Intelligent design is a rational explanation for the origin of species

I. What was intelligently designed? We have two independent and leading scientific fields that look into the origin of all of today’s species, we have evolution which deals with the diversification of current life, and abiogenesis which deals with the origin of the very first lifeforms by which evolution can occur. That is the naturalistic position. Pro appears to be advocating for Evolution but pushes Intelligent Design for the very first life-form. However that sets an ambiguous ‘goal-post’, for we do not have a strict definition of exactly what constitutes a lifeform. It isn’t black and white exactly what could classify as life:[1] 1. Reproduces 2. Metabolizes 3. Growth 4. Homeostasis There are numerous other traits that would be regarded as living or dead, by far the most important feature of life is the ability to reproduce, and indeed reproduction is the central requirement for evolution to take place. Ubiquitous features such as protein synthesis, signalling pathways, protein structures, enzymes, lipid synthesis or the citric acid cycle are not strictly needed for a system that just reproduces. As such, life very conceivably would have originated without many, or virtually all of the functions that even the simplest of cells have today and been quite viable to evolve into the diverse array of life we have today. The principle requirement for evolution via. natural selection is some mechanism by which replication with adaption can occur, and it is this type of system I will be supporting the naturalistic generation of in this round.[2] II. Life is driven to form First, make an assumption that life never formed on Earth, what would the environment have been like? Especially considering the early Earth. The atmosphere was thick in cyanides, methane, carbon dioxide etc etc.[13] and bathed in concentrated UV and visible light these are all energy-dense, low entropy states, and hence under ‘thermodynamic stress’, it is favourable for the system to move to a higher-entropy state, for a UV light beam to be reemitted as multiple infrared light beams for example. This is essentially the driving force for every process that occurs in the universe, the entropy must overall tend to increase and hence states to achieve this are naturally explored as reported.[3-5] Given this, the Earth without life is under significant ‘thermodynamic stress’, and this is exactly where life comes in. Life is very good at ‘relieving’ this thermodynamic stress, it is hence thermodynamically driven. Much like the pressure exerted by a lake behind a hydroelectric dam is a ‘system that wants to tend towards equilibrium’, such is the state of the chemistry and energy on Earth. Anything that provides a pathway for a system to run down to equilibrium will be rapidly exploited and utilized by the system, which in the dam example could be a crack within the walls of the dam, and on Earth a new pathway for these molecules and photons to reach higher entropic states.[6] There are several types of chemical reactions in chemistry, and one of the most potent types of chemical reaction are of the catalytic type, which allows a small portion of catalytic compound to convert a much larger portion of low-entropy reagents to high-entropy products, and these are abundant. The more catalyst, the faster the chemical reactions will take place, generally.[7] Life is a special case of this, where the product IS the catalyst, and as such becomes auto-catalytic. It’s a self-feeding and self-sustaining cycle, limited primarily by the availability of the reservoir of chemicals that it feeds off. To return to my dam analogy, if we imagine a crack in the dam is an example of a catalytic reaction, where a small hole will let through a large quantity of water. However this hole is easily plugged by debris etc, and larger holes will eventually be plugged too if the resivoir is large enough. However if the hole that allows the water through constantly spawns new holes for ever unit of water it allows through, then the equilibration will continue to accelerate at an exponential rate, and will be capable of overcoming negative-effects such as debris. [8] In the case of life and catalysis, the chemical reaction eventually slows and halts as the catalyst itself degenerates and degrades, but with a system that constantly spawns new catalyst on every cycle, then the process becomes very sustainable. That is essentially the requirement for life to exist, for a self-sustaining auto-catalytic process that is persistent and adaptive, such a system would be a basis from which evolution would inevitably occur, and is thermodynamically driven process. There are a number of hypothesis which could explain the origin of life, plus vast timescales (several billion years) as well we a vast number of planets