The Dachshund and the Alien Darwinist

Picture a time in the distant future when man has passed away and all of his works are dust. (Pick your favorite reason - Global warming, bird flu, sky falling, whatever) A group of alien anthropologists and palientologists land on what's left of Earth and set up an excavation. As luck would have it, they unearth a skeleton that is marvelously preserved. The skeleton shows an animal that had four legs, rather short, with a long, slender body. The ends of the feet show paws that were well adapted for digging, a long snout with sharp teeth. The lines are smooth.

After analyzing the remains, they begin to theorize what the animal's environment was. The animal was a hunter, they can tell. It is well adapted for tight areas. From this they surmize that the animal was a predator whose major prey was small burroughing animals. It's surroundings might have been a forest type environment with many smaller animals around.

The analysis is proper and scientific. The conclusions are logical. The problem is that they are wrong. The animal was the house pet of a family in Wisconsin, and never chased anything more lively than a squeaky ball or ate a meal that didn't come out of a can. Nature may or may not have eventually developed the Dachshund, but the fact is that human breeders did. They were the result of selective breeding for a particular effect. They were essentially the results of intelligent design. The failure of Evolutionary theory in this case is not a matter of method, but rather one of assumptions. A huge part of evolutionary science is based on the assumption that things proceed along predictable lines without any particular guidance. Species advance and change based on the environment and in turn the environment can be deduced from the species.

In the past, this assumption has been considered necessary, either because it was considered impractical to determine what outside forces might have existed or because the possibility of a guiding force was dismissed out of hand. That doesn't make Evolution science wrong, but it certainly leaves it vulnerable to wrong conclusions. If there is an active, guiding force, even one that acts intermittantly or in very small ways, evolution science is not going to find it. It can't. It's entire foundation is built on denying the question.

Proponents of Intelligent Design want to ask that question, using scientific techniques and analysis. They correctly identify that if the assumptions of Evolution are wrong, then the conclusions are suspect as well. I don't know what they'll find, but I consider the questions are worth asking. The next time someone tells you how ignorant proponents of ID are, at least take a moment to consider all of the questions won't even ask.