Did an Anti-ID Wikipedia Editor Shut Down a Darwin-Dissenter?
It's hardly news to observe that Wikipedia is biased against intelligent design (ID). Michael Egnor recently exposed how Wikipedians removed statements discussing how biological machines can be reverse-engineered, like human machines (an observation which has strong pro-ID implications). Errors persist from the very beginning of Wikipedia's entry on ID, with very first paragraph stating, "ID's primary proponents, all of whom are associated with the Discovery Institute, believe the designer to be the Abrahamic God." I'm pretty sure that notable ID-friendly scientists like Mike Gene would ardently dispute that statement on many levels. The critics' viewpoint dominates the ID page, with over 50% of the references presently containing citations to critics (like the ACLU-scriptedKitzmiller v. Dover ruling, the testimony of anti-ID witnesses, TalkOrigins, NCSE's website, PandasThumb, The Skeptical Inquirer, Barbara Forrest's writings, and so on). Moreover, when pro-ID viewpoints are given, they are nearly always rebutted by the writings of critics (unless they deal with religion). So what’s the purpose of the “encyclopedia” page? Is it intended to inform people about what intelligent design actually says or simply to publicize to the world what some critics want it to be, and what they think is wrong with it? It appears the primary aim is the latter. But Wikipedia's bias is sometimes made more explicit.
I recently received an email from someone who was concerned about how an anti-ID Wikipedia editor banned a Wikipedia user "for stating that evolution is a THEORY." (Note: As I stated recently, I don't endorse that argument, and I’ve only made one edit on Wikipedia in my entire life, and I had nothing to do with this exchange.) After the user was then blocked, the user stated, "You can block me all you want, but I've done nothing wrong, and you can't change that." A notorious anti-ID Wikipedia editor denied the user's request to be reinstated by citing a "Fundamental lack of understanding of the meaning of 'theory' as used in science" on the part of the user. Incredibly, the editor that banned this Darwin-dissenter justified the act by complaining user engaged in "repeated POV [point of view] edits." Promoting a “Point of view”? Their hypocrisy is incredible! The editor is clearly banning people because they disagree with his "point of view." It seems clear that only certain "points of view" are acceptable on Wikipedia when it comes to intelligent design.
Past editors have been exposed as not being the blameless, objective scholars they claim to be: Remember when the story broke on how "one of [Wikipedia's] most trusted and prolific editors, who claimed to be a professor of religion, was exposed as a 24-year-old from Kentucky"? (See "Editor scandal rocks Wikipedia.") Without commenting on the semantics debate over the proper use of the word “theory,” I'll let readers decide for themselves if a Darwin-dissenter's viewpoint was unfairly quashed by Wikipedia editors. The exchange can be viewed here.
Speakers include Discovery Institute Senior Fellows Dr. John West and George Gilder. And opposing them with the thesis that Darwinism and Conservatism are compatible will be National Review's John Derbyshire and Larry Arnhart, political theorist of Northern Illinois University.
Shortly after the event occurs, a video webcast will be available on the AEI site here.
From the Event Description:
There is a growing debate among conservative thinkers and pundits about whether Darwinian theory helps or harms conservatism and its public policy agenda. Some have argued forcefully that Darwin's theory provides support for conservative positions on family life, economics, bioethics, and other issues, while others have countered that the effort to justify conservative policy positions on Darwinian grounds is fundamentally flawed. Does Darwin's theory help defend or undermine traditional morality and family life? Does it encourage or discredit economic freedom? Is it a spur or a brake to utopian schemes to re-engineer human nature?
Law Review Note Critiques Selman v. Cobb County District Court Ruling
In March of 2002, the Cobb County School Board adopted a policy requiring stickers to be placed in biology textbooks which committed the apparently unconstitutional crime of stating, “Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered.” The lawsuit ended last December, when the school district entered into a lose-lose-lose settlement with the ACLU: (1) The district had to pay the ACLU $166,659, (2) The district had to permanently remove the stickers, and (3) The district was permanently enjoined from “making any disclaimers regarding evolution.” I don’t favor using the “evolution is a theory, not a fact” line because it enters semantic controversies over the proper definition of “theory” (a controversy which can be easily avoided, see here). I also am not a big fan of “disclaimers” (whether written or oral) because they aren’t very effective in actually improving student learning. Nonetheless, it’s shocking that the effect such a statement was found unconstitutional. A law review note by a student published in Temple Journal of Science Technology & Environmental Law now agrees:
Although the sticker categorized evolution as theory, the court improperly found that this categorization would have the effect of endorsing religion and favoring certain religious viewpoints. Under the Establishment Clause, the government is prohibited from taking "sides" regarding questions of religion. … [T]he sticker made no mention of preferring one religion over another or preferring religion to non-religion. The sticker stated that evolution is a theory, which neither undermines its widely-accepted nature nor contradicts any scholarly definition of evolution. The sticker merely, in accord with the weight of scholarly definition, emphasizes evolution's theoretical nature. It was erroneous for the court to conclude that the sticker improperly denigrated evolution as merely a theory, because even the most unimpeachable science is merely a theory.
By finding that presenting evolution as theory rather than fact violated the Lemon Test's effects prong, the court fundamentally created a new precedent making it unconstitutional per se for a school to even suggest that evolution is theoretical. It is true that, under Epperson, schools cannot suppress evolution instruction simply because it conflicts with a particular religious doctrine. In Selman, however, the School Board did not suppress evolution instruction, but rather acted to strengthen it. Not finding the School Board at fault on this account, the court identified the emphasis of evolution as merely a theory problematic.
This logic is confusing especially considering that the Edwards Court noted that the dictionary definition of evolution is "the theory that the various types of animals and plants have their origin in other preexisting types, the distinguishable differences being due to modifications in successive generations." As this paper earlier espoused, the academic community also regards evolution as a theory. It would therefore be contradictory for the court to require public schools to de-emphasize evolution's theoretical nature, or to require the presentation of evolution as unimpeachable theory, or worse yet, as indisputable fact.
(Kaitlin DeCrescio, “An Education in Evolution: Silencing Scientific Inquiry in Selman v. Cobb County School District,” 25 Temp. J. Sci. Tech. & Envtl. L. 285, 301-303 (internal citations removed).)
In other words, the article exposes hypocrisy in the law: courts are permitted to call evolution a “theory,” but apparently school boards cannot. Darwinists might counter that evolution is both “fact” and “theory,” and so her critique is off-base. As DeCrescio suggests, this implies they are fudging the definitions of their own terms, and such dogmatism would have the effect of “Silencing Scientific Inquiry.”
