Daily Lobo column
Monday, guest lecturer Philip Johnson, a law professor from the University of California at Berkeley, spoke for an hour in Woodward Hall about why the biology community should take the theory of “intelligent design” seriously.
The theory postulates that life is too complex to have evolved over time through a combination of natural laws and chaos. Instead, Johnson argues, life as we know it shows evidence of having been designed.
He challenges the scientific community to re-evaluate its attachment to the Darwinian theory of evolution, saying that it has become the equivalent of dogma among biologists. This, he says, leaves little room open for true scientific inquiry because it dismisses other theories of the origin of life without due consideration.
One of his prime examples of his theory is that cells operate like machines whose individual parts are useless. They are “irreducibly complex” in his words.
As an example, he proposes we think of an unassembled bicycle. By themselves, the parts of the bicycle cannot perform any of a bicycle’s functions. In order to function properly, it must be constructed in a very precise way — something that is only likely to happen if guided by an intelligent being.
His theory of life has the same concept — that advanced mechanisms in biology, such as eyes, ears and photosynthesis are too complex to simply have occurred by random chance. The two cornerstones of evolution, according to Johnson, are natural laws mixed with chance. But natural law can only create simple, repeating patterns, such as crystals. Chance only produces chaos.
As an analogy, he compares biology to the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). This project is engaged in detecting signals from alien civilizations by looking for patterns that are neither random static nor repetitive signals that result from natural law, such as pulsars. A verifiable signal from an alien race would have to be complex enough that it could not be mistaken for background noise or naturally occurring signals.
Why, then, Johnson argues, do we simply assume that intricate biological systems, which at first appear to be of intelligent design, are instead somehow created through natural law and chaos?
Johnson is right that the biological community tends to assume that Darwinian evolution is correct without much question. A scientific look into intelligent design would not be uncalled for. It is a possible explanation for the development of life.
The “intelligent design” hypothesis has two main questions to overcome before it could be proven true. First, how was it done? Secondly, who did it?
Johnson provided no insight into these two questions. A reasonable proposition will have to be made along these lines before the mainstream biological community will take it seriously.
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A plausible explanation for the construction of life as we know it will probably be available soon. Already, scientific understanding of biological processes is shedding new light into DNA and complex chemical interactions. Within the next century, it may be possible for us to construct new forms of life from scratch.
The second question will be more difficult to answer. Once it is possible to duplicate life through intelligent design, many people will believe the argument is over. They will say that since we know more about how to create life in a lab than we know about how it might have evolved naturally, the preponderance of evidence will sit with the theory of intelligent design.
But who is this designer? Is it God? How could you prove that?
Theologians have tried for millennia to uncover actual proof of God’s existence to no avail. Of course, it is possible that a supernatural entity simply willed life into existence, but that sort of thinking will never hold up to scientific scrutiny. Just because something is possible doesn’t mean it happened.
The theory of evolution as it stands today is far more complex than Darwin’s original proposal. Thousands upon thousands of intelligent people have devoted their lives to its study, and their conclusions so far make up the theory. It is hardly as simple as dogma.
Here at UNM, entire buildings full of people study and question every facet of the theory to learn more about life. It took decades for Darwin’s Origin of Species to become mainstream scientific belief.
Biologists have conducted many experiments to test the possibilities of evolution. They construct very simple self-replicating computer programs that randomly switch around elements of their code. The vast majority of these replications end in programs that cannot reproduce themselves. But when done millions of times, eventually the programs “evolve” to be even more efficient.
A fascinating article on this can be found at http://www.infidels.org/~meta/getalife/index.html
