A difference of opinion between intelligent design and evolution is ongoing — anyone who looks into the structure of the cell and sees the myriad of operations occurring has to stop and wonder: How can evolution account for this? And if evolution is a culling process, what generated the initial set of entities to be culled? On the other hand, intelligent design advocates have to answer some questions also: Why does the mitochondria structure in the cell exist? How does one account for adaptations? Where did that pesky reverse transcriptase come from?
Anyone looking at a system as complex as the cell is inclined to make statements that such complexity could never have evolved. One would do well, however, to look into the phase space of a very simple coupled polynomial system. The phase space solution set of these polynomials become chaotic in the mathematical sense of the word. An incredible complexity exists in even the simplest equations. Steven Wolfram has show that simple generators can produce the complex patterns on a mollusk shell. So complexity in itself is not an indicator of intelligent design.
Consider the mitochondria structure in the cell. This is a structure which provides cellular energy. Current thinking is that, at some point, a cellular organism ingested a bacterium of similar structure to the mitochondria, and instead of the bacterium’s proteins being digested, as usually happens, the bacterium instead survived as a symbiote within the cellular organism. The fact that the structure exists indicates a fortuitous occurrence rather than a structured design — unless one wants to argue that this ingestion was part of the design.
Also adaptations clearly occur. Man has been adapting domestic animals and grains for millennia. MRSA is a bacterium which has adapted to the human immune system, much as AIDS has adapted to the human T cell. And clearly these adaptations have passed beyond the somatic. The existence of reverse transcriptase throws a monkey wrench into the orderly intelligent design process. No electrical engineer would design a control system with a pole in the left hand plane, which is what a molecular design with reverse transcriptase amounts to.
So if God exists as an intelligent designer, are we to believe that it is as Woody Allen quips: ” …the worst you can say about Him is that basically He’s an underachiever.”
Evolution theorists have to do a little introspection also. Evolution in its strictest sense is the process by which adaptations make the transition from the somatic to the germ line. That is to say, adaptations that are passed along to offspring. Organisms with the adaptation, in the sense that they are more suited to the environment, survive to procreate. Less well adapted to the environment, they do not survive and eventually they are eliminated (rendered extinct). Thus evolution is a culling process — the fittest are those organisms which survive, with continued existence being the only criteria. But this begs the questions of the adaptations in the first place. Where did they come from and what was the source of the original pool from which viable processes were ‘selected’? Evolution is a backwards acting process, a culling of options. Somewhere in the process there is a need for new adaptations, new structures. There is some support for the hypotheses that radiological mutations provides such a pool. Other thought suggests that matter is endowed with self-organizing properties.
The physical world is described by the laws of thermodynamics. The second law, which states that entropy tends to increase, leads to the ultimate final state being the heat death of the universe. Evolutionists are constrained by this law. There is a preferred direction for processes. Combining things together into a higher energy state seems to violate the second law. If, as Ben Stein notes, life evolved from lightning striking the mud puddle, there are a lot of missing links, most of which violate the second law.
Note that the fact that they are missing is not surprising: Why shouldn’t they be missing. Millions of years could have passed under identical geological conditions which produced our fossils without proteins and amino acids being preserved — they are just too fragile. Only after life adapted and generated shells, bones and mineral inclusions could there be a preserved slice of the process to study.
But life itself seems to violate the second law. The significant factor, the one spark that distinguishes life from all other matter seems to be the ability to self-organize. The question is whether self-organization is another natural law which we have overlooked or the result of some prime mover or intelligent designer. Certain nanostructures are known to self organize — the so-called self-assembly process. So it is conceivable that all that electrified mud self organized into amino acids, complex phosphate chains, proteins and that the sieve of selection gave us the foundations of cellular metabolism.
Is self-organization a result of a process that has been overlooked and is responsible for that initial pool of selectees we evolved from? Or is this process the indicator that there is some higher intelligence guiding the development of life, but in a way that is far more clever and inscrutable than either side in the debate supposes?
March 24, 2008 at 11:33 am
So, in order to preserve the second law, the self-organizing principle of life would have to, in an extremely energetic process, do a great deal of disorganization while it went about organizing itself. In order to be as organized as we currently are (biologically, not file-cabinet-ally), each of us must be balanced out somewhere in the process with a massive about of entropy.
Especially in order to account for evolution needing choices from which to select. There may need to be many unworkable life forms organizing before a single workable life form is reached.
March 24, 2008 at 12:48 pm
Ah, but when will we get smart enough to recognize the simple answer is that there is an omnipotent, omniscient Creator who has covered all of the bases. Rather, all of us smart folks keep dreaming up all kinds of fabrications in minutia to try to explain the unexplainable and second guess God whose intelligence is beyond comprehension? How pompous of us!
March 24, 2008 at 3:09 pm
A few random points to add to a nice post:
-The Second Law of Thermodynamics is about the macro behavior of a system. The earth is, most definitely, not a closed system because it receives a huge amount of energy from the sun. Thus entropy could be (in fact is) increasing somewhere else.
