Posted on 02/21/2005 5:17:06 AM PST by billorites
Recently a school district in rural Pennsylvania officially recognized a supposed alternative to Darwinism. In a one-minute statement read by an administrator, ninth-grade biology students were told that evolution was not a fact and were encouraged to explore a different explanation of life called intelligent design. What is intelligent design? Its proponents maintain that living creatures are just too intricate to have arisen by evolution. Throughout the natural world, they say, there is evidence of deliberate design. Is it not reasonable, then, to infer the existence of an intelligent designer? To evade the charge that intelligent design is a religious theory -- creationism dressed up as science -- its advocates make no explicit claims about who or what this designer might be. But students will presumably get the desired point. As one Pennsylvania teacher observed: ''The first question they will ask is: 'Well, who's the designer? Do you mean God?'''
From a scientific perspective, one of the most frustrating things about intelligent design is that (unlike Darwinism) it is virtually impossible to test. Old-fashioned biblical creationism at least risked making some hard factual claims -- that the earth was created before the sun, for example. Intelligent design, by contrast, leaves the purposes of the designer wholly mysterious. Presumably any pattern of data in the natural world is consistent with his/her/its existence.
But if we can't infer anything about the design from the designer, maybe we can go the other way. What can we tell about the designer from the design? While there is much that is marvelous in nature, there is also much that is flawed, sloppy and downright bizarre. Some nonfunctional oddities, like the peacock's tail or the human male's nipples, might be attributed to a sense of whimsy on the part of the designer. Others just seem grossly inefficient. In mammals, for instance, the recurrent laryngeal nerve does not go directly from the cranium to the larynx, the way any competent engineer would have arranged it. Instead, it extends down the neck to the chest, loops around a lung ligament and then runs back up the neck to the larynx. In a giraffe, that means a 20-foot length of nerve where 1 foot would have done. If this is evidence of design, it would seem to be of the unintelligent variety.
Such disregard for economy can be found throughout the natural order. Perhaps 99 percent of the species that have existed have died out. Darwinism has no problem with this, because random variation will inevitably produce both fit and unfit individuals. But what sort of designer would have fashioned creatures so out of sync with their environments that they were doomed to extinction?
The gravest imperfections in nature, though, are moral ones. Consider how humans and other animals are intermittently tortured by pain throughout their lives, especially near the end. Our pain mechanism may have been designed to serve as a warning signal to protect our bodies from damage, but in the majority of diseases -- cancer, for instance, or coronary thrombosis -- the signal comes too late to do much good, and the horrible suffering that ensues is completely useless.
And why should the human reproductive system be so shoddily designed? Fewer than one-third of conceptions culminate in live births. The rest end prematurely, either in early gestation or by miscarriage. Nature appears to be an avid abortionist, which ought to trouble Christians who believe in both original sin and the doctrine that a human being equipped with a soul comes into existence at conception. Souls bearing the stain of original sin, we are told, do not merit salvation. That is why, according to traditional theology, unbaptized babies have to languish in limbo for all eternity. Owing to faulty reproductive design, it would seem that the population of limbo must be at least twice that of heaven and hell combined.
It is hard to avoid the inference that a designer responsible for such imperfections must have been lacking some divine trait -- benevolence or omnipotence or omniscience, or perhaps all three. But what if the designer did not style each species individually? What if he/she/it merely fashioned the primal cell and then let evolution produce the rest, kinks and all? That is what the biologist and intelligent-design proponent Michael J. Behe has suggested. Behe says that the little protein machines in the cell are too sophisticated to have arisen by mutation -- an opinion that his scientific peers overwhelmingly do not share. Whether or not he is correct, his version of intelligent design implies a curious sort of designer, one who seeded the earth with elaborately contrived protein structures and then absconded, leaving the rest to blind chance.
One beauty of Darwinism is the intellectual freedom it allows. As the arch-evolutionist Richard Dawkins has observed, ''Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.'' But Darwinism permits you to be an intellectually fulfilled theist, too. That is why Pope John Paul II was comfortable declaring that evolution has been ''proven true'' and that ''truth cannot contradict truth.'' If God created the universe wholesale rather than retail -- endowing it from the start with an evolutionary algorithm that progressively teased complexity out of chaos -- then imperfections in nature would be a necessary part of a beautiful process.
Of course proponents of intelligent design are careful not to use the G-word, because, as they claim, theirs is not a religiously based theory. So biology students can be forgiven for wondering whether the mysterious designer they're told about might not be the biblical God after all, but rather some very advanced yet mischievous or blundering intelligence -- extraterrestrial scientists, say. The important thing, as the Pennsylvania school administrator reminded them, is ''to keep an open mind.''
ping
one-step-back ping!
Oh boy! A crevo thread! Haven't had one of those in a loooooooooooooong time.
To evade the charge that intelligent design is a religious theory -- creationism dressed up as science -- its advocates make no explicit claims about who or what this designer might be.
So the advocates of ID think either God created life on earth or aliens did. I wonder which they really think is responsible. The kindest thing I can say about this position is that it's disingenuous.
Xenu
Maybe it was the Great Green Arkleseizure?
I love straw men...
-In a giraffe, that means a 20-foot length of nerve where 1 foot would have done. If this is evidence of design, it would seem to be of the unintelligent variety.-
But a giraffe is an amazing work of art, is it not? Only intelligent design could come up with such an interesting and beautiful creature.
Why are rabbits so darn-goshed cute? There's really no "reason" for it. Yet, there they are.
Sorry, you'd be kicked out of school for teaching that.
Can't you see it coming? "We libs are oh-so smart and scientific; and those Republicans are nothing but a pack of unwashed, inbred, beer-drinking bozos at the sawmill."
It's been said before, but it's worth endlessly repeating: Creationism is a cancer on conservatism.
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Of course there's a "reason" for it. Critters that are dangerous and vicious are perceived as loathsome or terrifying, whereas critters that are gentle and harmless are perceived as cuddly and cute.
Go ask the average Aussie how they feel about rabbits.
A person that was terrified of bunnies but wanted to cuddle up with snakes and scorpions would be seriously deficient in some way. Witness Jimmy Carter..
"keep an open mind."
Good advice ... none of us understands with absolute certainty the mystery of life and the universe.
I absolutely agree that what the author refers to as "Darwinism" is testable.
Let's see the data that supports random variation of complex multicellular organisms leading to speciation.
Bring it on.
Creationism IS a cancer on conservatism.
The variation is not random - as one might say about a flash-in-the-pan 'accidental' happenstance - but rather a self-organizing process driven by natural selection.
To use an analogue that's been common around here lately, evolution is no more "random" than is the food supply network of New York City.
We're here to help: 29+ Evidences for Macroevolution. When you've digested that, let me know. We have more. Lots more.
Right. Variation isn't really "random." I didn't want to get into that. The evidence that variation plus natural selection results in speciation is overwhelming. Darwin didn't even know what caused variation, but it was obviously going on.
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