On Intelligent Design

A few years ago I came across an abstract in Scientific American that described the discovery of a few additional steps (Post Transcriptional editing of m-RNA) that occur during protein synthesis that lead to the generation of two different functional proteins from a single gene in two different cell types in the human body.  This brief and seemingly innocuous study shook some very fundamental beliefs that I had up until that point -- primarily that one gene encodes one protein.  Over the years, Molecular Genetics has attempted to corroborate the evolutionary theory proposed by Darwin through discoveries such as Cytochrome p-450 in cells across various species.  But this one was difficult for me to grasp in the context of Evolution.  As an engineer, I know a 'hack' when I see one and this one looked like a hack.   However, as I started to question what I long believed as a student of Science and began to wonder whether we weren't in a lab and part of an elaborate experiment in the universe (friends told me to read The Hitchhiker's Guide series), I still stayed away from the often political and religious Creationist vs Darwinism debates.

That is until now.  There have been a number of recent articles and debates on Intelligent Design vs Evolution with the assertion that the theories related to Evolution cannot satisfactorily explain a lot of phenomenon and that we need to reconsider the possibility of Intelligent Design that has led to life.  When I think about it, even in the context of Darwinism, what we previously accepted as supporting arguments for the theory can easily be questioned and at times the theory seems like a house of cards. 

While I have not recently explored the politics and agendas behind the Intelligent Design supporters, conceptually I am in support of it -- at least to the point of ensuring that students understand that Darwinian theories are simply that with little that can be proven and there is much outside of it that cannot be explained by those theories. 

Having studied symbiotic and parasitic relationships between species, I also do not believe that all such 'design' is intelligent since at times it does not seem to work all that well.  But that is another debate.

 

Prof Speaks at 'Intelligent Design' Trial <http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051017/ap_on_re_us/evolution_debate>

Intelligent Design

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_design>

Comments

[Doug]

I agree - nature seems profligate in its generation of maddeningly complex "hacks". Complexity is a free resource. Nature is not constrained - in its designs - by any need to make them easy for us to decipher. I believe that argues against design by a creator who thinks like us - not for it.
Also, I think you will find this Behe guy is merely the latest in a long line of Darwin's critics who choose some marvelous system from nature (e.g. the eyeball) and then express their personal incredulity that it could possibly have evolved. This is hardly an original argument and in my opinion it is (still) wrong. See Dawkins - "The Blind Watchmaker" for details....

[Leo]

My interpretation of Darwinism's "evolution by natural selection" is that it attempts to explain how living things evolve within a world that is human-perceivable along with limited extension of human logic. I'm not sure Darwin ever tried to extrapolate beyond that world. Meanwhile, Intelligent Design advocates assert that "natural selection" wouldn't be able to account for, say, certain existing species, hence some "thing" else must be doing something ... This in essence is an attempt to seek an explanation from a solution set outside that of Darwin's.

So the two theories don't necessarily collide, except when one attempts to trace along the two different paths all the way to the primordial origin. Another cause for possible collisions stems from the definition of "natural". In fact, intelligent design would still be "natural" if we were open to assuming that the designers could be some intelligent beings of higher order. In that case, one could use the analogy of studying artificially built ant communities or cloning sheep. Such activity is natural because human beings possess abundance of curiosity and egoism by nature, and there is no reason to assume nosy ET can't exist. But as soon as attempts are made to recursively traced back to the primordial designer(s), it gets hairy, again.