I was at Drinking Skeptically on Wednesday, trying to talk to people about how they should write for the Gotham Skeptic, because frankly, I get tired sometimes and I’d like to share that terrifying “it’s Wednesday/Sunday at 9:00 and I still don’t know what I’m going to write about” feeling that has become such a regular part of my week. I was talking with Mitch, who if you’re a regular member of the NYC Skeptics, you probably know, and he’s telling me about this story he’d like to write all about “what if Intelligent Design was real.” I’m not going to go into it too much because that’s his thing, but I had a question on it, he encouraged me to write about it here, and that’s what’s been done and what I’m doing.
My big question with Intelligent Design is “Why would the designer have done it?” Designing and creating a species is a lot of work. We can infer that just from the recent work done in creating a single self-replicating cell. The project of the J. Craig Venter Institute just recently achieved success in creating a single strain of yeast using synthesized DNA, a project that was started almost fifteen years ago. Fifteen years to make a single bacterial cell that had the ability to self-replicate. How long for just one multicellular organism? When you start looking into how long it would take to make a mammal, the research time lines become exponentially more complicated. You’d have to create a being with huge amounts of complicated pieces – neurological, cardiac, muscular, skeletal…. the list goes on – that all have to work in tandem and be able to interact with a world around them full of bacteria, some of which is going to have to live inside of the being in order to make it function properly. And when you consider that we live on a planet where we are obviously a genetic relative to every other species on the planet, you need to assume that if one of us was designed we all were, or else we’re just made out of pieces of everything else and I don’t see why anyone would like the idea of “human as hodgepodge of other animals” over “human shares genetic ancestor with chimp.”
Motivation seems to be something people forget about. It’s the big question you need to ask conspiracy theorists. “The moon landings were a hoax, man!” Why would NASA do that? “Don’t you get it, they needed the money!” Weren’t they already getting lots of money? “Sheeple!” Motivation can inform us on how something is meant to be used. Especially when you look into something like design. Perhaps this is merely because I look at things from a human lens, but when human beings make things, we try to design things for a purpose. We slowly refine our designs, removing extraneous parts, adding on pieces when they can help achieve the functionality we want that particular item to fulfill. Why would we assume that someone designing a new living species should act any differently?
To add to that, there are major ramifications a designer must consider in the type of species it creates. Let’s say you want to create something that will be a warrior. You’re going to build a stronger skeleton and large muscles than when you’re designing something to be a dishwasher. Your designer biological piece of war tech is going to need specialized tools for its task. Do you want a warrior that can take down four of a warring species for each single one of your warriors that falls but that may be rather expensive? Do you want to create something relatively cheap that can overwhelm your opponents quickly? Even within a category like “things that kill people” a designer’s goals are going to be evident in its creation.
So let’s say that ID is correct, humans were designed by… something. Why?
Well, we weren’t made to be some kind of worker caste. Not because of something great about us, we’re not particularly strong. Big cats, gorillas, elephants, large snakes, komodo dragons, bears – we don’t want to get into a physical confrontation one on one with any of these guys. And while we’re at it, let’s also eliminate the possibility that we were made for battle. Besides our limited strength, our senses are fairly limited. Our hearing is sub-par, we see only in a rather restricted range of light, and there are tons of creatures out there who are way faster than us. True, there have been groups of humans who have become remarkable on the battlefields, but only through remarkable devotion to the activity and a little luck the variation lottery. The Apache, the Spartans, these guys seemed almost designed for combat – of course none of them would have done great against a hail of bullets, which are far cheaper and more reliable. In fact, there’s only thing that we’re really good at using over the other creatures on this planet, and that’s the fact that we’re smart. We’re creative and inventive, we can think through problems and use our big brains and opposable thumbs to create ways out of them. So maybe we were made to be scientists? But that would be moronic, because we can’t conceive of any way to create ourselves in some sort of non-sexual fashion, so whoever created us must be WAY smarter than we are. And how about the wholesome answer, we were made because our designer loves us. Well, our designer has a funny way of showing it. Making us so that we walk erect when our weight would be more happily distributed over four limbs, building in extra parts with no functionality except for to every now and again randomly get infected and make us sick, designing our immune response so that when it’s trying to fix us it makes us feel possibly worse than whatever antigen it’s dealing with… I’d think a designer that loved us would have prototyped a bit more. Maybe the designer that loves us is also lazy or just not that bright. Hurray! We were designed by someone who had to finish quickly before “Blossom” came back from commercial break.
So let’s look at a more sinister designer. Were we made for dinner? Well… I find it unlikely. We grow fairly slowly and procreate rarely, the majority of us only having two or three children in our entire lives. In theory, it’s good for promoting population stability, but it’s not that good for filling up happy meals at the local Alpha Star Ready McDonalds.
Thinking it through, the only thing that would be a motivation for us that I’d accept in any way, shape, or form, is that we’re an experiment that went awry. “Let’s see if we can make a talking monkey!” followed swiftly by, “Huh. Now what do we do with it?” I don’t see why that’s so much more appealing than evolution.
When it’s decided that an intelligent agent is responsible for anything, that means that something is here because someone wanted it to be here and they must have had a reason for that. I don’t accept intelligent design because, even outside of the fact that it’s not necessary in a world where evolution is obviously correct, I can’t think of anyone who, when looking at all their genetic building blocks, would put together humanity.