The first part of the video below, which is essentially my invited talk at a recent meeting in Erzurum, Turkey, is based on my 2013 BioComplexity article “Entropy and Evolution.” However, I want to focus here on the second part, beginning at the 19:40 mark, which discusses the remarkable similarities between the evolution of life and the evolution of human technology. The primary argument of Darwinists, from Darwin on down, has never been “natural selection of random variations is a reasonable explanation for evolution,” it has always been “evolution doesn’t look like the way God would have done things, therefore it must have been due to natural causes, and all other natural theories are even more far-fetched than ours.”
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The assumption underlying this argument is that God would have created with a magic wand, and new species would have appeared out of nowhere, with no connection to previous species, and we don’t see this in the fossil record (except possibly at the beginning of the Cambrian era!). What we do see, as explored in the second part of this video, are remarkable similarities between the evolution of life and the evolution of human technology, as seen in the patterns in the fossil record, and in a phenomenon known as “convergence.”
After my talk in Erzurum, a young man approached me and said (approximately) “do you, as a scientist, really not believe in evolution? Do you think life was due to supernatural causes?” If I had had more time to prepare a reply, I would have said, “The development of the automobile, from primitive to current forms: would you call that ‘evolution’? If so, then I believe in the evolution of life. But like the development of life, the development of the automobile was primarily due to intelligent causes; would you call those causes ‘supernatural’?”
Some people do not like the comparison, because (1) it may seem to bring God’s design down to the level of human design, and (2) they may say that Genesis 1 does paint a picture of creation by magic wand. With regard to (1), I would say that it does not bring God down to our level, because the things God has designed are so much more advanced than the things we design, but a designer must always get involved in the details of his design, no matter how intelligent he may be. And with regard to (2), although of course Genesis 1 is not an accurate scientific account of creation, even here we see a God who created one type of animal, “saw that it was good,” and proceeded to improve on it; that sounds a lot like the way we create things, though testing and improvements. And if all God had to do to create species was to wave a wand, why does the Bible say that on the seventh day, God “rested from all the work of creating that he had done”?