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. So, I disagree with many fellow unbelievers (materialists for the most part) who use phrases like "apparent design" or words like 'designoid' to describe the biological world. My view is that design is design. If I see it, I should call it design. This doesn’t imply a designer. That simply doesn’t follow.

How do you manage the distinction between design as a "process of making" vs. "plan or schematic" vs. "product of a designing process"?

I don’t manage that. Those are all conceptions of design, but they’re not what we see when we look at ATP synthase or a flagellum. I think those things are all distractions away from what I (personally) care about, especially since they all assume the presence of a designer.

Is that last one even rightly called design?

Sure, why not? Anyone who believes otherwise would have to claim that the sentence "I see design in this thing" is linguistically incorrect. I can respect that, but then it ends the conversation.

So you are trying to legitimize one understanding of design in its own right, separate from other definitions.

Yes, though I think the work of "legitimizing" this understanding is already done. To reject this use of the word/concept is defensible in principle, but there’s nothing revolutionary about saying "design is detectable without knowledge of a designer."

Seems like the same thing would have to be done with the term "purpose."

Maybe. [shrug]

I don’t think science recognizes design without a model of a designer. So this would be pretty revolutionary.

Science has never spoken on this, since it can’t do that. But scientists have. Here are just a few examples from places I know well.

Design Principles of Regulatory Networks: Searching for the Molecular Algorithms of the Cell

Defining the Design Principles of Skin Epidermis Postnatal Growth

Quantitative Operating Principles of Yeast Metabolism during Adaptation to Heat Stress

I tend towards notion of "appearance of design," and trying to make sense of what defines that appearance. That is, I think, closely aligned with what you are after.

I don’t see that as closely aligned, because I don’t assume that design requires a designer. "Appearance of design" downgrades ATP synthase to an "appearance" of something I consider obvious. I understand why people do this, and especially why naturalism leads people to do it (that infamous quote about a "divine foot in the door") but I’m with Dan Dennett here. The biological world is overflowing with design. Calling it "apparent" just encourages the madness of attempting to find the "real" design that isn’t just "apparent" design. Does this give some kind of comfort to ID creationists and their propaganda machines? Maybe, but that just means that they didn’t read to the end of the sentence: "…without a designer."

But here’s the thought experiment. Suppose I sit down at my supercomputer to predict ways to build a much better version of enzyme Z; let’s even say that my enzyme has a new substrate specificity and is orders of magnitude more stable than enzyme Z. I synthesize the gene and insert it into bacteria. Does this enzyme evince design? Or only apparent design? Is there any way to tell the difference, without knowing that I designed the new enzyme on my supercomputer? Are we going to actually say, "well I can’t tell whether this is design or apparent design until I investigate supercomputer user patterns?"

Just a couple of quick thoughts at this point.

🌵In a universe that includes one or more omnipotent gods, it is impossible to argue persuasively that anything came about without a designer, for the straightforward reason that such beings can make anything they want, and make it look any way they want.
🌲To me, the fundamental first question is not "can we have design without a designer?" but "does design detection imply knowledge or assumptions about possible designers?" I am saying an emphatic ‘no’ to that question, but one can coherently circumscribe ‘design’ to essentially require the answer to be ‘yes.’ I think that creates problems, which I’ve mentioned above, but it’s coherent and defensible to limit ‘design’ in that way. I will grant that once you answer ‘no’ to the fundamental question then it’s hard (maybe impossible) to answer ‘no’ to the first question.

What would you suggest as terminology for the two cases?

I don’t need any new words and I don’t share the premise of "design implies a designer" with you. I have tried to document the fact that design is a pretty integrated concept in biology, such that many biologists talk about design and design principles with no worry that they will be misunderstood. I’m afraid I don’t see how the concept of design without a designer is either hard to grasp (conceptually) or hard to understand (linguistically).

People have tried words like 'designoid' and phrases like 'apparent design.' The subtitle of Dawkins’ The Blind Watchmaker is "Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design." I’m well aware that many believers and unbelievers alike are stuck with the word 'design' linked to 'designer'. I have seen only one argument for this approach so far, which is the dictionary. Maybe there are other things going on. But here is Dennett (from this piece) on one reason why it might not be a good idea to refuse to give ATP synthase the honor of showing design:

The second misplaced emphasis is Pinker’s phrase  'the illusion of design in the natural world." Richard Dawkins, in a similar vein, says "the illusion of design conjured by Darwinian natural selection is so breathtakingly powerful" in The Ancestors’ Tale (p 457), and elsewhere proposes to speak of "designoid" features of the natural world (eg., Climbing Mount Improbable, p 4). I disagree with this policy, which can backfire badly. I recently overheard a conversation among some young people in a bar about the marvels of the nano-machinery discovered inside all cells. "When you see all those fantastic little robots working away, how can you possibly believe in evolution!" one exclaimed, and another nodded wisely. Somehow these folks had gotten the impression that evolutionary biologists thought that the intricacies and ingenuities of life’s processes weren’t all that wonderful. These evolution-doubters were not rednecks; they were Harvard Medical students! They hugely underestimated the power of natural selection because they had been told by evolutionary biologists, again and again, that there is no actual design in nature, only the appearance of design. This episode strongly suggested to me that one of the themes that has been gaining ground in "common knowledge" is that evolutionary biologists are reluctant to "admit" or "acknowledge" the manifest design in nature. I recommend instead the expository policy of calling nature’s marvels design, as real as any design in the universe, but just not the products of an intelligent designer.

You can read how Dennett describes design here, in his recent cool book From Bacteria to Bach and Back.

Biology shows design. I don’t think that’s confusing or unclear, and I think it’s a mistake to make distinctions based on old dictionaries. YMMV.