While I don’t agree with every aspect of this article’s analysis, Ms. DeCrescio makes some critiques worth considering. As a final note, the lower court’s ruling was vacated by an appellate court in May, 2006, so technically this case ends without a statement of law, and the anti-freedom-of-inquiry ruling she critiques is now defunct.
Political scientist and Discovery Institute Senior Fellow Dr. John West has been asked to lecture at Family Research Council in Washington, D.C. on Monday, April 30th at 11a.m. Dr. West's lecture will be "Darwin's Dangerous Idea: The Disturbing Legacy of America's Eugenics Crusade."
For those outside the D.C. area, the lecture will be audiocast live from www.frc.org (click on "Events")
From the Lecture Summary:
This year marks the centennial of the world’s first forced sterilization law, passed by the state of Indiana in March 1907. By the early 1930s, some 30 states had enacted similar laws as part of a secular crusade to breed better humans known as “eugenics.” Promoted in the name of Darwinian evolution, eugenics led to the sterilization of tens of thousands of Americans against their will, many of whom would not be considered mentally handicapped today. Why did America’s leading scientists and scientific organizations embrace eugenics for so long? Was eugenics a logical application of Darwin’s theory, or a terrible misuse of it? What is the connection between the eugenics movement and the population control movement that arose in the 1950s and 60s? Most importantly, what are the lessons we can learn from eugenics for today’s controversies over science, bioethics, and public policy? Dr. West will explore these questions and more.
It looks like CSC contributor Michael Egnor is not the only professor of medicine to stick his neck out for intelligent design and face severe personal attack. Dr. John Marshall of The University of Missouri–Columbia lectured this week on his own campus with the title "Intelligent Design: Is It Science or Religion?"
From both news and private reports, it sounds like he was verbally attacked in the Q&A session for his reasonable view that ID should be "part of the scientific discussion." According to one news report:
Rather than convince detractors that intelligent design was truth, Marshall repeatedly said he wanted the theory to become part of the scientific discussion, asking scientists to have tolerance toward his view.
One attendee told me he was astounded by the level of immaturity and name-calling from professors hostile to Dr. Marshall's position.
Earlier on April 6th Dr. Marshall debated chemistry professor Kenneth Schmitz at The University of Missouri–Kansas City as to whether or not ID is science.
Though he was mostly calling for civil dialogue and open discussion, Dr. Marshall said that "as a theory, I believe that intelligent design fits the evidence of biology better than Darwinian evolution." As his example shows, this is a tough claim to make in today's university environment.
Recently I shared my reading of David Brooks' recent colum "The Age of Darwin." The whole thing read like parody to me. I thought for sure that Brooks could not seriously write that, while we are generally post-modern people who are skeptical of metanarratives, we have and should abandon this view because Darwinism is the true metanarrative of life. I thought he was just pointing out the contradiction in academia between postmodern and Darwinian thought.
Whether he personally believes in evolution: "I believe in the theory of evolution."
What he thinks of intelligent design: "I've never really studied the issue or learned much about ID, so I'm afraid I couldn't add anything intelligent to the discussion."
All apologies to Ambassador Chapman, whom I never should have doubted.
I have always been fond of Mr. Brooks, as his columns were the highlight of my free college subscription to The New York Times. He has always had a gracious voice that is too rare in public discourse. I hope that one day he will read the arguments for intelligent design.
Real Estate Sale: High-Gravity Water-World with Weak Magnetic Field and Large Annual Temperature Fluctuations
Scientists recently discovered what the media is calling a "super-Earth" — a planet which may be able to house liquid water and has properties similar to earth’s own. Before you get ready to buy real estate, you should hear some other aspects of this "super-Earth" which may not be so cozy . . . or even habitable. The following was sent to us by astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez, whose work has investigated the requirements for habitability in the universe:
You are right about the host star being an M dwarf posing problems for habitability. The smallest planet's eccentricity is comparable to that of Mercury, so it is probably locked into a 3:2 spin-orbit resonance. So, the planet will experience large temperature variations over the course of its orbit. What's more, because its rotation is slower, it should have a weaker magnetic field and be subject to enhanced solar wind stripping of its atmosphere. Finally, the fact that it has a mass at least 5x Earth's means that it will have a high surface gravity and less surface relief than the Earth -- meaning no dry land.
We are repeatedly impressed to find that supposedly professional reporters use Wikipedia as an information source on Discovery Institute, intelligent design and various people related to these topics. I think the TV series “The Office” says it best (please don’t miss the irony):
Argumentum Ad Baseless Demonization: Assessing Dr. John Wise’s Response to Anika Smith and Sarah Levy
It’s disheartening (and revealing) when people have to demonize their opponents in order to argue against them. Unfortunately, SMU biology professor John Wise has chosen this approach, opening his rebuttal to Anika Smith and Sarah Levy by stating, “Deceptive tactics seem to be a recurring theme at the Discovery Institute,” and continuing for the entirety of his response to supply nothing more than a string of misdirected or misinformed ad hominem attacks.
Baseless ad hominem attack 1—Of Pandas and People: Wise attacks the Of Pandas and People textbook as if it is dishonest, and as if that affects the Discovery Institute. But Wise fails to mention that the textbook was first published a year before Discovery Institute was even founded, and many years before Discovery got involved with intelligent design. In fact, the Pandas textbook pre-dates the vast bulk of the scholarship coming from the ID movement. So it’s not clear why the status of the textbook is relevant to judging Discovery Institute in particular or even intelligent design in general. Nonetheless, Wise’s attacks on the textbook itself are misinformed.
Dr. Wise apparently read the Dover opinion and accepts it uncritically, taking the “Judge Jones Said It, I Believe It, That Settles It” approach to intelligent design and the Dover case. He claims that the Pandas textbook deceptively aimed to create a “new alias” for creationism when it started using term intelligent design. Yet when certain pre-publication drafts of Pandas used terms such as "creation" and "creationist," they used them in a way that rejected "creationism" as defined by the courts and popular culture:
In Edwards v. Aguillard, the U.S. Supreme Court declared creationism to be a religious viewpoint because it required a "supernatural creator." Yet many pre-publication drafts of Pandas juxtaposed "creation" and its cognates with statements to the exact opposite effect, noting that science cannot scientifically detect a supernatural creator. (For example, one pre-publication draft stated: “Some master intellect is the creator of life. But such observable instances of information cannot tell us if the intellect behind them is natural or supernatural. This is not a question science can answer.”) As Ms. Smith and Ms. Levy write, “Because intelligent design does not try to address religious questions about the identity of the designer, this test does not apply to ID.”
