Design-Assisted Evolution: A Response to Rope Kojonen
Can evolution and design be wedded in a happy marriage? On this ID The Future, host Casey Luskin kicks off a series of interviews responding to theologian Dr. Rope Kojonen’s proposal that front-loaded design and a full-blooded evolutionary process worked together in harmony to produce the diversity of life we find on earth. Here, Luskin interviews Dr. Stephen Dilley, lead author of a comprehensive critique of Kojonen’s model co-authored with Luskin, Brian Miller, and Emily Reeves published in the journal Religions.
In the first half of a conversation, Luskin and Dilley describe Dr. Kojonen’s proposal in a nutshell, providing the philosophical framing needed to grasp Kojonen’s elegant but flawed argument. Kojonen’s idea is the ultimate front-loaded design model, allowing for full-throated evolutionary mechanisms to work themselves out, but within a careful and purposeful arrangement of finely tuned preconditions and laws of form. It’s the best of both worlds: empirically detectable design within a fully natural evolutionary process.
But there’s a problem. Luskin and Dilley point out that the fine-tuning Kojonen claims is baked into evolutionary processes is actually not there. The sequence space for amino acids to come together to form functional proteins has been found to be both exceedingly rare as well as isolated. We don’t find evidence of fine-tuning within the mutation/selection mechanism. Instead, we find a process limited in its creative power that cannot have produced the complexity and information-rich innovation necessary to bring about life’s biological diversity. As Luskin puts it, “He [Kojonen] is arguing that God had to stack the deck in favor of evolution in order to get it to work.” It’s an interesting thesis, and Kojonen is serious and scholarly in his approach to the problem. But in the end, it fails on scientific grounds.
This is Part 1 of a two-part conversation. Look for Part 2 next! Luskin will continue his series with upcoming interviews with Dr. Brian Miller and Emily Reeves.
Dig Deeper
- Read the comprehensive critique of Dr. Kojonen’s model authored by Casey Luskin, Stephen Dilley, Emily Reeves, and Brian Miller.
- Want to evaluate Dr. Kojonen’s argument yourself? His book is The Compatibility of Evolution and Design.