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Old 05-09-2008, 06:11 AM
Rotaerk Rotaerk is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Okamifujutsu View Post
I'd like to revive my question from a few pages back. It was answered, but I took a break from here before I read the response, and now that I've seen it I'm not satisfied. My question is, how is ID significantly different than evolution. Beachbum gave me an answer that was basicly "ID says laws of physics govern things", and I have to think there's more to it than that.
If by Intelligent Design, you merely mean that some intelligence setup the universe in the beginning, triggered the "big bang", defined the phenomena behind our laws of physics, etc... that he did not directly create life, but merely setup the system in which it could evolve... then yes, evolution and ID can coexist. (However, this doesn't say that the ID principles are actually true, just not contradicted by the theory of evolution.)

But if by ID you mean that life itself was designed by an intelligence, then you are providing an alternative explanation for how life came to be as it is now. This in stepping on the turf of the Theory of Evolution, and thus they cannot coexist in this fashion.

If you are proposing that evolution is an example of intelligent design, then you might be over-generalizing the term "intelligence". Intelligence and evolution are both examples of optimization mechanisms, but one is not a sub-type of the other. Evolution achieves optimal survivability through random mutation and culling away of the unfit. Intelligence optimizes any conceivable goal, as long as it is desired, through cognitive modeling, prediction, and manipulation. Personally, I would never call evolution a form of intelligence, but if you insist on defining intelligence such that evolution is an instance of that pattern, then sure: the ID model can coexist with the Theory of Evolution.

On a side note, there's a difference between the process of evolution and the theory of evolution. Evolution is the logically deducible result of a system in which you have genetic variation (produced by mutation) and a metric for "good" genes and "bad" genes (the role played by the environment). Assuming scientists have observed genetic mutation (which is nearly certainly the case), and that there exists a sequence of mutations that can transform one genome into any other (harder to demonstrate, but still doable), then the process of evolution occurs, or we're insane and logic is useless.

The theory on the other hand is not that evolution occurs, but rather that this process can explain the origin of our species and trace it back to the origin of life. Consequentially, it is possible that the theory of evolution is wrong, the ID explanation is correct, and yet the process of evolution still occurs. (Of course, acknowledging possibility is not the same as saying it's likely.)

Last edited by Rotaerk; 05-09-2008 at 06:15 AM.
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