To summarize, the Pandas authors have made it clear that they adopted intelligent design terminology because their project was fundamentally distinct from common notions of creationism, and they wanted to make it clear they had a different project in mind. As one of Pandas’ authors explained his reasons for adopting intelligent design terminology: “I wasn’t comfortable with the typical vocabulary that for the most part creationists were using because it didn’t express what I was trying to do. They were wanting to bring God into the discussion, and I was wanting to stay within the empirical domain and do what you can do legitimately there.” There is no deception or wrongdoing here, and Dr. Wise’s attacks against Discovery Institute here are misdirected and baseless.
Baseless ad hominem attack 2—The Dover School Board members: Wise also complains about the “deliberate deception” of some Dover School Board members during the Dover trial, as if that somehow indicts us at Discovery. But the Dover Board chose to ignore our policy advice that they should not mandate ID, and we have criticized them extensively for their mishandling of the Dover policy and case, both before and after the trial (for some examples, see here, here, and here). When Dr. Wise attacks the Dover School Board members, he is actually joining with us. This ad hominem attack is entirely misdirected.
Baseless ad hominem attack 3: Anika Smith’s article in the SMU Daily: Wise suggests that Discovery’s Anika Smith was deceptive because she co-authored an article in the SMU Daily which identified her as a “recent graduate of Seattle Pacific University.” He suggests that perhaps she “purposefully meant to hide” and intentionally “omi[t]” her “relevant affiliation” with DI. This ad hominem charge, again, is baseless.
In fact, the SMU Daily Campus was very specific in its request for author information. According to what Ms. Smith wrote me, “They asked for my name, head shot, email address, and university affiliation. That’s what I sent them. If they had asked for my employer, political affiliation, ethnicity, or income level, I’d have given them that, as well, but they didn’t. They wanted my university affiliation, and because I have no reason to hide the fact that I graduated from Seattle Pacific University (go Falcons!), I gave it.”
For someone who claims that he “personally do[es]n’t care how [Anika] refers to herself,” Wise certainly devotes an awful lot of time and energy to impugning her integrity on how she refers to herself (5 of his 6 paragraphs, to be exact, deal with this issue). But it’s not like Ms. Smith tries to hide her affiliations: she writes regularly for Evolution News & Views and is listed on our staff page. It obviously wasn’t hard too for Dr. Wise to discover and verify her affiliations. Again, Dr. Wise has reached out to defend his viewpoint by attacking others (but conspicuously not rebutting their viewpoint), and he failed.
Baseless ad hominem attack 4: Sarah Levy: Not content to simply make baseless character attacks against Anika Smith and the Discovery Institute, Dr. Wise turns to a student at his own school, Sarah Levy, wondering “if there are any important ethical questions to be asked of … a third year law student here at SMU?” It is most disturbing that a professor would publicly question the integrity of one of his university's own students simply because she co-authored an article supporting intelligent design. Who is supporting academic freedom here?
In conclusion, Ms. Smith and Ms. Levy wrote a direct rebuttal to the scientific and philosophical objections that Dr. Wise posed against intelligent design. Dr. Wise responded by attacking their character but addressing none of their arguments. It’s a song we’ve all heard many times before, but the question remains: Does Dr. Wise have anything to say that is both accurate and rises above personal attacks? From reading his article, it doesn’t appear so. And that reveals more about the state of this debate than anything else written in this exchange.
What does David Brooks really think about Darwinism?
It is a rare day that I would dispute Bruce Chapman’s reading of anything. But today is one such day. Disagreeing with Ambassador Chapman's and Richard Kirk’s interpretations of David Brooks’ recent column “The Age of Darwin,” I (perhaps mistakenly) thought that Brooks was pointing out the irony of our supposedly post-modern intellectual culture which waxes eloquently about having no grand, unifying metanarrative and at the same time bows down to the Darwinian fairytale, to borrow David Stove’s phrase.
Writes Brooks:
…evolutionary theory reshapes psychology, dieting and literary criticism. Confident and exhilarated, evolutionary theorists believe they have a universal framework to explain human behavior.
Darwinism seems to explain everything!
The logic of evolution explains why people vie for status, form groups, fall in love and cherish their young.
I thought the obvious implication was that it therefore explains nothing. I thought this was a satire, a reductio ad absurdum on the Darwinists’ need to fit everything into this universal paradigm—as though 1859 was the year we discovered the true meaning of the world. We finally figured out that the true meaning of life is the perpetuation of genes—and in fact, come to think of it, the reason we think that the meaning of life is the perpetuation of genes is because this thought (meme, if you will) perpetuates our genes!
I’ve often wondered myself how long science, which depends upon a realist view of the world, can hold out against post-modernism’s variety-of-legitimate-interpretations viewpoint. I thought Brooks was subtly highlighting this contrast of worldviews. But upon rereading Brooks’ column, I realized that it may be read either way. Perhaps Mr. Brooks will clarify his viewpoint in a future column?
Michael Shermer and Paul Nelson will meet for their third debate over intelligent design and
evolution (they've interacted previously at the University of Alabama and Penn State) this Thursday, April 26, at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, California. The debate will be held in the University Union's Chumash Auditorium and begins at 8 pm (doors open at 7:30). The event is free to Cal Poly students; $10 at the door for the general public.
Nothing is quite so refreshing in times of censorship as a good satire. Fortunately, the ID Arts blog recently highlighted "Confession," a brief story by James Hoskins published in Number One Magazine, the literary journal at University of Missouri, where Hoskins is a student.
The story takes the familiar theme of a young student who finds his faith challenged by the evidence, only this time, there's a twist:
After a very uncomfortable silence of what seemed like an hour, Adam began, “Well, I guess I should start by saying I’ve been having a lot of questions.”
“About what?”
“Everything!” Adam’s eyebrows raised.
The Father, twiddling his glasses in his hand, said calmly, “Why don’t you tell me
some specifics and I’ll do my best to answer your questions.”
“Okay,” Adam said reluctantly. “How do we know that life is a product of
Chance?”
“Excuse me?” The Father had a disturbed look on his face.
Apparently, Hoskins wrote the story (which you can read here) in response to a controversial campus presentation on intelligent design:
In the spring of 2006, I attended a seminar at school called “Was Darwin Right?” hosted by the local Muslim Students Association. At the seminar they showed a video promoting the theory of Intelligent Design, with which I was already well acquainted. Following the video was a Q & A session that turned out to be a three-frontal attack on the young Muslim host by Darwinists in the audience. Coming to the defense of the speaker I quickly found myself in the middle of a debate with a biology professor and two biology students. They ended the debate by insisting there is an unknown law of nature that causes matter to organize itself into complex working machines. Realizing this as a last ditch effort on their part, I let it rest and did not pursue the argument any further. However, I did vent my frustration from that experience in a short work of fiction called, “Confession.”
