The Panda's Thumb links a neat article about "incompetent design". It's a telling satire of Intelligent Design, although I suspect the humor of the former may be lost on the latter! Worthwhile reading.

This passage got me thinking:

Wise cites serious flaws in the systems of the human body as evidence that design in the universe exhibits not an obvious source of, but a sore lack of, intelligence.

One of the reasons I found it interesting, is because it mirrors the Intelligent Design theme that we can detect design in the first place. Can we?

I see no reason to believe design is empirically undetectable. There, I've said it.

Despite my dissatisfaction with the current arguments of intelligent design, I see no reason to doubt the underlying premise, that it is thoretically possible to detect design in nature. In fact, this is a trivial belief for me, since I can certainly distinguish Human artifacts from (for example) trees.

So taking it as axiomatic that one can detect design...what does that mean?

To approach it as an exercise in pattern-matching, let's assume that there is a Design Pattern (designed things match it) and a Natural Pattern (natural things match it). This follows from our axiom, because without some sort of pattern, we could not distinguish between the two classes.

In classic text pattern matching, a pattern matches a sequence of "tokens", until either a token fails to match, or the pattern is satisfied. In textual pattern matching the tokens are alphanumeric sequences, in "design pattern matching", the tokens would be qualities of the object. This list might include variables like weight, height, color, structure, orientation, relation to other objects, purpose, history, etc. The only thing our pattern excludes is a priori knowledge of whether a thing was designed.

Let's further assume these patterns are 100% accurate (we will revisit this later).

The Problem of the Ice Sculpture

As our test case, we will apply our patterns to a highly artificed sculpture. It's a massive piece of work, a complete 1/10 scale model of New York city. By clever use of waterwheels, pistons, and water flows, we even have traffic moving through the streets. We have tiny joggers, walking tiny dogs. It's a marvel of the age.

It's also made completely of ice. Of necessity we built it next to a lake, for easy access to water.

Applying our Natural Pattern seems a patent waste of time, but we do it anyway. Of course, it doesn't match, as no conceivable natural force could create such a thing. We apply our Design Pattern and boom! This is clearly a designed thing. We pat ourselves on the back, and take the night off to celebrate.

The next day we come back, and find a massive lake where our masterpiece once stood. It is a twin to the lake that was there yesterday, down to the trace minerals in the water. It IS the same water, after all.

We apply our Design Pattern to the lake, and it says...

...

...I don't know what it would say. I can't possibly guess, without access to those marvelous Patterns. However, I can see two possibilities:

1) The Design Pattern detects some design in the new lake. For example, the fact that the plants beneath the lake are land plants, and could not have grown under a natural lake. Or the fact that there is no creek which could feed the development of such a lake. Or something.

Here's the problem: While the Pattern may well detect design, it can't possibly detect the design we created. The city is *gone*, and we did not design a lake. The lake was an accident, resulting in an anomaly.

Is an anomaly enough for the Design Pattern to fire? It's certainly true that the Natural Pattern should return a "false" result (the lake is not natural). But was the lake *designed*, and if so by whom? Again - assuming that design requires intent - we did not design a lake.

2) The Design Pattern detects no design in the lake. This would be an unsurprising result if we accept that design is simply information, and information can be lost or destroyed. Another way of looking at this is that a Designer creates information, and our Design Pattern simply picks it up. Not an earthshaking result.

Of course, this is just another way of describing a transmission between a Designer and our Design Pattern, and transmissions are subject to noise. A noisy transmission of Design must result in an imperfect reception of it. Even assuming redundancy in the Design "signal", we can only come arbitrarily close to perfect reception.

I mentioned earlier that I would revision the perfection of our Patterns. Lacking perfect "transmission" of design, we cannot assume perfect reception of it, and our "perfect" Design Pattern cannot be an infallible detector of Design. Even in principle. Just as importantly, every Design we do detect may in fact be a false positive, and the probability of that is proportional the the "noise" of the transmission, and inversely proportional to it's "redundancy".

On the other hand, I can see no such restriction on our Natural Pattern.

Well, my head hurts, so I'm going to wrap this up for now. To recap:

1) I do not believe the detection of an anomaly is equivalent to the detection of design. Note that in our example, the "anomalous" lake could have been the result of an icy meteor falling.

2) I do not believe that every appearance of design can be certainly classified as such. Certainly some can, those with a short transmission path (i.e. recent) or high redundancy (i.e. obvious). Assigning a high probability to the detection of ancient, non-human design, is fraught with peril.

I've made some leaps of logic in that last paragraph, but I'll deal with them tomorrow...

