FreeStyle:TOPS
From ResearchID.org
Excerpt from "Using Intelligent Design Theory to Guide Scientific Research" by Jonathan Wells, Ph.D.; Senior Fellow, Discovery Institute; May 10, 2004; © Jonathan Wells and ISCID 2004; PCID 3.1.2, November 2004. Available from http://www.iscid.org/papers/Wells_TOPS_051304.pdf.
Intelligent Design theory (ID) can contribute to science on at least two levels. On one level, ID is concerned with inferring from the evidence whether a given feature of the world is designed. This is the level on which William Dembski's explanatory filter and Michael Behe's concept of irreducible complexity operate. It is also the level that has received the most attention in recent years, largely because the existence of even one intelligently designed feature in living things (at least prior to human beings) would overturn the Darwinian theory of evolution that currently dominates Western biology. On another level, ID could function as a "metatheory," providing a conceptual framework for scientific research. By suggesting testable hypotheses about features of the world that have been systematically neglected by older metatheories (such as Darwin's), and by leading to the discovery of new features, ID could indirectly demonstrate its scientific fruitfulness. In November 2002, Bill Dembski, Paul Nelson and I visited the Detroit headquarters of Ideation, Inc. Ideation is a thriving business based on TRIZ, an acronym for the Russian words meaning "Theory of Inventive Problem Solving." Based on a survey of successful patents, TRIZ provides guidelines for finding solutions to specific engineering or manufacturing problems. When Ideation's president took us out to lunch, he told us that before ID could be taken seriously it would have to solve some real problems.
TOPS I was inspired by this to sketch out something I called a Theory of Organismal Problem-Solving (TOPS). Strictly speaking, I suppose the biological equivalent of TRIZ would survey successful experiments for guidelines to solve research problems posed by existing hypotheses. I chose to try a different approach, however: As I formulated it, TOPS suggests how ID could lead to new hypotheses and scientific discoveries. TOPS begins with the observation that the evidence is sufficient to warrant at least provisional acceptance of two propositions: (1) Darwinian evolution (the theory that new features of living things originate through natural selection acting on random variations) is false, and (2) ID (the theory that many features of living things could only have originated through intelligent agency) is true.
TOPS then explicitly rejects several implications of Darwinian evolution. These include: (1a) The implication that living things are best understood from the bottom up, in terms of their molecular constituents. (1b) The implications that DNA mutations are the raw materials of macroevolution, that embryo development is controlled by a genetic program, that cancer is a genetic disease, etc. (1c) The implication that many features of living things are useless vestiges of random processes, so it is a waste of time to inquire into their functions. Finally, TOPS assumes as a working hypothesis that various implications of ID are true. These include: (2a) The implication that living things are best understood from the top down, as irreducibly complex organic wholes. (2b) The implications that DNA mutations do not lead to macroevolution, that the developmental program of an embryo is not reducible to its DNA, that cancer originates in higher structural features of the cell rather than in its DNA, etc. (2c) The implication that all features of living things should be presumed to have a function until proven otherwise, and that reverse engineering is the best way to understand them.
It is important to note that "implication" is not the same as "logical deduction." Darwinian evolution does not logically exclude the ID implications listed here, nor does ID logically exclude every implication of Darwinian evolution. A Darwinian may entertain the idea that other features of an embryo besides DNA influence its development, and Darwinians can (and do) use reverse engineering to understand the functions of features in living things. Furthermore, an ID viewpoint does not logically rule out genetic programs or the idea that some features of living things may be useless vestiges of evolution. The differences between Darwinian evolution and ID that form the starting-point for TOPS are not mutually exclusive logical entailments, but differences in emphasis. The goal of TOPS is not to show that Darwinian evolution leads logically to false conclusions, but to explore what happens when ID rather than evolutionary theory is used as a framework to ask research questions. Take, for example, research on the vast regions of vertebrate genomes that do not code for proteins. From a neo-Darwinian perspective, DNA mutations can provide the raw materials for evolution because DNA encodes proteins that determine the essential features of organisms. Since non-coding regions do not produce proteins, Darwinian biologists have been dismissing them for decades as random evolutionary noise or "junk DNA." From an ID perspective, however, it is extremely unlikely that an organism would expend its resources on preserving and transmitting so much "junk." It is much more likely that noncoding regions have functions that we simply haven't discovered yet. Recent research shows that "junk DNA" does, indeed, have previously unsuspected functions. Although that research was done in a Darwinian framework, its results came as a complete surprise to people trying to ask Darwinian research questions. The fact that "junk DNA" is not junk has emerged not because of evolutionary theory but in spite of it. On the other hand, people asking research questions in an ID framework would presumably have been looking for the functions of non-coding regions of DNA all along, and we might now know considerably more about them.
