Two kinds of intelligent design

Today, there is a strange movement afoot referred to as “Intelligent Design” (ID). I say strange because the motivation behind it is to me not so clear. It appears to be culturally related to the earlier and very dubious “young-earth creationist” movement. But whereas one could perhaps understand (but not condone) the theological motivation behind that (shifting the blame apparently for animal suffering from God to mankind’s “fall”), I wonder what the motivation is for this newer movement?

Well, I know that it focuses on claiming that certain animal cells or parts could not have evolved in the gradual manner that Darwinian evolution postulates. Simply put, a principle of evolution is that for a trait or organ to evolve in stages, it must represent an advantage to organisms at each stage along the line. For example, for an eye to evolve, partial light sensitivity must be useful for organisms in the lineage (and I think it is easy to imagine that it would be useful to have even a very slight degree of light sensitivity). I believe that the flagellum is one example of “irreducible complexity” that ID proponents use, and I do not pretend to know anything about these biological systems, I find it dubious on the surface to argue that some trait can not have evolved gradually just because it isn’t clear how it could have. A great deal of info can be found on the web about this controversy, but most of it seems to claim that there are plausible ways that it could have evolved in the gradual way that Darwinism requires.

From a theological angle, what does this “biological ID” solve? If young earth creationism tried to provide a way around the “problem of pain” in the animal world, this latter form seems to do nothing of the kind. Animals would seem to have still killed each other and suffered long before man appeared on the scene (it is my impression that the ID movement does not dispute the billions of years old earth idea).

For my part, I think it very likely that Darwinian Evolution (in the modern post gene discovery era where it is called Neo-Darwinism) can account for all of the life forms, given that life somehow started. Now whether we will ever fully understand how exactly living forms got started, I do not know, but again my strong suspicion is that life did begin in some natural manner. I do not believe this in a dogmatic sense, but I would be surprised if it were not true. Proving it to be true is another manner, and, short of actually producing life from non-life, it is possible that we never will.

But I want to distinguish what might be considered a different kind of ID from te biological version, one that wonders if the physical universe is somehow designed by (in some sense) an enormously subtle intelligence. It could be something like a “God”, though by no means necessarily the type of God that the world’s theistic religions imagine. Or it could be a collection or panel of supernatural beings, or some kind of entities that we cannot even possibly imagine or grasp. The point is, there might be conscious agency involved in designing the laws of the universe. Suppose that the emergence of life was designed to an inevitable outcome from the initial conditions of the Big Bang, for example. It would not be necessary to imagine that a particular form of life (such as humans) might have been foreseen by the designer---indeed perhaps the chaotic, unpredictable nature of things required something like evolution to eventually produce life forms that are conceptually aware. In this view, there could be countless billions of intelligent life forms scattered through the universe, or there could be just one (us). We have no data on this.

One can imagine hundreds of variations on this idea, some involving the eventual spreading of consciousness throughout the universe. As numerous speculative science writers have pointed out, this could be the reason for the universe having “life built into it from the git-go”.

I do not, of course, know if this any of cosmological ID is actually true, or even close to the truth. I must confess that it does seem highly plausible to me that something like it is true. But I do want to point out that such a position might be called a form of ID—perhaps, “cosmological ID” would be an apt term for it—and that it would be vastly more plausible and respectable than the position represented in the current ID movement.

What causes aging?

In Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings (LOTR) the elves are immortal in the sense that they do not die of old age. They can, of course, be killed by accidents or in battle, be murdered, etc. Man, by contrast, is “doomed to die”, the phrase that appears in the poem about the Nine Rings that opens the novel. Of course, JRRT had a Christian perspective, and viewed an inherent mortality as a planned condition that is part of a scheme to save humankind from a worst fate that would await him if death did not deliver him from the corrupting evils of a “fallen world”. It presumes a sort of “planned obsolescence” that would pave the way for a second life that would, presumably, be free from such spiritually corrupting influences.

Well, me, while I love the mystery and the strange ambiance of LOTR, I don’t know anything for certain about any such second lives. For one thing, I cannot imagine what reality such a second life might be like, and in particular how it might be free from the potential for evil. But this is a complicated issue, to say the least, and it is not what I want to dwell on at the moment. Rather, all this leads me to thinking: what is the scientific reason for the human body ageing and, on a time scale of-- for most of us--- “four score” (80 years), rather rapidly wearing out and dying of “old age”? (if something else doesn’t get us first, of course.)

