ABSTRACT: With the current climate of the evolution versus intelligent design debate approaching levels of an irreconcilable impasse, what could help resolve some issues in the debate? One feature especially sets natural intelligent design (NID) apart from traditional intelligent design. NID by definition permits nothing but natural causes and explanations in its models. If supernatural intelligence were involved, NID would not see it. However, the opposite is true in terms of nonneural intelligence, such as that found in plants, and in conditional looping, such as found in computer-control systems. It is suggested here that while scientists are engaged in ruling out supernatural intelligence in explanating origins, they not lose sight of the possibility that other forms of intelligence like pure natural intelligence might still be involved.
If an evolution/NID debate at the molecular, genetic and cellular levels could condensed down to one essential consideration, I think it would be this: Are DNA replication and cell division based on any of the following mechanisms--input/output data, selective timing, switches, guided object positioning/juxtaposition, feedback, procedure looping, and the processing of inputs? These would be all natural, thus prone to err. If such is the case, then some aspect of non-conscious control processing (AI-like intelligence) would be involved. Intelligence would be involved in the nonneural sense suggested by Glenn Shrom (See Response Number 15 in "19 Responses to Origins of Intelligent Design"). Or is this all due to iterative timing instead, that is, looping, nonbranching, blind sequential (thus nonintelligent) replication sequences that are also prone to error? In a simple analogy, is there any steering wheel for reacting to an organism's condition or environmental circumstance, meaning an organism's state or situation? The choice in logical and AI terms thus is between that of input-output processing or strict hard-wired sequencing. These are questions whose answers are vital to assigning causal explanations to the processes involved.
Even if evolution is even an inadvertant consequence of the process of DNA and gene replication, there still can be no denying that intelligence is at work if some control processing is involved. Low intelligence, mistakes, and stupidity must still count as controlled natural processing in such a case, and thus must be counted as intelligence in the AI sense. Consider the fact that humans cannot be considered to be nonintelligent objects (creatures lacking all intelligence) simply due to the general stupidity they show as a species in matters of environmental management and ecology. It takes rudimentary intelligence to be stupid; it only takes none to be ignorant. The real question thus is whether natural input/output context processing (eg. relative to environmental circumstance or maturity) is involved in the reproduction of organisms and replication of their parts. It is a crucial consideraton in the evolution/NID puzzle whenever it is viewed at the microscopic level.
The problem with many evolutionists considering the intelligence or nonintelligence origins issue is not that they aren't up to speed; they can frame things in these terms, using AI terminology. They just as of yet choose not to. Neither are they ignorant of AI definitions of intelligence. They just don't adapt and apply the rubric of control processing for this area. Why not use it at these levels of explanation? In effect, they don't see the need. They close their eyes in all innocence to the consideration of rudimentary intelligence in gene and chromosone replication, confident that nonrecursive (linear) processes, statistical gene probabilities, and rates of mutations are sufficient for particle-based explanations, and that such explanations coupled with an environment posited in non-descript form are in turn adequate for explaining the whole matter of the biological progression upward of forms. One problem with this position is that it is only a description of general processes, an investigation of the basic 'hows.' None of it attempts to determine the reasons behind things functioning and adapting intricately, the 'whys.' It may well be that the type of explanations evolutionists tend to avoid, viz., detailed descriptions, naturalistic intelligent design can readily supply in the form of testable real world hypotheses.
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Hello Richard. Do we agree that DNA is a storage system for information? Now we have to take it to the logical conclusion. In order to extract the information from storage requires a transcription protocol (aka code.) We can't deny that there is a code required for protein synthesis, or else how can there be a storage system of information which produces an output of information for protein synthesis. You can't have one without the other.
ReplyDeleteLogically we have shown that DNA/RNA transcription necessarily requires a code for the extraction of information from the storage system. Where there is a code, there was design. Where there was design, there was a designer. If the code is advanced and sophisticated, we infer that the coder is advanced and sophisticated, which goes beyond the "one step at a time" mechanism of natural selection.
Best regards, Brent