Exceptional Abilities and Over-Design

Most likely, everyone has heard about or even known people with exceptional abilities. Some people excel certain things while others struggle. However, these people have amazing skills far beyond those wrought by learning and practice.

Children who can write symphonies, people that do complex mathematical equations in their minds almost instantly, and more. There are also people with serious mental disabilities who have such skills. (The television show The UnXplained had a few episodes on these kinds of things.) Believers in particles-to-prodigy evolution say these and other things are examples of over-design.

 Child solving math problem, Pexels / Mart Production

It seems ironic that evolutionists refer to over-design, yet they claim to reject any implication that the Creator was involved. Through time, chance, random processes, natural selection, and luck, everything is evosplained to improve an organism. Big brains (which have no bearing on intelligence) should not exist, nor should amazing abilities. These would not aid survivability. Some creationists suspect that such talents existed at the beginning of creation, but deteriorated after the fall of man.

The case for over-design is reviewed focusing on documented cases of normal persons that have exceptional abilities. Over-design refers to mental skills that exist at levels well-beyond that required for survival. Typical abilities and skills achieved by the human brain, such as in music, math, memory, and design, are also used as examples to illustrate the concept of over-design. Several case histories of exceptional abilities were reviewed to illustrate extreme cases of mental over-design. These cases provide strong support for a level of intelligent design that cannot be explained by Darwinism. A literature review concludes these exceptional skills remain unexplained in spite of numerous scientific studies that have explored this topic. Among those persons convinced that over-design requires an intelligent creator is the co-founder of the modern Neo-Darwinism theory of evolution, Alfred Russel Wallace.

One small item I want to mention before I send you to the rest of the article. The author made a brief remark that Wallace converted to Christianity, but there is no support for it in the text or my own searches. That's a small thing, and the rest is worth reading at "The Problem of Over-Design for Darwinism."