While Hoskins was advised to censor his story, he insisted on maintaining his artistic integrity and having it published as he intended it—regardless of the politically correct sensitivities on his campus.
Well-written and entertaining, the story hits its stride as it reveals the hypocrisy of Darwin-only critics who refuse to engage in debate (sound familiar?):
“They want to have both arguments presented in the classroom and leave it up to
the students to decide which is true! What could be more wicked! It opens our doctrine
up to heretical criticism and, worst of all, it endangers the authority of the Church and the
Priesthood to say what is science and what is not.”
“But, if we are so certain our view is true, then shouldn’t we welcome criticism?
Wouldn’t allowing students to see a fair contrast between the two views simply reinforce
their belief that the Church’s view is the true one?”
“It may seem so, but as I said earlier the lies of the enemy are always pleasant to
the ear. Such young, impressionable brains are easily mislead. (emphasis added)
This is a bright and entertaining work which manages sly references to the bacterial flagellum and John Lennon — a perfect antidote to certain humorless Darwinists. Enjoy.
Kirk Answers Brooks on the Status of Darwinism in Western Culture
Has Darwin successfully replaced Marx and Freud, and, of course, the Bible, as a narrative for Western civilization? David Brooks, House Conservative at the New York Times and often a writer of real insight, apparently thinks so. (He is another example of conservatives, like George Will and Charles Krauthammer, who do not want to be bothered to actually read the works of serious Darwin critics, let alone talk with them.) Richard Kirk replies effectively to Brooks in the new American Spectator.
This reminds me to remind readers of the debate at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC, May 3 on “Darwin and Conservatism: Friends of Foes?” Panelists include John West and George Gilder of Discovery Institute, versus author Larry Arnhart and National Review science reporter/columnist John Derbyshire. ( (John West’s forthcoming book on Darwin’s public policy, Darwin Day in America, has been accepted for publication later this year by ISI Press.)
My own view, realized about eight years ago, is that Darwin is the last remaining leg of the dangerous three-legged ideology that the 19th century bequeathed the 20th century. Marx is now mostly discredited (except, one must always note, at a number of universities and the official pronouncements of the Communist parties of Cuba and North Korea) and Freud is in equally bad shape (there are still some Freudians around and many ideas of Freud that are retained in our culture). Darwinism, happily, is crumbling, too, though David Brooks—who should take some time to study the matter—has yet to spot this particular trend.
Francix X. Clines, an excellent writer for The City Life and Editorial Observer sections of The New York Times, today (April 23, 2007) repeats what may be the most common mistake in trying to sell Darwinism to the public. In “Evolution, on Broadway and Off,” Clines writes of the American Museum of Natural History’s exhibition on evolution:
The DNA exhibit shows how the chimpanzee’s DNA has been conclusively shown to be 98.8 percent the same as the visitor’s DNA. Hey, that’s no show stopper for the monkey-song chorus — it still allows a one in 100 chance they’re right.
In other words, you are silly for not believing in Darwinism because you have very similar genes which make the proteins in your body as the chimps do to make their proteins. Game over, right? Not so fast.
The Main Issue: Unintelligent vs. Intelligent Mechanism
My hope is that one day thinking about Darwinian Theory will become clearer in the public square. Recall that Darwin made two claims: (1) all living beings descend from one or a few original ancestors, and (2) the mechanism driving the changes among species is the blind, unguided mechanism of natural selection.
The controversial claim, of course, is the second one—the idea that a purely material mechanism, without any intelligence involved, is responsible for all of the genetic information necessary for life (DNA) and hence for all of life’s diversity.
Clines and others seem to think that evidence for claim one establishes claim two. This is poor thinking. Sequence similarity may indeed be evidence for a common origin—but it does nothing to show that the common origin stems from a material cause rather than an intelligent cause.
Sequence Similarity Alone Does NOT Prove Common Ancestry
Second, the 98.8% DNA sequence similarity between chimps and humans that Clines references does not even establish claim one (common ancestry). And “you don’t have to take my word for it,” as LeVar Burton always used to say on Reading Rainbow.
As Francis Collins, head of the project which mapped the human genome, has written of DNA sequence similarities, “This evidence alone does not, of course, prove a common ancestor” because an intelligent cause can reuse successful design principles. We know this because we are intelligent agents ourselves, and we do this all the time. We take instructions we have written for one thing and use them for another. The similarity is not the result of a blind mechanism but rather the result of our intelligent activity.
Some design proponents think the evidence for common ancestry is good (e.g., Michael Behe), while others—citing the fossil record, especially The Cambrian Explosion—do not. But neither group thinks that sequence similarity alone proves either common ancestry or the Darwinian mechanism, as so many science writers of our day seem eager to assume.
A Moment of Clarity: Darwinists Plan to Recruit “People Who Do Not Care About Science”.
Every once in a while, in an epochal public debate, there’s a moment of clarity. Darwinism’s most recent moment of clarity came a short time ago, when prominent Darwinist and scientist Mike Dunford released the strategy developed by his colleagues in a policy forum piece published in the latest issue of the journal Science. The strategy is remarkable.
Dunford notes the emerging Darwinian strategy:
I think Matt [Nisbet] and Chris [Mooney] are right. We do need to spend more time (and thought) on communicating our views effectively, particularly to people who do not care about science.
In their article "Framing Science," Darwinists Chris Mooney and Matt Nisbet discuss the options for Darwinists facing an uphill battle against Intelligent Design scientists in the public forum. They note that the public doesn’t "get it" that Darwin’s theory is beyond reproach, and they agree that what’s needed is a new "framing" strategy, championed by political consultant George Lakoff.
Matt [Nisbet] and Chris [Mooney] suggest that we use a technique that they call "framing." This consists of emphasizing the parts of the message that relate to the things that the audience cares about…As long as the people we need to reach are uninterested in the science involved in the issue, we're going to need to find other ways to get them interested in the issue itself.
Notice the difference in strategy between proponents of Intelligent Design and proponents of Darwinism. Intelligent Design scientists are energetically seeking public and academic forums to debate the science. They fight censorship from Darwinists in universities and federal lawsuits from Darwinists in public school science classes.
Darwinists furiously suppress public discussion of the Darwin/Design controversy and now seek to enlist “people who do not care about science” to help the Darwinist cause.
People uninterested in science are a natural Darwinian constituency. They’re a mother-lode for philosophical materialists who deny the scientific evidence for design in nature.
Here's the Intelligent Design strategy: We'll continue to enlist people who do care about science.
Science Presentations at Darwin vs. Design Draw Praise from Attendees
It is interesting that the vast majority of those who criticized the recent Darwin vs. Design conferences in Knoxville and Dallas as unscientific didn't even bother to attend the conferences. If they had, they would have seen very detailed and technical (at times almost too technical) science presentations from Jay Richards, Steve Meyer and Michael Behe.
