Is Natural Selection an intelligent design?

Question

Seems as you look at the results you almost want to go against popular opinion on the Big Bang & Natural Selection.

Answer 1

What you are stating is an impression that has been around for a long time.  It's Paley's watchmaker.  The existence of a watch requires a designer.  And a watch can't function if only certain parts of it work.  They all have to work perfectly and be built independently.  This requires intelligence and deliberate design.  We look at the complexity of life and reasonably say, "It MUST have a designer."  One can't be faulted for having that impression.  But a fairly good understanding of how natural selection works will erase this conundrum.

I suggest a book by Richard Dawkins called "The Blind Watchmaker."  (He wrote it in his less fanatical years.)  I think you'll see why evolution requires no designer, no matter how complex it seems.

The Big Bang is an entirely different thing.  Many people throw evolution and cosmogenesis into the same bag.  It's like comparing auto mechanics to philosophy.

Answer 2

No, it's common sense.  If you've got two dogs left out in the cold, and one has a thick furry coat and one doesn't, it's pretty easy to see that one of them is more likely to survive and pass on those furry coat genes.

Answer 3

Absurd as it sounds: "Intelligent Design" is the one thing that looks pretty much "unintelligently designed".

... I'm not saying that Natural Selection or the Big-Bang theories are right – for sure science doesn't have all the answers (nor religion if that's the point), so certainly they COULD be proven wrong given the RIGHT facts...

What I'm saying is that the people that proposed them AT LEAST tried to put their brains to work trying to prove them right... while the people that proposed "ID" seem to have worked VERY hard trying to prove wrong the other theories (rather than proving right theirs).

Answer 4

>"Is Natural Selection an intelligent design?"

Clever pun.  

>"Seems as you look at the results ..."

What results?  If you mean "evidence", then I would gently suggest that before drawing any conclusion one way of the other, you learn a bit about the *whole* evidence that is being considered by the scientific community ... not the carefully cherry-picked snippets that you will find in certain web sites.  This can take some time ... as there are many entire *fields* of evidence (fossils, DNA, body structures, embryology, location of species on the planet, etc. etc.).   But if you really want to assess evolution, natural selection, and intelligent design honestly, then it is absolutely worth the effort.  (It's *REALLY* interesting too!)

>"... you almost want to go against popular opinion ..."

What do you mean by "popular opinion"?  

Do you mean "scientific opinion"?   I.e. the overwhelming consensus of the hundreds of thousands of scientists in the world who find that natural selection is one of the main pillars of modern biology?  

Or do you really mean the "popular opinion" of people whose only biology class ever taken is 10th-grade biology?    If so then I would remind you that a significant percentage of this "popular opinion" believes in Bigfoot, astrology, UFOs, ghosts, ESP,  haunted houses, communication with the dead, etc. and were quite willing to believe that smoking was not bad for you, that the moon landings were a hoax, and that invading Iraq was directly related to 9/11.

In short, "popular opinion" can be manipulated as long as people put the opinion of real experts (like scientists, doctors, or weapons inspectors) secondary to the opinion of non-experts (like religious leaders and politicians) who tell you what you *WANT* to hear.  Don't be one of them!

>"... on the Big Bang & Natural Selection."

Why do you lump these two together?   They are as different as astronomy is from biology.

Answer 5

Well, I guess what you might be getting at is the laws of our Universe seem to suggest that in a small % of cases life will evolve on different planets etc as it did on ours....so yes in a way, but not a way that is scientific, you could say that God created a universe where statistically life was bound to evolve.............

.....but another way of lookin at it is natural selection is part of our lives....babies miscarry because our system of reproduction has evolved to eliminate nearly all mistakes in cell division etc so we don't allow major mutations such as extra/missing chromosomes live to be passed on. Its kinda sad too:( We're all players/victims of evolution not onlookers watching it all play out. Evolution is real, unfortunately :( Intelligent design would have "proofed" us against things like cancer in the same way we design our cars with safety features or it woulda designed reproduction so all babies are born perfect

Answer 6

Natural selection is a very intelligent and a very creative design.  The mechanism of DNA works extraordinarily well to preserve the essentials of a lifeform, and to allow variations to make it interesting and to adapt to varying and changing environments.  Study that mechanism, and look at the extreme diversity of life using that mechanism.  It's reasonable to ask whether that mechanism looks more like it was designed than it looks like it happened purely by accident.

You are guaranteed to be deceived if you judge the Big Bang, natural selection (or any evolutionary ideas), or even Intelligent Design, by popular opinion.

Answer 7

this is definitely outside the box of the usual doctrines of both faith and science. i think if we seek out and remove various assumptions ,on the parts of both, from our equations...we begin to see a new picture. lets say we remove the assumption that time is linear and applies to everything in the universe, then certain impossibilities become more plausible. for example; maybe one could think there is no possibility that a omnipotent entity could control the destiny of every world, every rock, every atom and every particle in the universe because there is simply not enough time to do this. remove time completely, or stop it, and suddenly it is a possibility. likewise, if we remove the assumption, by the majority of believers, that this presence is an old and kindly wise man, who smiles down on us and asserts some parental influence, then other possibilities present themselves...that can support both arguments.