Minding the Gaps

Career opportunities for evolutionary biologists are pretty good these days, but there must be a nagging feeling that comes on to them every so often – assuming they are intellectually honest. I am not sure what in natural selection gave us a brain (and mind) far more sophisticated and superfluous than what was needed for survival, but it really screwed up. I mean, just think of the overhead required that catapulted us to have Shakespeare plays written, compose Bach music, or send us off to the moon. We didn’t need it. We also don’t need to be chasing after Truth, or having mystical experiences for that matter. It just gets us into all sorts of trouble, when we should be hunting boar (and not writing code) to get the girl!

It also seems there are these transitional spaces where natural selection doesn’t offer a great explanation. The Cambrian explosion is still a mystery where all these species appear fully developed with no alteration since that period. The move from primates to Homo Sapiens seems like quite a leap too, when although we were quite strong for a significant period of time, at some point the evolutionary process decided to make us weaker and give us the capacity for language and the awareness to know when we're acting like arseholes.

The evolutionary biologists eventually find that organisms can be reduced in complexity only so far. At some point, they bump up against an irreducible complexity. Then they need to explain how it is that complex interacting and interdependent parts of organisms can evolve together without a God to the somewhat brilliant and mostly stupid people we are today. Still, our potential to be real persons is quite excessive from that materialistic perspective. 

So will science fill in the gaps with evidence, or will I fall prey to the God in the Gaps proposition? Neither. I think scientists fall prey to these gaps with just as much religious vigor in their Darwin in the Gaps argument. They even cleverly point to Stephen Jay Gould’s punctuated equilibrium theory as a suitable explanation; however, never explaining the mechanism that made that even happen. And while I’m not going to say God lent a hand with these leaps, I’m also not willing to concede that there may be cosmic nudges happening here and there. Are these miracles? Or is it that existence, life, and mind are all miracles in themselves?

I will at least open myself to Intelligent Design as being one plausible explanation. In the interview below, Stephen C. Meyer convincingly raises some concerns with the neo-Darwinist position; such as, how are we to account for all the discontinuities in evolution; how so-called undirected processes produced the complexity and information needed for life to emerge; and how did we get so lucky with the anthropic fine-tuning required for organic material to appear from inorganic material?

Intelligent Design posits that personal agency (theist or non-theist) is fundamental to the cosmos. It's probably the only input to an open system that can account for the information needed for the origin of existence. But then again, the neo-Darwinist will lock him or herself into an impoverished closed system of scientism, where although the human mind can seemingly grasp things that are true, there can be no intelligibility at the root of it that is source of Truth. Garbage in, garbage out. 

Consider a look at Meyer's line of reasoning here: