Question When proponents of Intelligent Design insist that it is inconceivable for a particular biological structure to have simply evolved, their opponents sometimes respond "evolution is cleverer than you are." This is a pithy response, and no doubt there is truth to it; but can the ID-proponent really be reasonably expected to accept this?

Accepted:
February 2, 2011

Comments

Whether ID proponents would accept the counter is not necessarily the best question. I would suggest we ask whether they should accept it, or what force it has.

My own sense is that the charge that it is "inconceivable" how, say, the eye evolved is really quite lame. Suppose it true that it is utterly beyond the imagination of human beings how the eye might have evolved. So what? Surely there are plenty of things that are utterly beyond our imagining. That we can't figure it out in any detail, or even begin to do so, just doesn't show anything.

One might ask why we should believe that the eye evolved, then. The answer, presumably, is that we have good evidence for evolution in general, that we can actually see it in action in simpler cases, and that one can tell some rough story about why and how primitive light-detection might have evolved, and even see a range of such sensory organs in actual organisms. Having any reasonable sense of how the eye, as it is, evolved over the eons isn't really to be expected.

So I'd suggest that "evolution is cleverer than you are" is really just a way of dismissing the argument without trying to answer it.