Good post. How about a third possibility - evolution does happen, but in the context of a feedback loop between the evolving organism and a field of living intelligence which enables it to make adaptive choices very much more quickly than would otherwise be the case - evolution plus, in other words?
Maybe some currently unknown field, or something, will turn out to be important in the world. But the problem I have with how this kind of theory seems to work in practice is that it's really more of an anti-theory. If I ask what kinds of laws this 'field of living intelligence' might obey, and how it would work to do whatever it did, to affect ordinary matter, then I tend not to get answers, but refusals to answer. The specification that it's a field 'of living intelligence' seems mainly to mean is that I'm not supposed to ask those questions. Such a field obeys no laws, and it does not work through any particular mechanism.
Well, that sucks, in my opinion. While it's perfectly reasonable to imagine that there are things we don't yet know about the world, I think there's one basic thing that we should really have learned by now. Nothing
just happens; everything that happens, happens
somehow. There's always an answer to the question, "How does it work?"
If a 'field of living intelligence' did somehow exist and do things, it would surely do them somehow. There would be mechanisms and laws. And if whatever wonder it is that the FLI explains can be explained with mechanisms and rules, then it's a serious question whether maybe the currently known mechanisms and rules might actually do the job by themselves, without the addition of an FLI.
That would explain how, for example, insects sprayed with a new (to them) variant of insecticide are able to evolve a mechanism to render the chemical harmless within a month (two weeks even) by producing an enzyme which breaks a crucial chemical bond in the insecticide.
Evolution often works precisely because it is
not particularly efficient. If most members of a species produce some enzyme, it's normal that a few of them also produce a slightly different enzyme, because biochemistry is messy, and evolution is sloppy. So if an inspect species has evolved immunity to some insecticides of a certain kind, then it is quite likely that some of these insects may also happen, by individual variation, to possess a slightly different version of the enzyme, a version that makes them immune to some other insecticides of a similar kind as well. If the species has not yet encountered this other insecticide, then there will have been no reason for the trait of immunity to it to proliferate, and so the immunity trait will be rare.
So the new insecticide will initially kill almost all of this kind of insect. But then, within a short space of time, one notices that it does not seem to kill them any more. That's rapid evolution. But what has actually happened?
What happens quickly is not that the insects develop new biochemistry, or even that their larvae do in the next generation. What happens quickly is that the non-immune insects die, until only the initially rare immune individuals have survived. Without competition, they proliferate. Very soon, there are immune bugs all over. The species has developed immunity to the new insecticide very quickly, but it was
not a case of rapid R&D on the part of the insects. Nothing really surprising has actually occurred: there were always a few immune bugs there, the new insecticide killed all the others, and the few immune ones then spread like crazy. There is no need to postulate any kind of intelligent field.
This is the kind of way that evolution mostly works, if not always. It is
not any kind of atheistic rival for an intelligent designer; it is not a life force; it is not smart. It's really dumb, and it works like a hammer. Variation, selection, proliferation; rinse, lather, and repeat.
