Front end loading (Introduction)

by dhw, Thursday, November 13, 2008, 17:50 (5642 days ago) @ David Turell

I've now read the essays that David recommended: Does Nature Suggest Transcendence? by Neil D. Broom, and Current Stories by Kitta MacPherson. The bulk of the first consists in picking to pieces the arguments of the material biologists, in particular their various analogies, all of which in fact suggest conscious design. Broom's own image of the self-producing internal combustion engine is akin to Hoyle's Boeing 747, and if I may say so, David's own book contains a far clearer and more convincing analysis of the evidence. I shan't pretend to understand the details underlying the new discovery of "control theory" in the second essay, but when researchers talk of self correcting, steering, machinery, fine-tuning etc., again I find it difficult to equate such language with the random actions of chance, as they do. - There was a similar bias in the Sunday Times this week, with an article headlined: A brief encounter and life erupts. The subheading reads: Scientists have pinpointed the single tiny event that created all plants, and the opening paragraph reads: "Scientists have identified the single chance encounter about 1.9 billion years ago to which almost all life on Earth owes its existence." We are told that an amoeba-like organism engulfed a bacterium that had developed the power to use sunlight to break down water and liberate oxygen. The bacterium was probably intended as prey but instead it became incorporated into its attacker's body ... turning it into the ancestor of every tree, flowering plant and seaweed on Earth. Paul Falkowski, professor of biogeochemistry and biophysics at Rutgers University says: "The descendants of that tiny organism transformed our atmosphere, filling it with oxygen needed for animals and, eventually, humans to evolve." One of the accompanying diagrams (headed "How it all began") contains the following caption: "First plants colonised land 475m years ago, creating conditions for primitive land animals to follow 75m years later." - There is more in the article about chloroplasts and cyanobacteria, and what one researcher calls "a series of unique chance events". One presumably shouldn't ask where the amoeba and the bacterium, or for that matter the "primitive land animals" came from. Is it to be taken for granted that once you have plants, you will automatically have animals evolving to feed off them? But even if one grants the possibility that this whole process may have been the result of chance encounters, why do such researchers say categorically that it was? Every new discovery gives us insights into the extraordinary complexity of life and reproduction. Shouldn't scientists remain objective and tell us what may have happened without insisting that they also know the force that made it happen? I'm not taking sides here. It just seems to me that there's no difference between one scientist saying God did it, and another saying Chance did it. In both cases, faith subverts science.