Just finished watching (on the Trinity Broadcasting Network no less) a Discovery Institute inspired (paid for?) program from 2002 called 'Unlocking the Mysteries of Life'.
I've been following the whole ID insurgency for some time now and was amazed at how well put together the program package was. Very smooth. Very high production values. Little disingenuous on how it presented Darwinism (or a LOT), and their idea as the 'only' alternative explanatory principle. Usual suspect list trotted out (Behe, Kenyon, etc.).
BOTH sides of this 'debate' so-called are missing an important piece of information right in front of their faces. Call it 'local intelligence' if you like (I haven't settled on a name yet).
Purest Old Darwinism is selectional, but essentially bottom up, since it doesn't leave room for mind, intelligence, choice etc. on the part of the organism. Later work goes into sexual selection (NEVER mentioned in the program! Guess sex is still a taboo subject for TBN viewers) which of course requires a mind at least of sorts. The ID promoters say that proteins could never have come together in just the right way to fold or combine into just the right configurations all by themselves, and this includes their big argument- the bacterial flagellum (I wrote a review of a review on this particular piece of architecture in my undergrad days, before ID existed).
But this ignores the fact (a problem shared by the 'RNA first' crowd) that chemical reactions in nature (whether between sand grains or in cells) do NOT take place in a watery vacuum, so to speak, but are subject to constraints in their extremely local physicochemical environment.
Most natural environments are not made of purified repeated stuff units (as one generally sees in a lab), but all sorts of historically modified mixtures that are simply NOT identical from place to place. This sand grain may have a little more iron than that one, more on this end than that, and so on. Agglomerations (whether static or dynamic) are also locally unique.
Inside cells components may be exhibit a hodgepodge of configurations and states, all depending on both previous ones and on interactions between the exterior and exterior, as well as all sorts of complex systemic linkages.
The HISTORICALLY CUMULATED affects (whether biological or inanimate), combined with repeated effects (tides, day/night cycles, geochemical cycles, year, etc.) provide both a context and a memory against which biological systems must find their way. They constitute a kind of 'mind'. Neurologically based minds range the gamut of nearly completely instinctual to much more free-choice based. The former is much more like a quantum systems- all black and white with few gray areas, and subsystems can be quite uncommunicative (so that one antenna literally doesn't know what the other is doing). The latter on the other hand require more and more memory, ability to compare memories, extrapolate possible results and so on.
Most theories assume either a top down (ID) or bottom up (many evolutionary chemists) with little middle ground. One sees the same stupid absolutist dichotomy in linguistics, artificial intelligence, and other information-rich areas of concern.
A much better solution is to start from the middle, and then work to create more polar oppositions as specializations. Don't assume a designer. Don't assume DNA or RNA forming itself de novo. Start with the hodgepodge lodge. Start with mass and energy cycling. Start with existing cumulations of mass and energy. Start with known combinatorics of chemical and physical interations, crystallization and polymerization patterns.
Earth was a real place, with real parameters that delimited what could and couldn't easily be (of course include outside influences- we weren't a completely isolated system).
The bigger the system, number of levels, dynamic compartment and component linkages, etc., the more information that can be distributionally stored and acted upon. We look at DNA or RNA as if it was some sort of beginning. It couldn't have been. The World was the cell. A giant fertilized ovum metaphorically. What we see today is the end result of a lot of evolution. Based on the way information is packed density-wise in viruses versus bacteria and archaea and eucaryotes one can extrapolate that linear nucleic acid information storage was a late adaptation. The vast majority of DNA in a human cell does not code protein. It is physicomechanical/chemical in its operation. Originally probably simply scaffolding. Same with protein.
Bow down to the Great Pumpkin!
Jess Tauber