Dr. Behe gives his presentation on molecular machines in the cell.
Here is a write up from Dr. Mark Krejchi who attended the Dallas conference and found it to be very much focused on the science of intelligent design. And, Dr. Krejchi knows a thing or two about science having a PhD in Polymer Science and Engineering followed by a couple of postdoc stints at Caltech (Chemistry and Chemical Engineering Division) and Stanford University (Chemistry Department).
The conference was excellent. There was a good size crowd present during both sessions, even considering the very poor weather on Friday night. On Saturday, I would guess that the first floor of the auditorium was about 85-90% full, with a broad distribution of ages. I could not see if the balcony sections were inhabited.
Conference speakers closed the conrference by answering quesitons from the audience.
The structure of the conference was well designed. The introduction by Lee Strobel regarding his personal search that led to his understanding of ID and the power that this theory has for rationally explaining the scientific findings of researchers across a variety of different disciplines established an excellent foundation from which to build on during the second day of the conference.
Jay Richards' talk was well received and his ability to distill the astrophysical evidence for the universal constants and their role in defining the unique position the earth inhabits in the universe was compelling. In addition, his inference that this position was not serendipitous but established by design, by an intelligent force for an intelligent, rational agent that would naturally inquire as to the construction, purpose, and exploitation of its surroundings was very insightful.
Dr. Meyer gives his presentation on digital code in DNA.
Steve Meyer's talk was a bit more challenging. This was appropriate because covering the background material was necessary to ensure that the broad audience present would have a basis for understanding the implications of the complexity and specificity of the DNA structure, so that the conclusion could be established that the these two properties are the twin pillars that define information. Once this foundation was established, Steve did a great job driving home two points; (i). that the Darwinian mechanism composed of an undirected process that relies on random mutation and natural selection cannot produce the vast amounts of information required to create, let alone sustain, the complex life that scientific evidence demands, and (ii). that ID provides the most reasonable explanations available for not only the creation of the information inherent to DNA, but also provides for the complex biochemical pathways that are necessary to sustain life as well as for the mechanism of heritance between subsequent generations.
Finally, Mike Behe's talk, although a bit truncated because of time, made an excellent closing argument that the cooperative complexity, that provides the cornerstone for irreducibly complex biological systems, cannot be justified by a Darwinian mechanism that relies on subtle, small scale changes accumulated over an undefined, large number of generations that are incrementally selected by blind forces. Subsequently, he most convincingly argued that the complex structural organization of the biological components common to even the most simple living systems coupled with the clear purpose that defines their function could best be explained by the action of an intelligent designer. His emphasis that the inference to intelligent design was in common usage by everyone when we stumble along articles of unknown origin that have the appearance of structure and purpose, I believe, made a powerful connection with the audience.
Conference attendees had chances both days to interact directly with the scientists, get books signed and have their questions answered.
We also received a lot of great feedback via comment cards. Here are a few of those.
Roseanne
This was an awesome conference.
Jan
Great conference! Thank you for putting it on.
Taylor
Thank you for coming to Dallas, the conference was awesome! I enjoyed learning about the things that support intelligent design and am now encouraged to read more about it.
(Dr.) Tony
Conference is top shelf quality in all components. Very well researched, eloquently delivered yet understandably spoken. Hope this is the first of many.
Donald
Greatly appreciate your commitment to seeking truth.
Doug
Great conference. You have given proof (beyond reasonable doubt) that there is an Intelligent Designer.
Nathan
I’ve enjoyed the conference immensely.
Kelly
Thank you so much for this amazing conference.
John
As an engineer and senior member of IEEE, I am incredibly glad I attended.
Melody
Thanks – awesome info. That will really help me as I teach both sides fairly in my high school biology classroom.
Was eugenics a misapplication of Darwin’s theory to society? I must respectfully disagree with part of neurosurgeon Michael Egnor’s recent post at ENV, which seemed to suggest that it was. Egnor correctly pointed out that eugenics is based on artificial selection, whereas Darwin’s theory is premised on natural selection. But that fact doesn’t get at why eugenics was in reality a reasonable deduction from Darwin’s theory and is properly described as “Darwinian.” As I point out in Darwin’s Conservatives: The Misguided Quest, Darwin believed that human progress was ultimately based on the struggle for survival, and he further maintained that civilized societies were courting disaster by continually counteracting the law of natural selection through vaccinations, welfare programs, and the like. Eugenics was framed explicitly as an effort to remedy these violations of Darwinian natural selection.
It’s true that an even more pristine application of Darwinism would have been to completely stop helping society’s unfortunates so that more of them would die. But most eugenists thought such an approach would be too cruel, and so they promoted the artificial selection of eugenics as a more humane way to solve the problems identified by Darwinian biology. The fact remains that eugenics was thoroughly grounded in the principles of Darwin’s theory. It explicitly sought to remedy a problem identified by Darwin himself in his book The Descent of Man.
DARWINISM GONE WILD: Neither sequence similarity nor common descent address a claim of Intelligent Design
Metal mousetrap parts
Okay, so one day a guy walks up to you and says irreducible complexity is no problem for a random, Darwinian-like evolutionary process. In fact, he can explain how a mousetrap could be made step by step. That’s great, you reply, tell me. Easy, says he. He has just finished a detailed analysis of the standard mechanical mousetrap and discovered that, except for the wooden base, all the parts are made of metal! What’s more, he’s even looked at non-standard mechanical traps, and their pieces are all made of metal, too! Also, after much sleuthing he’s noticed that the mousetrap spring has a lot in common with the spring inside his ballpoint pen — both are made of metal, and both are curled into spirals.
Fascinating, you reply, please go on. Go on? What, are you blind? Don’t you see? asks he. The mousetrap spring must have arisen from something like the pen’s spring, to make the beginning of the mousetrap. Then the spring duplicated to form the other metal parts, which were added one by one to make the trap we see today. What more could a reasonable person ask for?
You point out that it isn’t quite obvious to you how that helps, that the function of the mousetrap would seem to be missing from all those parts, and that while all the parts were being added, the system still wouldn’t work like a trap. In fact, you note that the scenario says nothing at all about how the mouse-trapping function arose.
IDiot!, he mutters.
Common descent versus random mutation/natural selection
That’s pretty much the scenario being played out after the recent online publication of a paper by Liu and Ochman (1) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The gist of the paper is that the workers compared the sequences of the dozens of proteins of the flagellum of the gut bacterium E. coli to each other, to other E. coli proteins, and to the flagellar proteins of other kinds of bacteria. They noted plausible sequence similarities among the flagellar proteins to each other, but not so much to other bacterial proteins. So Liu and Ochman concluded that all 24 proteins of the flagellum core must have descended from a single gene for a single protein!
