Igor Dolgov

Department of Psychology

New Mexico State University

The proponents of the intelligent design thesis argue, amongst other things, that the incredible variety of amazingly designed creatures on planet earth must imply the existence of an intelligent designer. This is a modern-day version of the watchmaker analogy, the classic and ineffective teleogical argument for the existence of God. The typical objection to this analogy is that complex artifacts /creatures can be produced by a mindless natural process, as exemplified by the infinite monkey theorem. In the present work, I present an argument for a mindless natural process, self-organization, to be the origin of an evolutionary process that appears intelligent. Additionally, I present a technique for computing the spectral coefficient of a time- series of mutations which would determine the degree to which the advantageous and deleterious mutations are self-organized. Rather than being a true objection to the watchmaker argument as applied to Earth’s biodiversity, this viewpoint illustrates that a mindless natural process could also be intelligent, and allows for natural selection and intelligent design to be mutually inclusive.

Recorded at the 30th annual SSE Conference in 2011 at the Millennium Harvest House in Boulder, Colorado, USA.

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Published on November 12, 2018