Intelligent Design and the Computer Analogy
David Klinghoffer
Imagine if computer science allowed researchers to consider the physical components of computers but not the "ideas" that drive them, imparted by their designers. Douglas Axe, author of Undeniable: How Biology Confirms Our Intuition That Life Is Designed, poses that instructive question in a brief video conversation.
Most of evolutionary biology is limited by just such a stricture: consider the physical aspect of living creatures without probing the ideas -- the purposeful, immaterial design -- that we embody in physical form. In biology, you may not weigh the evidence for design, otherwise you're damned as a creationist!
This isn't to say people or other animals are computers, or machines. We're much more, which makes the stricture against intelligent design all the more perverse.
Still, the computer analogy is helpful. A couple of nights ago my family and I were watching the 2015 biopic Steve Jobs, and I was struck by a line delivered at the end. Jobs, co-founder of Apple, is confronted by his daughter over a particular and hurtful moral failing of his that has been revealed to her. She's furious and demands to know why he did what he did. Reaching for his lifetime experience in designing computers, in which he enjoyed both success and failure, he answers, "I'm poorly made."
It's a powerful, poignant scene, and what an interesting answer. Doesn't every parent dread the moment when our children realize how "poorly made" we are? Jobs wasn't speaking in a physical sense, of course, but rather a spiritual one. He was a brilliant but difficult and egotistic person.
Our bodies are wonderfully designed but all too transient and easily abused. So too, in their different way, are our spirits -- capable of soaring to sublime heights, but also congenitally flawed and frail. What joins body and soul is the mysterious design.
The film describes the agonies that went into the design of Apple computers -- the physical design and the software, but focuses -- this is where the drama lies, obviously -- on the intentions of their creators, mainly Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Now imagine if the narrative were totally reworked with an exclusive focus on Apple computers as a series of physical artifacts of increasing sophistication, arising spontaneously, as if neither the design nor the designers existed.
Crazy! The story would be flat, boring -- and false. Yet this in a nutshell is the field of evolutionary biology.
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