that such chemistry is possible on, as well as a vast number of independent environments on Earth with a range of different possible chemistry. Pro alluded to some such environments in his first round, the Urey Miller experiment for example found that organic molecules (mostly amino acids) naturally form in the atmosphere of the early Earth, hydrothermal vents themselves have a large range of chemistry as well as surface conditions. There are a vast number of environments to be explored, and they need not be isolated environments either, for what forms in the atmosphere for example is very likely to concentrate elsewhere. Several branches of abiotic hypothesis exist which can very potentially fulfil the conditions I have set out for life to occur, the most popular hypothesis of these is the RNA world hypothesis, but other potent solutions such as metabolism-first, and the lipid world hypothesis have their own fields of research with various positive results.[10] Even these however need not be the start-point, for RNA could very plausibly have come from an even simpler ‘ancestor’ molecule, with RNA itself being a later evolution (as DNA would have been to RNA). To make preclusions on abiogenesis given this is just absurd. Self-reproducing ribozymes that are less than 200 base pairs in length are known to exist, systems much, much simpler than the simplest of living cells we have today.[9] III. Intelligent Design I am struggling to find Pro’s positive arguments for intelligent design, which seems to be characteristic of most ID arguments.[11] Pro makes the argument that living organisms contain information that requires a sentient explanation, and that a natural explanation does not exist. However pro has left ‘information’ conveniently undefined in his arguments, which is bizarre given that the very definition ‘information’ is critical to the coherency of his argument. Given information theory, EVERYTHING contains information, whether it be a human, a pile of mud or a snowflake. Specific information that tells about how it was formed, what it was formed from, its temperature etc. Moreover the state of maximal information is actual complete randomness, and the information in a system will increase as entropy increases, as such Pro’s assertions that natural processes don’t create information are just hogwash.[12] If Pro is advocating for the DNA code, then he has already conceded this argument given he has already advocated for evolution, which by natural processes such as random mutations do generate raw genetic material which itself would be information. Moreover useless sequences would tend to become more useful with iterations of natural selection and further mutations, and hence become more ‘meaningful’. So on either front Pro’s argument is quite frankly just false. Pro makes the argument for irreducible complexity, which again is an anti-evolution argument and has very little to do with the origin of life (which Pro made me argue for in abiogenesis) for which Pro commits the argument ad ignorantum fallacy by only appealing to ignorance of natural explanations in order to push his thesis of sentient origins. Pro actually needs to demonstrate there objectively is not a natural explanation, rather than there just *currently is* not a natural explanation, and moreover needs to rule out every other non-sentient explanation in order to support his thesis. IV. Problem of using negative arguments: Most of Pro’s arguments for ID, as well as SETI are inherently arguments from ignorance, since they generally all depend on the ‘impossibility of the contrary’ types of arguments. The formal presentation of such is as follows: P1) Life is either arose purely naturally, or designed intelligentlyP2) Not purely naturallyC) Life was designed intelligently This might seem fair, if we accept that #1 is a true dichotomy then we are left with P2, to which Pro simply can never prove given the level of ignorance we have in the field of abiotic chemistry. Considering that life only needs to originate once, and given the enormous opportunity it has to do so (the number of planets, timescales as well as number of environments on each planet) it’s quite frankly absurd to claim to know whether or not P2 is true. Moreover an even bigger problem that it concedes that life could have existed before life did on Earth. In which case it self-refutes the notion that all life must be intelligently designed by virtue it is life. V. References 1. http://plato.stanford.edu... 2. http://evolution.berkeley.edu... 3. http://www.englandlab.com... 4. http://arxiv.org... 5. http://www.earth-syst-dynam.net... 6. http://en.wikipedia.org... 7. http://en.wikipedia.org... 8. http://www.mdpi.com... 9. http://www.pnas.org... 10. http://en.wikipedia.org... 11. http://nihrecord.nih.gov... 12. http://www.cmi.caltech.edu... 13. http://link.springer.com...