Semantic Reclamation: Emergent Design Vs Intelligent Design
Professor Ken Miller, who is famous for being the lead expert witness against Intelligent Design at the Dover Trial, has recently proposed that scientists reclaim the word “Design” from the ID movement (ie., the Creationists).
You can listen yourself to his argument for semantic reclamation here in a short discussion he had with James Randerson. I’ve also transcribed a couple of the most relevant quotes here:
ID proponents argue that we can see the hint of design in nature and they use that as evidence against evolution. And that puts scientists in a position of arguing that there is no design in nature — that nature is somehow capricious, arbitrary, random, pointless. Well there is design in nature and we should take that word away from the ID movement and define it in a scientific sense….
Yes design is real but that design emerges from the evolutionary process and the laws of physics and chemistry.
Personally, I couldn’t agree more. I really like the sound of Emergent Design. Others in comments on PZ Myer’s post have suggested Natural Design or Evolutionary Design or the longer Evolutionary Emergent Design which may work too. However, I prefer the term Emergent Design because I think it sounds better and it can contain more meaning: Emergent Design can also cover such emergent patterns such as evolutionary programming, fractals, Mandelbrot, etc.
PZ Myers, of the ScienceBlog Pharyngula, doesn’t agree with Ken Miller on this:
Look at all the flailings about over the word “theory”; lay people will hear that word being used by scientists and conclude that the creationists must have been right all along long before they get around to remapping their mental connections to design.
Another problem is of even greater concern. The word “design” carries other implications: purpose, planning, calculation. These are not present in evolution!
PZ Myer’s first argument is that it will just give creationists another means to twist our words. And his second argument is that this new use of design differs from current usage. Neither of these arguments are really valid when discussing the pros and cons of semantic reclamation.
Every time a word is reclaimed it is always the dirty word that everyone shies away from. The words are purposefully being twisted from their traditional meanings. Of course, some terms are not so much reclaimed as empowered such as Black and Gay; however, there are several examples of successful semantic reclamations:
- Punk, something or someone worthless or unimportant; a young hoodlum, becomes the proud Punk rock; and now gets transformed further to a suffix that means a style or movement characterized by the adoption of aggressively unconventional and often bizarre or shocking in both fashion and attitude.
- Queer, disparaging term for homosexuals in the sense of effeminate or unmanly, becomes the proud Queer embracing all who deviate from sexual/gender stereotypes; to now transform and mainstream even further with “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.”
- Dyke, used disparagingly by many, but like Punk and Queer it is now used proudly by the many of the same people it meant to insult.
Of course, one could point out that the hip hop cultural use of nigger, bitch, and ho haven’t really been all that successfully reclaimed. However, those terms are still also used negatively within the hip hop culture, which makes it hard for these terms to ever take on a new positive meaning.
What does this all have to do with Intelligent Design you might say? Well in this instance, Design isn’t used exactly as an insult, but it is being used as a means of attack. As a result, it has become the dirty word that scientists must shy away from. By being afraid to use the word Design, we are reinforcing the meaning that ID proponents want it to mean. We are empowering it for them not us.
Ken Miller is right. Anyone who looks at nature can plainly see pattern and design. By allowing the ID camp a monopoly on the word Design we are allowing all perceived design to be a win for the creationists. By instead reclaiming Design as Emergent Design we are reclaiming it and empowering it for ourselves.
Dang, I wrote a nice reply to this and Firefox ate it. Will try to reconstruct it as a way of avoiding homework.
I’m not so sure this is a good idea – it seems to me to have a fairly poor cost/benefit ratio. It would be both difficult and potentially dangerous to repurpose the word ‘design’ in this way. Difficult because this use would be directly contrary to the present use, in which ‘design’ does imply a designer (in the present use, wouldn’t it be absurd to refer to a nicely designed sunset?). Potentially dangerous for reasons similar to those you mention by PZ Myer – that it runs the risk of making it look like a victory for creationists, and that it would confuse people about the very issue of whether complex systems require a designer.
And I think the potential rewards are relatively slight. So we claim the word ‘design’ – so what? I don’t think people are so attached to the word that using it to describe unintended natural processes would win any converts to naturalism. And it isn’t like the word is being used as a slur that must be reclaimed; it’s being used as an accurate description of an inaccurate idea about how natural processes work. It’s the idea that’s objectionable, not the word, and appropriating the word doesn’t seem like it would do all that much good while running a high risk.
