Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

The Parable Explained

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I recently wrote a short story at Evolution News, I think a lot of people thought it was just a silly story, but it did have a point, even if I didn’t do a very good job of getting the point across. The point is that the reason Darwinism seems even remotely plausible depends entirely on the incredible ability of living things to reproduce, generation after generation, without significant degradation over time. Darwinism seems plausible to many people against the backdrop of real living species which, while awaiting accidents which might lead to further advances, incredibly, somehow, are able to maintain their current complex structures and pass them on for many generations. We are so used to seeing reproduction without net degradation in the living world that we take it for granted, it seems “natural” to most people, and it is actually very unnatural. To show how unnatural this process really is, I tried to get the reader to imagine an attempt to duplicate this technology in, say, cars, and to imagine natural selection acting in that backdrop. And we are furthermore supposed to believe that this whole incredible process began by pure chance, in the first living things.

Added later: In the video From Conception to Birth Alexander Tsiaras asks “How can these instruction sets NOT make mistakes as they build what is us?” That is the point I was trying to make.