I think it might be interesting, though, to try an experiment with Facebook.  Facebook has this feature where individual developers can create “Facebook apps,” like quizzes and little games and things.  You can embed these little programs in your Facebook profile, and then they proliferate like viruses by sending messages to all your friends on your list, trying to get you to embed the program as well.  In a way, a Facebook app is sort of like a basic living cell – it has the machinery to reproduce rapidly, and can live or die based on whether somebody somewhere finds it useful or entertaining.

Suppose someone developed a Facebook app that, every time it was shared with someone new, rewrote its own code ever so slightly – a point mutation, or a copy-and-paste, any of the sorts of operations that DNA might undergo.  How many generations would it take before a simple Facebook app that, say, displays a random message on your Facebook profile, becomes an in-browser word processor?  Or even a highly annoying celebrity-themed quiz?  Or anything new at all?

The very idea seems silly to me – the odds are tremendous that a single code tweak in a program results in a broken program.  I doubt such an app would survive even one or two generations from its original inception.  So many changes have to be made in concert to even have the code compile, it seems useless to expect random piddling to result in anything but a mess.  I can’t change the name of a variable without first declaring the new variable in a previous statement – if I change a variable declaration first, none of the usages of that variable will be recognized, etc, etc.

But even supposing there was a way to guarantee that your Facebook friends only got successfully compiled applings, there’s a still huge distance between “simple Facebook app” and “Hollywood quiz.”  What possible step-by-step path could exist between the two, such that each program along the way is more advantageous or useful for the Facebook user than the previous step?

I mean, really, if evolution operates according to the principle of bettering survival, why didn’t it stop with, say, bacteria, which seem to be surviving just fine?  Or even more complex organisms – algae, fungi, arthropods, rats, fish – are all quite well adapted and thriving.  That is, to say, as one ascends the ladder of evolution from simple to complex, one does not find anything like an increase in survivability.

This is the conundrum of The Spider and the Starfish.  Business organizations, according to this book, should consider operating more like a starfish, which is simpler, has more redundancy, and is hence much harder to kill and has a far easier time spreading.  The spider, on the other hand, being a highly centralized organism, is crippled by the loss of a limb and destroyed by the loss of its head.  Well, when you put it like that…

The trouble with this metaphor is that the spider does a lot more than a starfish.  If you want to be able to build a web, you need differentiated parts working together to achieve a coordinated end.

Getting back to evolution, we are fully aware that the spider is a more complex organism than the starfish.  Yet, the starfish is better at proliferating and surviving.  So in what sense is the spider more “fit” than the starfish?  It’s more interesting, certainly.  It can do more.  But who cares?  If the whole goal of evolution, insofar as a blind process can be said to have a “goal,” is the improvement of survival, there is no reason for a spider to evolve when much simpler organisms can and do survive as well – if not far better.

Hat tip to Uncommon Descent.

A lot of arguments against ID go something like this:

1) ID claims to not be creationism.
2) Many IDers are Bible-believing Christians who believe ID adds scientific credence to their beliefs.
3) Therefore ID is creationism.
4) Therefore ID is discredited.

I find this completely fascinating.  For this line of reasoning to make any sense, one has to define creationism to be the belief that God had anything substantive to do with the creation of life whatsoever, not merely a literal interpretation of Genesis 1 and an acceptance of the traditional seven-day creation period.  If so, then fine, a lot of IDers are “creationists” by that definition.

The fascinating thing is the jump from 3 to 4.  A lot of IDers, looking at those lines with their own lenses, might guess that the discredit occurs because creationism has, in the past, relied on some plainly bad science to make its point, and be frustrated that people aren’t willing to see past that to engage newer and superior scientific arguments.  This would be foolish, however, as the more I read arguments from Darwinists the more I become convinced that “creationism” is to be discredited not because the evidence isn’t there or the science doesn’t work but because it points to God.  It’s hard to have a genuine scientific argument with folks who deem an argument true or false based on the conclusion rather than the evidence or logic.

If this were not so, why is it so common to hear Darwinists attack ID as trying to sneak God into the classrooms rather than engage in the arguments themselves?  Or mock ID’s big-tent acceptance of those who believe the designers were aliens or spiritual powers other than Jehovah God as a “ruse?”  Or focus on the motivations and religious backgrounds of IDers as if it proved anything about the nature of the evidence?

Darwinists are right to be nervous and defensive about intelligent design, but they would be more convincing if they spent more time trying to persuade that the evidence pointed their way, rather than that those ID folks have bad motivations, “bad” meaning “arguing in favor of an intervening God.”