Make The Leap

By John M. Lynch
Recently I wrote on Wells' paper in Rivista. Some readers may know that he presented a talk on the very same material at the 2004 Biola "Intelligent Design and the Future of Science" conference, and the talk is available from ARN. During the Q&A session, he was asked to "elaborate on the specific way in which ID plays a role in this situation". Below I provide his answer and leave it up to you, gentle reader, to discuss his viewpoint.
“First of all, ID encourages a closer look at centrosomes and centrioles. They are not very interesting from a Darwinian evolutionary standpoint, in fact they are totally uninteresting. I have submitted this paper … to several journals. The first one, the editor was a strong evolutionary biologist, and his reaction was ‘well, we are not interested in theories of centrosomal function, we just want more molecules, you should just go out and give us those.’ This is the molecular reductionist emphasis that I attribute to Darwinian evolution. ID liberates us from that first of all. It encourages us to take cell structures or living structures at face value. I mean, this thing looks for all the world like a turbine, it’s been called a turbine for decades by cell biologists, but nobody – and I’ve searched the literature – nobody has proposed that it’s a turbine before. I think it might be, you know. It’s worth a shot. ID in a broader sense encourages this sort of cellular perspective, organismal perspective, as opposed to the bottom-up molecular perspective, but the most specific instance in this case is the turbine idea. Well, I would say the Archimedes Screw too – it looks like a screw, maybe it is a screw. … maybe it is a vortexer, and it turns out the effect would be similar to what we have observed in cells for decades. So, ID encourages one to trust your intuition, to make the leap. You know, if it looks like this, maybe it is, let’s look in to it. Maybe it fits, maybe it doesn’t, but it’s worth a shot. And so it’s not that ID says ‘Yes, this is where it is, you have to find it here’ – ID is more of an umbrella, a framework, that encourages this sort of risky hypothesis making that I think could ultimately be very fruitful”