Thermodynamics and snowflakes, oh my...

The American Spectator contains an article by Granville Sewell, where he revisits one of the classic objections to evolutionary theory. To wit, the dreaded Second Law of Thermodynamics.

(cue thunder and lightning)

Sewell seeks to pit the theory of natural selection against the second law, and show that natural selection violates entropy. Since it is axiomatic that nothing can violate entropy, natural selection must be flawed. Or so the argument goes. Of course, we at the Whirling Blade require a much higher degree of precision than your garden-variety political newsletter, and I will show where Sewell's argument lacks such precision.

Scalpels out? Alright, lets begin.

Sewell states:

It is a well-known prediction of the second law that, in a closed system, every type of order is unstable and must eventually decrease, as everything tends toward more probable (more random) states. Not only will carbon and temperature distributions become more disordered (more uniform), but the performance of all electronic devices will deteriorate, not improve.

We, of course, have no issue with this statement. In fact, it's worth restating the salient point, as it will eventually form the basis for a rebuttal:

every type of order is unstable and must eventually decrease

Do note the difference between the words "eventually" and "immediately". It is hard to imagine two words that, when interchanged, so completely alter the sense of a thought. One may learn, without fear, that he will eventually die. Swapping "immediately" in produces a rather different emotional state.

Onward. Sewell states:

Natural forces, such as corrosion, erosion, fire and explosions, do not create order, they destroy it.

And, unfortunately, we must disagree. There are very obvious examples of natural forces creating order. A dust cloud is less ordered than nine planets orbiting a Sun. Yet, according to current cosmological wisdom, a dust cloud formed our solar system. Atmospheric clouds are more disordered than rain, and if you continue to extract heat energy from THAT system, you get snowflakes. I would enjoy a discussion of how free water vapor is more highly ordered than fractal lattices of water molecules which are invariably hexagonal.

Natural forces can and do create order...temporarily. It is only in the great "eventual" that entropy wins out. To be fair to Sewell, mathematicians typically treat the time dimension as if the units were irrelevant. In the world of physical sciences, what is impossible in a second may be quite plausible in a century. Or vice versa. Sewell continues down this vein, building on his (incorrect) assumption:

The discovery that life on Earth developed through evolutionary "steps," coupled with the observation that mutations and natural selection -- like other natural forces -- can cause (minor) change, is widely accepted in the scientific world as proof that natural selection -- alone among all natural forces -- can create order out of disorder, and even design human brains with human consciousness.

Yet, as we have seen, natural selection is not the only natural force that can create order out of disorder. Gravity will do it. Electromagnetism will do it. Any of the four forces will, which is apparent in the fact that an atomic nucleus is more ordered than a cloud of quarks.

In a recent Mathematical Intelligencer article ("A Mathematician's View of Evolution," 22, number 4, 5-7, 2000), after outlining the specific reasons why it is not reasonable to attribute the major steps in the development of life to natural selection, I asserted that the idea that the four fundamental forces of physics alone could rearrange the fundamental particles of nature into spaceships, nuclear power plants, and computers, connected to laser printers, CRTs, keyboards and the Internet, appears to violate the second law of thermodynamics in a spectacular way

I tend to believe that when dealing with an axiomatic proposition, disproving the axiom is sufficient to disprove the proposition. I believe we have sufficient evidence that Sewell's axiom ("natural forces cannot create order") is false. The truth of his argument (or lack therof) must follow.

However, I cannot resist uncovering the contradiction in the preceding passage. According to Sewell, creating computers via the four forces appears to be a spectacular violation of the second law. In fact, by his arguments, the existence of computers is impossible, unless we posit that a computer is more disordered than a pre-solar dust cloud.

In addition, one can infer from his arguments that additional forces beyond the basic four, might make computers more plausible. In order for that to be true in his framework, these additional forces would still have to violate the second law, or they must be supernatural forces. Oy.

This leads to an interesting version of Arthur C. Clarke's famous law: "Any sufficiently advanced technology must have been created by magic". Oh, poor Arthur.

Since we have shown that natural forces can in fact increase local order, we do not need to create new ones by way of explanation.

On a final note, there is a fascinating article in Taipei Times, which proposes not only that intelligent life does not violate the second law, but that it is the result of the second law. Interesting stuff, and thanks to island for the link!

There was a worthwhile entry yesterday, touching on some facets of the Intelligent Design debate. In particular, tomday addresses the dismissive attitudes of the anti-ID faction. It's a nice write-up, and well worth the read. Although I consider myself an "opponent" of ID, my opposition is born mostly out of lack of quality in pro-ID arguments. tomday's reasoning is sound and interesting and consistent. ID needs more discussions in this vein if it is to be taken seriously.

