Complexity and ID/IOT

Advocates of Intelligent Design / Intelligent Origin Theory sometimes point to SETI as an example of science looking for intelligent design in the universe. If we can identify a complex signal as a sign of an extraterrestial intelligence, why can't ID/IOT point to complexity in nature as a sign of an intelligent designer?

Interestingly enough, ID/IOT advocates have not published any papers in the astronomical journals, either. That's only one of the many areas where a technique that really does detect intelligence would be very useful. The fact that ID/IOT stays away from areas where there's a real chance that intelligence might be present might say something about it.

But at any rate, let's look at the argumentum ad SETI. Does it hold water? First question: What does SETI actually look for?

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...the credibility of the evidence is not predicated on its complexity. If SETI were to announce that we’re not alone because it had detected a signal, it would be on the basis of artificiality. An endless, sinusoidal signal – a dead simple tone – is not complex; it’s artificial. Such a tone just doesn’t seem to be generated by natural astrophysical processes. In addition, and unlike other radio emissions produced by the cosmos, such a signal is devoid of the appendages and inefficiencies nature always seems to add – for example, DNA’s junk and redundancy.

OK, here's a point I've made in the past in other fora: One of the best indications of intelligence at work is simplicity, not complexity. A grove of trees in a meadow is scattered at random (subject to a few constraints – trees can't grow too close together). If you found a grove of trees arranged in an orderly row, you'd suspect someone had planted them in that arrangement. Regularly spaced rows are simpler than random placement – the information content is smaller.

And there's the famous quote, "I'm sorry for this long letter; I didn't have time to write a short one." Simplifying things takes work.

There’s another hallmark of artificiality we consider in SETI, and it’s context. Where is the signal found? Our searches often concentrate on nearby Sun-like star systems – the very type of astronomical locale we believe most likely to harbor Earth-size planets awash in liquid water. That’s where we hope to find a signal.
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In archaeology, context is the basis of many discoveries that are imputed to the deliberate workings of intelligence. If I find a rock chipped in such a way as to give it a sharp edge, and the discovery is made in a cave, I am seduced into ascribing this to tool use by distant, fetid and furry ancestors. It is the context of the cave that makes this assumption far more likely then an alternative scenario in which I assume that the random grinding and splitting of rock has resulted in this useful geometry.

In short, the champions of Intelligent Design make two mistakes when they claim that the SETI enterprise is logically similar to their own: First, they assume that we are looking for messages, and judging our discovery on the basis of message content, whether understood or not. In fact, we’re on the lookout for very simple signals. That’s mostly a technical misunderstanding. But their second assumption, derived from the first, that complexity would imply intelligence, is also wrong. We seek artificiality, which is an organized and optimized signal coming from an astronomical environment from which neither it nor anything like it is either expected or observed: Very modest complexity, found out of context. This is clearly nothing like looking at DNA’s chemical makeup and deducing the work of a supernatural biochemist.