I’m sorry, I just can’t clam up after doing my initial
Intelligent Design page. Quite obviously,
this subject is a particular "hot button" for me.
Just the other day, I ran into a great article in an old issue of Gnosis
magazine on this very subject – written in 1992. Entitled "The Streams of
Life", its author was Ted Shultz, former Managing Director of Whole Earth
Review and The Fringes of Reason. He was at that time pursuing a
doctorate in evolutionary biology at Cornell University.
Now, this article was not written to rebut evangelical Christians. Rather,
it was to clear up misconceptions among the New Age, crystal-dangling,
bang-haired, spirit-channeling nincompoops that actually comprised that
magazine’s best customers. In point of fact, back then the notion of a "divine
designer" came part-and-parcel with the philosophy of the Shirley Maclaine-inspired
chanting, incense-sniffing crackpots, quasi-Eastern guru charlatans, and
Druidic-Wiccan phallus-huggers running around at that time. They needed some
good old-fashioned, come-to-Jesus "centering" on the subject -- and I praise
the integrity of that magazine’s editor (Jay Kinney) for allowing it to
happen.
The main point of the article was to correct the popular misconception that
evolution is governed "by chance". There is no biologist alive who believes
that. Evolution is governed by a thing called "natural selection", and there
is nothing chancy about that. It says, very simply: If you’re not fit, you
don’t survive to pass on your "less than optimal" nature (genes) to any future
progeny. But the way you get fit is the important thing, and the nature
of that mechanism is what the Intelligent Design community seems to want to
ignore.
You will inevitably hear the common example presented to refute evolution,
relating to the physical development of the mammalian eye organ. The ID guys
express this in terms of the odds that something so complex could have
developed "by chance". Often they will present it in terms of "rolling the
dice" – the dice representing gene sequencing. They argue that, to get the
dice to all come up favorably, i.e., in a particular state necessary to define
an eye, would be extremely improbable. For example, if each of 100 dice
(genes) has to end up being a particular number to "make an eye", the odds
against getting this unique combination are only 1 in 6100 – an
impossibly remote chance that could never happen in the lifetime of our
universe. And this is simplistic, since the eye must surely be defined by more
than 100 genes. Their main thrust is that an eye, or any other
complicated organ, is "irreducibly complex"; that is, it can only function if
all its parts magically come together at once. And evolution,
they correctly point out, doesn't work that way.
Well, in point of fact, the eye has arisen not once, but between 45 and 60
separate times in the history of the animal kingdom, with no two designs
exactly alike! And none of them are truly "perfect", as they all have certain
design flaws – for example, our own optical nerve stretches from the front
rather than from the rear of the retina, resulting in a blind spot in our
field of vision. That is hardly what you would expect from a sensible,
omniscient Designer. Something is definitely wrong with this "roll of the
dice" argument.
What is wrong is that any complex organ such as an eye is not developed
"from scratch" as an "irreducibly complex" entity, but rather by building upon basic sub-features that are
beneficial to the organism -- or, in some cases, by sub-features that are
useful for reasons other than what they end up being used for. For example, it’s beneficial to develop a spot of
cells that is sensitive to light. (You can see that in simple organisms like
snails and worms.) This incremental feature develops in the first place
by action of any of a number of different change drivers: gene
transcription errors, random mutation at the gene level, or simply by a
particularly propitious intermixing of genes between two different mating
individuals. That's where your dice come into the picture.
Once that benefit is in place, the individual's selective survival is enhanced
and passed on to his progeny. That light-sensitive spot may then get
"better" by the incremental evolutionary development of neighboring structures
that allow it to detect the direction of the light it senses.
Then by neural arrangements that give a sense of the light's shape. And
so on, and on, over the fullness of time.
But here's the important point: The genes expressing those novel,
incremental features are preserved and are "locked into" future
surviving generations by virtue of genetics. Those particular dice are no
longer part of future rolls. Their contribution stays fixed, like one
finished cylinder on a slot machine. And once you begin to successively remove
dice from the roll, the odds of graduating to a "better eye" combination
increase rapidly and dramatically (see note below). But more
importantly, the notion that you have to get all the gene-dice into a
preordained, unique pattern before you have an functioning eye organ -- like
one single jackpot -- is completely bogus. Two cherries out of 3 will
still give you a decent payout.
Again, this is called genetics, a fairly simple concept that any
hayseed knows about, and it’s been
scientifically described since the 19th century -- before Darwin,
in fact. It’s a concept that the Intelligent
Design folks seem to have a mental block about when they blat out their
specious "dice-throwing" argument.
I want to conclude this rather vitrolic essay with a particularly lucid
portion of Shultz’s article below. I do so only to highlight my personal
disdain for the ID proponents and their notion of a "just and caring" Divine
Designer:
Perhaps the most convincing argument for a "here-and-now" evolution
driven by expediency is the horrific mercilessness of which nature is
frequently capable. The great insect order Hymenoptera (consisting of over
200,000 species and including ants, bees, wasps, and sawflies) is
dominated by life strategies that make the film Alien look like a
nursery story. In a typical hymenopteran life cycle (shared by over 75
percent of the species in this group) the larva burrows into a host
partially paralyzed and imprisoned by the hymenopteran mother. The larva
consumes the host from within, taking care to preserve the nervous system
so that the host continues to live (evidenced by frequent twitching and
moving about) and the meat stays "fresh". The host is finally killed when
the larva bursts free of its body. Other horrors of nature: "traumatic
insemination", occurring not infrequently in unrelated animal groups, in
which the male uses hypodermic-like genitalia to pierce the body wall of
the female in order to inseminate her; cannibalistic birth, in which the
offspring literally consume the mother from the inside out; and the use of
the young as a protein reservoir to be consumed in time of need, common in
ants and wasps. If these organisms have been designed, I’d rather not meet
the designer!
Back to Essays...
The referenced article is from Gnosis No. 22, Winter 1992, published by The
Lumen Foundation, Jay Kinney Editor-In-Chief. Great quarterly magazine,
from the kind of small publishing house that makes America truly great.
Subtitle is "A Journal of the Western Inner Tradition". It has a very
Gnostic viewpoint, so it's easy for me to like...
The total number of unique throws (permutations) you can get with dice is
expressed as a factorial of the number of dice thrown, times the number of
sides on each die. For 100 dice,
this is 6 X 100! or 6 X 100 X 99 X 98 X 97...etc. For 99 dice, this drops to
6 X 99!
or 6 X 99 X 98 X 97.. etc. So you can see that the total number of
permutations in the latter case is 100 times lower than in the former.
For 98 dice, it would be 99 times lower, and so on. As the total
possible number of permutations goes down, the odds that any one unique
combination will be thrown go up correspondingly.
Read more about eye evolution
here.
Read more about the probability of achieving abiogenesis (life from
non-living materials)
here.
