Falsify Intelligent Design? Try Simulating the Cambrian Explosion Digitally

Want to falsify the theory of intelligent design? Here’s one way.

Show with a convincing computer simulation – no cheating allowed — that the infusion of biological information in the Cambrian explosion could occur absent the intervention of a guiding intelligence: artificial life in a variety as we see in the Cambrian event, but without design.

Researchers have tried, in multiple cases, as Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics author Winston Ewert tells biologist Ray Bohlin on a new episode of ID the Future. But each time, the simulations hit a “complexity barrier,” as the scientists themselves concede, and fail. It’s a fascinating conversation. Listen to it here, or download it here.

Ewert calls it “the mystery of the missing digital Cambrian explosion,” observing that “something is missing from all of the different artificial life simulations.” There’s a secret ingredient, and guess what that is? Intelligent design.

Image: Trilobite, Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, by Tim Evanson [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons.