A
Evolution vs. Intelligence Design vs. whatever else is one such topic that I am pretty ignorant on. That being said, a friend of mine recommended a read A Brief History of Everything by Ken Wilber (thanks KM) and he saws the following on the topic (pg. 20; full disclosure, I have just begun ready the book so I am no where near all the way through it):
...The standard neo-Darwinian explanation of chance mutation and natural selection - very few theorists believe this anymore. Evolution clearly operates in part by Darwinian natural selection, but this process simply selects those transformations that have already occured by mechanisms that absolutely nobody understands.
Q: For example?
KW: Take the standard notion that wingd simply evolved from fore-legs. It takes perhaps a hundred mutations to prodice a functional wing from a leg - half-wing will not do. A half-wing is no good as a leg and no good as a wing - you can't run and you can't fly. It has no adaptive value whatsoever. In other words, with a half-wing you are dinner. The wing will work only if these hundred mutations happen all at once, in one animal - and also these same mutations must occur simultaneously in another animal of the opposite sex, and then they have to somehow find each other, have dinnner, a few drinks, mate, and have offspring with real functional wings.
Talk about mind-boggling. This is infinitely, absolutely, utterly mind-boggling. Random mutations cannot even begin to explain this. The vast majority of mutations are lthal anyway; how are we going to get a hundred nonlethal mutations happening simultaneously? Or even four of five, for that matter?
Furthermore, David Warren has another interesting article on the subject. In this one he also questions constant-G, which leads to the theory of darkmatter. I guess we can put Mr. Warren into if it is not an elegant solutionit is probably not correct. I sometimes fall victim to that mindset as well.
