Tuesday, March 10, 2009

something has to skew nature to choose the ones that work

the argument from Intelligent Design is that the perfection that is life on Earth cannot have possibly arisen from undirected material causes. there has to be an information source. okay, so there's an information source. DNA is an information source. the modern theory of particle physics is an information source. what's the problem?

why is this information source obviously the intelligence of an omniscient version of what has become the human mind? of course there is a directive force behind the interaction of particles that fosters their becoming something more complex which can harness its own energy fields -- even chaos behaves in an orderly fashion -- but it is silly to default to the idea that that force must be a god-like (human-like) intelligence that wished to put a bunch of tiny blocks together and make the organic lego organism that is the Cosmos. this is the problem with calling it "Intelligent Design"; of course it's intelligent design, but there is a surfeit of different kinds of intelligence.

biological intelligence, for one, refers to the ability of organic matter to recognize and interact with other matter: an amoeba, for instance, learning by trial and error to escape the terminal of a capillary tube.

chemical intelligence; the particular bonding interactions of atomic and molecular electron orbitals that result in spike or mechanistic function.

quantum intelligence; the collective formation of fields which become either rays of concentrated energy or building blocks of matter.

lower-animal intelligence; communication by means that humans are barely beginning to understand, and for reasons about which we have know way to assert an concrete understanding.

human intelligence is an evolved speculative tool like any other tool which arose from any other type of intelligence. there is absolutely no reason to think that Darwinian evolution is made null by the possibility of a god-like directive in the form of a human-like intellect. come on. of course Darwin's was a harrowingly rudimentary explanation - it was the first to make the suggestions that it did, what do you want from a less-than-omniscient creator?

Newtonianism was replaced by Relativity was replaced by Quantum Mechanics to explain increasing levels of what we are now accepting might be indefinite complexity innate to existence. God was pseudo-replaced by Linneaus/Lamarck were pseudo-replaced by Darwinism is being replaced by so many other theories of complex evolution. the ID controversy is no different than any other; it's not entirely devoid of merit, but like any other theory, if interpreted and marketed by extremists it loses what logic there is to the basic idea... which is that "nature" (defined as the gross systems perception of life) behaves more like an pallet, and something has to skew it to choose which particles or atoms or bacterial colonies or animals to drive into interaction.

i would be more swayed were it called Intelligent Particle Design... or Intelligent Boson Design... or fuck "intelligence" which is the component that is giving the argument its extremist ammunition and call it Boson Design. or Field Intelligence...

even in chaos, collision begets evolution.

of course... i'm still invested in the omnipotent command of DNA and microtubules, anyway.

No comments:

Post a Comment