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.

The figure above is an example of the kind of design I see. The diagrams depict various members of a superfamily of protein-based machines (that's the word used by the authors in the title of the 2019 PLOS Biology paper in which the figure appears). This is the type IV filament (TFF) superfamily and it includes components related to (in fact, derived from) the bacterial flagella of Intelligent Design fame. A commentary on the 2019 PLOS Biology paper is titled "Evolution of a family of molecular Rube Goldberg contraptions." Machines! Contraptions! That's the language of design, and I think it's perfect.

But I know that "design without a designer" is hard for many people to process. It seems wrong.

A few years ago, I was a regular participant in discussions at Peaceful Science, a website and discussion forum built around the ideas of Joshua Swamidass. In one thread, I mentioned the design-without-a-designer concept in response to a typically confused Christian. Others started asking for more detail, spawning a second thread about my position on design that gave me a chance to answer questions and write some organized thoughts.

I've taken my writing on that thread and excerpted it with some editing to make the questions (from others) a bit clearer and to remove people's names. The intent is not to protect identities, since the whole discussion is public—the goal is just to provide a clear and somewhat smoothly-flowing discussion of the question. That question is: what does it mean to talk of design without a designer?

That's for the next post.

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Image credit: Revised (cropped) from Figure 1 of Diversification of the type IV filament superfamily into machines for adhesion, protein secretion, DNA uptake, and motility by Denise et al., PLOS Biology (2019).