Re: The status of ID and a personal reflection

On 23/02/2025 21:52, MarkE wrote:

On 24/02/2025 6:10 am, Ernest Major wrote:

On 23/02/2025 11:43, MarkE wrote:

ID is described as "a pseudoscientific argument" on Wikipedia [1], there's clearly no love for it here, and as far as I know ID has limited recognition within mainstream science. The general public's awareness and support of ID I believe is higher but still constrained.
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ID has been accused of being a creationism Trojan Horse, and at times it seems to have pursued a political agenda, especially with education.  From to time to time, the Discovery Institute and Evolution News promote a misplaced right-wing perspective.

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In principle Intelligent Design could have been a legitimate scientific research program, albeit one that I would not expect to be productive. In practice it's a religiously motivated political movement.
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ID's studied agnosticism (when not addressing a friendly audience) about the identity and nature of the designer or designers is what makes it clear that it's not a scientific research program. A scientific research program would asking be who, what, why, when, where and how, or at the least how to investigate who, what, why, when, where and how.
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The aim of science is to explain (if you're a philosophical realist) or model (if you're a philosophical anti-realist) the world. By eschewing questions of who, what, when, why, where and how, what ID does is explain away observations, not explain them.

 Noooooooooooo. You're ignoring the asymmetry I describe below. With respect to a scientifically inferred designer, questions of who, what, when, why, where and how are the province of theology, philosophy, experience etc. In this context, science functions as a prompt and pointer to other epistemological domains.

The Intelligent Design Movement didn't have to eschew questions about the identity and properties of the design; that was a deliberate choice made for political reasons.
Arguably they've slipped up on occasion, and let their unstated assumptions leak into their arguments. They can't disprove evolution by the absence of junk DNA anymore than they can disprove evolution by its presence. I'm not old enough to remember the change, but as I understand the history the existence of DNA was rather a surprise; it had been naively assumed that natural selection would eliminate it. There remains a widespread reluctance to accept its existence among biologists; few would still defend an absolute panadaptationism, but panfunctionalism doesn't seem to have received the same critical scrutiny.
This leads me to suspect that the ID movements beliefs about the nature of the designer have led to their rejection of junk DNA, accidentally making a testable prediction in the process. By rejecting junk DNA they are implicitly assuming a designer that has the knowledge, capability and intent to produce organisms that lack wasteful features (at least this one). They may also be implicitly assuming recent design of organisms; otherwise what has prevented junk DNA accumulating since the organisms were created?
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alias Ernest Major