Mark Hartwig, "The science of design" (2005)

The science of design

Intelligent design (ID) is grounded on the observation that the world looks very much as if it had an intelligent source. The late Nobel laureate Francis Crick, co-discoverer of DNA’s structure and an outspoken critic of religion, remarked, “Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed but rather evolved.”

For example, consider the cell. Even the simplest cells bristle with high-tech machinery. On the outside, their surfaces are studded with sensors, gates, pumps and identification markers. Some bacteria even sport rotary outboard motors that they use to navigate their environment.

Inside, cells are jam-packed with power plants, assembly lines, recycling units and more. Miniature monorails whisk materials from one part of the cell to another.

ID theorists contend that living organisms like the cell appear designed because they are designed. And they’ve developed rigorous new concepts to test their idea.

In contrast to what is called creation science, which parallels biblical theology, ID rests on two basic assumptions: namely, that intelligent agents exist and that their effects are empirically detectable.

Its chief tool is specified complexity. That’s a mouthful, and the math behind it is forbidding, but the basic idea is simple: An object displays specified complexity when it has lots of parts arranged in a recognizable pattern.

For example, the article you’re now reading has thousands of characters, which could have been arranged in zillions of ways. Yet it fits a recognizable pattern: It’s not just a jumble of letters (which is also complex), but an article written in English. Any rational person would conclude that it was designed.

The effectiveness of such thinking is confirmed by massive experience. As William Dembski, author of “The Design Inference,” points out, “In every instance where we find specified complexity, and where (its) history is known, it turns out that design actually is present.”

Thus, if we could trace the creation of a book, our investigation would lead us to the author. You could say, then, that specified complexity is a signature of design.

To see how this applies to biology, consider the little outboard motor that bacteria such as E. coli use to navigate their environment. This water-cooled contraption, called a flagellum, comes equipped with a reversible engine, drive shaft, U-joint and a long whip-like propeller. It hums along at a cool 17,000 rpm. And flagellum is integrated into a sensory/guidance system that maneuvers the bacterium toward nutrients and away from noxious chemicals — a system so complex that computer simulation is required to understand it in its entirety. That system is meshed with other systems.

Decades of research indicate that the flagellum’s complexity is enormous. It takes about 50 genes to create a working flagellum. Each of those genes is as complex as a sentence with hundreds of letters.

Moreover, the pattern — a working flagellum — is highly specified. Deviate from that pattern, knock out a single gene, and our bug is dead in the water.

Such highly specified complexity, which demands the presence of every part, indicates an intelligent origin. It also defies any explanation, such as contemporary Darwinism, that relies on the stepwise accumulation of random genetic change.

In fact, if you want to run the numbers, as Dembski does in his book “No Free Lunch,” it boils down to the following: If every elementary particle in the observed universe were cranking out mutation events at the cosmic speed limit for a billion times the estimated age of the universe, they still could not produce the genes for a working flagellum.

Of course, what’s important here is not what we conclude about the flagellum or the cell, but how we study it. Calling design theorists religious is just a cheap way to dodge the issues. The public — and our students — deserve better than that.

Mark Hartwig has a Ph.D. in educational psychology from the University of California, Santa Barbara, specializing in statistics and research design. He was an early organizer of the intelligent design movement.