Life on planet earth operates on two basic principles, photo or chemical synthesis and in order for something to live something else has to suffer or die.
At present there are two major views on this subject, natural selection and divine design.
Bed bug males have a penis and female bedbugs have a vagina. Strangely, neither is used in the bed bug reproduction. The male penis is too large and misshapen to be inserted into the female. Instead he deposits sperm on her side and the sperm drill through her skin and tissues to fertilize her eggs. This process often kills the female.
Intelligent design is not based on any scientific evidence. I repeat, there is no scientific evidence to support the idea of intelligent design. It is not a scientific theory.
The evidence of science is that natural selection drives evolution. Intelligent design says that divine selection drives evolution.
The supporters of intelligent design have been attacking evolution by natural selection. They say that because there are some things that are difficult to explain in the process that there must have been an intelligent agent (really a divine designer). They say if natural selection is wrong, supernatural selection must be right.
This type of thinking is obviously not science, but if they can use that type of reasoning so can the rest of us.
The premise is that biochemical process are to complicated to have happened by natural selection so it must have been through supernatural selection. We of course have no way of knowing when and how often the designer has tinkered with biological process. What the divine designer does is not known to us.
By using scientific natural selection, predictions can be made and evolution can be understood. It is valuable in medicine, farming, and many other fields.
With supernatural selection there is no way of knowing when the designer might change a biological process, say to make a virus lethal or a gene that kills.
If supernatural selection drives evolution all of the evolution research that scientists have done, based on natural selection, since Darwin is wrong.
They say that DNA is much to complicated to have developed and mutated over millions of years by natural selection.
Natural selection can answer questions such as why human males have nipples, beards, and thicker skin than human females. We have no way of knowing what was in the mind of the designer on such basic observations.
I can play the same game. If there are flaws in intelligent design then natural selection must be right.
The proponents of intelligent design are divided into two camps. One group are creationists who believe the earth is less than ten thousand years old and it and all living things were created in six days by God.
The other group believes that the earth is very old and that an intelligent designer, a divine designer, caused changes in the make up of biochemical properties of life that led to evolution. The text book that the proponents of ID want public school students to use, Of Panda’s and People, by Davis and Kenyon states on page 100, “Intelligent design means that various forms of life began abruptly through an intelligent agency with their distinctive features already intact - fish with fins and scales, birds with feathers, beaks and wings, etc.”
This same book states on page 125, “Even if it is assumed that an intelligent designer did indeed have a good reason for every decision that was made, and for including every trait in each organism, it does not follow that such reasons will be obvious to us.”
This statement implies that the designer does indeed manipulate DNA and other proteins to control behavior and structure of living things. It is that we will never understand what the reasons are because we cannot know the mind of the divine designer.
Just where do we get information about intelligent design? Not from scientific publications. Evidence to support intelligent design has not been published in any reputable scientific journal or university biology text book. It has been published without showing evidence in magazines like Time, Newsweek and newspapers.
The July 2006 issue of Playboy had two letters from two leading supports of intelligent design. On page 44 is a quote from Michael Behe, “Intelligent design simply and straightforwardly proposes that perhaps the elegant machinery of life looks purposely designed because it was indeed purposely designed.”
My answer to that statement is; “Natural selection simply and straightforwardly proposes that the elegant machinery of life looks like natural selection because it is indeed natural selection.”
Are we to believe that the earth does not rotate on its axis because it looks like the sun rises and sets (Joshua 10:13 and Kings 20:9) or that stars can fall to the earth even though they are suns and galaxies, (Revelations 6:13)?
On the same page, David Berlinski, senior fellow at the Discovery Institute writes, “Having been told that Darwin’s theory of evolution is a great good thing, the American people have affirmed that they do not believe a word of it.”
My answer to his statement; “Having been told that intelligent design is a great good thing, scientists of the world have affirmed that they do not believe a word of it.”
Are there flaws in divine selection? There seem to be many, but two stand out.
Any reptile, bird or mammal that has six or eight years of reproduction produces four to six offspring a year. Of that twenty-five or so offspring only two will survive on average. This is not unusual among animals. Over ninety percent of all animals that hatch or are born die before they reach adulthood. They die from starvation, from disease or by being eaten by some other animal that is trying to survive. Death and suffering is the norm in the animal world.
Within our species over 60% of human fertilized eggs do not implant in the uterus. Of those that do, 15% are flushed out with the first menses and the female never knows she was pregnant.
The greater picture is even worse. Over ninety-six percent of all plants and animal species that have ever lived on earth are extinct.
These figures make sense if we understand natural selection, but do not if we think a divine designer was an intelligent designer.
There are, of course many other examples of flawed or at least very unusual methods of reproduction.
Plants, animals and almost all lower forms of life reproduce by having sperm and egg unite. In plants the female ovary produces eggs and the pollen produces sperm. Pollen is usually transferred by wind or insects. All fertilization is internal.
In animals fertilization can be external if the species live in water. Many fish species and all amphibians are fertilized externally.
It is internal fertilization that challenges intelligent design. Natural selection can explain the evolution of delivery of the sperm to the egg, but in many cases it hardly seems to be intelligent.
Peripatus or velvet worm is an animal that is a cross between an insect and an earthworm. More precisely a cross between Annelid and an Arthropod. The males have no penis and they deposit a bag of sperm (a spermataphore) on the back of the female. This eats a hole through the flesh of the female and the sperm fertilize the female's eggs. As with bed bugs this may result in her death.
Another variety of this creature engages in the practice of fertilization by hypodermic injection. The Male is equipped with a sword like structure . He drives this right through the female's skin and places the sperm deep in her body cavity. In these cases the species survive, but only at the expense of the individual.
All spiders masturbate. None of the males have a penis. They masturbate onto a small mat that they weave and then pick up the sperm with their hand like structures, the pedipapls, and deposit them into the female. This is artificial insemination. In most spiders this process kills him.
Mosquitoes are food for frogs, fish, bats and dragonflies. That is good for nature. So, why must the female have blood to reproduce? Last year 800,000 children died in Africa from mosquitoes that carry disease. In 2005 mosquitoes killed 2.7 million people and infected 300 million more. The male mosquitoes get along fine on plant juices. It is the female that carries the pain and suffering to other animals. Many species of mosquitoes are becoming resistant to insecticides. Is this suffering natural selection or divine selection?
And finally, nothing is stable in the universe. Continents are moving, the earth is slowing in its rotation, the moon is moving away, the sun is burning out, and the universe is expanding. This cannot be considered intelligent design, at least not by intelligent humans.
Of course, as they say in Of Pandas and People, “it does not follow that such reasons will be obvious to us.”
