Intelligent Evolution

Okay, I'm posting a lot about evolution/ intelligent design today. That's because my mind is literally opening up to various possibilities here. Let's say that I am evolving before your eyes.

The thing to understand about Darwin's "theory of evolution" is that it is a number of seperate theories. The Origin of Species is remarkably thorough, but it doesn't answer the "ultimate" question that we are getting at here. What it says:

1) Species have great fertility. They make more offspring than can grow to adulthood.
This is pretty easy to demonstrate, and Darwin does so.

2) Populations remain roughly the same size, with modest fluctuations.
More or less true of most species.

3) Food resources are limited, but are relatively constant most of the time. From these three observations it may be inferred that in such an environment there will be a struggle for survival among individuals.
Here is where I disagree with Darwin, and basically Malthus. The struggle doesn't seem inevitable or inferrable. China's population exploded, so they established laws on the number of offspring that a family could have. Hence, no struggle. I suspect animal packs may unconsciously behave the same way.

4) In sexually reproducing species, generally no two individuals are identical. Variation is rampant.

5) Much of this variation is heritable.

So far, nothing too scandalous here.

From these observations, Darwin argues that the environment "selects" certain traits because animals with those traits are better able to survive and so do. A cat cannot survive as long in a desert as a camel, for example. What Peter Wood is arguing is that none of this is tremendously controversial.

However, what he calls capital-E Evolution relies on unifying all of these ideas under one assertion- that the evolution, diversity and mutation that we can, and do, observe happen because of an underlying mechanism of random chance. That these things appear to us to be random, and so they must be so. His point is that this requires a belief in luck as well as a belief in randomness, and therefore requires a sort of blind faith. Or, at the very least, the same subjectivity as a belief that these things prove the existence of God.

So, the most reasonable way to deal with all of this would be to tell kids the following:

"Ultimately, the underlying mechanism of evolution is a matter of subjective speculation. Some theorists believe that life has evolved due to random chance, and others argue that evolution reflects the intelligence of a creator. However, the student is left to decide this question as they see fit."

This is not the same as the two current competing solutions, which seem to be:
a) Propping up Evolution as a doctrinal law
b) Simply calling Evolutionary theory into question out of hand

What this does is to allow the student the possibility of metaphysics, while still suggesting that metaphysical speculation (by evolutionists or creationists) is not really appropriate for a science class.

Finally, all of this reminds me of a dirty joke that Robert Anton Wilson once told:
"I finally had to stop being an athiest because I realized that I had nothing to scream out during sex. Somehow, 'Oh random chance! Oh random chance!' wasn't cutting it."