There’s an interesting post at Uncommon Descent that raises a very good question for the biological debate over intelligent design.<\/p>\n
For those who don’t know, biological intelligent design (BID) is the view that the combination of random mutations + natural selection + deep time is not<\/span> sufficient to account for the existence of life on Earth in all its diversity and that a fully adequate explanation will need to be fundamentally teleological – in short, we’re going to have to posit one or more designers.<\/p>\n The main argument for BID turns on the notion of ‘irreducible complexity’. The basic idea is that there are complex structures and processes at the biomolecular level that cannot plausibly<\/span> be explained by Darwinian processes (RM + NS) and that can plausibly be explained by appealing to intelligent design.<\/p>\n The standard reply among mainstream biologists (e.g., Kenneth Miller) is to replace the italicized word ‘plausibly’ above with ‘possibly’ and then to present an imaginative just-so story about how that apparently irreducibly complex could have possibly<\/span> evolved.<\/p>\n That’s a rather evasive response, of course, but it works pretty well since most people don’t notice the shell-game (swapping ‘possibly’ for ‘plausibly’).<\/p>\n In this context, Granville Sewell proposes that we ask evolutionary biologists this question, “What IF we were able to determine, to your satisfaction, that some biological structure really is irreducibly complex and not just apparently so?” Such a question could evoke any of the following responses:<\/p>\n The first and second responses are<\/p>\n BID is not science (because it can’t be adequately tested) and<\/span> it has been adequately tested and falsified. Let’s ignore the implicit contradiction in those two claims, however. A more important point is that<\/p>\n Now<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There’s an interesting post at Uncommon Descent that raises a very good question for the biological debate over intelligent design. For those who don’t know, biological intelligent design (BID) is the view that the combination of random mutations + natural selection + deep time is not sufficient to account for the existence of life on\u2026 Read More »<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-74","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/alanrhoda.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/alanrhoda.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/alanrhoda.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/alanrhoda.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/alanrhoda.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=74"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/alanrhoda.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/alanrhoda.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=74"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/alanrhoda.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=74"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/alanrhoda.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=74"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n