by William A. Dembski
Access Research Network
October 25, 2002


Keynote address delivered at RAPID Conference (Research and Progress in
Intelligent Design), Biola University, La Mirada, California, 25 October 2002.
The aim of this conference was to examine the current state of intelligent
design research.

Recently I asked a well-known ID sympathizer what shape he thought the ID
movement was in. I raised the question because, after some initial enthusiasm on
his part three years ago, his interest seemed to have flagged. Here is what he
wrote:

An enormous amount of energy has been expended on "proving" that ID is bogus,
"stealth creationism," "not science," and so on. Much of this, ironically,
violates the spirit of science. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. But
on the other side, too much stuff from the ID camp is repetitive, imprecise
and immodest in its claims, and otherwise very unsatisfactory. The "debate" is
mostly going around in circles. The real work needs to go forward. There is a
tremendous ferment right now in the "evo/devo" field, for instance. Some
bright postdocs sympathetic to ID (and yes, I know how hard a time they would
have institutionally at many places) should plunge right into the thick of
that. Maybe they are at this very moment: I hope so!

Every now and again we need to take a good, hard look in the mirror. The aim of
this talk is to help us do just that. Intelligent design has made tremendous
inroads into the culture at large. Front page stories featuring our work have
appeared in the New York Times, L.A. Times, Wall Street Journal, San Francisco
Chronicle, and so on. Television, radio, and weeklies like Time Magazine are
focusing the spotlight on us as well. This publicity is at once useful and
seductive. It useful because it helps get the word out and attract talent to the
movement. It is seductive because it can deceive us into thinking that we have
accomplished more than we actually have.

Two animating principles drive intelligent design. The more popular by far takes
intelligent design as a tool for liberation from ideologies that suffocate the
human spirit, such as reductionism and materialism. The other animating
principle, less popular but intellectually more compelling, takes intelligent
design as the key to opening up fresh insights into nature. The first of these
animating principles is purely instrumental -- it treats intelligent design as a
tool for attaining some other end (like defeating materialism). Presumably if
other tools could more effectively accomplish that end, intelligent design would
be abandoned. The second of these animating principles, by contrast, is
intrinsic -- it treats intelligent design as an essential good, an end in itself
worthy to be pursued because of the insights it provides into nature.
These animating principles can work side by side, and there is no inherent
conflict between them. Nonetheless, there is a clear order of priority. Unless
intelligent design is an intrinsic good -- unless it can be developed as a
scientific research program and provide sound insights into the natural world --
then its use as an instrumental good for defeating ideologies that suffocate the
human spirit becomes insupportable. Intelligent design must not become a "noble
lie" for vanquishing views we find unacceptable (history is full of noble lies
that ended in disgrace). Rather, intelligent design needs to convince us of its
truth on its scientific merits. Then, because it is true and known to be true,
it can become an instrument for liberation from suffocating ideologies --
ideologies that suffocate not because they tell us the grim truth about
ourselves but because they are at once grim and false (Freud's psychic
determinism is a case in point).

Intelligent design's dual role as a constructive scientific project and as a
means for cultural renaissance should raise some concerns over characterizing
our movement as a "wedge." Intelligent design's instrumental good of renewing
culture hinges on its intrinsic good of furthering science. Unfortunately, the
metaphor of the wedge clouds this order of precedence. The wedge metaphor, as
Phillip Johnson initially used it, focused on the discrepancy between science as
an empirical enterprise that goes where the evidence leads (which is a
legitimate conception of science) and science as applied materialist philosophy
that maintains its materialism regardless of evidence (this is a bogus, though
widely held, misconception of science). According to Johnson, the discrepancy
between these two conceptions of science provides a point of weakness into which the thin end of a wedge can be inserted. Pounding the wedge at that point of weakness is supposed to invigorate science, renew culture, and liberate society
from the miasma of materialism and naturalism. That's the promise.

Worthy goals though these are, their accomplishment is, in my view, not
appropriately ascribed to a wedge. Wedges break things rather than build them
up. Wedges are provisional and instrumental, conducing toward some end but not
ends in themselves. The subtitle of Phillip Johnson's book The Wedge of Truth is
Splitting the Foundations of Naturalism. I submit that the foundations of
naturalism are already split (thanks largely to Johnson's efforts). Even now the
right questions are on the table and being vigorously discussed. What's more,
the intelligent design movement is setting the terms (and even the vocabulary)
for the debate over biological origins. Karl Giberson and Donald Yerxa (neither
design advocates) make this point in their new book titled Species of Origins,
which details the debate in the United States over evolution, creation, and
intelligent design. In it they remark:

