scholars

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
--Hamlet, Act I, scene 5

Playing himself in his 2007 novel Diary of a Bad Year, J.M. Coetzee wrote: "I have no desire to associate myself with the people behind the Intelligent Design movement. Nevertheless, I continue to find evolution by random mutation and natural selection not just unconvincing but preposterous as an account of how complex organisms come into being. As long as there is not one of us who has the faintest idea of how to go about constructing a housefly from scratch, how can we disparage as intellectually naïve the conclusion that the housefly was put together by an intelligence of a higher order than our own?...

"It does not seem to me philosophically retrograde to attribute intelligence to the universe as a whole, rather than just a subset of mammals on planet Earth. An intelligent universe evolves purposively over time, even if the purpose in question may for ever be beyond the range of our idea of what might constitute a purpose.

"Insofar as one might want to go further and distinguish a universal intelligence from the universe as a whole -- a step I see no reason to take -- one might want to give that intelligence the handy monosyllabic name God. But even if one were to take that step, one would still be very far from positing -- and embracing -- a God who demanded to be believed in, a God who had any interest in our thoughts about it ("him"), or a God who rewarded good deeds and punished evildoers.

"People who claim that behind every feature of every organism lies a history of random selection from mutation should try to answer the following question: Why is it that the intellectual apparatus that has evolved for human beings seem to be incapable of comprehending in any degree of detail its own complexity?...I cannot see what evolutionary advantage this combination gives us -- the combination of insufficiency of intellectual grasp together with the consciousness that the grasp is insufficient."

Noam Chomsky explored a related topic in the introductory paragraphs of his 2003 political study, Hegemony or Survival? Referring to the work of contemporary biologist Ernst Mayr, Chomsky wrote that "Mayr estimated the number of species since the origin of life at about fifty billion, only one of which 'achieved the kind of intelligence needed to establish a civilization.' It did so recently, perhaps 100,000 years ago...

"Mayr speculated that the human form of intellectual organization may not be favored by selection...beetles and bacteria, for example, are vastly more successful than humans in terms of survival.

"We are entering a period of human history that may provide an answer to the question of whether it is better to be smart than stupid. The most hopeful prospect is that the question will not be answered: if it receives a definite answer, that answer can only be that humans were a kind of "biological error," using their allotted 100,000 years to destroy themselves and, in the process, much else."

Happy Mothers' Day!

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