Darwin's Theory - Does it work without God? (Part 2)

This a comment I received from Paramanand (Pandy) on my posting Darwin's Theory - Does it work without God?:

My take on Darwinism is of course on the side of Darwin. And I find something confusing what you write here. You seem to think that Natural selection is actually some hidden force which actually selects life forms.

However this is not the case. If you have two organisms, then they are not alike in all respects and definitely in some circumstances one will be better at survival than other and it will be selected. There is no force as such as work (or the hand of God).

To take an analogy, you have a sieve and some particles of various sizes. if you throw them all in sieve some will be filtered out and some will pass through. Now the sieve here is the natural environment which includes other organisms like predators, and members of species competing for mate. And in real world the sieve is highly dynamic. So a property which might have been good for survival once in past might be useless in future.

So the selection itself is undirected. But the random mutations which add to survival are preserved and accumulate over the millions and billions of years.

It is this marvellous process of natural selection which integrates (remember calculus) the small luck at each stage and generates blogger.com in 21st century from lifeless matters billions of years ago. What a transition!! Almost unimaginable by the proponents of Intelligent Design.

You can read the works of Richard Dawkins to get further enlightenment on this subject.

Pandy has made some good points but at the same time, I feel, I can write more on what I meant in light of his comments.

The sieve example does model Nature to the extent that the fit survive in Nature, as the smaller stones pass through the sieve. But do the stones that have passed through the sieve carry any memory or information that they passed through the sieve because they had such and such properties? If so, how? In the same manner, the fitter might survive, very well. But how does one explain the fact that the survivors pass on the genetic code (or the information of what made them survive) to the next generation? Nature could have kept on experimenting like this without ever evolving into more complex life forms. Some forms of amoeba and algae could have survived one time and some other forms at other times. There has to be some inherent intelligence that gives a sense of direction to evolution and that prefers survival more than extinction. After all, Nature would not be affected if all life ceased to exist.

Let me take an example. Consider a moulding machine that is used to give a particular shape to molten glass. Each piece of glass that is moulded is of the same shape. Then each piece is pushed on to a treadmill one after the other at the end of which they are collected by a person and packed into boxes. Consider a situation in which the moulding machine has been programmed in such a manner that the glass pieces it makes are very fragile. So fragile that they break when one glass piece touches the other one on the treadmill. If we compare it to the sieve example, the moulding machine is working in the manner it is supposed to work - giving the shape as programmed. However, the glasses are not strong enough and break when they come into contact with each other on the treadmill. Now, in this case, the moulding machine is in no position to change the settings on its own so that the glasses coming out are thicker/stronger and do not break when they come into contact with each other on the treadmill. So, the glasses it produces will continue to break while the machine will never stop making the same glasses. This is something that does not happen. Why? Because there is no transfer of information from treadmill to the machine that the glasses it is producing are too fragile and it needs to change the way it produces them.

Coming back to evolution, if I try to ask the question why the "beneficial" random mutations are preserved by Nature when it does not have to (that is, it is not bound by the laws of physics to) create self-sustaining life, I do not find a ready answer.

Not only has Nature evolved, but it has evolved so much as to produce intelligent beings!! This is something amazing and again not guaranteed by Darwin's theory.

What I tried to say in was that if the existence of God (an invisible intelligent force, if God seems to be too controversial) is not assumed, Darwin's theory seems to leave an unexplained gap. Now, this does not prove that God is enabling evolution but it does mean that there might be something which Darwin and scientific theory has left unexamined.