Science Literature

Edward Wasserman and Mark Blumberg are interested in explaining the origins of novel behaviours. They are aware of several research groups working with animals and give the example of crows that were observed to fashion wires into hooks that were in turn used to gain access to food. The researchers interpreted the crow behaviour using the concepts of creativity and insight. But this is a mistake, argue Wasserman and Blumberg. The crows are learning by trial-and-error, not by forethought.

"Nonetheless, we seem to be in the midst of a resurgence of faith among some scientists that animal behavior can be explained by creativity, insight and other mentalistic concepts. For our part, we remain skeptical about the utility of such groundless explanations. Indeed, we are unconvinced that creativity and insight are proper explanations even for human behavior."

Is design a crumbling iconic concept? (source here)

The authors draw inspiration from The Evolution of Useful Things (1993) by the engineer Henry Petroski. The thesis of the book is that the design maxim "form follows function" does not reflect the history of design, and Petroski argues, instead, that "form follows failure". In other words, humans are inveterate tinkerers and indulge in experimentation; some of these avenues are found to lead somewhere and are valued, whereas others are unsuccessful and are abandoned. This leads to an incremental evolutionary process, analogous to the "survival of the fittest".

"It is through this plodding process that today's designs - typically instantiated in the form of a detailed blueprint - embody all of the hard, painful, but often unacknowledged lessons of the past. Most of us are ignorant of that history, yet we glibly proclaim that the final products were intelligently designed, thereby perpetuating the myth of the creative moment. We then carry that myth forward and attribute each new artifact to individual insight, creativity and genius."

The authors of the article are aware of the way that Darwinist thinking has impacted our culture, not just the science of origins. They suggest that even Charles Darwin and Richard Dawkins were not radical enough to apply these ideas to "that last bastion of designer intelligence, our minds". Why should our minds be exempt from being understood in Darwinian terms?

"What did Dawkins mean when he wrote of things that "really are designed"? In The Blind Watchmaker, he provided a clear answer: "All appearances to the contrary, the only watchmaker in nature is the blind forces of physics. [. . .] A true watchmaker has foresight: He designs his cogs and springs, and plans their interconnections, with a future purpose in his mind's eye" [emphasis added].
Such uncritical acceptance of purpose and foresight in human design may well be unwise. [. . .] By attributing the origins of animals and artifacts to different kinds of designers - one blind, the other intelligent - both Darwin and Dawkins lapse into the same kind of "designer thinking" that ensnared creationists like Paley."

The authors are objecting to "mentalistic explanations of behavior", and "giving human designers too much credit". In their eyes, appealing to "foresight and purpose" indicates a lack of critical thinking. The effect of all this is to bring to the fore the stimulus-response framework of behavioural psychology. This makes learning in animals and humans the result of associations being forming between stimuli and responses. The authors refer to psychologist Edward Thorndike and one of his three laws: the "law of effect" says that responses to a stimulus which are followed by a reward will be reinforced and will become habitual.

"Importantly, this positively Darwinian process exists entirely outside the realm of purpose or foresight. If everything in nature is the result of fixed laws, as Darwin himself proposed, then would he not also have marveled at the explanatory power of the law of effect - which was not discovered until several decades after his death - and its compelling parallels with natural selection?"

The authors have contributed an essay which is in the tradition of explaining human beings completely in terms of physics and chemistry. Distinctive aspects of humanity are ultimately treated as myths: consciousness, creativity, foresight and purpose. Design thinking (they suggest) should be reformulated in Darwinian terms and evolutionists should be freed from disputes over "over where to draw the line between things that really are designed and things that only appear to be designed". Some of my past blogs have considered consciousness, evolutionary psychology, Darwin's thinking about the continuity of mind, and attempts to deconstruct love. These research 'findings' have the basic premises of materialism and rationalism. Their philosophical roots are not determined scientifically (for that is impossible) but are assumed. The researchers' attempts to deconstruct humanity are destructive. Happily, they are also flawed. In the case of creativity and design, the authors point to the role of trial and error and generalize from that. What they do not do is to grapple with concepts like induction, intuition, inspiration and brain-storming. Nobody denies that a process of experimentation follows the emergence of a design concept. Most will question whether that process is best described as "trial and error" because they will expect an intelligent design of experiments rather than tinkering. The flaw is to think that because design prototypes experience (intelligent) selection, the whole process is devoid of purpose and foresight.

The main problem facing our culture is that the materialists have tried to gain a monopoly for their favoured philosophy. They are always claiming that you have to be a materialist to do science. This means that they have an easy ride in the journals and in academic forums. Roll on the day when this straightjacket is removed, and scholars can follow the evidence wherever it leads.

Designing Minds
Edward A. Wasserman and Mark S. Blumberg
American Scientist, May-June 2010, Volume 98, Number 3, Pages 183f | DOI: 10.1511/2010.84.183

First paragraph: The basic argument of intelligent design was famously set forth in the watchmaker analogy of William Paley in 1802: The complexity and functionality of a watch imply a watchmaker; analogously, the complexity and functionality of living things also imply a designer, albeit one vastly more potent than a mere watchmaker. This argument rests on a simple analogy between the design of human artifacts and the design of natural forms. For the analogy to work, we must first accept that we design our inventions with purpose and foresight. On this point, most evolutionists and creationists agree. What distinguishes these two camps is that, when accounting for the origin of living things, proponents of intelligent design summon a divine creator, whereas evolutionists credit natural selection. Thus, evolutionists share with creationists the same understanding of design; they differ only in how they invoke it.