As I’ll mention below, other people find that claim very dubious, but let’s leave that aside for now. Let’s concentrate on the fact that this is being touted as an answer to claims of intelligent design. As I’ve pointed out many times, beginning with Darwin’s Black Box over a decade ago, the argument for intelligent design in biology has little to do with protein-sequence similarity or common ancestry, for the same reason that knowing all the parts are made of metal doesn’t explain the mousetrap. Even if all those parts are made of metal, and even if they derived serially from each other or from some primordial piece of metal, that doesn’t even begin to explain how a mousetrap could be built step by step by a random process. In the same way, even if all the proteins of the flagellum derived serially one from the other, or from some magical precursor protein, that doesn’t even try to explain how a flagellum could be built step by step by a Darwinian process.
Let me emphasize the point: Common descent is one thing. Random mutation and natural selection is something completely different. Evidence for common descent is NOT evidence for RM/NS. At the very best, protein sequence comparisons may say something about common descent, but they aren’t support for Darwin’s crucial claim that the startlingly elegant, functional complexity of life arose by random mutation culled by natural selection. The PNAS paper is quite irrelevant to that. The bottom line is that, despite the authors’ apparent confusion, the paper does not even try to address the irreducible complexity of the flagellum or its need for intelligent design.
Curiosity-challenged
The PNAS paper reaches conclusions that other workers find very questionable. Nicholas Matzke of the pro-Darwinian National Center for Science Education and Panda’s Thumb blog declares the work to be of “canine quality”, that is, “a dog.” (2) (Although a geographer by training, Matzke has acquired some skills in the area and earlier published his own sequence comparisons of flagellar proteins in Nature Reviews Microbiology.) The bottom line is that Matzke is quite skeptical that the two dozen kinds of proteins in the flagellum core could be derived from a single protein. His point is well taken. Yet neither of the scientists that Science magazine journalist Jennifer Cutraro called for comments expressed any curiosity concerning that startling claim. (3)
Nor were they curious about other some pretty obvious points: 1) What kind of amazing protein would it take to actually be able to give rise to the disparate physical parts of the flagellum? 2) The authors of the paper find few homologies between flagellar proteins and other proteins; yet if that primordial protein were indeed so plastic, why hasn’t it been co-opted to perform many other functions in the bacterial cell? 3) In their scenario, the prodigy protein gave rise to all the core parts of the flagellum billions of years ago, before the common ancestor of major classes of bacteria. Yet since that time it has not been heard from. A single protein which blossoms to give one coherent, astoundingly complex structure and then, its work complete, is never heard from again — that hardly seems like what one should expect on Darwinian grounds.
Grandioser and Grandioser
It seems that the grandiosity of Darwinian claims against ID is rapidly accelerating. Just one year ago the supposed big breakthrough was a paper by Thornton (4) showing that, if he himself personally changed a couple amino acids of a receptor protein in his lab, he could slightly alter the ligand it bound. So just last year, one worker strained to account for a couple amino acid changes to a single protein affecting one property. Yet twelve months later, the PNAS paper blithely claims to account for dozens of whole proteins with many different functions.
All in all, this paper is a marvelous example of Darwinism-gone-wild, where imagination does almost all the work, experiment none of it. I’m hopeful that my new book, The Edge of Evolution, will provide a sorely needed reality check when it comes out in June. It will demonstrate the enormous difficulty of putting together by random mutation and selection even two coherent amino acid changes, let alone a multi-protein complex.
1. Liu,R. and Ochman,H. 2007. Stepwise formation of the bacterial flagellar system. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A., http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/0700266104v1 2. Matzke, N. Flagellum evolution paper exhibits canine qualities, http://www.pandasthumb.org/archives/2007/04/flagellum_evolu_1.html 3. Cutraro, J. A Complex Tail, Simply Told, http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2007/417/3 4. Bridgham,J.T., Carroll,S.M., and Thornton,J.W. 2006. Evolution of hormone-receptor complexity by molecular exploitation. Science 312:97-101, http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/312/5770/97
Pseudo-Darwinism: Dr. Cartwright’s Error and Eugenics
Darwinist Dr. Reed Cartwright was highly critical of my recent observation that Darwin’s theory has nothing to do with experimental breeding of bacteria or with the biotech industry. In his original article, Dr. Cartwright asserted that Darwin’s theory was responsible for the experiments that unraveled the genetic code and for the entire biotechnology industry (!).
I pointed out that Darwin’s theory was a theory of random variation and natural selection, whereas experimental manipulation and breeding of bacteria were examples of purposeful variation and artificial selection. Darwin’s theory has nothing to do with either.
I have also noted that Darwin’s seminal contribution to medicine was eugenics. Dr. Cartwright saw the flaw in my linkage between Darwin’s science and eugenics:
Egnor has now contradicted himself because, as educated people should know, eugenics was a program, favored by many early geneticists, to selectively breed more fit humans (or better described as breeding less less fit humans), similar to how farmers had breed more fit livestock. Eugenics is therefore artificial selection and, according to Egnor’s dichotomy, absolutely distinct from Darwin’s natural selection.
Darwin’s theory asserts that all natural biological complexity arose by non-purposeful variation and natural selection. It doesn’t apply to purposeful variation or purposeful selection, which are designed.
Dr. Cartwright is right. The experimental selection of "desirable" bacterial variants is bacterial eugenics, using the same empirical principles that eugenicists applied to human breeding. Eugenics is human breeding, and is every bit as much of a misapplication of Darwin’s theory as are Dr. Cartwright’s examples of bacterial breeding.
Dr. Cartwright’s critique is sound science, but injudicious rhetoric. There's an obvious link between Dr. Cartwright’s scientific error and the eugenicists’ scientific error. Darwin’s theory was not the scientific basis for the discovery of the genetic code or for the biotechnology industry, any more that Darwin’s theory was the scientific basis for eugenics.
Modern eugenics arose from a philosophical proposition. The basis for eugenics was philosophical materialism, which denied the inherent dignity and sanctity of every human life. Denial of transcendent ethical standards eventually leaves "because we can" as the sole ethical standard. The basis for the elucidation of the genetic code and for the biotechnology industry was biological reverse engineering, microbiology, and molecular biology. Darwin’s science played no role in either.
Even After Darwin vs Design Conference is Over Controversy Rumbles Along
The Darwin vs Design conference last weekend at SMU in Dallas stirred up quite a debate in the Dallas media, and especially on the SMU campus. A number of articles have appeared in the SMU Daily Campus attacking Discovery Institute and ID, and today Anika Smith and Sarah Levy, the student who helped to organize the conference, have a very good response.