Since its inception in the early 1990s, the intelligent design movement has
attracted so much attention that it has succeeded in dominating the origins
debate. By this we do not mean that it is triumphant. Far from it. While
design has made some modest inroads in the academy, it is frequently seen ...
as a more attractively packaged variety of creationism. But design has
succeeded in setting the agenda for much of the debate. (p. 210)
The wedge metaphor has outlived its usefulness. Indeed, with ID critics like
Barbara Forrest and Paul Gross writing books like Evolution and the Wedge of
Intelligent Design: The Trojan Horse Strategy, the wedge metaphor has even
become a liability. To be sure, our critics will attempt to keep throwing the
wedge metaphor (and especially the notorious wedge document) in our face. But
the wedge needs to be seen as a propaedeutic -- as an anticipation of and
preparation for a positive, design-theoretic research program that invigorates
science and renews culture. The wedge, to mix metaphors, has already swept the
field, cleaned house, shone the spotlight, and exposed scientific materialism's
dirty laundry. Now that that has been accomplished, where do we go from here?
After the Polanyi Center debacle at Baylor University in the fall of 2000, my
colleague (and still good friend) Bruce Gordon assessed what happened as
follows:

Design theory has had considerable difficulty gaining a hearing in academic
contexts, as evidenced most recently by the Polanyi Center affair at Baylor
University. One of the principle reasons for this resistance and controversy
is not far to seek: design-theoretic research has been hijacked as part of a
larger cultural and political movement. In particular, the theory has been
prematurely drawn into discussions of public science education where it has no
business making an appearance without broad recognition from the scientific
community that it is making a worthwhile contribution to our understanding of
the natural world. (Research News, January 2001, p. 9)

Gordon's assessment contains an important kernel of truth but in other respects
is off the mark. The kernel of truth is that ID needs to succeed as a scientific
enterprise to succeed as a cultural and political enterprise (in other words,
the instrumental good of intelligent design cannot be achieved at the expense of
its intrinsic good). But this is quite different from requiring that intelligent
design attain a certain level of maturity and acceptance in the scientific world
before it may be regarded as a bonafide intellectual project and legitimately
influence public opinion.

Intelligent design's legitimacy as an intellectual project hinges on two facts
that are independent of its state of development. First, evolutionary biology
has been so hugely unsuccessful as a scientific theory in accounting for the
origin of life and the emergence of biological complexity that it does not
deserve a monopoly regardless what state of formation ID has reached. Second, ID is logically speaking the only alternative to a mechanistic evolutionary
biology. Evolutionary biology, as currently formulated, embraces material
mechanisms and eschews teleology. Yet these are the only two available options:

Either material mechanisms can do all the work in biological origins or some
telic process is additionally required. The issue, therefore, before the public
square is not in the first instance how far intelligent design has developed as
a scientific project but freedom and equity. In particular, are all sectors of
the public free to examine and discuss the full range of scientific options
concerning biological origins? Design theorists say yes. Darwinism's defenders
prefer that certain sectors of the public (like public education) be cordoned
off and censored.

Any rule-setting about what intelligent design must accomplish in the scientific
sphere before it may legitimately influence the political sphere is arbitrary
and betrays a naivet about the actual workings of science. In fact, any such
rule-setting is sure to undermine intelligent design's progress as a scientific
and intellectual movement. For a scientific research program to prosper, it must
employ talented workers and ensure that their efforts to further the program get
rewarded. This requires societal and political structures to be in place that
can attract talented workers and offer them incentives for a fruitful career.
Science, culture, society, and politics all work together in this regard. If you
don't believe it, try lobbying to get the NSF's or NIH's funding cut.
Although ID as a scientific program stands logically prior to ID as cultural
movement, this logical priority does not imply temporal priority. To think that
the scientific program must first succeed (and according to whose criteria of
success?) before the cultural movement can legitimately be undertaken is not
only naive but to give up on both. Baylor's Polanyi Center, which I founded,
was closed not because there was any problem with the design-theoretic research
it was conducting (the external review committee found no fault here) but
because of political efforts by Darwinists both inside and outside Baylor to
shut the center down. The scientific research and cultural renewal aspects of ID
need to work together, protecting and reinforcing each other. Science grows
within a cultural matrix but at the same time shapes that matrix. Their relation
is not linear but dialectical.

That said, we need to be very clear when we are doing the nuts-and-bolts
scientific and conceptual work on ID and when we are engaged in cultural and
political activity. What's more, these aspects of ID need to keep pace. We have
done amazingly well in creating a cultural movement, but we must not exaggerate
ID's successes on the scientific front. It is fine to receive respectful notice
from The New York Times. But, as David Berlinski has pointed out to me, Ren
Thom's catastrophe theory also received front page coverage in the Times and
thereafter, despite its real content as both a scientific theory and a
philosophical attitude, died quietly some time in the 1980s. An intellectual
movement cannot sustain itself on media attention. The scientific and conceptual
work on ID occurs out of the limelight, requires intense concentration over
extended periods, and is fully appreciated only by relatively few specialists.
The cultural renewal work on ID, by contrast, occurs in the limelight, offers
quick closure and gratification, and makes its appeal to the population at
large.

Because of ID's outstanding success at gaining a cultural hearing, the
scientific research part of ID is now lagging behind. I want therefore next to
lay out a series of recommendations for rectifying this imbalance.