But I do agree that we need to do a better job in public discourse of showing that natural processes can create amazingly complex patterns from relatively simple rules. Maybe a phrase like ‘emerging complexity’ or something like that. Another way of doing it is to draw attention to natural selection and related processes in everyday contexts more familiar to people than the creation of new species. For example, the way that basketball players tend to be tall because the rules of basketball select for tall people, or the way that there tends to be more debris on the highway between lanes rather than in them because all things being equal junk in a lane is more likely to be kicked up by a car and moved than junk between lanes.
—DELETED COMMENT—-
Note from the blog owner:
This was an advert for a creationist book entitled Quest For Right. If it had been your normal rambling creationist comment, I would have left it; however it was an ad copied word for word from their site. Thus, it was no better than spam.
@Erik thanks for avoiding your homework for me!
You propose some good analogies which could be useful for describing natural selection. However, those don’t get past the difficulty most people have with the “beauty of the eye” etc.
I mean I understand how the eye came to be and how it’s not “irreducibly complex” but it’s difficult for most to see past that (all puns intended). To most the eye is an engineered marvel. When someone says to them looks at the beautiful design of the eye they immediately agree that the eye is beautiful and feels designed.
Presented with this most evolutionary argument start with the negative “no it’s not designed.” And when people are innately viewing it as designed this is not a statement that will win them over. They can sense in their guts that it is designed and your statement just doesn’t ring true and thus everything else after that also rings false.
By instead approaching the issue by saying yes it is designed but designed by natural selection, you are not not directly challenging what they can see with their two eyes.
Also again as I have already stated by being afraid to use the word design you are empowering it for them. And actually I probably have commented that a sunset was nicely designed — but that’s because I’m an artist.
Interesting point – I think this is a stronger argument than you present in the original post. Of course that could just be the egoism of it being a reply to my comment…
I still worry that using the word design in this way would be a victory for the creationists, because it would reinforce the sentiment that anything complex must have intent behind it. My guess is that when people are in awe of the complexity of the eye or something similar they’re thinking a few things, including This can’t happen by accident, and perhaps This must have been designed by some intelligent force. Appropriating the term ‘design’ may help with the first point, that these things aren’t accidental, but I think it would just help the creationists on the second point, by allowing them to mislead people by saying, “See, even the scientists agree that it was designed, and if there’s a design there must be a designer!” Call it empowering the term for them if you will, but it just seems like a losing fight to try to appropriate the word ‘design.’
What we need to do is find a way to break the false dichotomy of design vs. accident in the minds of the public, to show that there is an alternative between random chance and intelligent design. I just had the thought that the term ‘design without a designer’ could be a catchy way to emphasize the point, but that risks sounding both smug and defensive at the same time.
Your suggested nomenclature change is not a bad idea, but I think it will only have effect if accompanied by much deeper changes in the way that we talk about evolution.
I’ve been reading George Lakoff recently, and he has a lot to say about the use of words and how they relate to “frames.” (see e.g. Chapter 3 of his book Thinking Points) In Lakoff’s view, mere word manipulation modifies the “surface frames” evoked in conversation, but if those surface meanings do no resonate with deeper conceptual systems, they will be rejected. He advocates instead the slow construction of “deep frames”, which are much more about the story and deep assumptions behind the words. Your story of “designed by natural selection” touches on this deeper sense; it might be effective in making evolution acceptable to creationists — but I suspect not.
I say this because my understanding of the rejection of evolution revolves around something embedded extremely deeply in the cognitive structures of most humans: the notion of “meaning” as an external construct, rather than a projection upon the world. This is where the idea that things have “purpose” comes from. It’s going to be very hard to change this idea, because it’s psychologically frightening to most people to believe that “meaning”, like “identity”, could be so malleable.
@johnathan You make a good point in that reclaiming the word design doesn’t do much to covert your run of the mill creationist. The main goal of reclaiming the word i feel is to debarb the Intelligent Design movement of their most common line of attack.
Moving from there to convincing isn’t easy but it is easier since your not starting from a defensive position.
Besides the assumed static nature or meaning I think evolution is hard to grok due to humans instinct to look for a direct causitive agent. The same instinct that makes us assume a supernatural agent behind slamming windows and weather and illnesses.
Some evolutionary changes are easy to fathom as a result of natural selection, and others are much more abstruse. Most can quicky envision what would cause a girrafes neck to be chosen for but an eye or the heart?