Taxonomy, Evolution and Intelligent Design

Tue, 18 Mar 2008 03:17:15 GMT

Well, I figured I would start some discussions by putting forward a couple of thoughts and seeing if people had interesting contributions on the points. Consider it a form of debate; I won't generally say what my opinion is until we get some feedback as I don't want to contaminate anybody's thought processes. There will be a wide range of subjects put forward here, many relating to my fields of research and others that just bug me.

Some basic "axioms" to work from:

Evolutionary and Intelligent Design theories are not necessarily mutually exclusive as developmental theories.
Creationism (organic implementation by a deity) is not part of this thought experiment.
As we divaricate (word for the day) from the original base organism, present scientific classification / taxonomic methods based on evolutionary pathing (or cladistics) will necessarily fail. Functional methods might be even worse at supporting this type of development as the manipluations are explicitly effecting functional changes.

NOTE: For the sake of this argument, we accept the widely accepted theory of Evolution as the status quo to the present. We must also consider, as we perform genetic (and related) manipulations on extant species, that we are creating new organisms which may be considered "Intelligently Designed" (let's give the scientists the benefit of the doubt here!).

Questions:

Is this a problem and if so, how might we address it?
Should (and can) there be a threshold for (sub-?)species membership?
Could (and should) organisms legitimately belong to more than one species?

Enjoy!

carlthulhu

Taxonomy, Evolution and Intelligent Design