1. Catalog of Fundamental Facts (CFF)

One of the marks of a disciplined science is that it possesses an easily
accessible catalog of fundamental facts. Think of the magnificent star cluster
catalogs in astrophysics. ID needs something like this. It would be enormously
helpful if we had and could make publicly available a catalog of irreducibly
complex biological objects or processes. The catalog should contain as complete
a list as possible, organized more or less as a table, with very complete
descriptions. Under the bacterial flagellum, for instance, the catalog would
list: found in the following; involving these biochemical parts; requiring this
level of energy; these substrates, etc. etc. The catalog should move from simple
to profound examples of irreducible complexity (such as the mammalian visual
system).

The criteria governing entries should be very strict and should be stated
explicitly: such and such is IC if and only if fill-in-the-blank. The catalog
should be widely distributed to the biological community. No mention of
intelligent design, nothing about naturalism. Just a catalog of the fundamental
facts as they are now known. Such a catalog would do more than any number of
forums or debates to persuade biologists that Darwinism is in trouble and that
ID is a live possibility. Right now most of them don't even see that there is a
problem. Irreducible complexity is for them not a problem urgently in need of
resolution but a detail to be shelved indefinitely. Such a catalog would put an
end to the current complacency.

2. Catalog Correcting Misinformation (CCM)

There is a tremendous amount of misinformation in the biological literature
whenever it impinges on design. Jonathan Wells's Icons of Evolution is an
attempt to redress that problem by examining a few faulty evidences used to prop
evolutionary theory at the expense of design. But the problem is pervasive.
Sometimes it's merely giving an evolutionary spin to a biological experiment or
fact when the actual evidence warrants nothing of the sort. Sometimes it's the
double standard by which natural selection gets applied -- if a biological
system looks well-designed, that's because natural selection is an efficient
designer-substitute that prunes away deadwood; on the other hand, if it looks
cobbled together, that's because natural selection is a sloppy opportunist.
The suboptimality objection has traditionally been Darwinism's ace for keeping
intelligent design at bay. But as with so many protective measures, it ends up
undermining the very thing it was designed to protect -- the field of biology
itself in this case! To refute design, critics resort to belittling systems they
claim are not designed (the logic from incompetent design to no design
presumably being de rigueur). In repudiating design, biologists therefore
consistently underestimate biological systems. Take, for instance, the inverted
retina of vertebrates. It continually comes in for abuse from Darwinists. What
sort of designer would have created such a system, with its backward wiring,
occlusion of incoming light, and blind spot? What more needs to be said? End of
story. No design here.

In fact, there appear to be good functional reasons for this construction. A
visual system needs three things: speed, sensitivity, and resolution. Speed is
unaffected by the inverted wiring. Resolution seems unaffected as well (save for
a blind spot, which the brain seems to work around without difficulty). Indeed,
there is no evidence that the cephalopod retina of squids and octopuses, which
is said to be "correctly wired" by having receptors facing forwards and nerves
tucked behind, is any better at resolving objects in its visual field. As for
sensitivity, however, it seems that there are good functional reasons for an
inverted retina. In the human body, for instance, retinal cells require the most
oxygen of any cells. But when do they require the most oxygen? Their oxygen
requirement is maximal when incident light is minimal. Having a blood supply in
front of the photoreceptors guarantees that the retinal cells will have the
oxygen they need to be as sensitive as possible when incident light is minimal.
The catalog for correcting biological misinformation that I am recommending
would not suggest that the vertebrate eye cant be improved or is in some
ultimate sense optimal. It would simply show why it is mistaken to regard the
inverted retina as incompetently designed. Indeed, there are no concrete
proposals on the table for how the vertebrate eye could be improved which
guarantee no loss in speed, sensitivity, and resolution. Theres also an irony
worth noting: the very visual system that is supposed to be so poorly designed
and that no self-respecting designer would have constructed is nonetheless good
enough to tell us that the eye is inferior. We study the eye by means of the
eye. And yet the information that the eye gives us is supposed to show that the
eye is inferior.

This biting of the hand that feeds you is typical of evolutionary biology. The
catalog I am proposing would document as much. Like the previous catalog, this
catalog is not optional. Biology is firmly in the grip of an anti-design bigotry
that needs to be unmasked and defeated. As David Berlinski has put it to me, "A
shift in prevailing scientific orthodoxies will come only when the objections to
Darwinism ... accumulate so forcefully that they can no longer be ignored."

3. Network of Researchers and Resources (NRR)

Intelligent design as a scientific and intellectual project has many
sympathizers but few workers. The scholarly side of our movement at this time
consists of a handful of academics and independent researchers. These numbers
need to swell, and we need to be properly networked. We need to know who's out
there working on what. To this end the Internet will prove invaluable.

