Intelligent Design or Evolution? Why the Origin of Life Implies Design

Human Evolution

This page not in book.

The intelligent design movement has done a fairly poor job so far in describing the limitations of the theory; as a result, many people mistakenly believe that the theory applies to all evolution, including the evolution of man. But the truth of the matter is that the DNA in humans is 99% identical to that in chimpanzees, and this similarity if anything supports Darwinian evolution.

Furthermore, intelligent design relies on information theory to assign a probability of evolution to new genes and proteins. This technique only works if new useful information is created from scratch. There is not a single gene found in man that is not also found in chimpanzees. So human evolution required no new genes, and as a result,  information theory cannot be used to assign a probability  to human evolution.

All higher forms of life appear to have evolved by shuffling and rearranging existing information. Information theory is not applicable to these processes. Today, there are no computational or analytical models that can accurately predict whether or not given 500 million years a fish can evolve into a chimpanzee or a primate can evolve into a man. Science assumes that naturalistic laws explain such transitions, but in reality, nobody really knows if this is true, because the probabilities for these events have never been calculated.

This book chose to limit all evidence for design to chemical evolution, the origin of the first self replicator, and the evolution of the first genes and proteins. Collectively, these events are all required for the origin of life. This approach avoids the many problems introduced by life's ability to shuffle and rearrange existing information.

The evidence for design is very strong, but it is limited to the evolution that took place on earth 2 to 4 billion years ago. In the future, it is quite probable that scientists will be able to infer design from more recent evolutionary events, but today this is impossible. All that can be said for sure today is that life was created. It was given the innate ability to evolve, and such evolution may or may not have been under the control of the designer.

To this author at least it seems silly to invoke design for the origin of life and then assume that the designer had no role in the rest of creation.

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