-Darwin’s term “survival of the fittest” was, I think, one of the most unfortunate choices of phrase I can think of. “Survival of the fitter” shows the comparative nature of the claim more clearly. “Fittest” in English has the unfortunate problem of connoting best in an absolute sense, which is, of course, wrong. Evolution as a mechanism finds local optima.
March 24, 2008 at 4:02 pm
Ronald,
Certainly some people already recognize that. There is hardly anything pompous in delving as deeply as we can into the question — for often we find things more magnificent when we understand the next layer of complexity. The task itself is morally neutral, but it can be carried out in a pompous or reverent manner. There’s nothing about asking questions that by itself implies disagreement. Questioning as a method is a good way of exploring the truth of something even when you agree with it already. (This, I think, is a core point of Thomistic philosophy)
Both irrationally atheistic evolutionists and incurious intelligent design-ists, by having pre-decided what they will think and then ignoring or downplaying evidence that doesn’t immediately support their conclusion, miss out on the fun and enlightenment of the exercise of discovery.
Once you choose that God is truth (as from your post I presume you have) there is nothing to fear in investigating all that is true — for God is found in every thing that is true. God doesn’t hide behind a veil of secrecy, but allows Himself to be investigated to the limit of our potential (and beyond that, sometimes). He gives us minds to use, we ought to use them.
So, if the mitochondria structure is the result of a fortuitous occurrence and it has propelled all living things to a new height of organization against all probability — fantastic! We can learn from that. We can stand amazed at that. We can apply the tools and methods we developed while exploring this to explore other things.
But we certainly can’t feel that that upsets some sort of balance of faith or unbelief.
This is science and the philosophy of science. Faith is (as you know) altogether different. To the believer, no proof is necessary. To the unbeliever, no proof is sufficient.
March 24, 2008 at 6:20 pm
The website describing the second law of thermodynamics has a page on why life doesn’t violate the second law:
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/biology/tree.html#c1
March 24, 2008 at 6:57 pm
Angry, your namesake doesn’t seem to hold true as you seem very well in control and your statement very inciteful. I especially like the last sentence about proof and faith. As humans,we are so prone to accept so many mundanethings “on faith” except those that should have the greatest significance in life, namely our relationship with our Creator and concern for our own eternal life as well as others. Faith, by its own nature and definition, has to include a certain portion of the unknown and the unknowing, otherwise it wouldn’t be faith, but fact! BTW, why is everyone in this blog either piqued or angry?
March 24, 2008 at 7:04 pm
Ronald
your reply illustrates quite a few of the problems.
1 explain the unexplainable – a few centuries ago disease was explained as possession by daemons, now mankind can fight disease because it has a better idea of the agents and mechanics behind it. If we had decided what was unexplainable back then we wouldn’t have bothered finding out anything to do with disease.. “No nothing to see here it’s unexplainable, so God dunit”. Now that’s hubris and pomposity in action, which leads nicely onto:
2 Pompous – indeed just how pompous is it to decide that the idea that we are formed in the image of an invisible, omni-god?
Just how pompous is it that someone on earth knows that the bible is the word of this god?
Just how pompous is it that each leader of each of these groups of people-who-know knows exactly what god meant when he passed his word on to some shepherds over two thousand years ago.
Just how pompous is it to not only know all of the above but also know that everyone else is wrong and they need to be converted to the true faith? Sometimes it is even better to stop them living rather than let them be led up the path of falsehood.
You can call the scientists a lot of things but the religious have them beat in the field of pomposity.
March 24, 2008 at 10:59 pm
[…] Pomposity of Scientists Posted on 25 March 2008 by harebell Another one of the blogs I read regularly recently tried to address the issue of Evolution v ID. […]
March 25, 2008 at 1:54 pm
Ronald asks:
“BTW, why is everyone in this blog either piqued or angry?”
Mostly because thoughtful, open-minded, logical posters are few and far between. The usual fare is poorly-organized straw-man arguments with questionable capitalization, an example of which ‘harebell’ so kindly provided.
Also, events like those in the next blog post keep us steaming most days.
-AI
March 25, 2008 at 6:26 pm
whoa there AI
I checked my post, no unnecessary capitalisation.
Also I fail to see how my calling Ronald on his a priori determinations is setting up a straw man. Especially as he did state that to expect answers to certain questions is pompous. I guess I was just asking him which questions should we not seek answers too…
I really don`t see any straw men therein, but I stand to be corrected.
July 10, 2008 at 4:30 pm
My trouble with evolution is basic. Evolution is too poorly defined. It absorbs the scientific findings of paleontology, molecular biology, quantum theory, heredity, etc. without a burp. Evolution is not paleontology or any scientific venture. Heredity and adaptation gave the world all the variety. Evolution forms species and takes too long to do this so no human has ever observed evolution in action. I conclude all talk of evolution remains just that until scientific proof of such a critter is provided. I am open to such proof ,but please no more chatter.
December 22, 2009 at 3:09 pm
Your article is an inspiration for me to discover more about this matter. I must confess your clarity diversified my views and I will forthwith grab your rss feed to remain up to date on any next articles you might put out. You merit thanks for a job well done!