If I may, I'd like to take two steps back from his article, and point out that ID is no longer a theory. It is patently true. We know for a fact that *some* species are the result of intelligent manipulation. The intelligence is Human intelligence, but since the type of intelligence is never specified in ID, the theory has been proven empirically.

And therein lies the problem with classic ID. As a theory, it is far too vague. What intelligence drives speciation? How does said intelligence interfere with an otherwise stochastic process? When did intelligence interfere? While it may be convenient to say that these are mere details surrounding the theory, they are in fact the definitions that outline what the theory is trying to say.

The "What Intelligence" question I have touched on. Humans have initiated breeding programs for thousands of years. Recently we have begun to dabble in direct genetic manipulation. Absent any restrictions on the identity of the Intelligence in ID, then the theory is true. It's been true for millennia.

Then, of course, there is the question of how did the Interfering Intelligence itself come to be? If the II was not itself evolved through intelligent interference, then we humans are the genetically-engineered corn, and ID is both false (for the II) and true (for Humans). In fact, for ID to be "true" requires an infinite regress of Interfering Intelligences designing intelligences who interfere. Since infinite "generations" can't happen in finite time, ID is false in this physical universe. Q.E.D...

...unless I have misunderstood either the definition of "interference", or the definition of "intelligence". Or perhaps I am unclear about whether the theory proposes every species must be interfered with, or "at least one". Which is entirely likely, since ID won't define any of those terms.

The "How" question is critical. Assuming an Interfering Intelligence exists, what are the general mechanisms of it's interference? Does it affect individuals, populations, species, or ecosystems? Does it have the capacity to redefine physical law? An intelligence with the capacity to affect entire ecosystems should not be a minor inference of ID. If anything, evidence of such an intelligence is *much* more important than the biology of a few species on one planet.

It's as if a theory were put forth about the existence of a footprint, with much discussion about how deep and wide the impression is, and a complete lack of interest in what actually made it.

Finally, the "When" issue. In discussions of this scope, we should always be conscious of the anthropic principle. Is ID a local phenomenon? Is it true for all species, at any point in time? Again, ID is trivially true for engineered bacteria. If we expect the theory to be worth discussing, we need a more rigorous scope definition, along the lines of "ID is true for this class of species", or something. In current ID literature I see nothing of the sort.

My opinion is that ID is, in many cases, a scientific veneer covering a religious message. Posts like tomday's are a reminder that some truly incisive minds are also wrestling with the issue, and remind us not to dismiss it out of hand. Still, the "theory" of ID needs more than smart people behind it.

Most of all it needs, well...an actual theory.

I can't believe I made a blog. I never really understood the phenomenon, I assumed it was the newest aberration of an increasingly narcissistic society. No one really cares what you think, nor what I think for that matter.

But of course that's not true. *I* certainly care what I think, and no doubt your opinions are important to you. Moreover, out of the 6 billion-plus people on the planet, I couldn't possibly say that not a single one is interested in the opinions of an anonymous stranger. Since anonymous strangers are by definition, interchangeable - I might as well be the one. Right?

So, having taken the plunge into massive hubris, pretension is not far behind...why call it "The Whirling Blade"?

Well, what is a blade? It's a Samurai Katana, a Knight's Bastard Sword, the Flint Knife in a Neanderthal's hand...it requires no electricity, no combustion, no moving parts, no internal structure. A blade is just a piece of something with a sufficient edge, and you know what? Good luck even specifying what "a sufficient edge" is. A blade is absurdly abstract, a thing defined solely by an indefinable feature.

And yet. At the very same time...

It is the tool that most defines our species. Need to harvest crops? Use a scythe. Need to dig a hole? Use a shovel. Build a house? Use an axe, or a saw, or a plane. Save a life? Use a scalpel. Defend your lands, or expand them? Use a sword.

A blade is an instantiation of the desire to penetrate, to separate, to defeat resistance and give shape. A blade is the physical avatar of human intellect, a projection of will onto the material plane. We say someone gave "an incisive analysis", or that they have a "cutting wit". The Gordian Knot certainly wasn't smashed with...a hammer.

Where was I going with this? Oh yes...this is a place where I will overanalyze, pontificate inappropriately, and dissect minutely...just for the sheer helljoy of it. A place to swing my blade indiscriminately, and see what the insides of things look like. I may be slightly, uh, edgy. Ouch.

Welcome to The Whirling Blade.