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Four things Darwin didn't understand what we do now
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from https://evolutionnews.org/2024/08/will-evolutions-new-synthesis-be-hard-or-soft-magic/
... Darwin’s theory, for all its flaws, was “hard magic.” It had clearly defined rules: Self-reproducing organisms experience tiny, random variations. The beneficial ones accumulate over (practically limitless) time. This causes the organisms to slowly diversify into countless species, with each one suited to its environment.
It was clear what this could explain, and what it couldn’t. For example, it could explain the gradual diversification of the species, but not the origin of life, or any sudden changes in the fossil record.
Because the rules were clear, the explanation was satisfying to many people. The only problem was that it didn’t take into account some things Darwin didn’t know:
First, it turned out that the universe is probably not eternal. Darwin didn’t know that.
Second, DNA and the genetic basis of “random variation” were discovered, and it became possible to compare the amount of time needed to have a reasonably high chance of getting a given variation with the time actually available to get it.
Third, better microscopes revealed the mind-boggling sophistication of life at the molecular level.
Fourth, tying all these together, the molecular biologist Michael Behe noticed that many molecular structures are characterized by a high level of interdependency among parts, meaning that tiny changes on the path to creating one of these structures would not yield any survival advantage (and therefore not be selected for) until the whole structure was complete. He ran the math on the number of mutations you would need to get a typical complex feature functioning (and therefore visible to natural selection), and found that quite literally all the time in the world is not enough.
Darwin’s theory was well-formulated and explicit. He just didn’t understand what we do now.
... I would say that evolution’s oldest rival, intelligent design, is also in a sense “hard magic.”
That may be a surprising assertion. If the designer is God, then God is certainly a Gandalf-like figure who can do whatever he wants. (Correction: Gandalf is a God-like figure.) In fact, that is one of the main criticisms of ID: that because God is inherently unpredictable, you can’t legitimately do science on him.
This is correct, actually. There can never be a formal science of God, or even a science that says definitively when some effect was caused by God and when it wasn’t. God — by definition — can do whatever he wants. Unlike natural phenomena, he has no limits, and therefore cannot be studied as a natural phenomenon.
But intelligent design is the study of design, not of God.
It’s possible to infer that something was designed, and this inference can be made mathematically rigorous, given enough data. This is not even controversial; the design inference is applied to non-deific minds in many uncontroversial fields, such as forensics, despite the facts that human minds are not much better understood by science than God’s mind is.
That’s because, while minds are not well understood, one of the only things we do understand about them is that they can design things that would not have otherwise arisen by chance and necessity, and that they do this to achieve goals. Based on this (universal) observation, intelligent design posits that if something has a specified, identifiable function, then the likelihood it was designed by a mind is the inverse of the likelihood that it arose by chance and necessity.
But that doesn’t mean that ID theory can say who the designer was. Forensics can’t tell you whether a person or a supernatural genie of infinite power murdered someone. (You can find DNA, but the genie could have faked it.) But it can tell you that they didn’t die by chance. Whether a murderer or a devious genie is more likely is a question for philosophy. Likewise, mathematical analysis of proteins can’t tell you whether those proteins were designed by God, or a genie, or Jack the Ripper. But it most certainly can tell you that the proteins didn’t emerge by chance.
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