Creative Re-Design

Yesterday’s PBS news byte featured a pair of Punch n’ Judy pundits debating evolution, but in this era of conservative doublespeak, the new ideology was something called “creative design”. This was just an old marketing trick I saw endlessly repeated all during my childhood. Sure the boxes might be as different as night and day, but inside was the same old breakfast cereal. In this case the “new and improved” product was plain old creationism, an old testament based notion that all living things came into existence in their present form. In other words, biology was as perfect and unchanging as the cosmos.

Of course, the “E” word was never mentioned. Instead the other camp had cleverly adopted a scientific approach to arguing their case. Yet again, it was the same old argument, repackaged. The rhetoric, put simply, was that dropping an egg is an accident – behold the mess; yet how could another “accident” account for the intricate complexity of the egg before it fell? This all implies some sort of intelligence underlying the design and quid pro quo, the existence of God.

I found the creationist’s choice of scientific stage props amusing. “Intelligent design” is proposed by students of biochemistry who marvel at the intricate perfection of the enzymes in body cells. Modern science (aka, “the pharmaceutical industry”), has shown enzymes are in fact tiny machines which perform their duties like billions of industrial robots. How on earth did all this come into existence? This surely implies some sort of creator…

Had these erstwhile students done their homework, they would have also seen that all living things on this planet have exactly the same carbon based biochemical pathways. All the same enzyme classes doing all the same duties. It doesn’t matter if one is a penguin or a petunia – in fact a man and a banana are 50% identical in terms of their DNA. The implication here is all life on earth is very closely related and quid pro quo, all living things are the descendants of a common ancestor. Perhaps both sides could compromise and agree that the first bacterium popped into existence from nothing, perfectly formed in 6 days by a perfectly divine creator who then took Sunday off.

Perhaps not. Ever attuned to the “dark side”, I sense its ominous presence lurking behind this fundamentalist American disdain of man being directly related to anything but his own species. America was founded on exploitation and greed which drives this society just as much as it did when the first Europeans set foot in the new world. The native population an opposite view, the earth being not only a living thing, but our own mother. Christians wrote it all off as backward paganism – polytheism and animism. To them the earth was infinitely inferior to humanity and hence, was ours to do with as we desired. The end result was just another Greek tragedy – Oedipus Ecology. Western man unwittingly rapes his own mother. Far easier to perpetrate the crime by denying who your parents are.

The ultimate irony is what the future holds for both sides of this debate as science continues to unravel the code behind nature’s design. Its only a matter or time before scientists learn to read the genetic code instead of merely being able to recite the letters. This of course will mean man himself will begin designing life as he designs bridges and buildings today. In a sense, man will usurp God. Christians can hiss and growl at this notion, comfortably mired in their animal passions, but history shows human intellect will eventually win out over fear. The proof of this is the fact humans learned to use fire.

BILLY BRAGGART: Yea, but look how destructive fire turned out ta be!
Roger L. Sieloff: Are you suggesting we abandon fire?
BILLY BRAGGART: Na, just learn to use it responcibly…
Roger L. Sieloff: How does one usurp God responcibly?
BILLY BRAGGART: IT’S NOT THE SAIME THING!!