. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. 

---. 1998b. Reinstating design within science. Rhetoric & Public Affairs 1:503-518. 

---. 2000. Intelligent design is not optimal design. Accessed on 2/3/00 at www.meta-list.org. 

Edis, T. 2001. Darwin in mind: Intelligent Design meets artificial intelligence. Skeptical Inquirer 25(2): 35-39. 

Gehring, W.J., and K. Ikeo. 1999. Pax 6, mastering eye morphogenesis and eye evolution. Trends in Genetics 15:371-377. 

Johnson, P. 1997. Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds. Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press. 

Kauffman, S.A. 1993. The Origins of Order. New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press. 

Max, E.E. 1986. Plagiarized errors and molecular genetics: Another argument in 
the evolution-creation controversy. Creation/Evolution 9:34-46. 

Mayr, E., and W.B. Provine. 1980. The Evolutionary Synthesis: Perspectives on 
the Unification of Biology. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 

Miller, K.R. 1996. The biochemical challenge to evolution. Accessed on 
10/30/99 at biomed.brown.edu/faculty/M/Miller/Miller.html. 

Olshansky, S.J., A.C. Bruce, and R.N. Butler. 2001. If humans were built to 
last. Scientific American March, pp. 50-55. 

Paley, W. 1831. Natural Theology: Or, Evidences of the Existence and 
Attributes of the Deity, Collected from the Appearances of Nature. Boston, 
Mass: Gould, Kendall, and Lincoln, . 

Pigliucci, M. 2000. Chance, necessity, and the new holy war against science. A 
review of W.A. Dembski's The Design Inference. BioScience 50(1): pp. 79-81. 
January. 

Roche, D. 2001. A bit confused: creationism and information theory. Skeptical 
Inquirer 25(2):40-42. 

Shanks, N., and K.H. Joplin. 1999. Redundant complexity: A critical analysis 
of intelligent design in biochemistry. Philosophy of Science 66:268-282. 

About the Author
Massimo Pigliucci is associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology a 
tthe University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN 37996-1100, and author of Tales of 
the Rational: Skeptical Essays About Nature and Science. His essays can be 
found at http://fp.bio.utk.edu/skeptic

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