Intelligent design is at this time still an academic pariah. Consequently, it is
difficult to concentrate our forces in any one institution. And yet, when I
speak about intelligent design on university campuses, I almost invariably
encounter at least one scientist on faculty eager to do research pertinent to
intelligent design. The Internet, particularly as live chats and
videoconferences become more readily available, will bring together scholars who
now work in isolation. This will help overcome the institutional barriers they
now face. Full and effective use of the Internet is simply a must.
The natural place to house such a network is within a professional society.
Fortunately, such a society is now in place -- the International Society for
Complexity, Information, and Design (ISCID -- www.iscid.org). Housing the
network there is an option, though there are other options. The important thing
for now is that we get networked, not who does the networking. Associated with
this network should be research coordinators expert in a given field of science
to help researchers in that field coordinate their efforts. The network needs to
be endowed with resources. The International Society for Complexity,
Information, and Design is currently working on an annotated bibliography of
design-relevant literature. Access to various online subscription services
(journals, specialized search engines, electronic books, etc.) should also be
part of the resource package. This will cost money but be well worth the
investment. Concentration of forces is a key principle of military tactics.
Without it, troops, though willing and eager, wallow in indecision and cannot
act effectively. The network of researchers and resources that I am recommending
is the first step in concentrating our forces. The next step is setting the
intellectual agenda for academic departments and even whole academic
institutions. But that is still downstream and will depend on the next
recommendation.

4. Building a Design Curriculum (BDC)

Ivan Pavlov and John Watson were both active in the early part of the twentieth
century developing a behaviorist psychology. Behaviorism itself, however, didn't
take off as an intellectual movement until a generation later when psychologists
built a curriculum around it. For scientific ideas to prosper (regardless
whether they are correct or ultimately mistaken, as behaviorism proved to be),
they must be part of a curriculum that gets taught within the educational
mainstream. This is the only way to win the next generation of scholars to
intelligent design. Without a presence in the science curriculum, intelligent
design will limp along, merely winning stragglers here and there.

A problem we now face with intelligent design is that even if the educational
mainstream opened its arms to us (don't hold your breath), we have no sustained
course of study to give them. A curriculum provides that, and much more. It
takes the crazy-quilt of science and systematizes it into an intellectually
coherent position. Students are thus introduced to a research tradition and not
merely to a disconnected set of claims and arguments, or worse yet to some
effective but easily ignored criticisms. Darwinists, by contrast, have a
curriculum -- indeed, one that is steadily gobbling up discipline after
discipline (evolutionary psychology being one of the more visible recent
additions). Daniel Dennett was right when he called Darwinism a universal acid.
Darwinism's hold on the academy is pervasive and monopolistic. By building a
design curriculum, we attempt to restore a free market.

Are we at this time in the position to build a design curriculum? Certainly
intelligent design as a scientific program needs to develop and mature.
Nevertheless, I believe we are in a position to start building such a
curriculum. At the very top of the list we need a introductory basal biology
textbook -- in other words, a standard 800- to 1000-page introductory biology
text framed around intelligent design rather than Darwinian evolution. Note that
such a text would provide a fair and detailed treatment of Darwinian evolution.
In fact, it would tell students more about Darwinian evolution than Darwinists
typically want them to hear, notably about the theory's problems and weaknesses
(and we don't even need to cite ourselves here; critics within evolutionary
biology's own ranks, like the late Stephen Jay Gould and now Lynn Margulis with
her theory of symbiogenesis, have saved us the trouble).

Actually, we'll need two basal biology texts, one geared toward college students
and then a simplified version geared toward high school students. The closest
thing we have right now is a supplemental biology text (Of Pandas and People).
This is a terrific book. Nevertheless, as a supplemental text, its market and
readership is necessarily limited. Once we have a basal biology text, we need to
go through each discipline where Darwinian and naturalistic thinking has been
used to illegitimately exclude intelligent design. Darwinism's universal acid
has eaten into many disciplines, ranging from the sciences to the humanities. To
counteract that acid, design theorists need to target each such discipline and
systematically rethink it. Make no mistake, this work of reconceptualization and
restoration will be very labor intensive and require the efforts of many
scholars. The disciplines at the top of the list after biology that need to be
reconceptualized are these: evolutionary psychology, bioethics, cognitive
neuroscience, artificial intelligence, philosophy of mind (especially the
problem of consciousness), the history and philosophy of science, foundations of
physics, and cosmology.

Building a design curriculum is educational in the broadest sense. It includes
not just textbooks, but everything from research monographs for professors and
graduate students to coloring books for preschoolers. It needs to take full
advantage of the technologies and media at our disposal -- CD ROMs, Videos,
DVDs, computer animation, e-learning, and more. The videos Unlocking the Mystery
of Life's Origin and Icons of Evolution are exemplary in this regard. So too is
the cartoon book What's Darwin Got to Do with It?, which provides a perfect
lead-in for students about to study high school biology.

Martin Luther once remarked that we can do without lots of things, but we can't
do without schools, for they must rule the world. Not only must they rule the
world, but they do indeed rule the world. Without a significant presence in the
educational mainstream, intelligent design will continue to be marginalized and
never attain its full potential. A design-theoretic curriculum is therefore
indispensable to the success of intelligent design as a scientific and
intellectual movement.

