Dear Peter,

Thanks for your questions, and I apologize for being delayed in answering.  I am lecturing this week in Los Angeles, and have long days with students (my lectures run all day) and limited internet access at my hotel (argh).

When I consider the testability of intelligent design (ID), I start with the profane and mundane: ordinary inferences to intelligent causation.  Broken window on my Honda minivan, Garmin GPS unit gone, Cook County road atlas still there (this actually happened to me after a lecture at the Univ. of Chicago a couple of years ago).  Now, why is it reasonable to call 911 on my cell phone, to report a theft?

On analysis -- and I'd love to write a post or two for Ricochet, sketching this out on my flight home to Chicago tomorrow -- it turns out that the logical structure of mundane design inferences, which everyone regards as rational, doesn't differ in any substantial way from the scary ID inferences involving biological objects.  

Which goes some way towards explaining the fact that many ID critics (in science or philosophy) are currently building careers trying to test ID proposals.  More on that later today.  Gotta lecture.

Brian,

Here's a slice from a long chapter I wrote with Steve Meyer (and others) on what may be the design signal in the Cambrian Explosion:

...we see in the fossil record several distinctive features...of designed systems, including (1) a quantum or discontinuous increase in specified complexity or information; (2) a top-down pattern of innovation in which large-scale morphological disparity arises before small-scale diversity; (3) the persistence of structural disparities between separate organizational systems; and (4) the discrete or simultaneous emergence of functionally integrated material parts within novel organizational body plans.  When we encounter objects that manifest any of these several features and we know how they arose, we invariably find that a purposeful agent or intelligent designer played a causal role in their origin.

If you're interested, I can send you the whole chapter.  Contact me at nelsonpa@alumni.uchicago.edu.

Wonderful.  In my professional life, however -- lecturing on these topics at universities here, in Europe, and in South America -- my shins are often bruised (so to speak) by knee-jerk reactions.

But Ricochet does strike me as an oasis of civility, bless the site.

Complex people, complex wine.  Give me both.

In my ideal universe, every member here would have been present as an observer at the Tuscany meeting, where we discussed issues such as the following:

Beginning some 555 million years ago the Earth’s biota changed in profound and fundamental ways, going from an essentially static system billions of years in existence to the one we find today, a dynamic and awesomely complex system whose origin seems to defy explanation. Part of the intrigue with the Cambrian explosion is that numerous animal phyla with very distinct body plans arrive on the scene in a geological blink of the eye, with little or no warning of what is to come in rocks that predate this interval of time...Thus, elucidating the materialistic basis of the Cambrian explosion has become more elusive, not less, the more we know about the event itself, and cannot be explained away by coupling extinction of intermediates with long stretches of geologic time, despite the contrary claims of some modern neo-Darwinists.

(K.J. Peterson et al., "MicroRNAs and metazoan macroevolution: insights into canalization, complexity, and the Cambrian explosion," BioEssays 31 [2009]:736.)

Could the apparent suddenness of the explosion be a signal of design?

I don't disregard any of these things, nor do I favor teaching intelligent design in public schools.

I was in Yunnan Province in 1999 because my PhD work at the University of Chicago concerned (in part) the Cambrian Explosion: the geologically sudden appearance of nearly all animal groups about 535-545 million years ago.  This event in the history of life, well-known to Darwin, has resisted neo-Darwinian explanations, as discussions at the Chinese conference revealed.  Among the scientists present, the Chinese paleontologists were the most open to considering alternatives to Darwinian theory; the Europeans, less so, but still open; the Americans, however, reacted with extreme hostility to the "intelligent design" speakers present, which included myself, Michael Denton, and Jonathan Wells.  Their reaction stemmed in large measure, I'd say, from the cultural conditions I sketched above, in my guest post.

Evolution is a scientific theory, but more than that.

Hello all,

I'm awaiting instructions from Claire about how to comment here, responding to individual members.  But a global point in the interim: much of what I wrote in "The C Word" should be seen as ironic, and expressed in the voice of one part of our culture, not my own. For instance, the paragraph beginning with the Walmart shopping carts expresses a mass of erroneous but widely-shared perceptions, dumping unique human beings into a cultural bin labelled "religious fundamentalists."  In my own voice: I have friends with conceal-and-carry permits who hold PhDs from Ivy League universities.  I also have friends who fit perfectly into the Montauk and Martha's Vineyard paragraph, who alas are weighed down with prejudices that they really need to shake off -- prejudices far worse than those they impute to others.

One reason I love Claire so much is her unwillingness to throw people into convenient cultural bins.  The same is true of her father.

More soon when I learn how to post here properly.

Thanks, Claire.  I'll be happy to contribute here occasionally, as long as I don't scare readers away, or annoy them.

The bio you posted is a few years' old, and I didn't write it (some PR staffer at Discovery Institute did), but at the time it was accurate.  Readers can see a more recent bio by clicking on my name / byline, next to the "The C Word" post.  The monograph on common descent, mentioned in the older bio, is still under submission at the Evolutionary Monograph series, but the editor (and my friend) Leigh Van Valen, died last October.  So publication is delayed.  

"Critique" is listed as a transitive verb in my Random House desk dictionary -- "to review or analyze critically" -- but I don't much like the word used that way either.