Yorkshire Philosophical Society

Event Information

Evolution And Intelligent Design

Dr Simon Hardy, Dept of Biology, University of York

Report
by Evelyn Lee

This was the ideal lecture to conclude the Darwin series. Dr. Hardy added to what had gone before by analysing with humour and clarity whether some validity can be found for the theory of Intelligent Design. The idea appeared in the nineties trying to prove that we are the perfect culmination of creation. Countering it, several irrefutable design faults were laid out before us. One was our inability to synthesize vitamin C, a failure particularly affecting sailors.  We share the inability with some other primates but not all. The sequencing of rat DNA demonstrated where the synthesis occurs, and the coding of the parallel human sequence revealed a fault. It was associated with the recent surprising discovery of intrusions of non-coding sections named ‘introns’ that serve an, as yet, unknown purpose.  Ready for anything, or imperfect design? Dr Hardy finished with a little jingle, written by Robert Taylor (his son’s father-in-law):

I was sequencing late on my tod,
When an intron appeared – very odd.
In code was the unbreakable, quite unmistakeable
Hebrew for “Copyright  – God”.