5. Objective Measures of Progress (OMP)

How do we gauge how well we are doing in developing ID as a scientific research
program? We need some objective measures of progress. Rather than lay out such
measures in pedantic detail, let me indicate what they are under four rubrics,
each followed by a series of questions:

Intellectual Vitality. Have we become boring? Have we run out of things to
say? Is the fount of fresh ideas drying up? Are we constantly repeating
ourselves? Are people who once were excited about what we're doing no longer
excited? Or do we have the intellectual initiative? Are we setting the agenda
for the problems being discussed? Are we ourselves energized by our research?
Is there nothing we'd rather be doing than work on intelligent design? Are our
ideas strong enough to engage the best and the brightest on the other side?
Intellectual Standards. Are we holding ourselves to high intellectual
standards? Are we in the least self-critical about our work? Are we sober or
immodest about our work? Do we demand precision and rigor from our each other?
Do we examine each other's work with intense critical scrutiny and speak our
minds freely in assessing it? Or do we try to keep all our interactions civil,
gentlemanly, and diplomatic (perhaps so as not to give the appearance of
dissension in our ranks)? Does the mood of our movement alternate between the
smug and the indignant -- smug when we hold the upper hand, indignant when we
are criticized? Do we react to adverse criticism like first-time novelists who
are dismayed to discover that their masterpiece has been trashed by the
critics? Or do we take adverse criticism as an occasion for tightening and
improving our work?

Exiting the Ghetto. Do we refuse to be marginalized within an intellectual
ghetto or second-class subculture? Are scholars and scientists on the other
side actually getting to know us? Once they get to know us, do they still
demonize us or do they think that we have an interesting, albeit perverse,
point of view? Is intelligent design's appeal international? Does it cross
religious boundaries? Or is it increasingly confined to American
evangelicalism? Who owns ID? Are we trying to get our ideas into the
scientific mainstream? Are we continuing to plug away at getting our work
published in the mainstream peer-reviewed literature (despite the deck being
stacked against us)? Or are we seeking safe havens where we can publish our
work easily, yet mainly for the benefit of each other? At the International
Society for Complexity, Information, and Design, for instance, we encourage
contributors to the society's journal also to submit their articles to the
mainstream literature. John Bracht, for instance, recently had his lengthy
design-theoretic appraisal of Stuart Kauffman's latest book, Investigations,
accepted in the Santa Fe Institute's journal Complexity. This is precisely
what needs to happen.

Attracting Talent. Are we continually attracting new talent to intelligent
design's scientific research program? Does that talent include intellects of
the highest caliber? Is that talent distributed across the disciplines or
confined only to certain disciplines? Are under-represented disciplines
getting filled? What about talent that's been with the movement in the past?
Is it staying with the movement or becoming disillusioned and aligning itself
elsewhere? Do the same names associated with intelligent design keep coming up
in print or are we constantly adding new names? Are we fun to be around? Do we
have a colorful assortment of characters? Other things being equal, would you
rather party with a design theorist or a Darwinist?

These, then, are my recommendations for turning intelligent design into a
disciplined science. Their implementation is absolutely necessary for the
success of intelligent design as a scientific program, intellectual project, and
cultural movement. Even so, their implementation is not sufficient for the
success of intelligent design. One more thing is required, and that's a set of
research problems that thoroughly captivate our scientific imaginations. These
need to be so compelling that scientists eagerly devote their careers to
resolving them.

Plenty of scientists are intrigued with intelligent design but for now don't see
how they can usefully contribute to it. I recently had an exchange with one such
scientist (a geneticist). I asked him, "What sort of real work needs to go
forward before you felt comfortable with ID?" His response was revealing:
If I knew how to scientifically approach the question you pose, I would quit
all that I am doing right now, and devote the rest of my career in pursuit of
its answer. The fact that I have no idea how to begin gathering scientific
data that would engage the scientific community is the very reason that I
don't share your optimism that this approach will work.

Or consider Francis Collins, head of the human genome project. As a Christian
believer, he is committed to design in some broad sense. Yet, at the most recent
meeting of the American Scientific Affiliation (Pepperdine University, 2-5
August 2002) he expressed doubts about intelligent design as a scientific
project. The problem, according to him, is intelligent design's "lack of a plan
for experimental verification."

I remain supremely optimistic that intelligent design has the research potential
to satisfy such scientists. That potential, however, needs to be actualized.
How, then, to actualize it? The most important thing right now is a steady
stream of good ideas together with the resources to implement them. In
particular, we need to reflect deeply about biological systems. That reflection
needs to generate profound insight. And that insight needs to get us asking
interesting new questions that can be framed as research problems. With these
research problems in hand, we then need to go to nature and see how they
resolve.

I'm mainly a theoretician, so I'm not in a position to lay out a detailed set of
research problems for intelligent design. Nonetheless, as an interdisciplinary
scholar who rubs shoulders with scientists from many disciplines, I am in a
position to lay out some research themes that may prove helpful to scientists
who are trying to find a way to contribute usefully to intelligent design
research. What follows, then, is a list of research themes (let me stress that I
make no pretense at completeness).

1. Design Detection

Techniques, methods, and criteria of design detection are widely employed in
various special sciences (like archeology, cryptography, and the Search for
Extraterrestrial Intelligence or SETI). There's currently much discussion from
all sides about the validity of detecting actual design in biology using Michael
Behe's criterion of irreducible complexity or my criterion of specified
complexity. Design theorists need to be at the center of this discussion.

