A Time-Travel Thought Experiment

_{Gil Dodgen

September 17, 2011

Intelligent Design}

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It’s 1859 and Charles Darwin has just discovered a modern computer, transported back in time to his era. He turns it on.

With a microscope he discovers a Core i7 920 CPU. Upon more investigation he discovers that it has approximately 781 million transistors.

The computer has a terabyte drive, with an operating system that was compiled from more than 50 million lines of intelligently designed computer code.

In my time-travel thought experiment, Darwin is transported into our contemporary era. Much to his amazement, he discovers that modern science has revealed that the simplest living cell is far more complex and sophisticated than the computer he discovered in 1859.

What would Darwin do?

Comments

Darwin über alles!!! and you guys better shut up for he has the final answer on evolution!!! You IDiots!!!Enezio E. De Almeida Filho_{September 18, 2011
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vjt, There aren't really that many ways to understand the statement:
We cannot fathom the marvellous complexity of an organic being.
...but by all means, keep on with the defend-every-poorly-researched-statement-by-some-ID-fan-at-all-costs. This guarantees ID will never improve, which is fine by me.NickMatzke_UD_{September 18, 2011
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From all I’ve seen from Darwin, I don’t think he would be the least bit “amazed” that the “unfathomably complex” cell is more complex than anything humans have created. And I don't think he'd view the kind of complexity seen in the cell as an argument against his theory: “The old argument from design in Nature, as given by Paley, which formerly seemed to me so conclusive, fails, now that the law of natural selection has been discovered.”goodusername_{September 18, 2011
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Ernst Haekel THE PROPERTIES OF PROTOPLASM That was from 1875, just 8 years before Darwin died.Joseph_{September 18, 2011
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Great thought exercise, Gil. I'd love to see some Sci Fi essays on it, a version on H G Wells' Time Machine. What happens when CRD sees a modern computer in his time, then what happens when he -- in company with Alfred Russel Wallace, Bishop Wilberforce and Haeckel, visits a modern molecular biology lab as a guest of Craig Venter and Francis Collins as well as visiting Gonzalez's new observatory, then sits down to a 3-hour magazine format live roundtable on Fox News, with Lennox, Berlinsky, Meyer, Richards, Dembski, Wells, Craig, Dawkins, Scott, P Z Myers and Matzke. I'd love to see some suggested dialogue! This could have the makings of a book, on the lines of the Dialogues of old! GEM of TKIkairosfocus_{September 18, 2011
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My experience tells me that the argument against design would go a bit like this:
Not knowing how a computer is made one could point towards the very natural process of crystallization to explain the silicon, what they call "transistors" only appear to be designed, we must guard against projecting our own ideas onto the facts. The reality is that there are no transistors: There are just some accidental pollutions - flaws really - in an otherwise perfect crystal. (Why are there these flaws if it was designed? Wouldn't a designer make it perfect all over?) Most of the other parts of the computer are also naturally occurring compounds or could be produced from naturally occurring processes. It's a bit difficult to say at the moment how exactly all these parts just happend to come together but there is no need to assume a supernatural designer, there is nothing special about it that could not be explained by natural processes acting by chance and necessity. Just show me any part that requires a supernatural designer.
AAAM_{September 18, 2011
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Hi Dr. Matzke, With the greatest respect, I think that the quote you have provided, which comes from Darwin's The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication Volume II (Chapter 2.XXVII - Provisional Hypothesis of Pangenesis), actually proves the opposite of what you claim. First, a bit of background for UD readers. Pangenesis is defined as follows in The Dictionary of Botany :
A now disregarded theory formulated by Charles Darwin that suggested a mechanism by which acquired characteristics may be inherited. He postulated that there were particles (pangenes) carried in the body fluids from all the organs of the body to the reproductive cells. These particles then influenced the gametes that in turn influenced the characteristics of the succeeding generation. (Emphasis mine - VJT.)
These particles of inheritance, or pangenes, were also referred to by Darwin as gemmules. Here's what Darwin biographer E. Janet Browne writes about them in Charles Darwin: A Biography, Volume 2: The Power of Place (Knopf Publishers, 2002):
Individual gemmules did not contain a complete microscopic blueprint for an entire creature in the way that Herbert Spencer or Carl von Nageli described.' (p.276, emphasis mine - VJT.)
