Walking and Intelligent Design.

12-28-2006 As on most mornings, I did a mile or two walk with my mother along the beautiful Gulf Shore Blvd. North with glimpses of the Gulf, Bay and sophisticated plantings. Each condo is a little different with many providing a very pleasant visage. Since her dog is up North in Ohio she walks me instead. At 85 she is doing very well in her exercise but slows a little after golf season.

There is much being said in the local paper about intelligent design. I do not believe that the subject belongs in science classes but do believe that it is appropriate for the study of history, government and philosophy. The incompatibility comes from the fact that science does not allow miracles but religion requires them.

It is interesting to speculate on the possibility of creating an Earth that inyoung but looks old as demanded by Intelligent design. As we gain in technological expertise, it is becoming more and more possible to do just that. Using today’s technology we could fool people who lived one hundred years ago by placing bones of the proper composition in the proper setting. We might even be able to fool scientists from 50 years ago by using the proper isotopic ratios making the material look old to the sophisticated chemist of that time. Just imagine what people a few hundred years in the future could do to fool us. There is even work to create the first synthetic organism. Although it will be only a lowly mycoplasma, the proof of principle will have been accomplished. While we will soon be able to perform intelligent design on our own; our future abilities do not prove that and intelligent designer was active in the past. In fact, with our new ability to see the structure of the genome of many organisms in detail and plot the progress of evolution, it does not look well designed at all. Our genome is quite a mess, nothing that an intelligent designer would create. It looks just like something produced by random mutation followed by natural selection.