I recently noted that the article “The Positive Case for Design” had been translated into Spanish. Well, now it’s been translated into Italian (see here) over at Progetto Cosmo. Check out their website for more information on intelligent design in Italian!
Airbrushing the Evidence for Reverse Engineering in Biology: Darwinist Makes Wikipedia Reference ‘Disappear’
In the Soviet Union, censors would routinely make out-of-favor party leaders disappear from photographs. In this photograph, Trotsky was made "photographic history" not too long before he was made "history" in a more tangible sense.
Darwinists, who are scientific, rather than political, materialists, have an affinity for airbrushing as well. When sneering, name-calling, and obfuscation don’t make the evidence go away, Darwinists just wipe it away. A recent example of Darwinian airbrushing is worth noting.
I recently noted that the discovery of the structure and function of DNA was a good example of reverse engineering in biology and that the discovery of DNA had nothing to do with Darwin’s theory. Reverse engineering in biology is an inference to design, even if the inference is implicit and not explicit, and even if the scientist using the reverse engineering methodology doesn’t agree with the philosophical implications of the design inference. Much of modern molecular biology is the reverse engineering of biological molecules.
To illustrate my point, I linked to the "Reverse Engineering" entry in Wikipedia, which had a nice succinct definition:
Reverse engineering... is the process of discovering the technological principles of a device or object or system through analysis of its structure, function and operation…Reverse engineering is essentially science, using the scientific method. Sciences such as biology and physics can be seen as reverse engineering of biological 'machines' and the physical world respectively (emphasis mine)
.My post was published on Evolution News and Views on April 3rd.
On April 4th, the Wikipedia reference to biological reverse engineering was airbrushed out. It was changed to:
Reverse engineering … is the process of discovering the technological principles of a device or object or system through analysis of its structure, function and operation. It often involves taking something (e.g. a mechanical device, an electronic component, a software program) apart and analyzing its workings in detail, usually to try to make a new device or program that does the same thing without copying anything from the original. The verb form is to reverse engineer.
This was airbrushed:
Reverse engineering is essentially science, using the scientific method. Sciences such as biology and physics can be seen as reverse engineering of biological 'machines' and the physical world respectively
.
The biological reverse engineering analogy was part of the original definition, and had been present until the day that I linked to it in my post. Someone (perhaps a Darwinist?) went to work with an eraser.
The history of the redactions shows that "DrLeeBot" deleted the phrase applying reverse engineering to the scientific method. He wrote, "Removed reference to scientific method; the analog [sic] is too abstract to be worth mentioning."
Looking a little further, is seems that DrLeeBot has an agenda. He has repeatedly modified Wikipedia articles on "pseudoscience" and modified articles on President Bush in ways that that make them more critical of the President.
Darwinists felt so threatened by my mundane observation that they actually airbrushed out the relevant part of the Wikipedia link for reverse engineering. This is how Darwinists debate. I made the simple point that much of modern molecular biology is biological reverse engineering, and that the implicit inference to design may be helpful in guiding biological research. Their reply: delete the evidence.
What are Darwinists afraid of? Intelligent Design scientists try to help people see the evidence. Darwinists are afraid they'll see it.
Mooney and Nisbet Recommend: Drop the Science, Up the Rhetoric
Over at ARN’s Literature Update, David Tyler has an excellent post titled “An Orwellian framing of the debate about evolution and ID,” reporting on an article in Science by Chris Mooney and Matthew Nisbet, who tell scientists how to discuss controversial scientific issues. This same pair wrote the cover article for the influential media journal Columbia Journalism Review just before the Dover trial in September, 2005, encouraging news media to avoid “a quest to achieve ‘balance’” when covering evolution. They even stated, “newspaper editors should think twice about assigning reporters who are fresh to the evolution issue and allowing them to default to the typical strategy frame, carefully balancing ‘both sides’ of the issue.” We have noted that this provides unambiguous “Proof that the Media is Biased Against ID.” Mooney and Nisbet’s latest piece continues the trend of encouraging scientists to dumb down science and avoid lending any legitimacy to viewpoints which might lie outside of the scientific consensus. They assume that neo-Darwinism is correct and suggest that scientists avoid “science-intensive responses” but should rather “frame” the debate over evolution in terms of “’public accountability’ that focus on the misuse of tax dollars, ‘economic development’ that highlight the negative repercussions for communities embroiled in evolution battles, and ‘social progress’ that define evolution as a building block for medical advances.” The problem for Darwinists is that all of these arguments, when properly “framed,” would lead one to support teaching Darwin objectively, and not to their viewpoint:
(1) “Economic development”: By far the largest negative repercussions for communities embroiled in debates over how to teach evolution are those inflicted by the pro-Darwin-only legal groups like Americans United for the Separation for Church and State or the ACLU, which force small school districts into hundred-thousand to million dollar settlements because they dared to question Darwin. Moreover, the root-cause of community angst over how evolution is taught is caused by those who insist upon teaching such a sensitive and important topic as biological origins in a one-sided, dogmatic, pro-evolution-only fashion; it is not caused by those who recommend teaching evolution in an objective, balanced fashion. After all, polls consistently show that a supermajority of Americans support teaching evolution objectively. Who is really going against what the people want here and causing community strife?
(2) “Public accountability”: Education is supposed to educate, not indoctrinate. Good educators who are accountable to the public will recognize that the vast majority of public wants both scientific strengths and weaknesses of evolution taught in schools, because that is both good science and good education. Good educators will us not use tax dollars to teach evolution dogmatically, but will rather teach students more about evolution, not the one-sided watered-down pro-evolution-only science which is so prevalent in classrooms.
(3) “Social progress”: Good educators will teach students about both the uses and misuses of evolution, not excluding the horrific and significant history in our country of using Darwinism to justify eugenics. This should be done if for no other reason than helping to ensure it does not happen again. Moreover, good scientists will inform people about where evolution gives insight and where it doesn’t, so that students realistically understand how to solve vital medical problems.
For example, we need to train students how to solve problems like fighting super-bugs caused by anti-biotic resistant bacteria. As neurosurgeon Michael Egnor explains regarding Darwinism and solving anti-biotic resistance:
Microbiology tells us that bacterial populations are heterogeneous. Individual bacteria differ from one another. Molecular biology tells us that some bacteria have molecular mechanisms by which they can survive antibiotics. Molecular genetics tells us how these resistance mechanisms are passed to other bacteria and through generations of bacteria. Pharmacology helps us design new antibiotics that circumvent the bacterial defenses.
