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This is from today's Washington Post (!!). Its transparently
silly, if not flat-out stupid, but pertains to this morning's
discussion:
First, let's get rid of the idea that ID (intelligent design)
is a form of sly creationism. It isn't. ID is unfairly
confused with the movement to teach creationism in public
schools. The most serious ID proponents are complexity
theorists, legitimate scientists among them, who believe that
strict Darwinism and especially neo-Darwinism (the notion that
all of our qualities are the product of random mutation) is
inadequate to explain the high level of organization at work
in the world.
agree with Johnson when he says, "The human body is
packed with marvels, eyes and lungs and cells, and
evolutionary gradualism can't account for that."
The idea, so contentious in other contexts, actually rings a
loud bell in sports. Athletes often talk of feeling an
absolute fulfillment of purpose, of something powerful moving
through them or in them that is not just the result of
training. Jeffrey M. Schwartz, a neuroscientist and research
professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine, is a
believer in ID, or as he prefers to call it, "intrinsic
intelligence." Schwartz wants to launch a study of NASCAR
drivers, to better understand their extraordinary focus.
He finds Darwinism, as it applies to a high-performance athlete
such as Tony Stewart, to be problematic. To claim that
Stewart's mental state as he handles a high-speed car "is a
result of nothing more than random processes coming together
in a machine-like way is not a coherent explanation," Schwartz
said.
"Talk to any athlete, and if they really are
honest, they realize that while they have worked and trained,
and put a lot of effort into being great, they started with
some raw material that was advantageous to them, and that it
was meant to work a certain way. We all recognize that we have
a certain design element."
A strict Darwinist would suggest this is an illusion and point
out that there are obvious flaws in the body. Peter Weyand, a
researcher in kinesiology and biomechanics at Rice University,
observes, "Humans in the realm of the animal kingdom aren't
terribly athletic."
Schwarz finds little or nothing in natural selection to
explain the ability of athletes to reinterpret physical events
from moment to moment, the super-awareness that they seem to
possess. He has a term for it, the ability to be an "impartial
spectator" to your own actions.
But Darwin himself admitted he didn't know
everything about everything. "When I see a tail feather on a
peacock, it makes me sick," he once said, before he understood
it was for mating.
None of this is to say that we shouldn't be wary of the uses
for which ID might be hijacked. In the last year, numerous
states have experienced some sort of anti-evolution movement.
But science class also teaches us how crucial it is to
maintain adventurousness, and surely it's worthwhile to
suggest that an athlete in motion conveys an inkling of
something marvelous in nature that perhaps isn't explained by
mere molecules.
Johann Kepler was the first to accurately plot
the laws of planetary motion. But he only got there because he
believed that their movements, if translated musically, would
result in a celestial harmony. He also believed in astrology.
And then there was Albert Einstein, who remarked that "Science
without religion is lame; religion without science is blind."
Historically, scientific theorists are sandlot athletes,
drawing up plays in the dirt.
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