Okay, my reply to you will have to be today's ID installment...
It is actually more mysterious and grand to NOT have intelligence in the design but for the intelligence to rise out of the chaos by itself.
More mysterious, I agree. Grand, eh, that's a value judgment.
Theoreticians who study chaos, emergence, genetic algorithms and complexity can show for a fact that simple systems can give rise to very complex behavior. Life is different from these emergent phenomena in its details, but not in kind.
One of the things I appreciate about Behe is that he addresses other alternatives* to darwinian evolution, such as "chaos theory" or "complexity theory". This line of theorizing says that spontaneous complex order emerges naturally when a few simple rules are laid down. "Complexity theory" can be called a computational theory as it basically involves guys programming computers with simple rules and letting them iterate and produce a vast array of complex designs. When the complexity theory guys (the big names are Stuart Kauffman and Stephen Wolfram) say mutation, they are talking about perturbations thrown into a computer program, not biological mutations. And when they talk about cellular automata, they are talking about a box with a one or zero in it. The idea is that the natural world is like a big computer program - or "universal Turing machine". I don't know if they're on the right track or if they're just a bunch of (really smart) guys playing and designing computer games. I expect there are only a handful of people equipped to judge that. Saying simple systems can give rise to very complex behavior - sounds OK so far - and that explains the rise of life in all its complexity on earth, one would expect to see simple systems giving rise to some kind of complexity everywhere else too. So far the probes on Mars haven't shown us a lot of complexity there, maybe its lurking there somewhere deep down in some hidden place. All in all, though, Mars is pretty disappointing to an earthling like me.
Oh BTW, for those who don't know that "complexity theory" is supposed to be an alternate to darwinian evolution, consider the following quotes from Steve Wolfram:
" Notes on Evolution from Wolfram's A New Kind of Science:
"Following the publication of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859 many scientists began to argue that natural selection could explain all the basic phenomena of biology, and although some religious groups maintained strong resistance, it was widely assumed by the mid-1900's that no other explanation was needed. In fact, however, just how complexity arises was
never really resolved, and in the end I believe that it is only with the ideas of this book that this can successfully be done." P. 861, A New Kind of Science, Stephen Wolfram
And "The Darwinian theory of evolution by natural selection is often assumed to explain the complexity we see in biological systems -- and in fact in recent years the theory has also been increasingly applied outside of biology. But it has never been at all clear just why this theory should imply that complexity is generated. And indeed I will argue in this book that in many respects it tends to oppose complexity. But the discoveries in the book suggest a new and quite different mechanism that I believe is in fact responsible for most of the examples of great complexity that we see in biology." P. 14, A New Kind of Science
The development of species occurs over millennia and unambiguous needs definition: "unambiguous to whom"? It is likely that bacterial evolution driven by the use of antibiotics meets the requirement of "probable" speciation but I doubt it would satisfy those looking for "unambiguous".
Similarly, the Abert/Kaibab Squirrels meet the requirement of speciations from common ancenstry yet can still interbreed.
I'll take your word for it on the squirrels. And no doubt we are causing new forms of anti-biotic resistant bacteria to emerge. But ID as a theory of how irreducibly complex structures and processes come from does not preclude natural selection from operating and producing some, perhaps very many,
changes in organisms.
Science is characterized by doubt and probability. Faith is
characterized by unambiguous certainty.
Doubt is a part of life for everyone in every sphere of life. Science certainly strives for knowledge to replace doubt, however. As does everyone.
Margolis (sic) is abandoning science in this requirement. I doubt it. She is the one who came up with the idea that the mitochondria found in organism's cells (maybe a couple thousand mitochondria in each of our cells making up about
20% of our cells area) originated as separate organisms who somehow entered into a symbiotic relationship inside other larger cells and became specialized parts of those cells. This is now the accepted majority opinion about mitochondria. How this happened is a mystery, though. I think Margulis thinks it's just the way things work.
People that are predisposed to put Intelligent Design into the shake and rattle of a complex universe are failing to grasp the simplest of scientific principles: that of Occam's Razor. There is no need to add ID to Darwin when other tools that are more rigorous (and independently observable in a variety of systems) can serve to explain an accelerated development process by the introduction of an observable property:
emergence. IF, emergence is simply a property of dynamic systems (as we can see from simulations and desktop experiments), THEN complexity (such as life) is simply a by-product of emergence. Wait long enough and self-sustaining systems will appear in a suitably stable environment that
is far from equilibrium.
Sorry, it's a long way form desktop computer programs to real life on a real planet. I think it'd help if we could demonstrate that "complexity (such as life)" has emerged on most of the other planets in our solar system. After all they've been around as long as earth has and are as stable.
