Intelligent design (ID) is a new theory opposing Darwin’s
theory of evolution.
Darwin’s theory may be summarized as follows:
Observation:
Living organisms reproduce.
Offspring inherits traits from it progenitors.
There is variability of traits.
Deduction: Some traits will facilitate survival and other
will hinder it.
The first difficulty of this theory is linked with the following query:
How are these various traits generated?
1. Darwinism: By random changes (mutation) of the inherited traits (genes)
2. H. Bergson: Traits are generated creatively.
The scientific community accepts only the first explanation and rejects the
second. It is regarded as a dogma of a new scientist belief (religion)
called Neo-darwinism. Yet we have seen in previous sections that
randomness as such does not exist in nature.
Which highlights a fundamental inconsistency of Neo-darwinism.
The second inconsistency is linked with the notion that evolution operates
solely on genes.
Neo-darwinism ignores the fact that:
1. Life on earth is structured along food chains, and evolution operates on
entire food chains.
2. Life evolved within a super-organism
called Gaia.
In other words while Neo-darwinism is
essentially a linear theory, the existence of food chains requires a
non-linear explanation.
We are led thus to examine a new theory called Intelligent Design
(ID). Life on earth is extremely complex, and non-linear. Neo-darwinism
lacks some essential concepts to tackle this complexity. Let’s return to the
above question:
How are the various traits generated?
1. According to ID: Variation is controlled by an intelligent agent like
God or an alien force.
2. It is proposed here that what we perceive as an intelligent design is a
property of complex systems like Emergence.
In my studies I demonstrated that simple CA models can
generate behavior which cannot be explained by Darwinism, and since the
model evolves by itself, it does not require an intelligent agent to control
it. This model manifests a wisdom, called Wisdom of the Body
(WOB). After reaching maturity it maintains a steady state (homeostasis) and
returns to it following a perturbation.
Popper and complexity
Karl Popper distinguished between falsifiable and non-falsifiable theories.
The first he regarded as scientific, and the last as non-scientific. Psychoanalytic
theory, for example is non-falsifiable, and cannot be regarded as scientific.
It might be some kind of an ideology. Yet this criterion seems somewhat naïve.
Take for instance a theory of a multi-dimensional complex system. While in
some dimensions it may be falsified, in others not. Since it is so complex
you may never expose the falsifiable dimensions. Also Darwinism is non-falsifiable.
It should be regarded as a model of evolution which served its purpose for
some time, and now has to be augmented.
Scientism
This blind belief in Neo-Darwinism is called by Houston Smith, Scientism
which must be differentiated from science. (http://www.uu.edu/centers/science/bookreviews/review.cfm?ID=37}.
Biology is dominated by Scientism with some characteristics of the ideologies
which dominated science in the USSR. They make you believe that mutations
drive evolution and even cancer, which to my understanding is sheer nonsense.
And all this happens in the strongest democracy on earth, the USA.
Glossary
Swarm intelligence - (SI) is an artificial intelligence technique
based around the study of collective behavior in decentralised, self-organised,
systems. It is a set of interacting agents, each with a constant number of
parameters. Initially it was applied to simulate the behavior of ant societies.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swarm_Intelligence
When you replace each agent with a CA you get a swarm intelligence of processes.
Such a swarm intelligence model evolves in a non-darwinian fashion.
Gaia theory is a group of scientific theories about how life
on Earth may regulate the planet's biosphere. It was conceived by James Lovelock
and augmented by Lynn Margulis.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia
Gaia started its existence with the appearance of the first organism on earth,
and from then it evolves. While Neo-Darwinists claim that life evolved independently
of the biosphere, I believe that life evolves as part of the biosphere.
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