Is natural selection intelligent?

Not so long ago I was talking about William Dembski's theories with some people at my shool's math faculty. We got talking about the need for life to have been shaped by an "inteligence".

One of my friends used the following argument: Suppose you were plaing a game (e.g. chess, stock-market investment or football) that we want to win. In order to win, unless the opponent is very dumb we have to work quite hard. If you can out-think and out play your opponent then you have a good chance of winning.

We can assume that a well matched opponent is intelligent because we have to struggle to beat them. If winning was very easy (for example, a chess opponent who appeard to make random moves) then we would assume that our opponent was rather stupid, and not intelligent at all.

In a sense challenging somebody or some-thing in a game is a good test of intelligence - Alan Turing devised a test for intellignece called the "Turing Test" which tests only verbal intelligence. Might challenging somebody to an investing contest be a valid test of investing intelligence? If I make a lot of money can I assume that I am more intelligent than the market?

Modern Cognitive Science students recognise there are many kinds of intelligence. We now have soccer playing robots. They are not as good as David Becham but getting better all the time.

But what of real life?

Our environment is not like a puzzle where once you know the trick you can easily overcome every challenge it offers, It includes every known challenge and to be good at it we need to have many kinds of intelligence. But we can imagine it as a sort of game, a struggle for resources, food, reproductive success.

Life is a struggle and we need to use all of our faculties (unless we are very gifted) to keep up with the daily grind. This is as true for humans today as it was 1000 or 2000 years ago. This is also true for every life form we know of. For example, rabbits struggle to avoide being eaten by foxes. Foxes struggle to catch enough rabits to feed their young. For both the fox and the rabit their environment is as tough to beat as an intelligent oponent.

And according to Turing, if something is indistingushable from intelligence then it IS intelligence. The environment is not a human intelligence but it is intelligent. Nor is this a god or any other kind of personified mind. This intelligence almost certainly has no concience, emotions or ambitions but it is still intelligent.

So isnt it possible that Dembski is right, and that intelligence is required to shape the life-forms of earth, but that the intelligence takes the form not of a God or an tribe of alien planet-seeders but a harsh environment that we all must struggle against?

4FREEDOM

Provide evidence that natural selection is indeed capable of the wonders it's touted to have and then you might have a point. Natural selection does not shape an adaptation or cause a gene to spread over a population or really do anything at all. It is instead the result of specific causes: hereditary changes, developmental causes, ecological causes, and demography. Natural Selection is the result of these causes, not a cause that is by itself. It is not a mechanism.