2. Biological Information

Information, according to its Latin etymology, means to give shape or form to
something. It's no exaggeration to say that the origin of life and its
subsequent complexification constitutes an "information revolution" in the
history of matter. Indeed, matter needs to be formed in very special ways to
constitute life. What is the nature of biological information? How do function
and fitness relate to it? What are the obstacles that face material mechanisms
in attempting to generate biological information? Most importantly, what are the
theoretical and empirical grounds for thinking that intelligence is
indispensable to the origin of biological information? I've begun to address
these problems in my book No Free Lunch, but much more work is needed here.

3. Minimal Complexity

Living things are complex systems that consist of complex subsystems that in
turn consist of complex subsubsystems and so on until a level of organization is
reached that is chemically simple (for instance, individual amino acids or
nucleotide bases). How does pruning away the complexity of such systems affect
their ability to perform some function or set of functions (most notably,
keeping the organism alive and able to reproduce)? How much can the complexity
be pruned down and still preserve function? Once a complexity barrier is reached
below which function can no longer be preserved, could coevolution overcome that
barrier by switching function? Are there systems that are not only minimally
complex with respect to some function, but for which any reduction of complexity
eliminates all possibility of biological function? Would such systems provide
decisive confirmation of intelligent design?

4. Evolvability

Evolutionary biologists are in the business of drawing evolutionary connections
between biological systems. This requires identifying biological systems,
relating them according to some similarity metric, and then telling evolutionary
stories that, as it were, connect the dots. Yet for large-scale evolutionary
changes, these stories tend to be imaginative reconstructions with no firm
evidential basis. This is certainly true of attempts to bridge major divisions
in the fossil record. It is also true of molecular phylogenies. Evolutionary
biology's preferred research strategy consists in taking distinct biological
systems and trying to merge them. Intelligent design, by contrast, focuses on a
different strategy, namely, taking individual biological systems and perturbing
them to see how much the systems can evolve (with and without intelligence).
Limitations on evolvability by material mechanisms constitute evidence for
design.

5. The Principle of Methodological Engineering

The reason evolutionary biology has lost all sense of proportion about how much
evolution is possible as a result of blind material mechanisms (like random
variation and natural selection) is because it floats free of the science of
engineering. At every crucial juncture where some major evolutionary transition
needs to be accounted for, evolutionary biology invokes a designer-substitute
(like natural selection, lateral gene transfer, or symbiogenesis) to do the
necessary design work. Yet unlike the science of engineering, evolutionary
biology does not actually perform the necessary design work or specify a
detailed procedure by which it might be accomplished. Intelligent design, by
contrast, takes what I call "methodological engineering" as a fundamental
regulative principle for understanding biological systems. According to this
principle, biological systems are to be understood as engineering systems. In
consequence, their origin, construction, operation, break down, wearing out,
repair, and above all history of modifications (both designed and accidental)
are all to be understood in engineering terms. In the next ten years I foresee
academic programs in biotic engineering supplanting academic programs in
evolutionary biology.

6. Technological Evolution (TRIZ)

The only well-documented example we have of the evolution of complex multipart
integrated functional systems (like we see in biology) is the technological
evolution of human inventions. In the second half of the twentieth century,
Russian scientists and engineers studied hundreds of thousands of patents to
determine how technologies evolve. They codified their findings in a theory to
which they gave the acronym TRIZ, which in English translates to Theory of
Inventive Problem Solving. The picture of technological evolution that emerges
out of TRIZ maps amazingly well onto the history of life as we see it in the
fossil record and includes the following:

(1) New technologies (cf. major groups like phyla and classes) emerge
suddenly as the solution of an inventive problem, which requires a major
conceptual leap (cf. design).

(2) Existing technologies (cf. species and genera) can, by contrast, be
modified by trial and error tinkering (cf. Darwinian evolution), which amounts
to solving a routine rather than an inventive problem. (The distinction
between routine and inventive problems is central to TRIZ. In biology,
irreducible complexity suggests one way of making the analytic cut between
these types of problems. Are there other ways?)

(3) Technologies approach ideality and thereafter tend not change (cf.
stasis);

(4) New technologies, by supplanting old technologies, can upset the ideality
and stasis of the old technologies, thus forcing them to evolve in new
directions (requiring the solution of new inventive problems, as in an arms
race) or by driving them to extinction.

Mapping TRIZ onto biological evolution provides a potentially fruitful avenue of
design-theoretic research that is entirely consonant with the principle of
methodological engineering.

I need here to add a footnote about TRIZ. Most design critics, by conflating ID
with creationism, see ID as committed to a designer who always designs from
scratch and has to get everything right the first time. TRIZ, by contrast,
bespeaks an evolutionary process that as much as possible takes advantage of
existing designs but then at key moments requires a conceptual breakthrough to
move the process of technological evolution along. On this view, the process of
technological evolution is itself designed. What's more, within that process,
designing intelligences interact with natural forces. Does this mean that
designer(s) is/are making things up as they go along? Not necessarily. The
conceptual breakthroughs needed to drive technological evolution can be
programmed from the start. And what about suboptimal and dysteleological design?
These can be explained in part as the result of natural forces subverting an
original design plan. Teasing apart the effects of intelligence from natural
forces thus becomes a key research question for a TRIZ approach to intelligent
design.

