"What do you mean by "created richness"?
I had written, in response to Howard Van Till:
"My personal vision involves a created richness of information
in mature organisms."
It seems to me that fundamental differences of perception about
the living world are found within the Christian community. Some
are advocates of "functional integrity", who see the richness of
God's creation in the building blocks of life and in the laws of
physics and chemistry. Such a creation has the dynamic
capability of realising the eternal purpose of God regarding
living things and mankind.
Others, represented by the Intelligent Design group, see the
richness of God's creation not only in the building blocks and
in the laws, but preeminently in the intelligent design input
which characterised living things at their beginning.
Irreducible complexity and information is present at the outset
of creation - although some ID advocates would want to say that
creation was not a 1-off event, but creative activity has taken
place over time.
I know the above is simplified, and I am open to correction and
qualification, but you did ask "What do YOU mean ..."!
Some very significant differences are here. I think they are
capable of being tested using scientific methods. Just to take
one example: Darwin did not have an understanding of genetics.
So the idea of a genome which can have many different phenotypic
expressions was not one that he was able to use in his
interpretation of variation. So, in _The Origin of Species_, he
devotes much effort to the study of artificial selection - and
extrapolated to the natural realm. However, all of this work is
now obsolete. The variations he was talking about were not due
to mutations, but to the expressing of existing information
within the genome. The animals and plants were not evolving
(involving new information), they were manifesting their existing
information. (To this day, plant and animal breeders, with few
exceptions, have shown very little interest in mutations, but
focus their efforts on utilising existing genetic information
within their target organisms). A creation-based biology, in
emphasising the richness of the genome, is less liable to fall
into the same mistake as Darwin.
Curiously enough, this concept of created richness predicts the
possibility of very rapid adaptation/speciation. The information
is already there! The model does not need mutations to achieve
speciation. It is a paradox (to me) that the people who ought
to be welcoming evidences for rapid speciation have often been
the people who have resisted the idea that speciation events occur at
all!
If anyone wants to discuss this further in the context, say, of
the Lake Victoria Cichlid fishes, please feel free to contribute
something.
Best wishes,
David J. Tyler.