The Greeks, tired
after a long unsuccessful siege of Troy resorted to a clever subterfuge by
leaving a large wooden horse in whose belly were hidden a few armed
warriors. Their hope was that the dumb and superstitious Trojans would
open the gates and drag the horse within the city boundaries and in the
cover of darkness, the hidden Greek warriors would sneak out and open the
gates to allow the returning Greek hordes aboard the ships to enter and
overrun the Trojans.
There are twenty or more states currently debating the teaching of
intelligent design in public schools. The idea of intelligent design is a
rehash of Bishop Paley’s arguments against Darwin and his theory of
evolution. Paley’s premise is that if you are walking across a meadow and
see a stone, you assume that it could be the result of natural processes.
If on the other hand if you see a watch lying in the grass, its
complicated finely honed structure for its specific purpose would require
you to assume the existence of its creator, a watchmaker. This seemingly
sound and logically irrefutable conclusion has been thoroughly refuted by
many scientists and is available to interested readers in Richard Dawkins’
book "The Blind Watchmaker". Mutations leading to genetic variation
provide the fodder for natural selection to work on over geological time
by survival and propagation of the fittest.
This is not a miraculous impossibility like a hurricane assembling diverse
metal scraps into a perfect 747 jet as propounded by Fred Hoyle, a
renowned astrophysicist who despite his high intelligence failed to
understand the theory of evolution. If a high intellect like Hoyle’s
failed to comprehend evolution, a seriously intellectually challenged
shrub with his limited repertoire of reading children’s stories to
kindergartens as a solution to national crises, is bound to be confused
into mouthing gibberish opinions.
Let us consider a few examples. If I told you that one person can win the
Powerball three weeks in a row, you would laugh at me. The chances of
winning the Powerball are one in a hundred million and so the chances of
three consecutive weekly wins are one in 10 to the power of 24. If there
were such a large number of lottery ticket purchasers then 10 raised to
the power 16 would win the lottery the first week. If these winners all
purchased one ticket the second week covering all numbers, there would be
10 to the power 8 winners next week. If these second time winners
purchased a different numbered ticket covering all possible combinations
the third week, there would be a single winner who would have won the
lottery for three consecutive weeks. The same objective could be attained
by a single person purchasing all the hundred million combination tickets
each week to become a three time winner. As Archimedes said, "Give me a
long enough lever and I can lift the earth".
As one should realize change is a matter of numbers. Mutation is the
substrate altered by chance, and natural selection the grim reaper which
mindlessly without premeditation or goal culls the population in a
direction conducive to increased survival, successful mating and greater
propagation to inadvertently and unintelligently design organs and living
things to greater perfection to attain those goals. Dogs are domesticated
wolves and in their case, artificial but active human selection has bred
within the same species such wide variations as pointers, setters,
terriers, Dobermans, bulldogs, St. Bernards and chihuahuas in a few
hundred years and less than a hundred generations. Similar examples abound
in pigeons and plants. So why not from chimpanzee ancestors to homo
sapiens in 15 million years or 600,000 generations? At every generation
the bottleneck of survival weeds out the unfit and improves upon the new
variations to achieve perfection.
An intelligence designing a box camera would make its outside impermeable
to light and have a variable aperture and a lens capable of changing focal
length and a light sensitive film at the back with a cable capable of
transmitting the image digitally to a distant screen or analyzer. The
human eye has many of these attributes but has its converging optic nerve
fibers massing into a bundle (cable) placed in front of the film (retinal
cells) within the camera. This leaves a blind spot where we see nothing
and the image is analogue not digital. The blind spot is filled in by the
computing brain causing car accidents while changing lanes. This is a Rube
Goldberg contraption produced by a tinkerer constrained by previous
anatomical structural handicaps of ancestors and not the work of an
intelligent engineering design starting from scratch.
There is no scientific basis for intelligent design. It is a backdoor
attempt to inject god into science and faith into reason, to obscure truth
and divert the attention of an ignorant public from real issues of
economic, political and strategic importance just like prayer, abortion
and homosexual behavior and marriage in the past. Other examples of
tinkering restrained by past evolutionary history are air breathing lungs
instead of water breathing gills in dolphins, whales and seals which spend
more time under water. They are compelled to surface to their detriment,
to breathe oxygen from the air. Their precursors were land animals and
thus their return to the seas constrained evolution to work with prior
restraint of air breathing for oxygen. Similar restrictions explain the
differences between the wings of insects, birds and bats. An intelligent
designer would have chosen the best optimum design and not such varied
patchwork designs with obvious faults.
On a lighter note, the gooey mixture of a faux pearl and a clouded crystal
glued with rum and rice, fermented in a dicky, when anointed over the
heads of young America over a suitable foundation, is a way to design
Neo-cons. It hardly qualifies as the work of an intelligent designer. The
crowning irony is the creation of a chicken hawk by transplanting the head
of a chicken on to the body of a hawk. Bah! No intelligent design. I
wouldn’t be surprised if evolution next designed an alpha primate
proconsul by gluing together the head of a draft dodger suitably vacuumed
of intelligence, and attached it to the body of a flying ace, making the
pathetic creature the commander-in-chief of a great fighting force in
history. Whatever else it may be called, one could not call it intelligent
design. It does not even deserve to be called evolution and seems more
like regression!
Boloji.com is owned and managed by
Boloji Media Inc Privacy Policy |
Disclaimer No part of this Internet site may
be reproduced without prior written permission of the copyright holder.
