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.''
What does Catholicism have to do with ID? And if you don't like God, couldn't you go the panspermia route?
An intelligent designer would have made the giraffe with a wireless network.
It is Constitutional to teach that in school. Btw, creation has nothing to do with evolution.
Yeah, the article is repleat with errors, like this one:
"From a scientific perspective, one of the most frustrating things about intelligent design is that (unlike Darwinism) it is virtually impossible to test."
That ongoing Michigan simulation that was recently discussed here on FR establishes the point quite nicely: Without the organizing selection pressure entirely random variation fails to produce evolutionary development of any significance.
The driving principle of evolution is not random, even if it is undesigned.
Make that *replete* - sorry
bump
Elijah Muhammed, founder of the Black Muslim Nation, taught that the white race was created in a testube 10,000 years ago by black scientists. Does that qualify as an intelligent design theory?
All you have to do is compare the genomes of known species. You see the evidence for random variation, and of selection. It's all there.
Absolutely! A GAN (Giraffe Area Network) would be a slam-dunk, especially considering the existing dual access-point antennas on the top of the head.
With 802.11Giraffe providing veldt-wide-area communication, they'd have an effective predator-avoidance system. Until the lions hacked into it, of course, with their LioNet "Carnivore" software...
Was this a comedy/satire article?
But we see evidence for the non-testability right here in this thread. When confronted with evidence that much of the construction of living organisms doens't look particularly intelligently designed, we get "'who are you to substitute your judgement for the designer's?" (Of course, better not write the Designer's, because we're not discussing God here, oh no). That's what Popper called an immunizing strategy, one of the hallmarks of pseudoscience.
If the evidence of design is tangible; if we can recognize design in nature by comparing natural objects to known designed objects, then we can similarly evaluate the quality of design in nature by comparison with the quality of design of known objects.
Quite the opposite, you are in lockstep with the libs and this is your "out". You and your ilk are the cancer, but you aren't conservatives anyway. The NYT gives your game away quite plainly.
I'll second that, and add pro-smoking and neo-Confederacy.
The position of St. Augustine of Hippo ca. 5th Century.
This past week I picked up a copy of Speciation (Published 2004), by Coyne and Orr, while visiting Cornell. Chapter One of this book starts out with a quote from Origin and then says:
So begins The Origin of Species, whose title and first paragraph imply that Darwin will have much to say about speciation. Yet his magnum opus remains largely silent on the "mystery of mysteries," and the little it does say about this mystery is seen by most modern evolutionists as muddled or wrong.You can read part of the introduction to Speciation at Amazon. It seems obvious to me from the introduction that Coyne and Orr will attempt to deal with just about every question I have and guys like you seem to ignore. They emphasize "an insistence on hypotheses that are testable," implying that a lot of what passes for "evolution" in not testable. In fact a page earlier, they have this sentence: "But given our almost complete ignorance of how these forms of selection [natural and sexual] give rise to new species, this conclusion was based more on intuition than data."
It will probably be several months before I work my way through the book. I'll have an open mind as I go through it. It will be open because I don't know the answers. But I can recognize arguments that are "muddled and wrong" or "based upon intuition," and I see many of those posted here at FR on this topic.
ML/NJ
Wow! That's quite the statement.
Here are some interesting statements made recently about selection by a scientist in Nature mag:
...typical studies of selection do not have the statistical power necessary to detect selection that appears unrealistically strong. Unfortunately, this paradox will not be resolved simply by accumulating more data of the same ilk, as all reviews identify problems with our current methods. How, then, are we to obtain a good handle on the true power of selection in nature?
and...
Meanwhile, we are only deluding ourselves that we have a good handle on the typical power of selection in nature. Once we do, we can begin to investigate how humans are changing selection pressures, and whether populations and species will be able to adapt accordingly.
~Andrew P. Hendry, “Evolutionary biology: The power of natural selection,” Nature 433, 694 - 695 (17 February 2005); doi:10.1038/433694a
How is this not correct reasoning? After all, the one and only evidence of design put forth by ID proponents is "It's obvious when you see it." Since the evidence of design is that you know it when you see it, it is also obvious that you know shoddy design when you see it. It's also obvious that you know a kludge when you see it, as in a computer program that has had its features extended and bloated by adding functions one by one, rather than by designing from scratch.
Life looks more like Windows than Linux, so to speak.
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