I always look at such issues from the game theory perspective of evolutionary biology. And it seems to me that the situation of Tolkein’s elves suggests the reason for the body wearing out and the body’s processes grinding to a halt. Namely, there is some expectation value of elapsed time before an accident causes death, and nature does not want to waste any efforts in assuring that the body and mind will last much beyond that average time interval. By the way, by “accidental death” I mean to include all of the causes of death that are not associated with the total body simply wearing out. That is, everything except “dying of old age”.

It is often noted that once the organism has produced offspring, and has ceased being fertile, we can expect it to be on borrowed time for some interval after that. But this begs the question. Why is fertility of finite duration? I suspect that the answer is again, that there is little to be gained by engineering a body that can continue to reproduce for a time that greatly exceeds the temporal expectation value for accidental death.

The wikipedia page on fertility in both human males and females has, in this regard, an unsatisfactory section called “the cause of the decline”. But the title of this section is incorrect because it really just deals with the statistics on when fertility falls off. In other words, it does not address what the real cause of the decline is.

I want to add---perhaps unnecessarily—that when I speak of such things as “nature engineering something” I do not mean that I impute conscious design to any entity outside of nature, or to nature herself. I view this in a Smithsonian sense as being one of those phenomena under the control of an invisible hand, and consider genetic evolution to be a sort of computer that through natural selection reaches an optimal solution.

I look forward to looking into the popular evolutionary literature on what is thought to cause aging and death. The above comments are really intended to simply raise the issue, and I plan to revisit the topic after I have done a bit of research. I noted today a chapter in J. Diamond’s book “The Third Chimpanzee” that speculates about the issue of aging, and I plan to read that first.

More on the topic of concealed ovulation in humans

There was an entry in this blog a few weeks about what seemed to me to be a puzzle, namely, how can we understand “concealed ovulation” in humans from the perspective of evolutionary biology. I recently happened upon the book “The Third Chimpanzee” by evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond. He writes, on page 78 of my paperback copy, that “…the most hotly debated problem in the evolution of human reproduction is to explain why we ended up with concealed ovulation….”.

I suppose I must admit I found it gratifying that at least I wasn’t being a dunderhead in writing about this puzzle. That is, if distinguished professional biologists cannot agree on the reason for this trait, then a layman in the area (such as myself) certainly has the right to be puzzled by it.

At any rate, Diamond goes on to say that there are at least six current theories about why the trait evolved. As I understand his more lengthy explanations, it evolved for one of the following reasons:
1. To enhance cooperation among males (he considers this one to be rather male chauvinist for some reason)
2. To cement the bonds between mates
3. To enhance the probability of the female to receive her fair portion of meat from male hunters
4. To force the male into a permanent marriage bond (he considers this one to be “gender neutral” in a gender politics context)
5. To encourage seevral males to help her, and to at least not kill the infant (this one, by Sarah Hrdy, he applauds as a welcome “feminist” perspective)
6. Because a woman that had a tendency to conceal ovulation could not avoid the risk and pain of childbirth, and hence left more descendants that did those that did not conceal it (this is the theory that Nancy Burly suggested in about 1979, and the one that I mentioned as being a common sense explanation in my earlier post).

I find it rather regrettable that Diamond seems to place so much emphasis on being politically correct. For example, he approves of number 5 because it “overturns masculine sexism and transfers sexual power to women”. This seems an odd reason to like a hypothesis, for shouldn’t scientific truth be the only guide for favoring an explanation of any natural phenomena? Nevertheless, the several pages he devotes to this issue involve some intriguing speculation, and I find it quite interesting.

More about "concealed ovulation"

Apropos of my previous entry: I just found a paper on the internet, albeit not a very recent one, that seems to hypothesize that the reason that ovulation is concealed from the female herself is indeed what I conjectured in my previous post (prehistoric women that avoided sex during fertile periods tended to be supplanted in the gene pool by those for whom ovulation was concealed). The article is titled "The Evolution of Concealed Ovulation", by Nancy Burley, and appears in the journal The American Naturalist, December 1979. Note that this paper was published almost 30 years ago, and it would seem that there has been adequate time to examine this hypothesis, and perhaps it has been largely rejected by evolutionary biologists. However, it is interesting that the Burley paper refers to, but apparently rejects, the Noonan-Alexander hypothesis (also 1979) cited by Linden in his book (see the previous post for the reference), so both hypotheses have been around about the same length of time.
So.......I continue to wonder, what is the current best theory among biologists to explain this feature of human biology. Anyone?

