Tuesday, August 09, 2005
(10:53 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
On Intelligent Design Arguments
I can't even begin to tell you how stupid I think Intelligent Design arguments are. Take today: I'm suffering from allergies. My body reacts to harmless substances by trying to expel them as vigorously as if they were deadly toxins. This is a negative side-effect of having an immune system, which -- as we all know -- is not a perfect defense against all disease, but generally helps us to get by. Or have you ever read the process of how the body produces energy by breaking down various amino acids or whatever? I can't write out the process from memory because it is ridiculously circuitous and in many steps, the body actually takes a net loss in energy. Where was the Intelligent Designer on that one? And if the male and female genitals were so self-evidently "made for each other" (such that homosexuality is obviously bad, on the face of it), why is it that sex is often painful for women the first time (and sometimes more than just the first time)? Or what about the brilliantly engineered plan of wasting millions of sperm when only one is really necessary?Yes, life is complex; yes, it's hard to understand. This argues against some Engineer in the Sky perfectly calibrating everything. Life is just getting by -- it continues to stumble upon new ways of just getting by. When I look at the biological world, I do not see a fucking watch. Perhaps "Darwinism" (which may or may not even exist) has settled into some too-easy answers. I don't know, because I'm not an expert in biology. But it seems to me that this weird, haphazard, untidy thing that we call biological life is more what you'd expect to result from a protracted struggle than from someone sitting down at the drawing table. Creatures aren't perfectly suited to their environment, and the human body isn't some kind of beautifully designed perfectly functioning machine -- anyone who thinks the contrary has lived neither in an environment nor in a human body. Perhaps the terminology "survival of the fittest" is misleading -- it's not survival of the "fittest in absolute terms," but survival of the "least unfit."
It seems to me that a certain kind of "creativity" shows itself in this struggle (I will not call it a "process"), but it's far from being the kind of creativity that produces a watch.
Read this Milbank piece for a different, and more informed, take on this matter.
UPDATE: Jonathan Dresner sends along this essay on translation, not written by Jonathan Dresner but rather by Serge Gavronsky. It seems relevant to this post insofar as it plays on the Tower of Babel story in an unexpected way.
