The Star Larvae Hypothesis
Nature's Plan for Humankind
Introduction: Beyond Darwin and Intelligent Design

Beyond Darwin and Intelligent Design

The two-party system (evolution vs. intelligent design) is an obsolete paradigm. Our hypothesis synthesizes the thesis-antithesis of evolution and intelligent design into a new model of biology's origins, development, and cosmic calling.

It's startling to realize how unquestioningly the hive accepts unguided evolution and supernatural design as the only candidates to explain the natural world. It's one thing that people pick a side, but loyalty to the two-party system itself is the troubling part, an obstacle to progress that needs to be dislodged. A little anarchy might be a good thing here.

Unguided Evolution and Intelligent Design are doctrines. They are competing doctrines of different worldviews, different paradigms, different ideologies.

Here’s a modest proposal: Rip the arguments from their ideologies and examine them. Take no prisoners. Then get creative; collect the strengths of each side and discard the weaknesses. Assemble the remaining pieces and see what you get. Can you stitch together an alternative to the prevailing orthodoxies?

The strength of evolution theory is its empirical foundation: the fossils in the rocks. (Did God put them there to test our faith? The Bible mentions no such scheme.) From the fossil record of life's history we know that it took longer than a week for all the species to appear. So, the Bible fails to get the timing right, because the rocks show that the worms came millions of years before the fish. And likewise the fish before the reptiles, who preceded the rodents, who pre-date the primates, of which the most recent is us. From bacterial origins 3.5 billion years ago or so, terrestrial life has been spinning out new phyla, classes, orders, families, genera, and species in a sequence, distributing new forms through time and over the span of the Earth's surface. How does it happen?

Evolution theory hinges on the concept of natural selection, but, oddly, biologists have yet to settle on what it is that nature selects: genes? organisms? species? some other division or grouping of organic nature? The problem of identifying the units of selection is compounded by the inability of biologists even to define the foundational terms “gene” “organism” and “species.” Each of these terms is highly problematic, even outside the context of evolution, because ambiguous cases arise no matter what definition is adopted. In their introduction to the philosophy of biology, Sex and Death, Kim Sterelny and Paul Griffiths lay out the convoluted difficulties involved in not just determining which of these terms corresponds to the units of evolution that get selected, but also in simply defining the terms in the first place. If organic nature is a "seamless web," then what discrete features can be "selected"?

Another problem with evolution theory as currently formulated is its insistence that only two mechanisms explain the history of biological life. And only those two will be considered. This arbitrary cap on mechanisms of evolutionary change exposes the theory to criticism on the grounds of implausibility. Could random mutations, the overwhelming majority of which are detrimental to the organisms in which they occur, as the ONLY source of new genetic arrangement, coupled with natural selection, which can ONLY cull genes and concentrate the remainders, together account for the panoply of organic life past and present? Is it plausible? Maybe if you squint really hard.

Whatever plausibility it might have is challenged now by new research data. Limiting the available mechanisms to mutation and natural selection makes it hard for evolution theory to account for data that Darwin never had to address. There’s new data that never confronted Mendel. We know things now that no one knew even in the years of Crick and Watson. New technologies are force-feeding evolution empirical data that it will not be able to swallow—if it doesn't adapt.

The new technologies are DNA sequencing and analysis, and they are making trouble for evolution theory. Sequencing and analysis research is turning up genetic anomalies that evolution does not predict and that seem to undermine the assumed mechanisms of evolution theory. The research has turned up genetic sequences that are noncoding (nonfunctional) when they occur in older species but functional (coding) when they occur in newer species. Examples are linked to from the star larvae phylogeny page. This parsimony is a conundrum for evolutionists, because evolution theory allows no prospect of ancestors anticipating the needs of descendants. "Junk" DNA has been a puzzle since its discovery early on. Why would species harbor long sequences of DNA that seem to serve no purpose? But the discovery that one species' trash is another's treasure, and in particular that junk in older species codes for proteins that only newer species can use in their metabolisms, challenges evolution theory's rejection of teleology. The discovery suggests that the evolution of species, like the development of organisms, is, in part at least, pre-programmed.

A evolutionist response might be that nature is resourceful and makes use of what she is given. But this is just an application of coincidence to plug a hole in a scientific theory, a secular version of the God-of-the-gaps. It remains to be seen, but if the coincidences pile up as a result of ongoing DNA sequencing and analysis, then at some point the balancing act will collapse, and the theory's premises—the allowable mechanisms of evolutionary change—will have to be re-formulated.

The planfulness of evolution implied by the existence of "dormant" genes in earlier species that become active in, and are essential to, the metabolisms of later species, does not, however, necessarily mean that intelligent design, in its early twentyfirst-century form, is the only contender left standing.

