If God is not an idiot...

I recently had the extreme misfortune of taking part in a debate over evolution. I don't know why I even bother.

Religious deniers of evolution... (sigh)... have certain commonplace objections to it, and they tend to be really kind of exotic. They sometimes attack the accuracy of carbon dating (as if the theory relied on carbon dating!), or they attack the very idea of biogenesis - of life emerging from non-life, as if that is some huge insurmountable gap to be crossed that even an infinite amount of compositional variation and selection could never give rise to... (a bit of a red herring, since all current scientific theories of biogenesis are provisional anyhow - this subject area is still in its early days)...

Other favored tactics involve asking what came "before" the big-bang (which displays a total ignorance of how spacetime dimensionality is best understood), or showing that random variation could never lead to complex organs like eyes (which in fact are not so complex and which have emerged many times along different species lineages, in several different designs - if this seems hard to digest, start with the fact that pigments react to light, whether they are in an organism or just lying around, but the ones in organisms thus come to carry info about the outside world as a simple result of responding to light...)

Most religious argumentation against evolution betrays a failure of the imagination as well, specifically a failure to imagine scale - the scale of cosmological/evolutionary time, and the incredible power of combinatorial processes...

But look... Evolution-deniers really don't have to get so fancy to disprove evolutionary theory. It would be extraordinarily easy to disprove evolutionary theory. All you have to do is find one single population of organisms. That's it. The population has to have certain characteristics, of course, but once you find it, evolutionary theory as we know it will be forced to its knees.

You can challenge or disprove evolution if you can find a population of organisms where:

1) There are different (inheritable) traits across organisms;

2) The different traits lead to some organisms having more reproductive success than others, and these traits are inherited by their children who thus also have more reproductive success (i.e. more grandchildren per parent down the successful lineage;

3) Yet somehow, mysteriously, when you look at the genetic composition of each subsequent generation, most of the organisms are genetically related to the *less* reproductively successful ancestors, i.e. the grandparents that had the *fewest* (as few as zero) grandchildren.

Finding this population of organisms would refute evolutionary theory, or at least give it pause. Explaining this pattern of inheritance would force us to posit a new mechanism of inheritance not yet framed by science. For as long as no new mechanism (e.g genetic quantum tunneling?) were found, evolutionary theory would have to be provisionally considered incomplete. During that time period, people might speculate that perhaps certain lineages in these "inheritance without descent" species were "favoured by God", so that even though a "favoured" organism might have have the fewest descendants by way of reproduction, they have the most descendants via this favour - God puts the DNA of His favored organisms into subsequent generations, in violation of evolutionary principles... or something.

A very strong case of such a finding would be a population where *all* organisms do not demonstrate reproductive fitness, but rather eagerly get themselves eaten by predators as soon as possible, before reproducing. (They would be "manna", essentially...) Nevertheless, the species persists and thrives, growing with each generation. Finding a single such population would displace evolutionary theory as an acceptable general framework for biology (for the period of time within which no reproductive mechanism was understood).

Of course, find such species sounds like an impossible task, but only if we accept the scientific worldview of cause and effect. On a religious worldview, there is no reason why God could not intervene in the causal order of nature, and reshape future generations of a population as He saw fit, to give that population the characteristics noted above. Most emphatically, if He had any interest at all in disproving evolutionary theory, He could do it very easily by creating and maintaining such a population. The whole scientific/materialist worldview would be shaken by such a discovery.

If He thinks he can challenge the scientific worldview by making an image of the Virgin Mary appear in a grilled-cheese sandwich, or writing "Allah" on the side of a fish, (no offense and of course I say this for effect...) He's pretty dumb. The scientific worldview is *based* on ideas like the power of combinatorics and coincidence to produce patterns that may fortuitously be able to play a role in the context of some other system...

If God is not an idiot, and he wants to demonstrate his existence in the face of scientific skepticism or evolutionary reasoning, all he has to do is support *one* of the kinds of populations I have described above.

If religious people are serious about rebutting evolution, all they have to do is find it.