Richard Dawkins on Design Detection as Good Science

In The Ancestor's Tale, Richard Dawkins calls design detection a "genuinely important question":

[I]t is possible to imagine validly using some version of the argument from design, or the argument from irreducible complexity. Future visitors from outer space, who mount archaeological digs of our planet, will surely find ways to distinguish designed machines such as planes and microphones, from evolved machines such as bat wings and ears. It is an interesting exercise to think about how they will make that distinction. They may face some tricky judgements in the messy overlap between natural evolution and human design.

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Given that the illusion of design conjured by Darwinian natural selection is so breathtakingly powerful, how do we in practice, distinguish its products from deliberately designed artifacts? Jacques Monod began his Chance and Necessity in similar terms. Could there be genuinely persuasive examples of irreducible complexity in nature: complex organization made up of many parts, the loss of any one of which would be fatal to the whole? If so, might this suggest genuine design by a superior intelligence, say from an older and more highly evolved civilisation on another planet?

It is possible that an example of such a thing might eventually be discovered. pp. 549-550. 

After discussing Francis Crick's theory of Directed Panspermia (seeding life on earth from outer space), and saying it raises interesting questions, he noted:

Crick was talking about superhuman, not supernatural, design. The difference really matters. On Crick's world view, superhuman designers of bacteria, or of the means to seed Earth with them, would themselves have originally evolved by some local equivalent of Darwinian selection on their own planet. p. 552.

Dawkins gives no serious attempt to explain how we would determine the identity of the designer scientifically. He does not say what a scientist is to do if she detects design but cannot identify the designer. He does not give clear criteria for distinguishing designed from non-designed objects. But he is clear that the question is "important" and gives no indication or reason why it would not be scientific.

For a video of Dawkins saying much the same thing to Ben Stein, go here.

Transcript of the Interview of Richard Dawkins By Ben Stein in the Film Expelled

This is a partial text of the interview of Richard Dawkins by Ben Stein in the film Expelled. This is the key section in which Richard Dawkins acknowledges that it is possible to find evidence of design in biology, and that it could have been seeded here by a "higher intelligence" from elsewhere in the universe.

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BEN STEIN: How did it get created?

DAWKINS: By a very slow process.

BEN STEIN: Well, how did it start?

DAWKINS: Nobody knows how it got started. We know the kind of event that it must have been. We know the sort of event that must have happened for the origin of life.

BEN STEIN: And what was that?

DAWKINS: It was the origin of the first self-replicating molecule.

BEN STEIN: Right, and how did that happen?

DAWKINS: I told you, we don’t know.

. . .

BEN STEIN: What do you think is the possibility that Intelligent Design might turn out to be the answer to some issues in genetics or in Darwinian evolution.

DAWKINS: Well, it could come about in the following way. It could be that at some earlier time, somewhere in the universe, a civilization evolved, probably by some kind of Darwinian means, probably to a very high level of technology, and designed a form of life that they seeded onto perhaps this planet. Um, now that is a possibility, and an intriguing possibility. And I suppose it’s possible that you might find evidence for that if you look at the details of biochemistry, molecular biology, you might find a signature of some sort of designer.

. . .

And that Designer could well be a higher intelligence from elsewhere in the universe. But that higher intelligence would itself have had to have come about by some explicable, or ultimately explicable process. It couldn't have just jumped into existence spontaneously. That's the point.


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The interview can be found on YouTube here.