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Posted:

28th April, 2008

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Biomimetics and intelligent design

The penny has finally dropped: bioengineers around the world are turning in ever-increasing droves to nature for ideas. As we saw last week, nature's seemingly endless ingenuity is providing inventors at the leading edge of technical progress with a windfall of potential models to copy. And yet, in spite of the bulletproof logic of William Paley and thousands of others who have convincingly articulated the simple truism that "things" can't design themselves, thousands more cling with near-medieval dogmatism to the fairytale of "descent by modification", holding that nature's sublime inventiveness is a product of near-infinite random variations that are transformed into lucky breaks by the forces of nature. The appearance of design is, according to evolutionists, delusional. (See "The no-design delusion".) The author of the National Geographic article quoted in last week's blog typifies this attitude:

Every species, even those that have gone extinct, is a success story, optimized by millions of years of natural selection.

Renowned British atheistic evangelist, Richard Dawkins, harps on the theme of delusional design in nature, giving credit for nature's ingenuity to "tiny changes cumulated over many steps" (The Blind Watchmaker, p. 90.) which, he goes on to say,

. is an immensely powerful idea, capable of explaining an enormous range of things that would otherwise be inexplicable.

Without wishing to sound boorish, we respond, "Bosh". To begin with, utter bosh to the assertion that without recourse to accumulated tiny changes over millions of years nature's wonders are "inexplicable". Come again! Dawkins is here using a rather transparent, almost childish propaganda device - make it sound as if the speaker's explanation is the only possible one for thinking people to entertain. He illustrates the irresistible wisdom of his assertion with this example:

How did snake venom get its start? Many animals bite, and any animal's spit contains proteins which, if they get into a wound, may cause an allergic reaction. Even so-called non-venomous snakes can give bites that cause a painful reaction in some people. There is a continuous, graded series from ordinary spit to deadly venom.

Stop and think: how does the existence in nature of an array of toxic chemical cocktails that pales the best bartender's capacity for variation on a theme favor mindless evolution over intelligent design? Tell me. Dawkins would like us to believe that such an alleged "graded series" must be taken to support evolution and cannot be explained by the idea of creation. Bosh, nonsense. please insert your favorite word.

The discovery in the fossil record that horse-like creatures of numerous kinds have walked our planet over the past forty or so million years in no way - not even by a fine hair - favors evolutionary dogma over creation philosophy. Ditto for the amazing parade of whale-like creatures that have graced our planet. As if an infinitely intelligent God could not possibly have "dreamed up" a cornucopia of creatures with both similarities and dissimilarities around a basic body plan. Nature's array of complex, specifically-acting venomous brews demands the existence of an intelligent "final cause" - God.

So much could be said against the credo that ingenious survival devices found in nature result from a virtually endless series of tiny accidental experiments in design, but this is only a blog after all. Let us be content with just two points. First, as famous evolutionist, Stephen Jay Gould admitted,

The fundamental issue of evolution cannot be differential survival of adaptive traits, but their unexplained origin (Bully for Brontosaurus, p. 139).

One wonders how he did not recognize the significance of his own words. In short, he is saying that no mystery attaches to natural selection's perceived basic method of eliminating duds - design features that don't work won't be perpetuated. Of course they won't. Penguins simply could not survive if their wings were not perfectly "adapted" (evolution theory euphemism for "designed") for underwater swimming. Call it "natural selection" if you must; "design constraints" would be a much better term. God harmonized His designs to the constraints imposed by the laws He had created. As Gould points out, where evolution theory disintegrates is (among other things) in its lack of ability to explain how such traits (design and behavioural features) arose in the first place. Such structures and behaviors are way too complicated to be explained by recourse to spontaneous bloopers in the long chains of nucleotides that make up genes.

Second, the origin of integrated suites of design features belies the simplistic theories of evolution. Snakes must not only produce a venom that is "not a single lethal substance, but a complex mixture of components" (Covacevich and others, Toxic Plants and Animals, p. 372), they must also be equipped with highly sophisticated venom-delivery systems, not to mention the musculature needed to provide puncture power, and so on and so on. The notion that such integrated, complex systems could arise by an almost infinite series of tiny changes ought to be rejected outright. It's just plain nonsense.

Intelligent scientists can copy nature's designs because they work, and they work because they originated in the mind of God.

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