lpetrich

The whole issue of design is not as cut-and-dried as the advocates of the existence of "specified complexity" seem to think; let us consider these examples of supposed design by supposed inhabitants of other celestial bodies:

Thanx to <a href="http://www.talkorigins.org/design/faqs/nfl/" target="_blank">this detailed document on Dembski's claims</a>, I've learned of a curious example of such supposed design: Johannes Kepler had thought that the Moon's craters had been created by its inhabitants, because they are highly nonrandom arrangements of mountains. But his successors of the last half-century have shown that meteorite impacts are a much more plausible hypothesis.

In the eighteenth century and thereabouts, many people had believed that all the other planets were inhabited, on the ground that God would not let a world go to waste. But such people were rather short on evidence.

Fast forward to the 1890's, when GIovanni Schiaperelli reported "channels" on the surface of Mars. However, he had written in Italian, using the word "canali", which got mistranslated as "canals", implying intelligent design. The likes of Percival Lowell took up on this idea, speculating in detail about what the Martians were like -- while many astronomers gradually became convinced that those "canals" or "channels" were an optical illusion. Some claimed to have seen them, and some claimed that they had never done so, though certainly not for lack of trying. And some claimed that Mars had a lot of barely-visible detail that was only visible when the Earth's atmosphere was especially still along the line of sight.

Spacecraft offered a much better view than was ever available from the Earth, and some have taken huge archives of pictures. And only one or two of the Schiaperelli-Lowell channels/canals matched features in those pictures; the large majority of them were optical illusions.

To see, try "Marte ha canali" with Italian-&gt;English at some automatic-translator site like <a href="http://babelfish.altavista.com" target="_blank">http://babelfish.altavista.com</a> or <a href="http://www.freetranslation.com" target="_blank">http://www.freetranslation.com</a> (I don't really know Italian; I translated "Mars has channels" into Italian and put "canali" in the right place). Perhaps we ought to ask Massimo Pigliucci about this question.

But no sooner had canals been discredited than another Martian feature came into prominence -- the Mars Face. Planetologist Harold Masursky had joked, IIRC, that "this is the guy who built the canals of Mars". However, from some observation and lighting angles, it does not look much like a face; it looks much like some nearby rocks that do not look much like a face.

Such speculation has extended beyond the Solar System; the first pulsar discovered was named LGM-1, after a joking speculation that it was a beacon run by extraterrestrials. But pulsars have turned out to be neutron stars, which are a little more massive than the Sun, yet squeezed into dimensions comparable with that of some big city. And with a luminosity comparable to the Sun's.

So let's summarize:

Moon's craters: natural phenomenon (impacts)
Martian canals: false perception of barely-visible detail
Mars Face: false perception of a real object
Pulsars: natural phenomenon (neutron stars)

I wonder if IDers would be willing to explain why all these phenomena represent "unspecified complexity". And it must be with reference to the observations themselves and only the observations themselves, and not with their causes.

HRG

AFAICT, Dembski makes a "No true Scotsman" argument for those cases: when we know the natural mechanism which caused X, X by definition has only "apparent specific complexity".

This means of course that we never can tell whether an object has "true CSI" without knowing the process which produced it.

Regards,
HRG.

lpetrich

Thus making the concept devoid of predictive value. Which makes me wonder if Dembski has really thought about that, as opposed to waving around yet more mathematical gibberish.

Bilboe

Yeah, I read his remarks about Kepler and the moon craters. I was surprised at his answer. I would have thought that he would try to show that the craters weren't all that complex. They were circular, and Kepler couldn't figure out how that could happen on the moon without intelligent design. But we see circular patterns in the dirt every time it rains. Now if the craters had been in a recognizable pattern -- say, the prime numbers from 2 to 101 -- that would be harder to explain by non-intelligent causes.
Likewise with the other examples. If better telescopes had continued to see straight lines on Mars and if even fly-by satellites showed straight, deep trenches, would we still claim non-intelligent causes? If the latest photos had shown a face in detail, would we still say it was just a natural formation?

lpetrich

I think that bilboe is ultimately correct here, especially if one could eventually find more direct evidence of the designers, such as landing a spacecraft and taking pictures of some abandoned base or something like that.

However, even then, it might still be possible to think of some weird undesigned natural phenomenon that does the trick.

For example, it is seriously speculated that 13-year and 17-year cicadas have their prime-number lifespan lengths as an adaptation that gets them out of sync with predators' population cycles; I'm not sure how much testing has been done on that hypothesis, however.