EonBlue

As reported in Science Daily:

Darwin’s theory of evolution, individuals in a species pass successful traits onto their offspring through a process called “deterministic inheritance.” Over multiple generations, advantageous developmental trends - such as the lengthening of the giraffe’s neck - occur.

Now, the findings of an international team of biologists demonstrate that evolution is not a random process, but rather occurs through the natural selection of successful traits. The collaborative study by researchers at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Israel, the U.S, France and Germany is published in the November 2007 issue of Current Biology (vol. 17, pp. 1925-1937). When the researchers measured changes in 40 defined characteristics of the nematodes’ sexual organs (including cell division patterns and the formation of specific cells), they found that most were uniform in direction, with the main mechanism for the development favoring a natural selection of successful traits, the researchers said.

“Since random development would not create such unifying trends, we concluded that the observed development was deterministic, not random,” said Professor Benjamin Podbilewicz from the Technion Faculty of Biology.

Like predicting the sun will rise in the sky, the creationists will take this finding and say that this is evidence for an intelligent being (aka god).  The truth is, this is not evidence for any designer.  It is only evidence of how evolution works.  I would say that it is evidence against a designer.  A designer would be “tinkering” with the design, and this would show up as “random” changes.  And, it is neither evidence for or against a god that started the evolution process and left it alone.  That is unanswerable, and therefore irrelevant for this discussion.  But they will ignore this, and say that a deterministic process shows intelligence in designing the process, and then they will connect the dots with their tortured logic to the Abrahamic god and their creation beliefs formed by Bronze Age sheep herders 4000 years ago, and yet somehow say that these same people will rationalize what else is written:  the earth was flat, bats are birds, unicorns exist, and all the other false information in their sacred texts.

And even though one creation “museum” is about to bite the dust, that other monstrosity is still standing.

One can also argue that if there are no random processes, and everything is deterministic, then free will goes out the door.  And with it the concepts of heaven, hell, salvation, choice, and all the other things the creationists believe without evidence in.

But I digress.