George Gilder on technology, evolution, Darwin and intelligent design

Recently Discovery President Bruce Chapman sat down for an interview with Discovery senior fellow, author, and technology guru George Gilder. The subject: evolution and intelligent design.

Gilder also has a major essay in the new issue of National Review, titled “Evolution and Me: Darwinian Theory has Become an All-Purpose Obstacle to Thought Rather than an Enabler of Scientific Advance.”(subscription required)

The National Review piece offers a unique and fresh perspective on the issue of materialism vs. design and is a breakthrough description of the case against Darwinism and for intelligent design based largely on information theory and our understanding of information in the age of supercomputing and instant information delivery. It turns out that Darwin’s theory is especially vulnerable to the analysis of life from the hierarchical structure that Gilder says a 21st century understanding of modern physics, mathematics and computer science provide.

Gilder’s penultimate point? “Wherever there is information there is a preceding intelligence.”

“Everywhere we encounter it,” Gilder writes, “information does not bubble up from a random flux or prebiotic soup. It comes from mind. Taking the hierarchy beyond the word, the central dogma of intelligent design ordains that word is subordinate to mind. Mind can generate and lend meaning to words but words in themselves cannot generate mind or intelligence.”

Throughout the article Gilder shows how irreducible complexity in mathematics, in logic, in computer science, in physics, all point to a similar irreducible complexity in biological systems as well. He winds through information theory and economics, moving smoothly from quantum physics to mathematics, all the while showing how “Darwinism is a materialist theory that banishes aspirations and ideals from the picture. As an all-purpose tool of reductionism that said whatever survives is, in some way, normative, Darwinism could inspire almost any modern movement, from the eugenic furies of Nazism to the feminist crusades of Margaret Sanger and Planned Parenthood.”