Friday, April 2, 2010

All Intelligent Design or Evolution Need Prove

Intelligent Design need not toy with the idea that there is a God, or even explicitly allow for its possibility. There are many types of causal agents that could be influencing direction-limiting biological progress, some natural and others beyond our current levels of functional, systems understanding. Attributing the development of life to a cause or group of causes beats propitious additive random design (evolution) hands down. Take the miracle of the DNA code and its replication, for example. What human alive today could have thought that one up on his own? Originally, it was an incredibly difficult concept to even model. It would have been impossible to have humanly designed it, and it still is. Also consider the self-healing, automatic mending nature of the body which can even by-pass incidentally obstructed blood vessels and restore blood flow. These processes surpass the capabilities of current medicine. We cannot even pair up strands of RNA.

Functioning systems call for causes. The only natural, physical analogies that run counter to the principle of a precipitous cause have a very short lifespan by comparison and are functionally many levels lower on the scale of complexity than functioning, self-repairing tissues and organs. Four of only a handful of possible choices are wave action, typhoons, tornadoes and snowflakes. Humans are basically left to mimick, imitate, or copy observed natural functions. They are not like mere weather or climatological patterns, but more like feedback-driven biological machines beyond human capability to replicate. We are generally neither creative nor insightful enough to originate our own biological systems solutions. What could not be manufactured by man cannot have evolved out of choice accidents and the environmental variation that has been available on Earth.

Intelligent agency, like the evolutionary paradigm, must be viewed through the looking glass it produces and has produced. Basically, its processes are shown in its biological products. But products alone tell us little about the methods used in their manufacture unless some sort of manufacturing code lies beneath the surface. We are limited organisms ourselves, with mediocre sensory organs comparatively speaking and specialized intellectual capacities, thus are restricted by our constitution just as other organisms are. Who certified us capable of discovering our own origins? For one, we can only perceive our world in limited ways and forms. We can only sense certain things, too. Other concepts and phenomena are only noticed by first attributing cause and meaning to them, i.e., to their instances, events and objects. Technology has only added to these abilities incrementally. It has not yet enhanced them on an exponential scale. We are children of a 21st century intellect, its shared records, and its store of devices. We are rarely able to work our way out of this conundrum and see beyond it. When the subject and details of what happened in milleniums past comes up, we are often reminded that our families cannot often agree on what was wrong with last night's supper or conversation. We can offer no guarantee that the experts are right in their interpretation of history. We should even be less reliable when it comes to the matter of pre-history. Why do we give evolutionists a free hand and blank check in the public schools? If one scientist speaks up against it, he or she should be mentioned! I have a masters degree in anthropology and am not permitted to present my view in a U.S. public school science classroom! Current-day court rulings are not merely recapitulating the U.S. court rulings that supported and encouraged monopolies to have an economic heyday in the U.S during the 19th century. They are legally preserving the same type of absurd travesty occuring in American educational institutions!


One consequence of this is shown in the forms our data take. Evolution is just as restricted in its data pool as ID is. Creationists use religious texts for sources of data, primarily. ID broke off of it to base its views on the scientific method and then found its theory severely restrictive, too. Now it jumps into theory and philosophy, as it jumps backs to data and research. Like historical science, evolution and ID are relegated to the position of searching for processes in the archives of past data (fossils and fissures), or else be limited to present physical microprocesses (in genetics and biological cells). Most of our interpretations are circumscribed by the absence of real, direct, ever-present, ideal forms of data. We cannot conduct experiments on macroevolution, for example, but we can sure act like we understand it very well. Both evolution and ID then project views from the position of weakness (and in some cases ignorance), the absence of direct observation of physical data, as a result. Little empirical research is even attempted on the processes of biological progress; instead, much is assumed theoretically. Very little of it gets tested. The main way to prove this fact is by citing the general lack of hypothesis testing found traditionally occuring or going on currently in origins science.

With evolution and ID sitting on their laurels and neither doing much more than complacently trusting theories, unable to physically test their key principles, and waiting for supportative evidence to pile up in the form of subtle, indirect accumulation of implications and a subjectively interpreted preponderance of findings, the following state of affairs exists: All ID needs to demonstrate is that nature is smarter than man. If it proves this case within the present sparse intellectual climate, it has ipso facto proved its main thrust. And this point shouldn't be all that hard to prove, since (as Peter Marshall had said) the DNA code created us and not vice versa! That thrust is that features of directed intelligence in all likelihood produced biological progress- that intelligence in nature is much more likely the cause of biological progress than chaos theory's explanation. All evolution need do is prove that man is the pinnacle of natural, physical development and there is no need to grow beyond his design or look beyond it for anything better. Hopefully, both premises won't be demonstrated to have merit at the same time, but this is exactly what I expect to see happen in the present highly charged political climate of the origins debate.

Randomness is impotent as a directional force. And indeed, I did not say important. Even an appropriately demonstrated process of evolutionary progress needs a demonstratable rationale for directional change and increased complexity as shown in the fossil record. With hominids, it has been culture. With nonhominids, it should be other derivatives of intelligence.

The despised injection of brain matter that would constitute adding insights from artificial intelligence and ID into evolutionary theory in order to give it a needed shot is categorically rejected without due consideration. Any directivity sufficient to provide strong (as opposed to weak) causes of increased biological complexity is currently rejected out-of-hand by evolutionists. They won't countenance causal discussions or observable physical causes because of their blindly hypocritical, unnaturalistic committment to time as cause. No criticisms or adjustments to evolutionary theory supported by nonloyalists are allowed because of wildly charged emotionalism. The merits of AI and ID's arguments cannot not even discussed in an adultlike, rational manner. An atmosphere of dogmatism and a climate of professional fear that it built clouds all discussion. It has beseiged evolutionary science for decades. Partisanism and dogma are the root causes behind it.

Evolutionists' main weakness in this area is their blind parochialism: many are not interdisciplinary. Furthermore, such close-minded proponents are adamant and childishly proud of the fact. Dogma and ideological purity can reign in interest-group politics, and it does so precisely in the case of evolution's out-of-hand, categorical rejection of AI and ID due ostensibly to their hatred of the alleged association of ID proponents with creationists. Stated as at the heart of the argument is a fear of the pollution of science by religion and religious texts, though the same scientists do not try to rein in religious influences that might influence cosmology. Neither are they concerned over the heavy influence that other philosophical positions already have on science, such as humanism, materialism, or atheism. Thus their rejection of ID is most likely historically based and not rooted in any theoretical or methodological- indeed any substantive concerns.