7. Autonomy vs. Guidance

Many scientists worry that intelligent design attempts to usurp nature's
autonomy. But that's not the case. Intelligent design is merely trying to
restore a proper balance between nature's autonomy and teleologic guidance.
Prior to the rise of modern science all the emphasis was on teleologic guidance
(in the form of divine design). Now the pendulum has swung to the opposite
extreme, and all the emphasis is on nature's autonomy (an absolute autonomy that
excludes design). Might there not be a mid-point that properly respects both and
in which design becomes empirically evident? The search for that mid-point needs
always to be in the back of our minds as we engage in design-theoretic research.
It's not all design or all nature but a synergy of the two. Unpacking that
synergy is the ID research program in a nutshell.

8. Evolutionary Computation

Increasingly it is becoming evident that organisms employ evolutionary
computation to solve many of the tasks of living. But does this show that
organisms originate through some form of evolutionary computation (as through a
Darwinian evolutionary process)? It seems that the immune system, for instance,
is a general purpose genetic algorithm that targets an interloper, sets up a
gradient that tracks the interloper, and then runs a genetic algorithm
specifically adapted to that gradient whose output is a molecular assemblage
that vanquishes the interloper. All of this sounds very high-tech and
programmed. Are GPGAs (General Purpose Genetic Algorithms) like this actually
designed or themselves the result of evolutionary computation. Evolutionary
computation occurs in the behavioral repertoire of organisms but is also used to
account for the origination of certain features of organisms. It would be
helpful to explore the relationship between these two types of evolutionary
computation as well as any design intrinsic to them. My work in chapter 4 of No
Free Lunch lays out some of the theoretical groundwork here. Besides theoretical
work in this area, we need a large contingent of ID computer programmers who can
write and run computational simulations that investigate the scope and limits of
evolutionary computation. One such simulation is the MESA program (Monotonic
Evolutionary Simulation Algorithm) due to Micah Sparacio, John Bracht, and me.

It is available on the ISCID website
(http://www.iscid.org/ubbcgi/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=6;t=000054).
9. Understanding Discontinuity

Evolution is committed to continuity in a broad sense. Its main business is to
connect dots. But for dots to be plausibly connected, they need to be reasonably
close together. That's why the absence of transitional forms, gaps, and missing
links or intermediates constitute a problem for evolution. To be sure,
evolutionists do not regard the absence of intermediates as a problem in the bad
sense. They regard such discontinuities not as challenges to their theory but as
discontinuities that are only apparent and that will disappear once the missing
intermediates are found. Consequently, whenever an intermediate is found, it is
regarded as a triumph for evolutionary theory (witness the recent excitement
over the Touma fossil find in Chad).

Evolutionary biology attempts to explain the absence of intermediates from an
evolutionary path on the assumption that the intermediates did once exist. But
now lets turn the question around. Suppose that discontinuity is a fact not
just about the history of life as we know it but about the history of life
itselfin other words, the intermediates never existed. In that case, how did
biological forms in all their vast complexity and diversity come about? In
asking this question, let's hold off asking for the underlying cause or causes
of biological complexity and diversity. Rather, let's merely ask what a video
camera would see if it were scouring the past and recording key events in lifes
history. There are exactly four possibilities:

(1) Nonbiogenic emergence. Organisms emerge without the direct causal agency
of other organisms. In place of life begetting life, here we have nonlife
begetting life.

(2) Generative transmutation. Organisms, in reproducing, produce offspring
that are vastly different from themselves.

(3) Biogenic reinvention. Organisms reinvent themselves in midstream. At one
moment they have certain morphological and genetic features, at the next they
have a vastly different set of such features.

(4) Symbiogenic reorganization. Organisms emerge when different organisms
from different species get together and reorganize themselves into a new
organism.

None of these possibilities is out to lunch. Nonbiogenic emergence had to happen
at least once, namely, at the origin of life. Symbiogenic reorganization has
been Lynn Margulis's main focus of research, and there is increasing evidence
for it. Biogenic reinvention (organisms changing in midstream) is also not that
crazy when one considers the life cycles of certain organisms which from one
stage to the next are completely unrecognizable (for example, the metamorphosis
of the butterfly or, even more extremely, the various forms of the liver fluke).
Finally generative transmutation suggests a programmed view of evolution, where,
like a computer program that kicks in at a certain time (recall the Michelangelo
virus that kicked in March 6th, 1993), organisms change in one generation.
French paleontologist Anne Dambricourt has seriously argued for this view in
respect to the emergence of Homo sapiens.

With regard to these four possibilities, the crucial question now is this: How
does one make sense of these possibilities in light of intelligent design?
Clearly, none of these possibilities makes sense without some directed
coordination.

