Design without a designer: explaining and answering some questions

I've been writing and thinking about design in biology since I started Quintessence of Dust. I want to write and think about it a lot more, so in my last post I introduced my view of the concept and pointed ahead to this post, which consists of edited excerpts from some conversations at a discussion forum at the Peaceful Science site. You will find links to those conversations in the previous post. I have removed people's names and lightly edited for clarity. Other people’s words are indented; the rest are mine.

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I would like to understand better how you think about it because it seems quite different from the way I normally think about it. I would really like learn more about how you see it and expand my understanding of "design".

This is a potentially big interesting deep conversation that is worthy of a dedicated thread with some clear goals. Someday I’ll propose that, since I believe that we can improve the quality and tone of conversations about biological design by getting at least some unbelievers to agree that design in biology is an interesting and worthy question that need not and should not have inherent religious overtones.

I guess my first question for you as you compare your conception of 'design' to mine is this: do you think design is something that is done (by a designer) or do you think it is something that exists and can be detected by humans? Obviously both can be true, but as long as a person believes that 'design' necessitates a 'designer', then they won’t see design the way I do. Because my view is that design exists whether or not it is linked to a designer. To me, it is axiomatic that a mindless process can generate design, not only because we have seen it happen but because there is no good argument to the contrary. It is instructive, IMO, that the "argument" offered to the contrary is something like "all of our examples of design can be traced back to a mind." This is not even an argument.

But what do we mean by 'design'? Here I think we can look at some of the definitions and conceptions offered by the ID movement. I think Behe’s "purposeful arrangement of parts" is a nice start, because it captures something that we all detect when we consider (for example) a molecular machine. Was a bacterial flagellum designed by a designer? I don’t know. Does a bacterial flagellum evince design? To me, the answer is obviously yes.

Design without a designer: the "British tendency" and introduction

One of the most interesting books I've read in the last few years was The Gene's-Eye View of Evolution by J. Arvid Ågren. The author explains the gene's-eye view both scientifically and historically, and I hope to write about the book sometime soon. But for now there's one point he makes that I found fascinating. Citing Kim Sterelny (an Australian philosopher of science who has written on personalities in evolutionary biology, esp. Gould vs. Dawkins), he identifies two major emphases (Sterelny calls them "tendencies") in evolutionary biology: the American interest in diversity and the British interest in design. These are pretty crude distinctions, at least because examplars of the "British tendency" include Americans like Dan Dennett. But the point is that one of two major streams of thought in evolutionary science is the challenge Paley made famous and that inspired Darwin—the one that inspired The Blind Watchmaker and its author. It's the challenge of explaining design in the biological world, and the most notable characters in that story are Brits from three very different generations.

Schematic representations of the type IV filament superfamily of nanomachines, from Figure 1 of Denise et al. 2019

I'm not British (I'm just a wannabe) but I'm drawn to that question too. My interest is probably partly due to my time served as a Christian believer, since the Christian god is a common unworthy beneficiary of the curiosity and wonder that nature inspires in humans. I have always objected to the whole construction: we see cool and extraordinary stuff in nature, we don't seem to have an explanation, so we turn to a god as an "answer." Nothing about those stories appealed to me, not when I was a committed believer and not now that I am an emancipated apostate. One problem, that I've mentioned before, is that I am apparently of the British tendency: I see the design, and I want to explain it. Design is the question, and not the answer to any interesting question. Design is what I see. I don't need a religious apologist to convince me that it exists.

What I'm reading in June

One motivation for relaunching Quintessence of Dust was my desire to write about things I'm reading, whether books or articles. So here is this month's entry in my new series, What I'm reading, posted at the start of every month.

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Fiction

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

Recommended by colleagues on our PLOS Slack channel and in a great review at NPR. Plus, as a bardolator I am doctrinally obligated to read a book with a title like that. I'm deliberately reading the last few chapters slowly; this is something I do when I love a book so much that I don't want it to end.

Hester by Laurie Lico Albanese

I bought this book in March at the Tucson Festival of Books after a fascinating event called "She persisted". Even got my copy signed! WBUR loved it. I asked the author whether it would matter that I (unlike, I think, everyone else at the event) have never read The Scarlet Letter and was assured that it would not. I'll start as soon as I finish Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow.

Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman

Continued from May. I only recently read American Gods (I know, I know!) and of course loved it. (I was late to the party but at least I read the "author's preferred text.") My brother's favorite book by Gaiman is Neverwhere, and I'll get there, but I grabbed this nice collection of stories and poems at Bookmans and am almost through.

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Non-fiction

Complicit by Max Bazerman

I wrote about this book and my experiment (before and after reading). The first chapter was harrowing and introduced me to the term "complicitor."

A Humanist Path: Confucius and Lao Zi for Today by Wei Djao

This book was strongly recommended to me by a friend here in Tucson. My friend has studied with the author, who was partly Tucson-based (and perhaps still is). I'm excited to finally experience the wisdom of these ancient teachers. The publisher's page has a little more information.