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Intelligent design? No way.

Intelligent Design is a bad idea, almost as bad as String Theory. Actually, it just shows how both intellectual adventures, biosciences and physical sciences, drift into the slippery grounds when the basic reasoning of the natural philosophy is ignored. Before I get there, however, let me take a minute to talk some numbers.

The promoters of the Intelligent Design hypothesis shouldn’t take a look into A-Z encyclopedia of garden plants by The American Horti- cultural Society (DK, 2004). They might get an overdose of intelli- gence.. The encyclopedia lists more than two thousand genera of plants and gives description of about 15 thousand individual plants (species). ‘Only’ 15 thousand because most genera are really huge. For instance, just under A of the encyclopedia and the genera with at least 300 species: Acacia (at least 1,100), Acalypha (about 430), Allium (about 700), Aloe (about 300), Anthurium (700-900), Aristo- lochia (about 300), Asparagus (about 300), Asplenium (over 700), and Astragalus (some 2,200). Intelligent design? No way.

But there’s more. On the same line, more damaging for the Intelligent Design hypothesis. According to Wikipedia, as of today, under the title Insect, more than a million insect species have been described while the number of species still in existence is estimated at between six and ten million. Intelligent design? No way.

To get back to the subject, who are the Intelligent Design believers (IDBs for short)? The promoters of the Intelligent Design hypothesis are not blind, they are not idiots, I guess. So, what for they fight? Are they religious defenders? I don’t think so, I reckon their support for God hypothesis is just a side-effect. IDBs are proponents of human uniqueness myth, the myth inherited from religion and recycled into science to counterpart the evolution which is a science. The idea that the human animal has a unique purpose in the universe because only the human mind reflects the natural laws of the universe is self-flattering, sure. But besides mythologizing themselves, what sort of arguments IDBs offer?

Consider, in particular, a significant event in the history of life, the ‘Cambrian explosion’, when many animals suddenly appeared in the fossil record without apparent ancestors in earlier layers of rock. IDBs argue that the ‘mysterious’ features of the Cambrian event are best explained by intelligent design, rather than purely undirected evoluti- onary processes. What’s wrong with this argument? For one thing, it involves a fundamental misunderstanding of what evolution is. You can see a design at work in evolution if you impose reasons on it. Like, in a given environment, different species faced with the common problems create in the initial attempts at solution their own solutions to their own subsidiary problems and so on. Don’t do that: evolution is ‘smarter’ than you are. Then, how can you state that something

appeared suddenly? Which brings us to the question of what is a time unit for a living creature in a given environment. In particular, atmospheric oxygen levels reached a peak of 35% in the late Carbo- niferous and early Permian geological times, before falling to 15% in the late Permian. What is ‘suddenly’ and what is ‘as usual’ at 35% atmospheric oxygen? Do IDBs know that? They might overload their minds with all that. Besides, knowing something is not the same as understanding it.