Intelligent Design

By

Orbis Tertius

“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so”

                                                                                  –Hamlet

Intelligent design is the theory that life, at some  level, is simply too complex to have arisen from the chemical aleph. 

For the scientist, intelligent design is a prison.  Like Hamlet’s Denmark, one cannot be a king of infinite space when trapped inside the nightmare of irreducible complexity.  However, the real tragedy of this concept is that thinking makes it so.  If we accept that the world is to complex to understand, then what is the use of trying to understand it?  

Intelligent design is a failure of language expressed as a failure of the imagination.  A molecular machine that is too complex to arise randomly is actually an artifact from Tlön.  In other words, an article of  fiction that has somehow gained a foothold in the real word.   

Borges challenges his readers to come up with an example–the retina! flagellum! ect–of a biological machine of irreducible complexity.  I will show you that these are all objects from Tlön that have somehow come to exist alongside real retinas and flagellela. 

If we do not eliminate these impostors, the world of Tlön will eventually become the real world.  When this happens, the only science will be admiration of the designer.  The designer who is none other than small minded man, seeking his mirror image.

Hello, my name is Jorge Louis Borges.  You may remember me.  I spent 86 years searching for the infinite, little knowing, that the infinite spent the same number of years looking for me.  When we finally found each other, I ceased to remember a time when we were apart.

If you have ever tried to catch a star in a child’s butterfly net, then you know my predicament.  It is impossible to describe the infinite in words.  Indeed, words are like the butterfly net, catching nothing but the occasional metaphor. 

Yet I persist, knowing now, that certain of my previous works contain imperfections.  These imperfections are now set, like the rare impurity that adds color to certain diamonds.  I cannot remove them without destroying the work.

To continue along my former creative path is impossible.  Instead, I have decided to dedicate myself to literary criticism.   

Human Genome

By

Everyone

Hello, my name is Jorge Luis Borges.  For my first in a series of book reviews, I would like to appraise the human genome. 

The fact that one book has almost 7 billion authors might have overwhelmed me when I was alive.  No longer!  Alas, considering how abrupt the ending is, the whole thing now seems much too short.  With a great sense of Irony, it ends with the sun still shining brightly, perhaps too bright.  But I don’t want to give away the ending just yet!  In fact, I may not want to give away the ending at all.  Well, let me put it to you this way.  If you are reading this in the year 2531, you may want to put off having children.    

It is interesting that the book contains over 3 billion characters.  This is quite a slog for the average reader.  With 7 billion versions moving through time, it can be difficult to keep track of of everything.  For this reason, I prefer the restrained elegance of  chromosome 12 on the single genome still going in the year 2532.

AGGGATACTTACTTAGAGGGATCCTTCTAGACTACTTATGCTGAGAACACTCACACTACTACATAADACATADTCA AT

It is a remarkable piece of writing, not simply because it conferred resistance to the killer virus, but because it allowed one individual experience the loneliness of being the last man on earth.  How incredible it is that a single letter–the third ”G” in the sentence above–allowed this man to experience something so profound.     

I wrote a story once, about a man who remembered everything.  Mistakenly, I believed this man to be unique.  It occurs to me now that this last human genome on earth also remembered everything.  It rattled around with the contents of a billion years, encased in cells.  Truly, it is like the Library of Babel, the millions of salt water hexagons called “cells”. 

Indeed, this is a strange  and beautiful book that can be read in many ways. You are studying it at this very moment with the tiny reading machines inside your cells.  It is a mirror broken into three billion letters, and we each decode its mysteries.