What if evolution was intelligently designed?
For a long time I have been annoyed with both sides in the alleged conflict between evolution and religious faith.
The anti-religion crowd just assumes (based on what, I don't know) that if god existed he would design individual blueprints for each individual species, like some industrial designer designing the latest iPod. They envision a god who sits down at the drawing board and designs an anteater and then goes out and manufactures an anteater based on that design. Once this vision of how god operates is accepted as fact then it becomes possible to disprove the existence of god by finding evidence that each creature is not individually designed and that creatures morph into other creatures through evolution.
For some reason the creationist crowd also buys into this vision of god as industrial designer, so they struggle to disprove evolution and show that god really does manufacture each individual species based on special blueprints he made up for each species?
But what if god just doesn't operate like an corporate industrial designer individually designing each product? What if what god created using intelligent design wasn't individual species, but instead a single entity of earth-life that uses a system of DNA, mutation, sexual reproduction, and death, to flexibly adapt to changing environmental circumstances? What if evolution is not some abstract fundamental principle of the universe, but instead just another adaptive feature of life that god decided would be useful?
We assume that since human inventors throughout history came up with an idea for a gadget, and then designed and made it based on that idea, that god must operate the same way: coming up with ideas for distinct devices and then designing and building them. But what if god takes a more holistic approach? What if god sees herself as more of a strategic CEO and doesn't want to get dragged down into the details of day to day operations? What if rather than designing one of this and one of that, god designed a self-managing life system that takes care of itself 99.99999% of the time without any maintenance or intervention by god? Sure this vision of god as the prime delegator is speculation, but isn't the vision of god as a control freak micro manager who has to design each individual species just as much speculation? How can we know how a god might choose to operate?
Seeing evolution as just another survival feature of plants and animals is easier if you step back and mentally view life from the perspective of passing centuries and not passing minutes. Imagine watching earth as a time lapse movie where each century is a second. At that speed you don't even notice that individual plants and animals are born and then die. Instead all you can see is each species as its own entity. You see the species growing and changing and then fading away. Once you start thinking of whole species as an entity, then their evolution can begin to just look like adaptive behavior. The climate gets colder so the species grows longer fur. A species starts to each the same food, so they change the shape of their jaw so they can eat something else that has less competition. You see species morph their size and characteristics to adapt to changing circumstances, just like an individual chameleon changes its skin color to match its surroundings, or an animal sheds its winter coat in the spring.
If you then speed up the mental time lapse movie of earth's history to 100,000 years per second, then you start to stop noticing the activities of individual species, which can come and go in a flicker, and instead what you observe is how the genus, classes, and orders, morph through speciation to adapt to changes.
Speed up the time lapse movie even faster, and then you lose track of even the individual orders and classes and genuses coming and going, and life can begin to look like a single organism just adapting to its environment by tweaking the characteristics of its cells.
There are a few questions that suggest to me that there is a lot that we don't know about evolution and that we are in no position to declare anything about god based on our understanding of evolution.
One mystery, at least to me, is how and why evolution suddenly shifted gears and became a powerful force after eons of lackluster performance. Evolution on earth was more or less stalled out at very simple single and multicellular organisms for 2 - 3 billion years. If alien scientists studied the first 3 billion years of the history of life on earth, without knowing about the Cambrian explosion and what followed, they would have to conclude that evolution had a very limited capability to adapt organisms, and that life on earth would always be limited to simple and tiny organisms. After a 3 billion year track record of basically stagnant evolution there would be no basis for predicting anything other than more of the same until the end of time. To me this suggests that there is no single unitary thing as evolution. Instead there are different varieties of evolution, some of which are pretty unimpressive, and some of which have incredible performance characteristics. And if there are different varieties of evolution, with different characteristics, maybe it is not a fundamental law of nature, but instead a mechanism, a tool, that can have different qualities and characteristics.
