Two weeks ago, we revisited the Quandary Den to see what happens when multiple players are able to work together. We did this by modeling gene duplication, a known biological process. Last week we saw some results showing that solutions involving multiple players could evolve, and when multiple players got involved solutions tended to come faster. At the same time, more wasn’t always better; we saw that when players were added too quickly, they were more likely to get in the way and inhibit solutions. This little model gives us a picture for how organisms might evolve complexity, that is solutions involving distinct, coordinated parts. In this case, we have an adaptive pathway to complexity, since adding players provides opportunities to potentially increase fitness. But is that the only road to complexity?
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irreducible complexity
Does Intelligent Design Rule Out Evolution?
In the next series of blog posts we are going to look at Christian questions about evolution. In my last post we saw that two of the Christian views of creation, Young Earth Creationism and Old Earth Creationism, disagree with the scientific account of the mechanism of creation. Because of this we need to ask, is evolution true? Perhaps the strongest recent challenge to evolution has been the Intelligent Design movement. For the rest of this post we are going to look at Intelligent Design and ask if it is a better explanation than the scientific view of evolution by natural selection.
What is Intelligent Design? Intelligent Design supporters make three claims.
- Certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection.
- Intelligent design is detectable based on empirical observations using objective criteria.
- Reference to intelligent design is legitimate within a scientific explanation of events in natural history.
How might we detect God’s supernatural intervention during the course of natural history? If God has intervened supernaturally during the course of natural history, one would expect to find gaps in the chain of natural explanations. And in fact there are gaps. Some examples are the origin of life, the origin of biological information, the origin of complex biological structures, the origin of the universe, and the fine-tuning of the laws of nature for life. So those gaps could represent places where God has intervened supernaturally. However, all scientific explanations are underdetermined by the data so it is not surprising to find gaps. Furthermore, science has a history of filling in the gaps. Therefore the presence of gaps alone doesn’t prove that the gaps are due to direct action by God. [Read more…] about Does Intelligent Design Rule Out Evolution?