The Evolutionary Biology Lecture of the Week for May 8, 2006 is now available
at:
http://aics-research.com/lotw/
The talks center primarily around evolutionary biology, in all of its
aspects: cosmology, astronomy, planetology, geology, astrobiology, ecology,
ethology,
biogeography, phylogenetics and evolutionary biology itself, and are
presented at a professional level, that of one scientist talking to another.
All of
the talks were recorded live at conferences.
This week's lecture is the second of three lectures that will discuss whether
or not Darwinian evolutionary theory is sufficient to explain all of the
phenomena we see in nature.
The first talk, that of David Fogel's, addressed the question whether or not
the evolutionary process is sufficiently quick enough to generate the enormous
complexity and quality of solutions we see in nature. The next talk, that of
Andy Knoll's, will ask whether or not the microevolution characteristic of
population genetics is a sufficient description of the course that the
evolution
of complex life has taken on this planet.
This week's talk asks a different question: did the evolution of life on this
planet require the assistance of an external intelligent agent, a designer?
Is it too complex otherwise to have been evolved by chance alone?
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May 8, 2006
Part II: Is Evolution Sufficient?
The Challenge of Intelligent Design
Eugenie Scott, National Center for Science Education, Inc.
62 min.
Although its most ardent advocates argue otherwise, for most people the
Intelligent Design movement is an obvious, transparent attempt to reintroduce
creation science â and thus religion â back into the American classroom.
Nevertheless, political and religious motivations aside, there is an
interesting scientific question at the heart of the ID thesis: "If the
evolution of
life on Earth had been directed by an external agency, could we detect that
interference now?"
In an odd twist on the old adage that one man's religion is another man's
science fiction, one of the finest movies made to date deals with the theme of
the directed evolution of mankind, although that aspect of the film generally
goes unrecognized by most of its viewers. Rated 22nd in the American Film
Institute's list of the best 100 movies in the last 100 years, Stanley
Kubrick's
1968 film, "2001: A Space Odyssey," explores the possibility of the directed
evolution of man by an unseen omniscient immortal, the Overmind.
In the movie, black monoliths, which are computers/gene resequencers, are
simultaneously placed 4 million years ago on the African plain amid a group of
australopithecines, buried on the Moon and put in orbit around Jupiter by the
Overmind.
In the most punctuated of punctuated equilibrial events, when the apes touch
the monolith, they are transformed, and a bone now learned to be used as a
weapon is thrown to the sky in celebration, only to become an orbiting nuclear
weapons platform circling a modern Earth in a brief 4 myr instant of time.
The second monolith is discovered on the Moon almost as soon as mankind has
evolved the capacity to cross this short synapse of space. The lunar discovery
immediately leads to the third monolith orbiting Jupiter.
When a lone astronaut approaches the Jovian monolith, space and time are
ripped apart as he is transported across space, to live out the remainder of
his
life, slightly out of phase with himself, in zoo-like conditions. At the end of
his life, a fourth monolith appears at the foot of his deathbed, and the
information that is modern humanity is transformed into the next stage of human
evolution, the Star Child.
The Star Child appears above the Earth in the final scene of the movie, as
30,000 nuclear weapons explode on the surface below (unshown in the movie),
wiping the planet clean in preparation for the arrival of the next stage of the
directed evolution of mankind. But even the Star Child may yet only be
intermediate to the final end-goal, and Earth be only one of a thousand planets
on
which the Overmind is orchestrating similar evolutionary progressions.
In that, Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" retells Friedrich Neitzsche's
"Thus Spoke Zarathustra," in which Neitzsche writes:
Companions the creator seeks, not corpses, not herds and believers. Fellow
creators the creator seeks â those who write new values on new tablets.
Companions the creator seeks, and fellow harvesters; for everything about him
is ripe
for the harvest.
Clearly, no one in the ID community is specifically arguing the 2001 story,
but their arguments are strikingly similar: an external intelligent agent has
interfered with the evolution of life on Earth at specific times: e.g., at the
point of the origin of life, the origin of the digital code inherent to DNA,
the evolution of the nanotechnology of molecular motors, and in the explosion
of body plans at the onset of the Cambrian.
The ID argument thus becomes a modern recapitulation of that found in William
Paley's 1802 book, Natural Theology. A mind can recognize the design of
another mind, and although the designer may be unseeable and unknowable, the
presence of the designer can be detected and some sense of its thoughts can be
discerned.
Just two weeks ago, TVW, Washington State's Public Affairs Network, held a
televised debate between Peter Ward (Univ. Washington) and Stephen Meyer
(Discovery Institute). The debate can be viewed here:
http://www.tvw.org/MediaPlayer/Archived/WME.cfm?EVNum=2006040103&TYPE=V
(100 min/300 kbps; right-click on the image to view at full-screen).
In this discussion, Meyer was provided sufficient time to provide an eloquent
explanation of the Discovery Institute's position, and his comments provide
an excellent bookend to this week's lecture.
In this lecture, Eugenie Scott not only succinctly outlines the scientific
questions surrounding Intelligent Design, but also the philosophies of its
fellow travelers and supporters, very few of which, as you will see, readily
agree
with one another.
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Wirt Atmar