Intelligent design has its own problems. Evolution at least gives us an account of how it works—how the physical objects it proposes to account for got to be the way they are. Intelligent design doesn't even give us that. If a supernatural designer is behind nature, then how does this designer make the transition to intelligent fabricator? To compete with evolution, intelligent design needs to be about more than design. It needs to explain the implementation. How, specifically, does the design get translated into protoplasm?

By telekinesis—pushing the atoms into place by mind power? Every proton? Every electron? And where did the atoms come from anyway—were they just thought into being—and then pushed by forces outside of physics into DNA molecules—or into whole organisms? Or after the first generation of organisms does the designer-fabricator periodically nudge genes into new configurations—beneficial mutations—to beget new species? The designer-fabricator might still be at work mutating a gene here, unmutating one there—by mechanisms that intelligent design cannot describe in anything like the level of detail to which the theory of evolution has been developed and to which any theory would have to attain to seriously challenge evolution.

In other words, in addition to suffering from the usual ideological objections, intelligent design flunks the specificity test. It is too vague to pose as a contribution to science.

So, should it be taught in school? Allowing supernatural explanations of physical events into science classes is simply to rename religion science.

One refrain in response to this point is "teach the controversy." But why? We don’t teach the controversy in other curricula—or should we? What about the Kennedy assassination? Maybe American history classes should teach about magic bullets that exit bodies, spin around in the air, then go back in. Sounds like intelligent design to me, Martha. Specified complexity, anyone? Maybe Jesus was a psychedelic, or entheogenic, mushroom. Teach the controversy.

Or, maybe the attack of 9/11 was an inside job. An awful lot of security systems had to fail coincidentally on that particular day to produce the effects of the 9/11 attack. If we’re going to teach intelligent design in science class, then why not teach conspiracy theories in other classes, too? After all, that’s what intelligent design theory is—a conspiracy theory. Things are not as they seem on the surface. Behind the scenes lurks a mastermind who pulls the strings, arranging events ("coincidences") according to a plan.

And yet.

And yet, even paranoids can have real enemies. And even conspiracy theories can predict events that come to pass.

The normal life cycle of an organism from fertilized egg to reproductive adult would seem to be a potential neutral ground for evolution and intelligent design. In the case of the development of each complex organism, events unfold according to a plan. The predictability of the course of development is taken to be an expression of a genetic program, plan, or code. These terms have teleological implications, and science must concede that the process—ontogeny—is an example of teleology in nature—of the result being implicit in the process itself.

This is a key concept in understanding the merits and demerits of evolution and intelligent design.

Intelligent design proponents are keen to point out that the mechanics of the eye, say, mark the organ as an example of design. But we know where eyes come from—from genes—and intelligent design proponents seem to be content to allow for naturalistic mechanisms taking care of the genetic transcription and translation and the assembly of the resulting proteins into functioning eyeballs. Or, is the intelligent design position that the designer nudges the molecules along during every chemical process that occurs during the construction of an eyeball? Or, is the DNA alone the divine technology and the creatures its natural (physiochemical/mechanical) expressions? Again, ID vagueness.

Now, when an eyeball is forming in an embryo, the cells are arranging themselves according to a (genetically coded) design. Science has no problem with such a design operating in nature—when it comes to the development of an organism. But the doctrine of evolution disallows designs that operate across generations—during phylogeny. There is no justifiable reason for such an arbitrary declaration. It is a point of doctrine. It is an ideological assertion, a posturing forced by scientific theophobia.

The solution to the debate is natural design. We have a model, an example. It is the design that guided each of us from fertilized ovum to (varying degrees of) adulthood. It is the process of ontogeny. If evolution—phylogeny—is embedded in an organismic life cycle, then there should be no problem adjusting evolution theory to make it conform to a design and no need to invoke supernatural designers. The stellar life cycle is the ontogeny within which planetary phylogenies can be positioned.

The very same system of protein templates—DNA—that is responsible for a caterpillar being able to dissolve itself utterly and reassemble the molecules into a butterfly, or for a fertilized ovum being able to develop into an elephant or an oak tree, is responsible for the diversity of species itself. Why should we concede that DNA works necessarily according to a program in the one instance, but forbid it from doing so in the other?

After all, what do we want? What do WE—as moderns, rationalists, scientifically minded (or at least, scientifically indoctrinated) sensible—non-superstitious—people want? We want a natural explanation of the world, one that does not rely on the "God of the gaps," using the concept of God to bridge the gaps in science. And we crave meaning for our lives, individually and collectively. We want to participate in a historical plot, or telos. Every soul hungers to star in a cosmic drama. We want a purpose that is not just our assignation of purpose to what we want to do, or find ourselves doing. We want to make a difference.

The star larvae hypothesis delivers a natural teleology, an account of our purposeful place in nature that dispenses with the supernatural and with nihilistic materialism.

We are neither the crown of Creation nor dust in the wind,
but creatures engineering a world from our collective imagination.

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