The Mud Theory

The latest New Yorker has a piece in which the "mud theory" of the origins of life is discussed. A number of origin myths include stories of humans made by deities from mud.

Intelligent Design isn't necessarily a mud theory, but it is probably little more than mud theory dressed up in scientific clothing. I doubt that an Intelligent Design theorist who posited a Designer named Vishnu would get much traction with the anti-evolution crowd in America. But what if you take ID's claims that it does not argue for a particular Designer at face value? If we adopt as our underlying metaphysical assumption a Designer or Designers, can we make inferences about them from their creations?

We know from observations of life that it all boils down to genetic material, DNA and RNA. The Designer apparently has one trick up its sleeve. We can infer that the Designer has been at work continuously for billions of years and that it continues to work on the DNA and RNA of living things this very second. The Designer either is very long lived, or there are multiple Designers. The Designer's work occurs simultaneously throughout the entire biosphere all the time; therefore, it is either omnipresent or vastly numerous, perhaps representing a Designer for every organism that ever lived.

The Designer is invisible to us and uncommunicative. The Designer may well be entirely impersonal.

The Designer apparently works through changes to DNA and RNA in interaction with the environment. These changes appear to be random as most of them result in the demise of the design. It appears that the Designer does not know the consequences of its tinkering with the genome and that it works entirely through trial and error. It does not appear to learn anything from this process, and if there are multiple Designers, they must not be well coordinated or they are actually not working together. The Designer makes the same errors over and over and takes numerous trials to get to an adaptation, if it ever does.

It follows that we can, for all practical and scientific purposes, disregard the existence of the Designer in devising models of how organisms adapt and evolve. We should, of course, keep our eyes open for any affirmative evidence of the Designer's handiwork.