Hmmm. Sounds like Darwin's evolutionary contemporaries were ahead of him in their thinking. They at least recognized that the information for making a whole creature needed to be stored somewhere - even if they mistakenly thought of this information as a blueprint, instead of a recipe (which we now know to be a more appropriate metaphor). Darwin didn't see this. He thought that the information for making each part of the body was autonomous in its own right, and that the information for making the various body parts somehow collected in the gametes of sexually reproducing animals. In short: Darwin's approach to organismic complexity was a piecemeal one, which failed to do justice to the integration of the whole organism. I would suggest that this approach colors his whole thinking on the subject of complexity, and it reveals a blind spot on Darwin's part. And now at last we come to the full paragraph, from which you quoted a small excerpt. Here it is:
The units of the body are generally admitted by physiologists to be autonomous. I go one step further and assume that they throw off reproductive gemmules. Thus an organism does not generate its kind as a whole, but each separate unit generates its kind. It has often been said by naturalists that each cell of a plant has the potential capacity of reproducing the whole plant; but it has this power only in virtue of containing gemmules derived from every part. When a cell or unit is from some cause modified, the gemmules derived from it will be in like manner modified. If our hypothesis be provisionally accepted, we must look at all the forms of asexual reproduction, whether occurring at maturity or during youth, as fundamentally the same, and dependent on the mutual aggregation and multiplication of the gemmules. The regrowth of an amputated limb and the healing of a wound is the same process partially carried out. Buds apparently include nascent cells, belonging to that stage of development at which the budding occurs, and these cells are ready to unite with the gemmules derived from the next succeeding cells. The sexual elements, on the other hand, do not include such nascent cells; and the male and female elements taken separately do not contain a sufficient number of gemmules for independent development, except in the cases of parthenogenesis. The development of each being, including all the forms of metamorphosis and metagenesis, depends on the presence of gemmules thrown off at each period of life, and on their development, at a corresponding period, in union with preceding cells. Such cells may be said to be fertilised by the gemmules which come next in due order of development. Thus the act of ordinary impregnation and the development of each part in each being are closely analogous processes. The child, strictly speaking, does not grow into the man, but includes germs which slowly and successively become developed and form the man. In the child, as well as in the adult, each part generates the same part. Inheritance must be looked at as merely a form of growth, like the self-division of a lowly-organised unicellular organism. Reversion depends on the transmission from the forefather to his descendants of dormant gemmules, which occasionally become developed under certain known or unknown conditions. Each animal and plant may be compared with a bed of soil full of seeds, some of which soon germinate, some lie dormant for a period, whilst others perish. When we hear it said that a man carries in his constitution the seeds of an inherited disease, there is much truth in the expression. No other attempt, as far as I am aware, has been made, imperfect as this confessedly is, to connect under one point of view these several grand classes of facts. An organic being is a microcosm - a little universe, formed of a host of self-propagating organisms, inconceivably minute and numerous as the stars in heaven.
Darwin's gemmules were thus tiny and numerous but they were not very complex. Indeed, the whole point of hypothesizing that they were tiny and numerous was to remove the need for them to be complex. What's more, according to Darwin, inheritance is just like growth, and is no more remarkable in an animal than in a bacterium. I leave it to my readers to decide whether this piecemeal, reductionistic approach to genetic inheritance does proper justice to the internal complexity of organisms.vjtorley_{September 17, 2011
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Guess who wrote this?
Finally, the power of propagation possessed by each separate cell, using the term in its largest sense, determines the reproduction, the variability, the development and renovation of each living organism. No other attempt, as far as I am aware, has been made, imperfect as this confessedly is, to connect under one point of view these several grand classes of facts. We cannot fathom the marvellous complexity of an organic being; but on the hypothesis here advanced this complexity is much increased. Each living creature must be looked at as a microcosm – a little universe, formed of a host of self-propagating organisms, inconceivably minute and as numerous as the stars in heaven.
The idea that Darwin thought the cell was simple is another anachronistic invention of the ID movement.NickMatzke_UD_{September 17, 2011
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A thought experiment defines parameters to actually allow some type of output that has meaning. Your thought 'experiment' does not fulfill the requirements.linzel_{September 17, 2011
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