As noted in an earlier post, intelligent design (ID) is a theory that claims there is considerable scientific evidence that the Universe, life on planet Earth, and human consciousness are not accidents of naturalistic evolution, but are the results of intentional design by a super intelligence, although who or what that designer may be is not identified. For further details about ID theory, refer to this web site. I will not repeat any of this now; my purpose here is different.
ID theorists are often chastized for not identifying the designer or his methods. I will first point out that Darwinism, the principal naturalistic alternative to ID for life on planet Earth, has been around for 150+ years, with thousands of scientists working on various aspects of it, yet there are still huge uncertainties about how it works and whether it can accomplish everything attributed to it. In contrast, ID has been around for perhaps 30 years and has maybe a dozen scientists working on it openly (i.e. those willing to be known publicly, given the attacks made against anyone promoting ID). Thus, it is hardly surprising that ID theory is not yet fully developed! Even so, it has a lot going for it, usually focusing on the biological information aspect of life on Earth; i.e. where did all that information in DNA come from?
It is correct that ID theory does not offer any mechanism for how the intelligent designer (whoever it was) operated or proceeded to do its design work, nor how all that design got implemented in various life forms. There has been some speculation, of course (see below for mine), but ID purposely avoids saying who the designer was/is and how he/she/it/they did their work. The reason is that there is, as yet, little scientific evidence that would point to a particular designer or its methodology. Given the fossil record, the bio-molecular data, and other available evidence, it is impossible to go beyond detecting the attributes of design in the data.
ID is not the only science having that limitation. Forensics looks at data and can say that some event (e.g. a death) was not an accident, but rather was murder, without identifying the murderer, or precisely how the murder was carried out. Similarly, archaeology can say that certain artefacts (e.g. stone tools, or post hole patterns) are evidence of design and manufacture rather than natural causes, but they usually cannot say who made them without other evidence. It is always assumed that some group of early humans made them, but that is often just an assumption (albeit probably a good one), based on our expectations.
What follows is some idle speculation on my part about one possible mechanism for ID. First off, I assume, for lack of a different word, that “God” is the designer, tinkering or playing with his creation and aiming ultimately to create living beings capable of supporting souls well enough to appreciate and interact with him (that would be us humans). At the same time he is expanding the repertoire of possible life forms, for his own good reasons and pleasure. He perhaps uses his agents (e.g. angels with lab coats?) to do the detailed design work (i.e. defining new genes and other genome changes), and then implementing those designs by incorporating the changes into existing species to create new ones, possibly using methods we would view as “miraculous”. Thus, new or modified genes and other DNA are carefully inserted into existing genomes in somatic cells to provide new features or functions for the new species being created.
Choosing to modify existing species simplifies the work and provides continuity (AKA common descent), but also constrains the type of changes that can be made successfully. Why create something new from scratch when you have a viable species with 98% of what you want, and just need to tweak or add a few genes for some new feature or function? This is the same way that biologists today would work to resurrect lost species like the Woolly Mammoth, for example – implanting a modified egg into a female elephant – so it is not entirely crazy. Of course, human scientists have mammoth DNA to work with, making their job somewhat easier – nothing to design except the process, as difficult as that undoubtedly is. Perhaps in a few more decades, scientists will understand genomes and living systems well enough to invent new genes and their related information needed to implement new features, thereby creating new species of their own.
For what should be obvious reasons, you cannot have a fish giving birth to a reptile, or a dinosaur egg producing a fully fledged bird, so there would have to be some intermediary steps along the way between these different families. Modified somatic cells would have to be compatible with the existing species and be viable in order to develop and grow to maturity within the parents' environmental context, so the steps from one species to the next would have to be small enough to accommodate such practicalities. And at each step, you would have to generate a minimum population of the new species to support reproduction. All that work could, perhaps, be done elsewhere, in a “divine laboratory” somewhere, before releasing the new species into the wild, just as modern scientists would do. Once natural selection had worked to stabilize the new species (or cause its extinction if not truly viable), the next steps could be taken and another new species created.
Those familiar with Darwinian evolution theory will note that this picture looks like “punctuated equilibrium”, but with ID accounting for the punctuations to new species, and natural selection taking care of the periods of equilibrium between intelligent interventions. The difference, of course is that ID readily provides the evolutionary “saltations” (jumps) that Darwin ruled out in his theory, while materialistic evolutionary concepts cannot account for them. Sudden major jumps to a new species in a small population (as inferred from the fossil record, and supported by genomic data) go against any realistic Darwinian process, but fit right into the above ID scenario. This also “explains” where all the bio-information comes from for the origin of life, novel proteins, irreducible complexity, etc. – the hallmarks of ID theory – which naturalistic causes cannot account for. The designer decides what new species it wants, and its agents do the detailed design and lab work to bring them about.
Unlike blind Darwinism, ID can obviously have purpose and goals in mind for its work, easily accounting for the multitude of life forms on Earth, both past and present. All the weird and wonderful plants and animals can be seen as the designer tinkering within his creation, just for the joy of seeing what can be done with the marvellous biology he has developed. ID also neatly accounts for the apparent borrowing of genetic information between distant, unrelated branches of the "tree of life", which Darwinian theories have difficulty explaining, simply labelling it "convergent evolution". For example, the same genetic designs can be used to provide echo-location functions in both bats and in dolphins even though the two mammal branches separated in the fossil record long before echolocation existed. If the designer has a design available, he may incorporate it wherever he wishes, regardless of the pattern of descent to those species.
All this, of course, is not part of formal intelligent design theory, but is just an entertaining romp in theo-biological speculation. Perhaps once ID theory is allowed to exist alongside naturalistic theories about life's origins, researchers can begin to look closely at the saltations in the fossil record, and between the genomes of seemingly related species, to better understand at what points in time the new genomic information was added to create each new species, as well as the nature of the additional DNA needed to bridge the gap between each new species and its assumed precursor. That would go some way to identifying when, how, and how often ID was performed in the biosphere; whether one species at a time continually, or as upgrades to numerous life-forms at distinct and simultaneous points, as after a mass extinction event for example. That would provide a lot more scientific data to fill in ID theory and would allow further speculation about the designer and its methods.
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