10. Steganography

Finally, we come to the research theme that I find most intriguing.
Steganography, if you look in the dictionary, is an archaism that was
subsequently replaced by the term "cryptography." Steganography literally means
"covered writing." With the rise of digital computing, however, the term has
taken on a new life. Steganography belongs to the field of digital data
embedding technologies (DDET), which also include information hiding,
steganalysis, watermarking, embedded data extraction, and digital data
forensics. Steganography seeks efficient (that is, high data rate) and robust
(that is, insensitive to common distortions) algorithms that can embed a high
volume of hidden message bits within a cover message (typically imagery, video,
or audio) without their presence being detected. Conversely, steganalysis seeks
statistical tests that will detect the presence of steganography in a cover
message.

Consider now the following possibility: What if organisms instantiate designs
that have no functional significance but that nonetheless give biological
investigators insight into functional aspects of organisms. Such second-order
designs would serve essentially as an "operating manual," of no use to the
organism as such but of use to scientists investigating the organism. Granted,
this is a speculative possibility, but there are some preliminary results from
the bioinformatics literature that bear it out in relation to the
protein-folding problem (such second-order designs appear to be embedded not in a single genome but in a database of homologous genomes from related organisms).

While it makes perfect sense for a designer to throw in an "operating manual"
(much as automobile manufacturers include operating manuals with the cars they
make), this possibility makes no sense for blind material mechanisms, which
cannot anticipate scientific investigators. Research in this area would consist
in constructing statistical tests to detect such second-order designs (in other
words, steganalysis). Should such second order designs be discovered, the next
step would be to seek algorithms for embedding these second-order designs in the organisms. My suspicion is that biological systems do steganography much better than we, and that steganographers will learn a thing or two from biology --
though not because natural selection is so clever, but because the designer of
these systems is so adept at steganography.

Such second-order steganography would, in my view, provide decisive confirmation for ID. Yet even if it doesn't pan out, first-order steganography (i.e., the embedding of functional information useful to the organism rather than to a
scientific investigator) could also provide strong evidence for ID. For years
now evolutionary biologists have told us that the bulk of genomes is junk and
that this is due to the sloppiness of the evolutionary process. That is now
changing. For instance, Amy Pasquenelli at UCSD, in commenting on long stretches of seemingly barren DNA sequences, asks us to "reconsider the contents of such junk DNA sequences in the light of recent reports that a new class of non-coding RNA genes are scattered, perhaps densely, throughout these animal genomes." ("MicroRNAs: Deviants no Longer." Trends in Genetics 18(4) (4 April 2002): 171-3.) ID theorists should be at the forefront in unpacking the information contained within biological systems. If these systems are designed, we can expect the information to be densely packed and multi-layered (save where
natural forces have attenuated the information). Dense, multi-layered embedding
of information is a prediction of ID.

It's time to bring this talk to an end. I close with two images (both from
biology) and a final quote. The images describe two perspectives on how the
scientific debate over intelligent design is likely to play out in the coming
years. From the vantage of the scientific establishment, intelligent design is
in the position of a mouse trying to move an elephant by nibbling at its toes.
From time to time the elephant may shift its feet, but nothing like real
movement or a fundamental change is about to happen. Let me emphasize that this is the perspective of the scientific establishment. Yet even adopting this
perspective, the scientific establishment seems strangely uncomfortable. The
mouse has yet to be squashed, and the elephant (as in the cartoons) has become
frightened and seems ready to stampede in a panic.

The image that I think more accurately captures how the debate will play out is,
ironically, an evolutionary competition where two organisms vie to dominate an
ecological niche (think of mammals displacing the dinosaurs). At some point, one
of the organisms gains a crucial advantage. This enables it to outcompete the
other. The one thrives, the other dwindles. However wrong Darwin might have been about selection and competition being the driving force behind biological
evolution, these factors certainly play a crucial role in scientific progress.
It's up to ID proponents to demonstrate a few incontrovertible instances where
design is uniquely fruitful for biology. Scientists without an inordinate
attachment to Darwinian evolution (and there are many, though this fact is not
widely advertised) will be only too happy to shift their allegiance if they
think that intelligent design is where the interesting problems in biology lie.
I close with a quotation by Emanuel Lasker, philosopher, mathematician, friend
of Albert Einstein, and world chess champion for 27 years. Strictly speaking his
comments are about chess. But for Lasker, chess was life and life was chess.
Victory in chess was for him a triumph of truth. I present Lasker's quote
because he puts his finger on the honesty, precision, and critical sense that
must guide our thinking if we are to meet the challenges of evolutionary biology
and turn intelligent design into a disciplined science. Here is the quote:
Life is generated only by life. He who wants to educate himself in Chess must
evade what is dead in Chess -- artificial theories, supported by few instances
and unheld by an excess of human wit; the habit of playing with inferior
opponents; the custom of avoiding difficult tasks; the weakness of
uncritically taking over variations or rules discovered by others; the vanity
which is self-sufficient; the incapacity for admitting mistakes; in brief,
everything that leads to a standstill or to anarchy. (Lasker's Manual of
Chess, p. 338)

Acknowledgment. I want especially to thank David Berlinski for perceptive
insights and remarks about what needs to happen for ID to succeed on the
scientific front (I've reworked many of them into the text). The recommendation
for a catalog of fundamental facts is his. I also want to thank John Bracht,
Micah Sparacio, Paul Nelson, and Jonathan Wells for helpful comments on an
earlier draft of this essay.