On Intelligent Design

I seriously don't even remember writing this, or its context, though some of it seems pretty okay, even if I am far out of my depth. The first line is somewhat ironic. I do have a bachelor's degree in chemistry, but I could only be called a scientist in the most generalistic and theoretical way.

Non-scientists should not be allowed to write articles about this kind of thing.

Okay, I don't really believe that... but: it does sort of remind me of something I said to Jennifer the other day as we channel surfed into some kind of post-modern pseudo-day-of-the-dead, university white-folks get multicultural "art" exhibit:

"Making art is like having children. There are a lot of people who probably shouldn't be allowed to do it, but there's really no ethical way to stop them."

Evolution is no more in "crisis" than any other scientific theory, which is to say, considerably, because that's what science does - attacks the gaps, pushes the paradigm shift, improves itself. The picture this writer portrays that there is some sort of deep, internal schism rocking the world of evolutionary biology is just not accurate, though I'm sure the folks who are pushing the alternative view really want to believe that it is.

It is reasonable to ask questions about, particularly, the thermodynamic, biochemical basis of evolution, because we're only scratching the surface of that chemistry.

But the Intelligent Design argument is old hat, and as science it's a load of bollocks. On a hypersimplistic level, it's sort of like poker – a royal flush of hearts is no more or less likely a hand than a specific, random hand of garbage. More precisely, both are extremely unlikely to be dealt at random from a shuffled deck. But the flush is perceived as the unlikely outcome, while the other is just another rotten hand, because of the definition of what is a valid hand. If you get dealt five aces, on the other hand, you know someone has fiddled the deck. Arguments about irreducible complexity and what could or couldn't "reasonably" happen by "chance" are meaningless: for Intelligent Design to win out it would have to demonstrate that the development of the living cell from basic components is thermodynamically impossible. Proofs of a negative are tough to come by so it basically falls to the biochemists to prove that it IS thermodynamically possible. And that will be no easy task. It may not be possible. As long as you are defining the condition of "Intelligent Design" as being that which creates what we observe in the world, though, you're certainly dealing from a stacked deck.

So it all becomes just a bunch of philosophical questions. Attacking Darwin is a bit of a straw-man endeavor, because he worked out his theories a very long time ago without the benefit of biochemistry or the knowledge of DNA. His theory is neither complete nor completely accurate. But microevolution (variation within species) has been demonstrated experimentally and macroevolution (the origin of species) is still the best explanation of the fossil record. Creationist rhetoric against the fossil record is garbage.

What we don't have is a thermodynamic explanation of evolution – the chemistry of how the mechanism of the evolution of organisms works. The theory of natural selection based on random mutation is supported by the evidence of microevolution, and it provides a credible theory that fits with what we know - but that isn't really science, it's philosophy. It seems entirely possible to me that there is more going on than that. Serious scientists have theorized about fundamental components or templates for living systems being seeded from outside the solar system. Tough to prove, and it sort of just moves the basic problem farther back in time and into a different neighborhood, but there's certainly no scientific argument against the possibility. For myself, I question how the whole discussion is framed. There's no such thing as "random" in science. There is the probabalistic (as in quantum mechanics, where phenomena can only be described as the probability distribution of possible configurations) and there is stuff that is too complex for us to predict and so we call it random (like throwing a die - it's movement is pure physics, there's nothing random about it, but we can't determine the result in advance so the output is "random."

So what the scientist is really saying is that this complex chemical system of life on Planet Earth is not "random," just that it is no more significant than anything else in the universe. Personally this fits my idea of God better than the "Creationist" viewpoint that seems to hold that God made all of the vast infinity of the universe basically for window dressing, and chose just this one little ball of mud to be the sole "significant" place in it. I don't see God as I understand God creating anything insignificant. I've never seen the conflict - I find it difficult to fathom the belief that God, having chosen to create a universe demonstrably dictated by a certain kind of order, would not choose to create one where that order would work out on every level - including the emergence and evolution of life based on this order. Let alone create a world where the evidence suggests such a deceptive, contrary picture of deep history, if the "literal" fact is that He formed us all out of clay in the same week six thousand years ago. The observable reality that this order has produced, in this little corner of the universe, me, observing it all, conscious of my existence in it and wondering what it's all about, is sufficiently metaphysical to me.

So you can keep Darwin in my book.

this is what is up with this.