Thank you for your question. I'm smitten by things like apples and trees also. However, implicit in your remark may be a thought about which I'm doubtful: It's the thought that if things like apples can't come into being by pure coincidence, there must be some divine cause to these things. I can't be sure whether this is what you have in mind, based on your question, but if it is what you're aiming at, I'd suggest the following: The theory of Evolution by Natural Selection does not try to explain biological phenomena in nature by appeal to nothing more than sheer coincidence. Rather, apparent design and complexity in nature are in general due to differential rates at which different organisms are able to pass along their genes, and that's not a chance process. (This point is eloquently spelled out in Dawkin's book, _Climbing Mount Improbable_.) Also, I should point out that there lots of biological entities that are not convenient for human beings at all: weeds, poison ivy, noxious fruit...

Your last sentence is right: It's not true that in the case you have in mind the parents confer a benefit on child that would otherwise lack it. You're right also that it is a bit strange to suppose that children benefit from this. On the other hand, one might argue that this practice benefits society at large by increasing the overall representation of intelligence. (Whether increasing the overall level of intelligence in the population will benefit it, is an empirical question to which I doubt we have an answer.) Or one might hold that it benefits the parent or parents by increasing their chances of having high-achieving children. (Whether having smarter children in general makes parents happier is also an empirical question, and I also doubt that we know how to answer it at this point.) You might enjoy pursuing these issues a bit further with Jonathan Glover's new book, _Choosing Children: Genes, Disability and Design_, forthcoming in early 2008 with Oxford University Press. Glover is an...

Dear Joseph, thank you for your question. What reaction the world would have to the scenario you envision is an empirical question better answered by a sociologist or a social psychologist. However, let me just note that when Evolution by Natural Selection started to be popularized in the Nineteenth Century, many saw that it tended to take the wind out of the Argument from Design. Many theists were indeed quite upset about this, and that is no small part of why Darwin met with such hostility. But the result was not "mass destruction and chaos." So it is not clear to me why mass destruction and chaos would result from the tables turning in the other direction. Also, my guess is that many natural scientists who stake their research careers on Evolution by Natural Selection's being true would be *surprised* in this scenario, but rational enough to face the facts as you imagine them. If in fact they could be convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that ENS is false, and that theism is true, ...