Monday, August 22, 2005

Intelligent design gets even more coverage in the NYT

Fads come and go, but does any one have any doubt that ID proponents are gathering steam? A new article in the NYT by Kenneth Chang lends credence to the movement by giving it yet another pointless, but fair, hearing.

Chang covers four elements of ID's arguments against the biology we've known for over 100 years:

  • Irreducible complexity: everything is like a complicated mousetrap; remove a part and nothing works. Therefore, how could there have been functional intermediates prior to something like the eye, or blood-clotting? Answer: lots of organs and enzyme systems have been shown to have loopy, non-intuitive evolutionary origins. Most biological systems are nothing more than elaborate, and very, very small, Rube Goldberg machines -- although in this case, Rube Goldberg machines that actually work -- with oddball collections of parts borrowed from systems with entirely different purposes. One blood clotting enzyme has a close relative in the digestive tract, for instance.
  • Science purposefully eliminates the non-material, and could therefore miss the true cause of biological origins. But science is perfectly suficient at delivering explanations of the natural world with no recourse to an "in-your-face" designer.
  • A set of large evolutionary "leaps" in the fossil record (such as the Cambrian Explosion) could not have occurred over the short period of time that they are said to have occurred. Nonsense. 30 million years (the duration of the Cambrian Explosion) is still a very, very long time. Besides, there's no reason to assume that evolutionary change need have occurred at exactly the same rate throughout Earth's history. A big unanswered question is why we have no evidence of multicellular life between the appearance of the first eukaryotes (2 billion years ago) and that of the first multicellular animal life (600 million years ago). The same objection could be raised by IDers to this little factoid, but it wouldn't carry the same urguency, would it?
  • Some patterns are visible in the natural world that could only have been established by a designer. Mathematical algorithms are being developed to detect these. Why is it mostly mathematicians, engineers, and biochemists who become creationists?
The article also discusses the idea that some IDers (here, Behe) have that the "design" inherent to the biological world could have been established at the Big Bang -- in other words, nothing IDers say can ever be proven wrong.

1 comment:

Matt Thompson said...

Daniel, again thanks for your comment. You've brought up a broad range of metaphysical issues that I don't feel competent to discuss, but I think I can generate a response to what you've said that might help you deal with the odd conflicts that have arisen over this issue ever since Darwin.

In the classroom, if a question about the potential problems of the origin of life or other criticisms of pure evolutionary theory come up, I simply state that while not all natural occurrences have been observed, this does not mean they outside the realm of our imagination, as bounded by physical law. In the case of the origin of life, we must face the fact that the evidence for how life originated was itself destroyed by the continuing evolution of that life -- in other words, we will never be able to directly observe it. Sometimes processes destroy their origins. As to repeating an origin-of-life experiment in the laboratory -- well, that would be very difficult. We'd have to utterly void of oxygen whatever cuvette or chamber we were using for the experiment and then provide all the little contingencies that may or may not have been involved, as well as guess the order in which events occurred.

Lot's of people are working on the origins problem and are making good theoretical progress, but it is unlikely that they will ever be able to provide hard, synthetic evidence of how life actually originated.

I want to say to you, as a former believer, that I completely respect your beliefs and that I want to provide room within the natural world for the supernatural. God may have had a hand at any point in our evolution. I don't know. But I also know that nothing so far has suggested that His hand was explicitly necessary. Evolution appears to be able to do the whole thing "on it's own".

Now, writing "on it's own" alerts me to the fact that even if God had no direct hand in any of it, a believer may still rest on the fact that God, as a sustainer of all things, is at all times involved. Let evolution be His hand, and all is well.

I wish scientists were not openly hostile to religion. Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins are the worst offenders. On the other hand, they are among the few scientists that have turned a dispassioned, scientific eye to the origins of religion and consciousness, and that can be valuable, as well.