Engineerless engineering is a thing?

 Design Without a Designer? New Book Says Yes!

Daniel Witt

The more we learn about living systems, the harder they are to explain without invoking teleology — purpose, planning, goal. If an intelligent designer is off the table, this creates a dilemma for some. 

Wouldn’t it be great if you could have your cake and eat it too — have design, without a designer? In 2023, MIT Press released an edited volume of papers by prominent biologists and philosophers of science titled Evolution “On Purpose”: Teleonomy in Living Systems. The purpose of the volume is to promote the theory of “teleonomy.” Teleonomy is “internal teleology” — goal-directedness that comes from within a system, not from outside. Under this theory, there need be no God (or aliens, or Platonic or Aristotelian forms, or anything of the sort) guiding the development of living systems; the living systems themselves set the goals.

The “Unspoken” Inference 

Biologist Peter Corning, one of the editors of the volume, writes: 

The evolution of humankind is undoubtedly the most striking example of how teleonomy has exerted a shaping influence in biological evolution, but a case can be made that teleonomy was also involved in many of the great turning points and transitions in the history of life on Earth, including the earliest colonization of the seafloor, the emergence of the eukaryotes, the migration of life forms from the oceans onto the land, the rise of multicellular organisms, the development of land plants and trees, the origin of fish, birds, and mammals, the invention of social organization, the division of labor (task specialization), and more. 

Teleonomy is also an implicit (though unspoken) influence in connection with many other familiar terms, I would argue, including “symbiogenesis,” “organic selection theory,” evolutionary “pacemakers,” the “Baldwin effect,” “major transitions theory,” “niche construction theory,” “gene-culture coevolution theory,” “natural genetic engineering,” many examples of “semiosis,” and, recently, the concept of “agency” in evolution. These terms all suggest the role of purposive behavior. A radically different view of evolution has been emerging in this century. We now know that living systems actively shape their own evolution, in various ways.

In other words, Corning is saying that all sorts of evolutionary theories contain the hidden assumption of purposiveness, i.e., design. This is an important admission, since it’s what ID theorists have been saying. 

Of course, he differs on where this design comes from. But it’s worth noting that the thesis of teleonomy implicitly acknowledges the validity of the design inference. If you can infer design in nature, you can infer design in nature. Period. Then you can decide whether it comes from within or from without.

That means that if the teleonomic explanation (“living systems actively shape their own evolution”) doesn’t hold up, the old alternative hypothesis will be there, waiting. 

Is Teleonomy a Good Explanation? 

So, does the teleonomic explanation hold up? Well, we have to ask: where does “teleonomy” come from? Why does it exist? 

The answer, according to Evolution “On Purpose”, is that it come from… drum roll… evolution. In addition to causing evolution. 

The term “teleonomy,” Corning writes, was coined “to draw a contrast between an ‘external’ teleology (Aristotelian or religious) and the ‘internal’ purposiveness and goal-directedness of living systems, which are products of the evolutionary process and of natural selection.” However, teleonomy is “not simply a product of natural selection. It is also an important cause of natural selection and has been a major shaping influence over time in biological evolution.” Conversely, natural selection “has been both a cause of this purposiveness and an outcome.”

This is not, in itself, illogical. You could have two forces at work — purpose and natural selection — that synergistically encourage each other, in a sort of positive feedback loop. But then, you still have to explain how the feedback loop got started. 

Imagine that someone asks an evolutionary biologist where chickens came from. 

“Eggs,” the scientist replies. 

“Where did eggs come from?” his interlocuter replies. 

“Chickens!” says the scientist. 

The problem with this explanation is not that it is false. As it happens, it is quite true. The problem is that it fails to explain. It does not answer the question that was really being asked.

Likewise, “teleonomy” fails to explain. The design of nature requires an explanation, an ultimate explanation. Rather than explain, invoking “teleonomy” just dodges the question. If we say that natural selection and random variation cannot explain something, evolutionary biologists can say, “Well, it’s not random variation, it’s goal-oriented.” If we ask where the goal-oriented-ness itself came from, they will say “natural selection.” The question returns to where it began; a final cause for the existence of design in nature has yet to be proposed.

