Should any of you wonder where this aging scientist stands on the matter of Evolution and/or/versus Intelligent Design ...

Should any of you wonder where I stand on the matter of Evolution versus Intelligent Design, the following quotation taken from the Q & A section of the online magazine, Yorigins (a neat y-zine) sums it up rather well:

Q. IS THE ARGUMENT FOR DESIGN BASED ON SCIENTIFIC IGNORANCE?

A. On the contrary. If you've ever watched Disney’s Fantasia, you may recall a god casting thunderbolts down from the clouds. Lightning bolts, rainbows, and many other natural phenomena were once explained as divine intervention. Such thinking is referred to as god-of-the-gaps reasoning--attributing the mysterious to a divine hand.

But, today’s intelligent design arguments are based upon a growing body of scientific evidence concerning everything from DNA to the laws of physics; and upon our uniform and repeated experience.

Design theorists offer extensive evidence that blind, material causes are incapable of building irreducibly complex and information-rich systems. They then point out that whenever we know how such systems arose such as with an integrated circuit, a car engine, or a software program invariably a designing engineer played a role. Design theorists then extend this uniform experience to things like molecular machines and the sophisticated code needed to build even the first and simplest of cells. An increasing number of leading scholars attest that increased scientific knowledge about such things has greatly strengthened the argument for design.

You would be surprised at how often I've been called to task, so to speak, for even suggesting that Intelligent Design isn't based entirely on ignorance and a disregard for scientific inquiry.

But hey, in another thousand years or so, we'll probably all know how we came to be ... so to speak.