The evolution of life on Earth was spurred on by the bombardment from space of comets carrying viral genes and frozen eggs of complete species such as the octopus, a new multi-author paper has claimed.
Stein: What do you think is the possibility that intelligent design might turn out to be the answer to some issues in genetics or evolution?
Stein [in voice over]: Wait a second. Richard Dawkins thought intelligent design might be a legitimate pursuit?!
Dawkins: And that designer could well be a higher intelligence from elsewhere in the universe. But that higher intelligence would itself have had to come about by some explicable, or ultimately explicable, process. It couldn't have just jumped into existence spontaneously. That's the point.
Stein: So, Professor Dawkins was not against intelligent design, just certain types of designers, such as God.
Now maybe Dawkins had forgotten what he said, but thankfully we have the internet to remind us. He is absolutely correct about one thing though. Nothing can simply "just jump into existence spontaneously": not the beginning of the universe, nor the introduction of new life forms.
Many other such abrupt appearances or discontinuous origins are documented in the fossil record. For example, the first winged insects, birds, flowering plants, mammals, and other groups also appear abruptly in the fossil record, with no apparent connection to putative ancestors in the lower (and older) layers of fossil-bearing sedimentary rock.
In the Origin of Species, Darwin depicted the history of life as a gradually unfolding, branching tree, with the trunk of the tree representing the first one-celled organisms, and the branches representing all the species that evolved gradually from these first forms. As Darwin depicted life's history, novel animal and plant species would have arisen from a series of simpler precursors and intermediate forms over vast stretches of geologic time.
There is another and allied difficulty, which is much graver. I allude to the manner in which numbers of species of the same group, suddenly appear in the known fossiliferous rocks…To the question why we do not find records of these vast primordial periods, I can give no satisfactory answer.
We now have a quarter of a million-fossil species but the situation hasn't changed much. The record of evolution is still surprisingly jerky and, ironically, we have even fewer examples of evolutionary transition than we had in Darwin's time. By this I mean that some of the classic cases of Darwinian change in the fossil record, such as the evolution of the horse in North America, have had to be discarded or modified as a result of more detailed information—what appeared to be a nice simple progression when relatively few data were available now appears to be much more complex and much less gradualistic.
The old scientific idea of episteme—of absolutely demonstrable knowledge—has proved an idol. The demand for scientific objectivity makes it inevitable that every scientific statement must remain tentative forever.
Ironically, people like Dawkins are so dogmatic in their assertions that they end up asking those who follow them to take a blind leap of faith. To believe in the benevolent intervention of extra-terrestrial beings of a superior intelligence, of a higher power, of even a certain type of designer – anything other than God – even when the physical evidence does not support what he is saying.