Tuesday, September 20, 2011

Natural Selection


“Environmentalists” voice loud concern at how mankind poses a threat to the environment and to non-human creatures, and challenge us with our responsibility to care for them. This is consistent with the Genesis mandate to have dominion over the earth, but inconsistent with the materialist evolutionary model that changing environments produce inhabitants that are more fit, mankind itself being but another product of that process.

Randy Guliuzza P.E., MD, in a series of articles published in Acts & Facts (ICR 2011) on illusions inherent in the evolutionary model, argues that the illusion of natural selection is that the driving force for adaptive traits in an organism reside within the environment rather than in the organism. That is that chaos accidently becomes an environment, which randomly acts on itself over immense time to produce the appearance of order. This was Darwin’s basic premise, that the source of new traits was not in the inherited design of the individual, but in the external pressures brought to bear on it. Guliuzza likens this to claiming that an environmental problem selected the solution that an engineer designed to deal with it, as though the intelligence resided in the problem rather than the engineer. This is appealing, since the specific solution is largely influenced by the problem, even though the driving creative action is the engineer responding to it. He points out that the creative force for solutions resides rather within the capacity of the organism to change.  To the extent that it can, it will adapt to changing environments, or move to a familiar one, or perish.

In this, the “environmentalists” actually agree in practice with the creationists. Despite professing that changing environments are the creative force of natural selection, they know that environments do not create. They also agree with the creationists that mankind uniquely possesses both the ability and the responsibility to purposefully affect the environment and his fellow creatures for better or for worse. This concedes that there is in fact a better and a worse, that there is some sense of goal or purpose to life, which would have no meaning in natural materialism. This brings to mind an astute observation cited by Stephen Meyer in Signature in the Cell that both evolutionist and creationist scientists can make the same discoveries in living systems because they both act as though the systems were designed, even though the former claim they only appear to be so.
 
“Natural Selection” then, the highlight of Darwin’s model, and the backbone of the philosophy of life sciences, is as Guliuzza argues, an illusion. To reconcile what is observed in real life, “Nature” is continually personified, not only in common parlance, but even in scientific literature whose authors remind themselves and their readers that the personification is only for convenience and illustration. But this defeats the premise of all that exists having come about without an intelligent designer, direction or purpose. The driving force is supposed to be from so called natural processes such as gravity, nuclear, electromagnetic and molecular forces being inevitable and inherent. These are, however, no more natural or inevitable than a human brain, but are evidence of yet deeper levels of design and intelligence. To assume that the “laws” of nature and physics are just self-existent with no prior cause, is on par with concluding that the entire physical universe just happens to be what it is, with no prior cause. The term “selection” further exposes the personification of nature, by giving non-conscious, undirected, random chaos the power to do what we invariably know only intelligence to do, that is to select constructively towards a goal.  –philw