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Reading Between the Lines: Intelligent Design in Philip Ball’s Non-ID Book

Image source: Louvre Museum, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

I recently finished reading science writer Philip Ball’s new book, How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology. Ball is a gifted writer and science communicator, making this a pleasant volume to read. But what I found most fascinating is how often Ball, in describing this new biology, feels the need to appeal to design language despite his overt disavowal of any support for intelligent design. It’s almost as if the evidence forces his hand against his will!

The main thrust of the book is that a reductionist genetic essentialism is no longer a tenable view of how life works. DNA is not a simple blueprint for building an organism. The instructions contained in the genome are subject to interpretation by a myriad of cellular and organismal systems rendering it impossible to make any predictions about the phenotype of an organism simply by analyzing its genotype. In Ball’s view, agency acts at all levels of organismal structure (shades of Denis Noble) making the processes of life far more complex and dynamic than the old gene-centered view allowed for. But in making this argument, Ball is forced into employing design tropes and explicit design language in ways that I think even he finds a bit embarrassing given his desire to remain biologically orthodox.

A Clear Stance

To be clear, Ball makes his anti-ID stance explicit near the end of the book: “I do want to be clear…that there is no obvious challenge in any of what I have said or say hereafter to the core principles of Darwinism — or perhaps we should say of neo-Darwinism” (453). And about the appearance of agency in evolution he says, “There need be nothing mystical about the question — it is not a backdoor for intelligent design” (460). Ball feels the need to assure his readers of his biological orthodoxy, but this just serves to emphasize how aware he is that what he says about how life works could easily be seen to support design thinking. Examples of this abound.

To start, Ball recognizes the intractable problem at the heart of origin-of-life scenarios:

The fact that DNA can only be made with the help of proteins (such as DNA polymerase), and that proteins can only be made with the help of DNA, poses a chicken-and-egg conundrum for how the whole shebang could have got started when life on Earth began (109). 

Kudos to Ball for recognizing this problem. Unfortunately, he simply ignores the more important question of whether this conundrum renders naturalistic origin-of-life scenarios moot. He certainly offers no naturalistic explanation himself. He just leaves the conundrum hanging and ignores its larger significance.

Praise for the ENCODE Project

On the matter of “junk DNA,” Ball praises the ENCODE project for showing that much of the human genome actually has function, and he further recognizes that this does not sit well with many evolutionary biologists. He cites Ford Doolittle to the effect that if most of the human genome is not junk, we would have to be unique among animals. Doolittle scornfully termed this “genomic anthropocentrism.” But Ball pushes back in defense of ENCODE, writing, “To accuse an internationally renowned team of scientists of opening the door to intelligent design is akin to an ideological accusation of a betrayal of the faith” (123). Ball doesn’t see it this way. He supports the findings of ENCODE even as he rejects intelligent design. But his language becomes more and more design-laden as he goes.

Consider his discussion of intrinsically disordered proteins, proteins that remain in a mostly unfolded state until they are needed to perform a function at which time they take on the appropriate form. Ball (citing Polish cancer researcher Ewa Grzybowska) says of intrinsically disordered proteins that they “enable cells to respond quickly to a change in circumstances, giving access to a wide variety of possible routes for transmitting and directing signals that are — and this is crucial! — not programmed into the system” (164). But how do cells know how to respond in unprogrammed ways to unexpected circumstances? Is Ball implying some sort of cellular or even molecular cognition similar to that considered by Barbara McClintock in the 1980s? He does not say (though later it appears he is leaning this way). Once again, he tantalizes us with non-Darwinian, ID-friendly possibilities, but simply ignores the obvious implication.

However, when we get to Ball’s discussion of causal emergence, the cat is out of the bag. He calls causal emergence “a general design principle for life” (217). And in a discussion of body-patterning processes in embryonic development he writes:

Here again we can see one of nature’s design principles: to find the right balance between top-down, bottom-up, and middle-out mechanisms for building organisms, so that adaptation and variation can happen, and innovations — dramatic new solutions to the challenge of “design” — are possible without producing a dangerous sensitivity to small changes (330).

So nature and life possess design principles, do they! And where might these principles have come from? A designer, perhaps? Ball again has nothing more to say. He once again tantalizes us with overt design language and then moves on.

But the Theme Continues

Ball goes on:

Indeed, even single, functional biomolecules like proteins represent their environment in a sense, for example in the way that the polypeptide chains are “designed” to fold on the assumption that they will do so in water, and the way enzymes have active sites that in a sense “anticipate” their respective target ligands (361).

Ball tries to protect himself here by the use of scare quotes. But he really can’t have it both ways. If polypeptide chains are designed to fold in water, then they are designed to fold in water and there must have been a designer. If they are not designed, then their ability to fold in water must be the result of undirected material processes. And if the latter, why bother to use the words design and anticipate only to undermine their meaning by using scare quotes? Clearly the evidence for design is compelling to Ball, but he must try to maintain his commitment to biological orthodoxy at the same time, leading him to twist himself into a bit of a pretzel.

In another defensive move, Ball has this to say:

I have talked here about cells deciding their fate: electing which valley of the landscape to go down. This sounds like very anthropomorphic language, but it needn’t be. After all, we speak routinely of computer systems making decisions too, especially in artificial intelligence (262, emphases in the original). 

Does Ball really want to go down this road? Computer systems make decisions only because they have been designed that way by their intelligent creators. No decision-making computer has ever arisen as the result of an undirected physical process. If the existence of decision-making computers implies the existence of an intelligent computer engineer, then the existence of decision-making cells likewise would imply the existence of an intelligent creator of those cells. Ball’s analogy threatens to undermine his whole anti-ID stance.

To go even further, Ball favorably quotes biologist Dennis Bray:

…living cells have an intrinsic sensitivity to their environment — a reflexivity, a capacity to detect and record salient features of their surroundings — that is essential for their survival. This feature is deeply woven into the molecular fabric of living cells (263).

Ball doesn’t even exclude the possibility of cellular sentience. And yet, to maintain credibility with his scientific readers, he simply can’t bring himself to entertain the obvious conclusion being forced upon him by the accumulating biological evidence: Neo-Darwinism is dead, but intelligent design is looking more and more likely. 

I appreciate Ball’s willingness to fully engage with this emerging dynamic view of how life works. He is right to pronounce the old gene-centered view dead on arrival, even if it is being kept artificially alive in many quarters due to fears that the alternative doesn’t fit so neatly with naturalism. Yet despite Ball’s strenuous disavowal of intelligent design, How Life Works just might be one of the more important ID books to appear in recent years. And that irony should not be lost on anyone.