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We live in what we like to refer to as a modern world, but
certainly the experience of being human never seems to
change. Despite our evolving informational, technological and
material environments, our interactions with each other (and
ourselves) remain as they have since the dawn of recorded
history.
One of the most obvious aspects of being human that has withstood the process of time is our intellect. Call it intelligence, smarts, sentience, sapience, whatever you wish... our mental inclination toward abstraction and conceptualization far exceeds any other observable living creatures on this planet. For perhaps this reason alone, the idea arose at some point in our history that we must be the final result of a mindless and inexorable process of development; a process of development that Charles Darwin is typically credited for discovering. We call this process Evolution, and although evolution as an algorithm can be successfully applied to much more than the development of life on this planet, it is most frequently associated with Darwin's "world shattering" idea. But is there really such a process in regard to the origin of all biological life, and if so, are we truly the final result? I've done my share of Internet surfing, seeking out both sides of this stalemated argument. It can't be expressed effectively enough that the arduous fervor of both sides is ultimately not a proof of either concept: God or Random Chance as the originator of life as we know it. The simplistic view of this debate is that only the Science side has all the documented and researched facts, and the Creationist side merely has conjecture, wishful thinking and "bad science." Proponents of the Scientific view never seem to run out of examples of facts that refute the "deceptive, ungrounded objections" of the Creationist view. I have looked over reams of bulleted, detailed counter- arguments designed to drive home the "truth" of the matter: that Creationists never know what they're talking about. Science insists that if these Creationists have the ignorant audacity to refute the BodhiDarwin, they're only begging to be exposed as populist charlatans with a hidden agenda to send us all back to the dark ages. We're informed that Jonathan Wells has cherry-picked the examples in his book Icons of Evolution, and that his arguments are "intellectually dishonest." But while the arbiters of truth are busy trying to drown Wells's assertions with a flood of facts, they're not spending very much time explaining why these inaccuracies are still present as seminal examples of evolution in modern textbooks. The best explanation Wells's critics can muster is that these textbooks are mostly used at the high school level. Apparently, high school students don't deserve the same access to scientific accuracy as college students. We're expected to accept the proclamation that Michael Behe's argument regarding irreducible complexity in his book Darwin's Black Box is just plain silly, because we're told that gradual evolution can do more than just add parts. To sum up for those reading this who aren't as familiar with this particular debate, Behe points out (correctly) that certain structures vital to life (biological cells), contain such intricate and complex interdependence between their constituent parts that the entire cell can't function with any one of those myriad parts removed. Thus, Behe asserts that gradual evolution could not have produced those structures, since the cell can't perform its principle functions with only part of its contents. The Scientific detractors of this argument claim that Behe's observation is invalid: the simple version of their counter- assertion is that it only seems like a cell couldn't survive and function without its myriad interacting parts. What the Scientific fact spewers are actually doing here is vending faith, not science. They maintain the presupposition that because the origin and development of all life on this planet had to be congruous with Darwin's theory, that of course the cells must have found some way to develop myriad, intricately cohesive functions one unique interdependent part at a time, never missing a step. These same statistically miraculous and ingeniously evolving cells never failed to continue existing and replicating during this multi-million year process. And furthermore, these aimless yet resilient microscopic entities never failed the larger organisms they eventually became a part of, despite their non-existent ability to engineer their own future structures. Regardless of what you or I choose to believe, and no matter how strong the urge to call the other side wrong, try to remember this: Facts are never truly self-evident when it comes to matters of theoretical controversy; they are merely subjective tools of the persons manipulating them, as any litigator or marketing analyst can attest. |