Design Detection Is a Legitimate Task in Scientific Inquiry, But a Scientist May Be Clumsy At It

Quite a few biology analysts have pondered and studied the sky-high levels of organization and fine-tuning and component interdependence in living systems, and have concluded that such systems show evidence of having been designed. But sometimes people try to "throw a yellow flag" on that type of thinking, by claiming that judging whether something was designed is not a legitimate task in scientific inquiry. 

But such a claim is not true at all. Many types of scientific inquiry do involve judging whether something was designed. I can give some examples:

• Archeologists and anthropologists often in their work spend time judging whether something dug up is a mere accident of nature, or whether the thing dug up is a product of purposeful design. For example, an archeologist or anthropologist may spend quite a bit of time judging whether some sharp rock was a random accidental rock or a rock deliberately fashioned by some intelligent agent hoping to make a tool.
• Radio astronomers involved in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) spend lots of time analyzing radio waves, trying to judge whether they are purely of natural origin or whether they are signals from intelligent agents on other planets. 
• Astronomers may analyze some astronomical object passing through our solar system, and try to judge whether it is a natural object like an asteroid or comet, or perhaps a spaceship from another planet. 
• Virologists and other scientists may spend a great deal of time trying to figure out whether a novel virus such as COVID-19 is a purely natural virus, or whether it is the result of some lab leak involving a lab that was doing gain-of-function research involving deliberate design in an attempt to change a previously existing virus. 

So it is clear that design detection is a legitimate task in scientific inquiry. But if you are a scientist trying to do design detection, you should follow some good principles, rather than clumsily fumbling around.  Avi Loeb is a Harvard astronomer who spends quite a lot of time on tasks of design detection or trying to figure out whether something unusual observed by scientists is designed. But Loeb seems to do a poor job at this task. 

Here are some good principles of design detection:

• Look for the existence of very many well-arranged parts, particularly a case in which nearly all of the parts are needed for some functional result to be achieved. 
• Look for the existence of many different types of parts or components in a very well-arranged system, particularly cases when such parts themselves consist of many well-arranged parts.
• Look for the existence of a hierarchical organization. An example is a book series built from books, each built from chapters, each built from paragraphs, each built from sentences, each built from  words, each built from characters or letters of an alphabet, each built from pixels. Another example is a human body built from organ systems, each built from one or more organs or other components, each built from tissues, each built from cells, each built from organelles, each built from protein complexes, each built from protein molecules, each built from amino acids, each built from atoms, each built from subatomic particles. 
• Look for interdependent components, which can be a particularly strong sign of design. An example is that the blades of an electric fan cannot function without the fan's motor, and the motor serves no purpose without the blades. 
• Look for the existence of very high improbability whenever that serves some functional purpose and can be reasonably called an example of very precise fine-tuning. 

Conversely, "look for something unexpected" is not a particularly good design detection strategy, because it is too easy to find something unexpected when analyzing things, particularly things that are hard to observe. It is just such a design detection strategy that seems to dominate the look-for-design efforts of Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb, rather than any of the good principles I have listed in the bullet list above. 

Loeb is a scholar of objects that visit our solar system. Loeb has repeatedly tried to claim (without adequate warrant) that such objects are products of deliberate design.  Loeb's first efforts in this regard were focused on a strange object named ‘Oumuamua which was distantly observed by astronomers. It rather seemed to have entered the solar system from outside the solar system.  Being only between 100 and 1000 meters long and passing many millions of miles away, 85 times farther away than the moon, the object was never photographed as anything more than a speck. We can see some astronomical photos of ‘Oumuamua at the link here, where ‘Oumuamua appears as a mere featureless dot, using up only a few pixels in the images.  Press stories about  ‘Oumuamua repeatedly showed some cigar-shaped visual that was not an actual photograph, but was merely a speculative fake visual. 

As described in my post here, Loeb tried to persuade people that ‘Oumuamua was an extraterrestrial spaceship. Loeb capitalized on this opportunity, writing a book trying to promote such a theory. He ignored facts defying his hypothesis. One was that ‘Oumuamua seemed to have a tumbling motion, one we would never expect an extraterrestrial spaceship to have. Another reason for rejecting the claim that ‘Oumuamua was some kind of extraterrestrial spacecraft is that the object showed no sign of moving towards our planet.  Loeb's attempts to suggest that ‘Oumuamua was a designed object seems to have been based on attempts to show that ‘Oumuamua was an oddball outlier having some strange features not seen before. You do not show the likelihood of design merely by showing something has some odd features. 

