The Origin of Specious Nonsense. Twelve years on. Still going. Answer soon.

Although reading this thread normally gives me a headache and I should know better, there is one issue on the whole creationism versus evolution argument that needs clarification, and that is it's an argument that suffers from two logical fallacies, it is both a category error and a false dichotomy.

Creationism in its various flavors offers a non testable i.e. non scientific hypothesis for how the universe we inhabit started and how life emerged, the work of some kind of supreme intelligence. Evolution has nothing to do with this question, it is a scientific theory based on mountains of evidence that is our best current theory on how DNA based life evolved once it got started. That is the category error. Evolution has nothing to do with how the universe started, if it started, or how life emerged from inanimate matter.

Creationism versus evolution is also a false dichotomy as it fails to consider other alternatives. Leaving aside panspermia, the most obvious middle ground is that nature in its broadest meaning is both purposeful and intelligent in ways that we are only beginning to understand.

The question was asked what do we mean by nature and what do we mean by intelligence? For the purpose of this discussion I would use the broad wiki definition of "the phenomena of the physical world, including all of life, from the subatomic to the cosmic". By definition this has to include all the laws of nature that determine how the universe evolves and how life emerged and evolves.

Intelligence is a very difficult concept to pin down, in particular in light of modern scientific discovery. It is imo a supremely arrogant position of humans to assign intelligence to themselves, and deny it to other species. It is also a very Christian concept that places humans at the pinnacle of evolution, disregarding the fact that other species have been around for hundreds of millions of years longer than we have and will most likely be still around millions of years after we have gone, assuming we have not destroyed their habitat.

There are two scientific findings in recent years that anyone interested in this topic should think long and hard about. One is the work of Toshiyuki Nakagaki in Japan, recently duplicated by a group in the US, demonstrating that unicellular amoeba can learn to navigate a maze.

http://www.nature.com/news/how-brainless-slime-molds-redefine-intelligence-1.11811

The second is even more fascinating which is the phenomena of honeybee waggle dances, a sophisticated language first studied by the Nobel prize winning Karl von Frisch. The attached paper explains this behavior in detail, but in short when a worker bee returns to the hive after finding a source of food, it communicated both the distance and direction to the food source using a dance routine which translates the horizontal direction of the food source relative to the position of the sun, to a vertical direction of dance routine. In other words if the food source is located 60 degrees horizontally to the left of the sun, the dance will be performed 60 degrees left of vertical. This is quite the feat considering that the sun moves constantly during the day and the angle of the dance has to be adjusted to reflect this.

http://www.cals.ncsu.edu/entomology/apiculture/pdfs/1.11%20copy.pdf

The trivial answer one hears is this is just instinct, which doesn't tell us anything. The truth is we have no idea currently how honeybees accomplish this, with their less than a million neurons compared our trillion, not to speak of the amoeba that have no neurons at all. Behaviors like these are clearly somehow embedded in DNA, as all the evidence demonstrates that honeybees emerge with this ability and no evidence to suggest any training is involved.

The scientific community is slowly coming to terms with the fact that all of nature is teeming with what we refer to as intelligence, based on information processing. We simply cannot dismiss this because of our current lack of knowledge of how this intelligence emerges and what mechanisms are utilized in it's application.