Chemical Civilization or More Comments on ID

Human imagination has limits of sorts—not at the individual level, to be sure, but when we get more collective, certain thoughts never seem to occur to groups—at least not in public writings. The Intelligent Design movement in biology (I call it the new biology), using very powerful reasoning, based on observation, not on first principles, has concluded that actual design underlies biological systems. The proposition surfaced—and in the wink of an eye ID proponents were tarred with the brush of creationism. If life is actually designed, the only possible explanation anybody can come up with is that the designer must be God.

The leading thinker in this field, in my opinion, is Michael J. Behe, a biochemist. I rank him thus because he stays close to the actual observational data at the lowest possible level—and he isn’t tempted to knee-jerk reactions. His two books are Darwin’s Black Box and The Edge of Evolution. These are must reading for anyone who wishes to understand the ID proposition. I’ve quoted Behe earlier to show that he does not name the designer but simply insists that design is present in life. In his second book, which is largely concerned with malaria, a disease caused by a one-celled organism (a so-called protist) of which the most virulent kind is Plasmodium falciparum, Behe faces the “designer” question squarely when he says:

Here’s something to ponder long and hard: Malaria was intentionally designed. The molecular machinery with which the parasite invades red blood cells is an exquisitely purposeful arrangement of parts…. What sort of designer is that? What sort of “fine-tuning” leads to untold human misery? To countless mothers mourning countless children? Did a hateful, malign being make intelligent life in order to torture it? One who relishes cries of pain? Maybe. Maybe not.

I discovered “intelligent design” before that movement began when—already a father with children—I studied biology on my own and discovered what I called the unmistakable signs of what I called technology—present at the cellular and sub-cellular level. I was then professionally engaged in technology assessment—the human kind—and the conclusion seemed obvious. Being also a science fiction writer, my own intuitions rapidly produced the concept of chemical civilization. (That subject is mentioned multiple times in this blog; here are one, two, three, and four posts on the subject.) What I saw in Brigitte’s textbook (Biology Today, Random House, 1972, which is the book I had been reading) was precisely what I saw in my work-life, but more sophisticated in design at the sub-microscopic level—namely technology of the human kind. It wasn’t perfect; it showed the same tendencies as our own—thus definitely goal-seeking arrangements of chemicals to get certain jobs done, by far not perfect, frequently not elegant at all—but working. I imagined this civilization peopled by what I called “little people”—invisible to us, utterly invisible, who made machines by nudging atoms around to achieve some end which still remains murky except, on certain days, to the primitive cosmologist who cohabits this body with me.

The picture I have of life is of an intelligent striving but by a civilization that cannot see the whole picture at all—indeed is striving mightily to see anything at all. We are one of its most successful ventures, because we do, indeed, see a little something ourselves—still not enough, but something. The very fact that life eats life, nature red in tooth and claw—and the fact that life is innocent, innocent, innocent—right up to our appearance—tells me that intelligence is present but, above the chemical, not vision of the sort we sometimes manage. Assuming that our observations are correct—that something intelligent but certainly not even very scient, much less omniscient, is the causative agent of life—indeed that it is life, as we really understand it, and bodies are merely tools it needs in this weird dimension—assuming all of that, quite interesting cosmological ideas surface—and indeed this blog is filled with such speculations.

Now to my opening statement concerning imagination. Nowhere in the ID literature have I thus far encountered serious speculation of the sort that imagination and a little thought—particularly about the fractal nature of this universe—suggests, namely that intelligence may be diffused in the universe and may be as common as matter, thus that many orders of intelligence may exit—to be sure all of them created. Deep down I am a creationist, but not of the primitive variety. Some of us, anyway, accept two orders already—the human and the angelic, beneath the Ultimate. Why not, minimally, a third? My conclusion? It might best be expressed, perhaps, by modifying a popular saying. Keep it simple—and you’ll stay stupid.