Skeptick writes:
Wow. Pretty amazing stuff, that DNA. VERY amazing. Must have taken a pretty sharp guy to design it.
You underestimate it. It is
far more amazing than anything designed.
Don't be sucked in by the content free rhetoric of the intelligent design people. Their "intelligent designer" does nothing which could not be attributed to some kind of superhuman. They claim that they can identify design, but not the designer... it could be a space alien, or a "pretty sharp guy", for all they can actually tell.
See this
interview with Michael Behe. The relevant extract:
Although intelligent design fits comfortably with a belief in God, it doesn't require it, because the scientific theory doesn't tell you who the designer is. While most people -- including me -- will think the designer is God, some people might think that the designer was a space alien or something odd like that.
A designer constructs artefacts from what raw materials they can find, in an attempt to fit the artefact to circumstances. This involves tradeoffs of one capacity against another, to serve some purpose of the designer. The designed result is a thing, which is then used in a context, surrounded by an environment in which it must work.
This is how the intelligent design clowns perceive living organisms.
Part of the perversity of this is they are sometimes perceived as supporting belief in God, as opposed to a denial of God by conventional scientists.
The truth is just the reverse.
All of this debate we conduct here is, in the end, about religion. We'll continue to address various questions within the purview of empirical scientific observation and modelling. But for a moment, I'm going to try and cut to the heart of the matter.
In Christian theology, God made
everything. You can't point to one thing, and say that God made this thing, in contrast to that thing. In so far as people claim to see
design in one thing, they are contrasting that with other things. Whatever the designer is must thus be less than the maker of the universe; and is reduced to some kind of a manufacturer, working within the universe to make some limited set of artefacts.
The story told in the first chapter of Genesis is
very different. God does not toil; but commands. He calls life forth from the waters and from the earth. He gives the Sun command of day, and the Moon of the night. He divides chaos; and order is the result.
The idea that this is somehow a literal truth is merely silly. We deal with that matter here also; but perhaps I may assume that you at least recognize this much. Of course, this does not mean Genesis is meaningless. The point of the first chapter of Genesis is to refute the pagan polytheism of the cultures within which the bible was written. It does so using the cosmology known to the time; but turns it on its head with insights that have transcended any one culture to be an inspiration for millennia. Many scientists have been inspired with a vision of a coherent, consistent universe; every part of which operates by one God given authority. Newton, Galileo, Kepler, Dobzhansky, and many others, were not merely believers, but exceptionally committed and driven even by the standards of the day by their theistic faith. Unbelievers also have shared a similar wonder at the order inherent in the universe; Einstein, Davies, Dawkins, and many more.
The intelligent design advocates miss this. They dismiss the working of the world as being something "random", and somehow incapable giving rise to the phenomenal and subtle wonders of biology. They need to bring in a little manipulator of some kind, who constructs and designs analogously to a human designer. Their God is too small.
In fact, DNA, and life, are much too subtle and complex to be made by any process analogous to the workings of a designer. They are, like you as an individual and like the world in which we all live, a natural part of the universe itself.
A final thought, from
Danny Hillis; on the relative merits of evolution and design. (Cut and pasted from a
review of Kevein Kelly's
Out of Control.)
"There are only two ways we know of to make extremely complicated things," says Hillis. "One is by engineering, and the other is evolution. And of the two, evolution will make the more complex."
Cheers -- Sylas