Another mystery to me is why life only appeared once. Everything I have ever read about evolutionary biology in the popular press says that all living things are related, that they all trace back to a single common ancestor organism. But if life was the result of inevitable chemical processes, why didn't it appear multiple times in the earth's 4 billion year history? If the odds of life forming from basic chemicals were even 1 in a billion, then there should still be at least a few completely unrelated forms of life on earth. The fact that primitive life appeared very early in the earth's history suggests that the probability of it occurring are fairly high (otherwise wouldn't it have been 3 billion years or more before even primitive life appeared?), but then once it appeared early on it never happened again.
Another thing that fascinates me is the recent work in the field of evo-devo. One discovery was that the genes used to build a fruit fly body can be found in every living thing; That there are fundamental and identical genetic building-blocks that are used to build every animal. All animals are constructed using the same set of basic genes, with the variation in appearance between animals occurring because other master genes control how much of each building block gene is expressed in each animal. If animals are all using the same genetic toolkit, and the differences between animals are due to tweaking the expression of each fundamental genetic building block, and not due to fundamental differences in genetic basics, then suddenly all animal life starts to look like a single entity that is programmed to adapt to changing circumstances rather than distinct individual entities that all have a completely separate identity. Maybe evolution is not the story of the creation of creatures with independent and distinct identities, but instead the story of a single system made up of linked subsystems that merely adapts as needed to its changing circumstances.
From the evo-devo perspective evolution looks less like a fundamental law of nature, but instead as just a set of tools and methods for adapting to change. When the pupil of an eye changes size in response to different levels of light we don't say that there is some fundamental law of nature that dictates that eyes adjust to variations in light levels. We just say that the eye has a mechanism that allows it to work in both low light and bright light. Maybe evolution is merely a mechanism that allows life to carry on without interruption when conditions change.
And maybe that mechanism for adaptation was intelligently designed. We wouldn't think much of a human inventor who designed something that fails the first time the weather changes. Why would we expect a supernatural inventor to make animals that can only work in one specific set of environmental circumstances, and which have to be manually redesigned and replaced every time things change? Wouldn't an inventor be much more clever to design his invention so it automatically changes its form and functions to adapt to change? Maybe the fact of evolution says nothing at all about whether or not there was an intelligence behind the creation of life on earth.
The anti-religion crowd just assumes (based on what, I don't know) that if god existed he would design individual blueprints for each individual species, like some industrial designer designing the latest iPod. They envision a god who sits down at the drawing board and designs an anteater and then goes out and manufactures an anteater based on that design. Once this vision of how god operates is accepted as fact then it becomes possible to disprove the existence of god by finding evidence that each creature is not individually designed and that creatures morph into other creatures through evolution.
For some reason the creationist crowd also buys into this vision of god as industrial designer, so they struggle to disprove evolution and show that god really does manufacture each individual species based on special blueprints he made up for each species?
But what if god just doesn't operate like an corporate industrial designer individually designing each product? What if what god created using intelligent design wasn't individual species, but instead a single entity of earth-life that uses a system of DNA, mutation, sexual reproduction, and death, to flexibly adapt to changing environmental circumstances? What if evolution is not some abstract fundamental principle of the universe, but instead just another adaptive feature of life that god decided would be useful?
We assume that since human inventors throughout history came up with an idea for a gadget, and then designed and made it based on that idea, that god must operate the same way: coming up with ideas for distinct devices and then designing and building them. But what if god takes a more holistic approach? What if god sees herself as more of a strategic CEO and doesn't want to get dragged down into the details of day to day operations? What if rather than designing one of this and one of that, god designed a self-managing life system that takes care of itself 99.99999% of the time without any maintenance or intervention by god? Sure this vision of god as the prime delegator is speculation, but isn't the vision of god as a control freak micro manager who has to design each individual species just as much speculation? How can we know how a god might choose to operate?
Seeing evolution as just another survival feature of plants and animals is easier if you step back and mentally view life from the perspective of passing centuries and not passing minutes. Imagine watching earth as a time lapse movie where each century is a second. At that speed you don't even notice that individual plants and animals are born and then die. Instead all you can see is each species as its own entity. You see the species growing and changing and then fading away. Once you start thinking of whole species as an entity, then their evolution can begin to just look like adaptive behavior. The climate gets colder so the species grows longer fur. A species starts to each the same food, so they change the shape of their jaw so they can eat something else that has less competition. You see species morph their size and characteristics to adapt to changing circumstances, just like an individual chameleon changes its skin color to match its surroundings, or an animal sheds its winter coat in the spring.