Avoiding the Question

I suspect it will never be proposed, because the point is to sweep the problem under the rug by obscuring it in a complexity of causes. The theory of teleonomy does not address — is not even in dialogue with — the arguments of, say, Michael Behe or William Dembski that unguided processes simply cannot generate novel information or irreducibly complex systems. But it does make it harder to apply those arguments, because there is nothing concrete to discuss. We are not talking about a bacterial flagellum, or an eye, or even a brain — we are talking about a vague internal “purposiveness.” This purposiveness, if it exists and is not supernatural, would have to arise from some organized and complex system. But the exact nature of that system is hidden somewhere in an endless chain of “purposiveness caused by natural selection caused by purposiveness caused by natural selection…” going back who knows how far.

In future posts, I plan to discuss some of the specific mechanisms for evolution proposed in the Evolution “On Purpose”anthology. However, this is the basic problem that underlies the whole endeavor. At the end of the day, ordered complexity requires either extreme luck or intentional planning. The idea that life itself did this planning may sound like a clever work-around, but in the end it’s no better than the idea of a god who created himself. 

Nothing can create itself. Everything has a cause, until you get back to some eternal First Cause. Any attempt to avoid that logical destination is just stalling. 

Information is in the mind of the informed?

 The Connection Between Intelligence and Information

Willam Dembski

The key intuition behind the concept of information is the narrowing of possibilities. The more that possibilities are narrowed down, the greater the information. If I tell you I’m on planet Earth, I haven’t conveyed any information because you already knew that (let’s leave aside space travel). If I tell you I’m in the United States, I’ve begun to narrow down where I am in the world. If I tell you I’m in Texas, I’ve narrowed down my location further. If I tell you I’m forty miles north of Dallas, I’ve narrowed my location down even further. As I keep narrowing down my location, I’m providing you with more and more information.

Information is therefore, in its essence, exclusionary: the more possibilities are excluded, the greater the information provided. As philosopher Robert Stalnaker put it in his book Inquiry: “To learn something, to acquire information, is to rule out possibilities. To understand the information conveyed in a communication is to know what possibilities would be excluded by its truth.” I’m excluding much more of the world when I say I’m in Texas forty miles north of Dallas as opposed to when I say I’m merely in the United States. Accordingly, to say I’m in Texas north of Dallas conveys much more information than simply to say I’m in the United States.

An Exclusionary Understanding

The etymology of the word information is congruent with this exclusionary understanding of information. The word information derives from the Latin preposition in, meaning in or into, and the verb formare, meaning to give shape to. Information puts definite shape into something. But that means ruling out other shapes. Information narrows down the shape in question. A completely unformed shmoo is waiting in limbo to receive information. But until it is given definite shape, it exhibits no information.

The fundamental intuition of information as narrowing down possibilities matches up neatly with the concept of intelligence. The word intelligence derives from two Latin words: the preposition inter, meaning between, and the verb legere, meaning to choose. Intelligence thus, at its most fundamental, signifies the ability to choose between. But when a choice is made, some possibilities are actualized to the exclusion of others, implying the narrowing of possibilities. And so, an act of intelligence is also an act of information.

A Narrowing of Possibilities

A synonym for the word choose is decide. This last word is likewise from the Latin, combining the preposition de, meaning down from, and the verb caedere, meaning to cut off or kill (compare our English word homicide). Decisions, in keeping with this etymology, raise up some possibilities by cutting down, or killing off, others. When you decide to marry one person, you cut off all the other people you might marry. An act of decision is therefore always a narrowing of possibilities. It is an informational act. But given the definition of intelligence as choosing between, it is also an intelligent act.

Given the etymology of information and intelligence, it’s obvious that the two are related notions. The million dollar question in connecting the two is how we can know when an intelligence is actually responsible for an item of information. Information can happen naturally — a rock falls naturally here rather than there. But information can also happen intelligently — a rock may be put deliberately here rather than there. So how do we tell the difference? 

Answering that question is the whole point of specified complexity and the design inference. If you’ve got the time and inclination to probe this question deeply, get the book: William A. Dembski and Winston Ewert, The Design Inference, 2nd edition. Otherwise, stay tuned here — I’ll be providing a user-friendly synopsis of how to know when an intelligence is responsible for information.

Postscript

The featured image here may look like a random inkblot, but it’s not. Many people don’t at first see what’s there. Once they see it, they know that the information there is the product of intelligence. But until then, they would be within their rights to think that it’s just a random naturally-formed inkblot.