Blue Collar Scientist

Seriously - it does. Just not in the way today’s intelligent design creationists think.

Over at Post-Darwinist, Denyse O’Leary has written some pablum about the scientific predictions made by intelligent design creationism (hat tip to Pharyngula). The entry starts out by citing a question posed on another forum:

can [anyone] provide any samples of things that intelligent design theory has predicted, which researchers have later determined to be true?

O’Leary attempts to respond:

No good theory will be found for a random origin of the universe….

No good theory will be found for a random origin of life….

Complete series of transitional fossils will not usually be found….

Discovering the true mechanisms of bursts of natural creativity may be of immense value to us….

No account of human evolution will show a long slow emergence from unconsciousness to semi-consciousness to consciousness….

O’Leary seems to have a problem understanding the simplest of questions - she was asked for examples of things that intelligent design creationism predicted, and were later found to be true. But she’s actually making up a laundry list of things that intelligent design creationism supposedly predicts that will never be found to be true. And somehow this supports intelligent design creationism.

It’s a pretty easy sport, and I’d like to play. I hereby confidently predict, based entirely upon what the theory of evolution says about the world, that it will never be found that invisible pink unicorns exist.

Ha! See what I did there? I have single-handedly proved evolution is true.*

Buried amongst O’Leary’s “nine predictions” are some statements that when initially evaluated, might appear to be theoretical predictions in the scientific sense. Such as:

We will discover the functions of many brain areas whose functions we did not know before.

This isn’t a prediction of intelligent design creationism, its a prediction based upon an empirical observation of the progress of human knowledge. Evolution predicts we will discover the functions of previously mysterious brain areas, too, and for two reasons. One reason is that evolution predicts that the phenotype will not be purposeless. The other is that the philosophical and epistemological foundations of evolution (and all scientific theory) presuppose that knowledge can be obtained.

Note that O’Leary disagrees with that last bit - most of her predictions are that knowledge can not be obtained. This is the fundamental weakness of intelligent design creationism - it presumes that answers aren’t available, that because we don’t know something, it must have been god, or little green space aliens, that did it.

The next doozy isn’t even a complete sentence:

Better health care for people with complex illnesses.

Again, I’m pretty sure that every evolutionary biologist for the last century has predicted that a better understanding of evolution (including evolution’s sub-specialties of genetics, inheritance, development, and biochemistry) would lead to better health care.

The problem here is that the intelligent design creationists do not understand how to identify a unique or distinct prediction made by their supposed hypothesis. When scientists evaluate rival hypotheses that seek to explain the same phenomenon, they focus on the predictions that contradict each other. That way, by testing one of them, they can generate evidence that favors one hypothesis over another.

I know I’m only a layman in this field, and I know I’m swimming against the current here and that the mighty PZ Myers says otherwise, but I believe that intelligent design creationism does make predictions. I think O’Leary could have posted some coherent predictions of intelligent design creationism, but that she didn’t, because those predictions have been proven false.

Intelligent design creationism claims (I’m taking this claim from the book Of Pandas and People, which is a generally-recognized as valid source among intelligent design creationists) that different creatures are specially created and are not related.

If that were so, I believe that we would find that these creatures would be made of the most appropriate chemical compounds given their phenotype and environment. But this turns out to not be so - out of a possible thousands of amino acids, all of life’s protein is built by only twenty of them, and all the species in the world can only produce a couple hundred amino acids. Despite this, some amino acids that are not used or made by living organisms would be quite useful to many living creatures today. For example, synthetic amino acids with efficient chelating properties might be quite useful to organisms living in areas with arsenic-contaminated water. Yet such organisms lack such useful amino acids and must make do with less effective chelators.

Evolution, on the other hand, predicts that life will be parsimonious in its building blocks, because, the theory says, a mutation that allows the synthesis of a new amino acid is much less likely than a mutation that repurposes an existing one for a new function or a new piece of anatomy.

More fundamentally, I think intelligent design creationism predicts that all organisms should be able to synthesize all of the amino acids necessary to their life. There’s no reason why, given that so much of an organism’s genotype is noncoding and therefore available to undertake this trivial function, that an intelligent designer would not have given every organism this ability But this turns out not to be the case - in many organisms, some necessary amino acids must be consumed, and cannot be produced.

Meanwhile, evolution predicts that some organisms will lack the ability to synthesize an essential amino acid. One of several ways this might happen is as a result of a deleterious mutation - the species may nevertheless survive as long as the essential amino acid is present in their diet.

Intelligent design creationism predicts that, since insects, fungus, lobsters, snails, and octopus are unique, distinct, unrelated creatures, and since they live very distinct lifestyles with vastly different requirements, that they would not be made of the same substances. What is actually found in nature, though, is that the cell walls of fungus, the shells of lobsters, the teeth of snails, and the beak of the octopus are all made of the same substance - chitin.

But evolutionary theory predicts that many different structures with very different functions in many different organisms will be made of the same substance, because it is easier for variation and mutation to put an existing substance to work in a new way, than to come up with a whole new appropriately designed substance for the task in the way an intelligent designer would.

I could go on, but suffice it to say that I think biologists unnecessarily denigrate the predictive power of intelligent design creationism. The predictions are there - they’re just false. They’ve long since proven to be baloney. I think it is time that the actual experts who walk among us point this out. These ideas have already been tried, they’re not true, and that’s going to have more effect swaying an undecided school board member than making the bland assertion that intelligent design creationism makes no predictions.

* By no means should you believe this claim.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008 at 1:19 pm and is filed under evolution. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.