Loeb's next attempt at design detection involved a  2014 meteor (the CNEOS 2014-01-08 meteor), a meteor that seems to have blown up in the atmosphere.  There was never any reason to think that there was any design involved with this object. But somehow Loeb raised a large amount of money to go on a seafaring expedition trying to dredge up what he thought were remnants of the object.  The expedition dredged up some tiny specks from the bottom of the sea, which Loeb got groundlessly excited about. The result was stories such as a CBS News story story entitled "Harvard professor Avi Loeb believes he's found fragments of alien technology."

What went on was a farce of analytic incompetence. There was nothing that looked the least bit designed in the tiny metal  specks that Loeb had dredged up.  But Loeb incorrectly claimed that there was something very unusual about the metal specks. As I show in my post here, such claims were unfounded. The element composition of the specks was very similar to the element composition of similar sea specks and metal specks found all over the world. But Loeb kept claiming that there was something unusual about his beloved specks of metal. 

We may note here the extreme deviance from good principles of design detection.  Showing that something has some unexpected characteristics does not establish any likelihood that it was designed. "Look for something unexpected" is not a particularly good design detection strategy, because it is too easy to find something unexpected when analyzing things. Here the attempt at design detection was particularly clumsy, because there was nothing very special at all about the metal specks that Loeb had dredged up from the sea. 

Now Loeb is back again at the job of trying to look for design in odd things entering our solar system. There is an odd object called 3I/ATLAS which NASA calls a comet. But this year Avi Loeb has been trying to suggest the object is a spaceship from another planet. Loeb's misstatements about his dredged-up sea specks were so far off the mark that I don't think anyone should have any great trust when he analyzes an object of this type while attempting to suggest it is an interstellar spaceship. By now there should be a "boy who cried wolf" effect that diminishes our trust in Loeb when he does analysis of this type. We should "take with a grain of salt" most of the claims that Loeb makes about the characteristics of 3I/ATLAS.

Again, Loeb's attempts at suggesting design are not based on any of the good principles of design inference I listed in my bullet list above.  No one has detected any organization or functional complexity or high functional arrangement of parts in 3I/ATLAS. Again, Loeb's attempts at suggesting design are based on a lame "look for something unexpected" strategy. 

Loeb's main attempt to suggest something unexpected in 3I/ATLAS is his claim that the object has no tail. Comets have tails when they get close enough to the sun. The heat of the sun and its stream of particles (called the solar wind) cause the comet to lose some of its particles, resulting in a comet tail. But at this time 3I/ATLAS is not close enough to the sun for us to expect it to have a long tail. And a recent NASA photo does seem to show the beginning of a tail in the comet. The photo is below:

Credit: NASA (link)

What we see here looks nothing like an interstellar spaceship. It looks like a comet that is beginning to form a tail, by the outgassing of particles. 

Despite the new images, Loeb is still trying to suggest the object is an interstellar spaceship. In his post written just after the photo above was published a few days ago, Loeb states this:

"A way to resolve the discrepancy between the mass reservoir of rocks in interstellar space and the unexpected discovery of a large object, is that 3I/ATLAS was not drawn from a population of rocks on random trajectories but instead — its trajectory was designed to target the inner Solar system. This possibility is consistent with the alignment of this retrograde trajectory with the orbital plane of the planets around the Sun, a coincidence of 1 part in 500 for a random occurrence (as discussed here)."

Loeb's post is unconvincing. Almost all of his reasoning is "it looks find of funny" reasoning based on trying to show that  3I/ATLAS is unusual or unexpected. Showing that something is unusual or unexpected does not show any likelihood that such a thing is designed. Nature is constantly presenting to us unusual things that are not designed. As for something that has a probability of 1 in 500, that is also not any good reason for thinking that design is involved. Things with a probability of merely 1 in 500 happen every day even when no design is involved. You would need to show a much, much lower probability to be providing a good reason for suspecting that design was involved. 

Oddly Loeb has spent lots of time trying to persuade us there is design in cases where there is little suggestion of design, while paying little attention to vastly more convincing cases in which nature shows us things that look very much like design. The things I refer to are:

(1) The enormous levels of accidentally unachievable information-rich hierarchical organization and very fine-tuned functional complexity and component interdependence within all large living organisms, particularly human beings. 

(2) The enormous amount of fine-tuning in the universe's fundamental constants, laws and physical characteristics, which conspire (against the most enormous odds) to make the universe habitable for creatures such as ourselves. 

Such biological fine-tuning and cosmic fine-tuning offers very much material for "this isn't chance, it is design" arguments enormously more convincing than any of the  "this isn't chance, it is design" arguments that Loeb has made based on strange-looking objects from interstellar space.  When studying such biological fine-tuning and cosmic fine-tuning  you will frequently encounter probabilities that make Loeb's "1 chance in 500" improbability look like "chickenfeed" in comparison, with the probabilities frequently being those like 1 chance in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

Some requirements for our existence