Intelligent Design
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Intelligent Design
An idea promoted and disseminated by various neo-Creationist proponents (see below), not to be confused with "classical" Creationism as touted by Duane+Gish and numerous others.
Intelligent Design (ID) is essentially the notion that life is so remarkably complicated, diverse, and impossibly non-random† that "special creation" by a "designer" stands alone as the credible explanation for its origin and current existence, asserting that ID can be inferred by excluding all other alternative hypotheses on probabilistic grounds to account for biological history and diversity.
It is contended the "irreducible complexity"†† of organisms' molecular machinery is so complex and necessitates all parts of a "biologic unit", e.g., an eye, to work in sychrony, that it shows life must have been designed. And further supposes that if any part of an eye (or a wing, etc.) were missing this would render the organ useless and non-adaptive to the organism, thereby demonstrating, to the minds of ID defenders - in a kind of Creationist analogue to "backwards engineering" - that such forms could not have developed through a process of Evolution by Natural Selection.
ID advocates don't necessarily believe in the literal truth of the Bible (e.g., of a "young" Earth) and may studiously refuse to offer anything on who or what "designed" life on Earth.
These are some major works by proponents advocating ID:
M+Behe "Darwin's Black Box" (1996) NY Free Press
W+Demski "The Design Inference" (1998) Cambridge Uni. Press
P Johnson " Defeating Darwin by Opening Minds" (1997) InterVarsity Press
For an overview and critique of ID and the Intelligent Design movement from a scientific perspective see, for example:
† apparently not appreciating the tendency to retain characteristics having adaptive value while "discarding" less adaptive characteristics via differential survival.
†† excerpt from Michael+Behe: “An irreducibly complex system cannot be produced directly (that is, by continuously improving the initial function, which continues to work by the same mechanism) by slight, successive modifications of a precursor system, because any precursor to an irreducibly complex system that is missing a part is by definition non-functional”. (emphasis added)
Consider whether the use of the word “improving” by Behe here is suitable and justified - in a particular environment having particular characteristics makes it more likely, as compared with having other characteristics (variability within populations), that organisms with the former will survive – what we might refer to as higher-level functions have emerged because this process of changes has accumulated and built upon characteristics passed on by surviving organisms – an organism living now has the characteristics it has, probabilistically, because its ancestors survived with those characteristics, that is, in consequence of Natural Selection (leaving aside mutations as a separate contributor to change).
(see also: Creationism, ’Creation-science’, Darwinism, Evolution, the principle of Natural Selection, Pseudo-science)
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Glossary of selected Judgement & Decision-making, Belief-related, and other Psychology terms A-Z » Labels:
Intelligent Design, argument from design, celestial watchmaker, Duane Gish, 'irreducible complexity', “Darwin’s Black Box” by Michael Behe, “The Design Inference” by W. Demski, “Defeating Darwin by Opening Minds” by P. Johnson, “Why Darwin Matters” by Michael Shermer |