Robert Wright reviews and quickly disposes of three arguments for “Intelligent Design”. Amoung the challengers is a Baylor math professor who claims to have a filter which can determine if something is a random collection of parts, or a “inteligently designed” complex organism.
First of all, devising a test that shows that organisms aren’t randomly arranged molecules is a curious way to spend time. After all, no one ever said that natural selection produces random conglomerations of matter. Rather, it is said to produce complex, functional arrangements of matter. In fact, according to evolutionary biologists, it produces arrangements that look for all the world as if they were composed by an intelligent designer. So, even if Dembski does have some test that can determine whether a being’s complexity is of the precise sort that an intelligent designer would produce, that won’t help his cause. For that is exactly the sort of complexity evolutionary biologists expect to find in the first place.
What these ‘arguments’ against natural selection have in common are fundamental non-understandings of modern evolutionary biology. And, apparently, a lot of people quoting Steven Jay Gould out of context.
