lpetrich

This is an inference that multiple designers had designed some entities; this is a natural extension of Dembski's "Design Inference".

This is an essential part of efforts to detect forged signatures; handwriting styles are individualized, and a close examination of a signature may reveal whether it was written with an imperfect imitation of someone else's style.

Handwriting analysis has also been useful in archeology; by that means, it was shown that the various Mycenaean Linear B tablets had been written by several scribes, each of whom had written several tablets.

Such stylistic analyses have been used in other fields; much of the debate about the authorship of various parts of the Bible has been based on stylistic analyses -- characteristic vocabulary, preoccupations, etc. More recently, the Unabomber was identified when someone recognized some familiar styling in the text of his manifesto.

Applying that to the world of life, one concludes that if many features had been designed, then there had likely been more than one designer. Camera-like eyes are sometimes pointed to as examples of design, but those of vertebrates have one characteristic architecture and those of cephalopods have another. So could there have been a separate designer for each? Charles Darwin himself, in his creationist years, had concluded that Australia's distinctive fauna might suggest that "there had been two Creators at work."

Likewise, predator-prey relationships suggest multiple designers, one for the predators and one for the prey, because predators are adapted for finding and catching prey, and prey are adapted for avoiding and resisting predators. Multiple food-chain levels suggest additional designers. Thus, in a grass-deer-wolf food chain, with deer eating grass and wolves eating deer, the grass, deer, and wolves had had separate designers.

In an attempted rebuttal, Walter ReMine has claimed to have demonstrated that there had only been one designer, but I've yet to see his "proof".

The multi-design inference must be an embarrassment for the Intelligent Design movement, because it goes against the theological predilections of many of its participants. However, I doubt that those like the Raelians would be terribly bothered by a multi-design inference.

Oolon Colluphid

Bravo lpetrich!

But I know what Creation's Terrier would say:

Surely the (single) designer just liked variety? Doesn't the plethora of designs on earth indicate just that? And if you're a vast intelligence such as God, there might be great pleasure to be found in ‘reinventing the wheel’ in different ways, trying out different ways of doing things. Some designs, such as aquatic streamlining, might be unavoidable because they are basically sound ways of doing things; but others could be just for the fun of it. And surely, if you are vastly intelligent and immortal, the world might be rather boring if it were otherwise.

Why else make a universe that seems, at its basic levels, to be inherently unpredictable? Such a universe would provide constant variety and interest by virtue of being unpredictable. So I don’t think your reasoning cuts any ice I’m afraid.

DT / CT

Jesus Tap-Dancin' Christ

Indeed that may be the case--yet with every stroke of the brush, every tweak of the organism, there remains the same characteristic touch of God that is distinguisiable in form, much as handwriting analyses shows who wrote what. Further, the use and disuse of specific patterns within the organism are evidence of exactly who designed said organism. With each individual, as one practices building, slight variations in style show up--leading to large differences (when viewed at the correct scale).

So while God may have opted to have two seperate eye types, and took pleasure re-inventing the wheel, the singnature of each eye's internal composistion and blueprints are different such that it is impossible for a single designer at work--most likely there are two.

Now, we all know who that second designer is--none other tan myslef, pre-tap-dancing days.
But at a fundamental level, if there were only one designer, no matter how unpredicatble he may attempt to be, his signature will always be left behind, making it possible to discern his involvement.

The universe, however, operates with four forces, three of which can actually be unified, with the fourth as yet ununified. It is the fact that we have, essentialy, two seperate kinds of basic forces (after siplification) that once again shows that the Father and the Son were having a pissing contest.

Naturally, I lost. After all, He is My Dad.

Chrestomathy

Jesus Christ, that's funny....

RBH

Ipetrich wroteNot to be immodest or anything, but see this thread on ISCID for an extended development of Multiple Designers Theory. Note that there is some considerable resistance to the "designer-centric" focus from IDists.

What the heck! AS long as I'm citing myself, see also my Validating Design Discrimination Methodologies on ISCID.

RBH

lpetrich

You beat me to it, RBH; in your comments, you've pointed out some of what I'd pointed out, like predator-prey relationships.

As to your challengers' requesting that you identify the number of designers of your car and of some computer game, that would be rather difficult, because both are composed of several disparate elements.

The more successful efforts at identifying multiple designers are cases where one compares fundamentally similar entities, like handwriting samples.