The Evolutionary Puzzle of Concealed Ovulation

Comments on The Accidental Mind, by David J. Linden

I am fascinated by this excellent book. It deals with how the brain, especially the mind, has evolved, and emphasizes that the brain is not an efficiently designed gizmo. Rather, he arguer that it is a serendipitous kludge put together willy-nilly through many diverse evolutionary steps, with many subsystems inefficiently built on top of each other. It is a tightly argued book, and makes good cases for explaining how brain evolution gives rise to a wide range of human behaviors and emotions (love, memory, dreams, and God, as stated on the cover).
However, one argument he makes leaves me puzzled. He discusses, on page 149, the question “why do humans have concealed ovulation and recreational sex?”. This is, seemingly, two different questions, is it not? The first part, about concealed ovulation, is very interesting to speculate on from the perspective of evolution. The second part of the question though seems to me to be not a weighty one. For isn’t the obvious answer that it is fun and feels good? Don’t all animals, in a sense, engage in recreational sex? No animal, as far as I can tell, does it because it is intentionally going about the business of procreating. Now, that of course is the effect of it, and in fact why nature has made it feel good. If it didn’t, an animal would be disinclined to perform the act, and its genes would not be in the gene pool. So it seems to me. I am a simple layman in this area, so I could be way off base here, and maybe not fully understanding some subtlety in the question.
Let me turn to the first part of the question, that about concealed ovulation. He presents a hypothesis to answer this, attributed to Noonan and Alexander of the University of Michigan. This hypothesis is that concealed ovulation evolved as a means of keeping the male around. Reasonable sounding, as one can see that from a game theory perspective that if ovulation were evident to a male, he might leave upon having sex with an ovulating female to have impregnate another female. Since he is not sure, and he doesn’t want to take a chance that any offspring that the first women has are in fact from another male, he sticks around. He does not want to waste resources raising another males offspring (which would not propagate his genes). Presumably, a male sticking around does, according to this explanation, tend to increase the chances of the woman’s offspring surviving and passing on her genes. Amusing if this is true: maybe this is an indication that we males are good for something after all.
We must quickly add though that male usefulness may not follow as being true today. A protective male could have been much more useful in prehistoric times to provide protection against invaders, predators, and other violent enemies.
But it is not so clear to me that this hypothesis makes sense from a “selfish gene” point of view (the Richard Dawkins book of that name makes perfect sense to me, so I look at everything about evolution from that perspective). It seems to involve assuming that a given male consciously wants to maximize his genes representation in the gene pool, doesn’t it? And as I said above, it seems to me that all animals, including humans, engage in sexual activity because of the pleasure it brings. Putting ones genes into the gene pool, i.e., procreating, is a byproduct from the animal’s point of view.
The other thing that bothers me is that this Noonan-Alexander hypothesis only seems to explain why ovulation is hidden from the male. It is not clear that it explains why it is hidden from the female as well, who will have, presumably, a more nuanced sense of what her body is doing that an external male would have.
Why, I wonder, do people not consider what seems to me to be a more simple explanation of concealed ovulation? Namely this: humans have gradually evolved conceptual knowledge of consequences, or “cause and effect”, and must have long ago (in prehistoric times) figured out that the sex act could result in babies. Perhaps, once a woman knew that to be the case, she would be more inclined to abstain from sex when she was aware that she was ovulating. If she did abstain, she would be able to enjoy all the “recreational sex” she wanted, but she would less likely to be impregnated. To be sure, there have no doubt been times when a woman wanted to have children, but it is easy to imagine that babies could have been a severe burden at many times in human history. Hence, on this view, the woman that somehow mutated a tendency to conceal the fertile times could give rise to more offspring than would a woman that avoided sex when she knew she was ovulating. The latter type of woman would be gradually supplanted in the gene pool, and women with concealed ovulation would thrive.
I seem to recall that in one of the many books I have read on “evolutionary biology” that this theory of mine has been considered by others and soundly rejected. If anyone can enlighten me as to exactly why it is faulty, I would be most grateful.
Note: There is a wikipedia entry on "concealed ovulation", but it does not discuss why it evolved. It does point out that some other mammals, such as rhesus monkeys, have it.