This is especially true if we add the billions of years possible with a panspermia model**
Oh wow, yet another alternative to darwinian evolution. Fred Hoyle and Francis Crick (the double helix DNA discoverer, the Nobel winner) are the theorists here. Hoyle sees life spreading accidentally on meteors or comets. Crick theorizes "directed panspermia", where aliens send living organisms on space ships to new planets to seed life there. Both came up with these theories because they see darwinian evolution as inadequate to explain the origin of complex living organisms on earth.
It seems opponents to ID are willing to employ any argument, even conflicting ones, to avoid intelligent design. It's obvious what the problem with ID is - it's that most people are going to give the intelligent designer a three letter name. And that might tend to support religious faith. Horrors!
The Big Bang theory, which Hubble came up with almost a century ago, had the same kind of problem - it theorized the universe had a beginning (gasp, a point and time of origin or c....... - lets not say that word - just like some primitive religious faith). Einstein looked into it and accepted the Big Bang idea but many others resisted for decades. Now of course, it's accepted by science - even atheistic scientists.
This should be encouraging for those with problems with ID. It shows ID won't require you to give up your faith (or non-faith). Anthony Flew, the British former atheist philosopher who recently accepted ID, was one of the first to take the plunge. He says he's now a deist who accepts "Spinoza's god" or "Aristotle's god" NOT that primitive Semitic tribal god. See - if ID becomes accepted, you won't have to get baptized or pray or anything.
*Re dealing with alternate theories, which Behe does - One who doesn't is Richard Dawkins, a great popular apologist for darwinian evolution - see The Blind Watchmaker, and many more books, including his latest, The Ancestor's Tale. I checked this out hoping to see what counter-arguments this guy would give to ID. How disappointing. Would you believe Michael
Behe and William Dembski's names don't even appear in Dawkin's recent book? If he could take them on himself and prevail like he does with "creation scientist", you know he would. Dodging the issue is really damning. And when you look up Intelligent Design in the index, it says "See Creationists". What intellectual dishonesty!
It is not surprising to learn that Dawkins has his own religious dogma - atheism. He thinks religion is a bad thing which should be discarded and looks on darwinian evolution as making atheism intellectually responsible. IMO he's a mirror image of the faith-driven creation scientists he condemns
in his books.
**Here's something on Crick's directed panspermia ideas:
The idea that life might have been intentionally spread throughout space and seeded on the surface of other worlds by a guiding intelligence.
A detailed version of this hypothesis was put forward in 1973 by the molecular biologists Francis Crick (co-discoverer of the structure of DNA) and Leslie Orgel.1 The chances of microorganisms being passively transported from world to world across interstellar distances, they felt, were small. The probability of successful seeding would be greatly increased, they pointed out, if the fertilization were carried out
deliberately by an existing technological civilization. Their argument depended first upon demonstrating that it was possible for an advanced extraterrestrial civilization to have developed in the Galaxy before life first appeared on Earth. This they were able to do (see extraterrestrial civilizations, ancient). As for the means of dispensation:
"The spaceship would carry large samples of a number of microorganisms, each having different but simple nutritional requirements, for example, blue-green algae, which could grow on CO2 and water in "sunlight". A payload of 1,000 kg might be made up of 10 samples each containing 1016 microorganisms, or 100 samples of 1015 microorganisms. "
Crick and Orgel further suggested that directed panspermia might help resolve one or two anomalies in the biochemistry of life-forms on Earth. One of these was the puzzling dependence of biological systems on molybdenum. Many enzymes, for example, require this metal to act as a cofactor. Such a situation would be easier to understand if molybdenum were relatively abundant on Earth (see elements, terrestrial abundance). However, its abundance is only 0.02% compared with 0.2% and 3.16%, respectively, for the metals chromium and nickel, which are chemically similar to molybdenum. Crick and Orgel commented:
"If it could be shown that the elements represented in terrestrial living organisms correlate with those abundant in some types of star-molybdenum stars, for example-we might look more sympathetically on "infective" theories."
A second example they give concerns the genetic code:
"Several orthodox explanations of the universality of the code can be suggested, but none is generally accepted to be completely convincing. It is a little surprising that organisms with somewhat different codes do not coexist. The universality of the code follows naturally from an "infective" theory of the origin of life. Life on Earth would represent a clone derived
from a single set of organisms."
There might be a variety of reasons why an advanced civilization would wish to intentionally initiate life elsewhere: as an experiment in astrobiology using an entire world as a laboratory; to prepare a planet for subsequent
colonization (see terraforming); or, to disseminate the genetic material of the donor world to ensure its survival in the event a global catastrophe (see extraterrestrial civilizations, hazards to).
Reference
1. Crick, F. H. C., and Orgel, L. E. "Directed Panspermia," Icarus, 19, 341 (1973).
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More to follow on ID as I have time. |