And in fairness, one can do that with computer games also; some parts of games fall into the category of being fundamentally similar entities, like levels, sprites, and models.

For those unfamiliar with computer games, many of them have several game worlds or levels that one can travel through or choose to visit; in some cases, one can identify designers by quirks of levels.

Sprites are 2D pictures of objects like game characters, items to pick up, and scenery objects; models are 3D versions of these. One can use one's favorite art-criticism techniques on these. But the quasi-Cubist appearance of many computer-game models is functional, not stylistic; it's a way of keeping rendering time down by simplifying the geometry.

lpetrich

I will concede that a single superpowerful designer can imitate several less-powerful designers. The trouble is that such a hypothesis tends to lack falsifiability; for sufficiently powerful designers, it would be difficult to rule out hypotheses like creation with apparent age, like Philip Gosse's Omphalos hypothesis.

Also, there is a parallel to the single-powerful-designer hypothesis in Biblical criticism.

Among present-day scholars, the favorite hypothesis of the authorship of its first five books is the JEDP hypothesis, which posits four separate sets of authors, each with a characteristic vocabulary and preoccupations.

The traditional hypothesis, however, is that all those five books had been written by Moses and only Moses, and its present-day defenders maintain that he had repeatedly switched stylistic gears as he wrote.

Principia

This is a fun topic!
But that's the beauty of the MDT. It tests the IDiots' prior commitments when they argue for ID (SDT style, of course). For all of their use of human design examples, I think they missed an obvious point -- there are presently a lot of "designers" in the universe. Why they would extrapolate certain design analogies and not others is really hypocritical. In another hypocrisy, one common ID response is that any good engineer would reuse parts that are optimal in some sense (e.g. the genetic code, IC systems, etc.). But then one finds in nature an assortment of redundant systems that perform similar function, yet show distinctly different paths of evolution. But, if good engineers recycle their wares, or better yet, if an engineer has the capacity to decide which system might perform better than the others over billions of years, then why would he make redundant parts of poorer quality? MDT is clearly a better explanation here. After all, in any human analogy, say, if we saw a semi vs. a sedan or an iBook vs. a Compaq laptop or a cave painting vs. Mona Lisa, we have the sense to say that they were made from different agencies. A research plan also immediately presents itself. For instance, classify all known enzymes according to overt function/purpose in its native environment. Across all classifications, determine how many "styles" of design there are, suggesting the number of designers. For optimal effect, reduce the list to all those items for which their current evolutionary pathways are not known.

RBH

Principia wroteAs I argued in the MDT OP, since single-designer theory is an impoverished special case of Multiple Designers Theory, MDT inherits all the support adduced for SDT. Anything one can say about SDT can be said about MDT. Can design be detected in biological phenomena? That supports MDT precisely as strongly as it supports SDT. And MDT is clearly more consistent with the biological facts.

I should say that the original idea for MDT grew out of Nic Tamzek's ITWA - Invisible Tinkering Warrior Armies - posted here some months ago. As is apparent from its name, Nic focused on the subset of mutually antagonistic designers responsible for predator/prey arms races and perhaps parasite/host arms races. MDT subsumes those along with mutualism and symbiosis, and thus is more comprehensive. As Ipetrich points out, SDT requires a designer with a serious personality disorder, able to take first the predator side then the prey side in a macabre dissociative creationist war with itself. MDT, on the other hand, provides a natural way to account for those kinds of phenomena.

The great task for MDT now is to systematize design discrimination methodologies. I offered some suggestions in the MDT posting, and Principia clearly has some ideas. Surely there is some bright young IDist out there who will pick up the baton and build the research program his or her elders seem unable to get off the ground.

RBH

Principia

Here's an article that does something rather close to what I had in mind wrt MDT: http://www.genome.org/cgi/content/full/8/8/779

Vol. 8, Issue 8, 779-790, August 1998
Analogous Enzymes: Independent Inventions in Enzyme Evolution
Michael Y. Galperin, D. Roland Walker, and Eugene V. Koonin
Now, of course, the IDiots seem loathe to consider the plausibility of "imaginary stories" such as gene transfer and "recruitment of enzymes that catalyze a similar but distinct reaction." OTOH, why would an intelligent designer go so far as to reinvent the wheel 34 different times? MDT seems applicable here.

EDIT: to add more of the same,