If you then speed up the mental time lapse movie of earth's history to 100,000 years per second, then you start to stop noticing the activities of individual species, which can come and go in a flicker, and instead what you observe is how the genus, classes, and orders, morph through speciation to adapt to changes.
Speed up the time lapse movie even faster, and then you lose track of even the individual orders and classes and genuses coming and going, and life can begin to look like a single organism just adapting to its environment by tweaking the characteristics of its cells.
There are a few questions that suggest to me that there is a lot that we don't know about evolution and that we are in no position to declare anything about god based on our understanding of evolution.
One mystery, at least to me, is how and why evolution suddenly shifted gears and became a powerful force after eons of lackluster performance. Evolution on earth was more or less stalled out at very simple single and multicellular organisms for 2 - 3 billion years. If alien scientists studied the first 3 billion years of the history of life on earth, without knowing about the Cambrian explosion and what followed, they would have to conclude that evolution had a very limited capability to adapt organisms, and that life on earth would always be limited to simple and tiny organisms. After a 3 billion year track record of basically stagnant evolution there would be no basis for predicting anything other than more of the same until the end of time. To me this suggests that there is no single unitary thing as evolution. Instead there are different varieties of evolution, some of which are pretty unimpressive, and some of which have incredible performance characteristics. And if there are different varieties of evolution, with different characteristics, maybe it is not a fundamental law of nature, but instead a mechanism, a tool, that can have different qualities and characteristics.
Another mystery to me is why life only appeared once. Everything I have ever read about evolutionary biology in the popular press says that all living things are related, that they all trace back to a single common ancestor organism. But if life was the result of inevitable chemical processes, why didn't it appear multiple times in the earth's 4 billion year history? If the odds of life forming from basic chemicals were even 1 in a billion, then there should still be at least a few completely unrelated forms of life on earth. The fact that primitive life appeared very early in the earth's history suggests that the probability of it occurring are fairly high (otherwise wouldn't it have been 3 billion years or more before even primitive life appeared?), but then once it appeared early on it never happened again.
Another thing that fascinates me is the recent work in the field of evo-devo. One discovery was that the genes used to build a fruit fly body can be found in every living thing; That there are fundamental and identical genetic building-blocks that are used to build every animal. All animals are constructed using the same set of basic genes, with the variation in appearance between animals occurring because other master genes control how much of each building block gene is expressed in each animal. If animals are all using the same genetic toolkit, and the differences between animals are due to tweaking the expression of each fundamental genetic building block, and not due to fundamental differences in genetic basics, then suddenly all animal life starts to look like a single entity that is programmed to adapt to changing circumstances rather than distinct individual entities that all have a completely separate identity. Maybe evolution is not the story of the creation of creatures with independent and distinct identities, but instead the story of a single system made up of linked subsystems that merely adapts as needed to its changing circumstances.
From the evo-devo perspective evolution looks less like a fundamental law of nature, but instead as just a set of tools and methods for adapting to change. When the pupil of an eye changes size in response to different levels of light we don't say that there is some fundamental law of nature that dictates that eyes adjust to variations in light levels. We just say that the eye has a mechanism that allows it to work in both low light and bright light. Maybe evolution is merely a mechanism that allows life to carry on without interruption when conditions change.
And maybe that mechanism for adaptation was intelligently designed. We wouldn't think much of a human inventor who designed something that fails the first time the weather changes. Why would we expect a supernatural inventor to make animals that can only work in one specific set of environmental circumstances, and which have to be manually redesigned and replaced every time things change? Wouldn't an inventor be much more clever to design his invention so it automatically changes its form and functions to adapt to change? Maybe the fact of evolution says nothing at all about whether or not there was an intelligence behind the creation of life on earth.
posted by AndyfromTucson at 7:18 AM
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