What does Darwinism add to the sciences of microbiology, molecular biology, molecular genetics, and pharmacology? Darwinism tells us that antibiotic-resistant bacteria survive exposure to antibiotics because of natural selection. That is, bacteria survive antibiotics that they're not sensitive to, so non-killed bacteria will eventually outnumber killed bacteria. That’s it.
If we just teach students "Darwinism is the total answer to solving anti-biotic resistance," students may be missing many key pieces of this important puzzle. Moreover, as Jerry Coyne stated in Nature:
…if truth be told, evolution hasn't yielded many practical or commercial benefits. Yes, bacteria evolve drug resistance, and yes, we must take countermeasures, but beyond that there is not much to say. Evolution cannot help us predict what new vaccines to manufacture because microbes evolve unpredictably. But hasn't evolution helped guide animal and plant breeding? Not very much. Most improvement in crop plants and animals occurred long before we knew anything about evolution, and came about by people following the genetic principle of 'like begets like'. Even now, as its practitioners admit, the field of quantitative genetics has been of little value in helping improve varieties. Future advances will almost certainly come from transgenics, which is not based on evolution at all."
(Jerry Coyne, "Selling Darwin: Does it matter whether evolution has any commercial applications?," reviewing The Evolving World: Evolution in Everyday Life by David P. Mindell, in Nature, Vol 442:983-984 (August 31, 2006).)
Finally, David Tyler writes in response to Mooney and Nisbet’s piece:
These two communicators realise that they are advancing ideas that could be seen as manipulation of the media to keep the masses submissive. They conclude: ‘Some readers may consider our proposals too Orwellian, preferring to safely stick to the facts. Yet scientists must realize that facts will be repeatedly misapplied and twisted in direct proportion to their relevance to the political debate and decision-making. In short, as unnatural as it might feel, in many cases, scientists should strategically avoid emphasizing the technical details of science when trying to defend it.’ The fundamental problem evident here is that the authors have failed to grasp that all three of their illustrative cases relate to contested issues within science, as well as having major ramifications for society. … The authors are seeing these controversies through their personal ideological "frame". They qualify their advice on strategy using these words: "without misrepresenting scientific information". However, their analysis of the controversial issues reveals that they have already misrepresented scientific information - by failing to acknowledge the reality of scientific debate and by linking dissent only to political and religious agendas.
Tyler concludes: “This is a sure sign of Orwellian control police and a sad day for science.” It’s also another instance of Darwinists attempting to dumb down evolution and fudge their arguments in order to de-legitimize the viewpoints of scientists who hold viewpoints outside of the consensus.
Mr. Lemonick, Michael Faraday, and James Clerk Maxwell
Mike Lemonick, Time Magazine’s senior science writer and credulous Darwinist, has a habit of writing things that make even his Darwinist friends cringe.
He recently posted an essay sympathetic with Darwinists who are trying to shut down the Southern Methodist University Darwin vrs. Design conference. He called the Discovery Institute all kinds of names, including "propagandists" and purveyors of “half truths [that] will actually make people more ignorant."
Mr. Lemonick made this remarkable statement:
If the DI had been around when people thought lightning was stuff the gods threw when angry, we might still not have electricity.
Let’s ask: what role did the inference to design play for scientists who gave us electricity? The 19th century physicists whose research formed the basis for our modern understanding of electromagnetism were Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell.
Michael Faraday was a devoutly religious Christian. He understood his life as a search for God’s design in nature. He was a member of Sandemanian church, an offshoot of the Church of Scotland. Sandemanians were considered particularly fervent believers, even by Victorian standards. Faraday was an elder in the church, and a sermon he delivered was recorded by his friend and biographer J.H. Gladstone:
It [is] his turn to preach. On two sides of a card he has previously sketched out his sermon with the illustrative texts, but the congregation does not see the card, only a little Bible in his hand, the pages of which he turns quickly over, as, fresh from an honest heart, there flows a discourse full of devout thought, clothed largely in the language of Scripture.
Michael Faraday's life was a seamless blend of science and faith, and his life of passionate Christian belief would equal or exceed that of many of the scientists who have signed the Discovery Institute's Dissent from Darwin List. Faraday would be appalled to see his work used as an example of science divorced from faith in God and from the inference to design in nature. He believed passionately in both. If he lived today, Mr. Lemonick would derisively label him a "fundamentalist" and a purveyor of “half truths [that] will actually make people more ignorant."
James Clerk Maxwell, a devout Presbyterian, was also an intensely religious man. In a letter to the Bishop of Gloucester and Bristol, Maxwell explained his view of the unity of faith and science and the design he saw in the natural world:
At the same time I think that each individual man should do all he can to impress his own mind with the extent, the order, and the unity of the universe, and should carry these ideas with him as he reads such passages as the 1st Chap. of the Ep. to Colossians (see Lightfoot on Colossians, p.182), just as enlarged conceptions of the extent and unity of the world of life may be of service to us in reading Psalm viii, Heb ii 6, etc.
Like Faraday, Maxwell saw God’s design everywhere in his science. He explicitly believed that God's design was evident in nature, and that it was his job as a scientist to study the design. Like Faraday, he would be appalled to see his work used to advance scientific materialism. If Maxwell lived today, Mr. Lemonick would dismiss him a creationist "propagandist."
It’s ironic that Mr. Lemonick would choose electromagnetism as a vignette for the design inference in science. The two scientific pioneers of classical electromagnetism, Faraday and Maxwell, were particularly devout Christians who inferred design everywhere in nature. They believed that God designed everything—including electricity. Their approach to science was pure design inference, undiluted by atheism or materialism. Contra Mr. Lemonick, we have electricity because of men who believed in God and in the evident design in nature.
Mr. Lemonick misunderstands the philosophical origins of modern science. The Scientific Revolution emerged within, and only within, Judeo-Christian civilization, and nearly all of the scientists who gave us modern science—-Copernicus, Pascal, Galileo, Newton, Kepler, Leibniz, Harvey, Vesalius, Linnaeus, Lavoisier, Mendel, Pasteur, as well as Faraday and Maxwell, were devout Christians who inferred design in all of nature. They worked entirely from the design inference.
Mr. Lemonick’s misunderstanding of the history of electromagnetism, as well as the history and philosophy of science, is on a par with his misunderstanding of the Darwinism/ID debate. There’s reason for his blindness: Mr. Lemonick has an ideological axe to grind. He detests any approach to science that crosses the boundaries set by scientific materialism, and he wants science scrubbed of any hint of transcendence.
Science, and all philosophy, have a basis in culture. Western science is rooted in Judeo-Christian culture. If Mr. Lemonick seeks a culture that enforces the monopoly of materialistic science stripped of any inference to God or of any inference to design, there are places in the world in which materialistic science is de rigueur and de jure. North Korea, for example.
I've mentioned this great site before, but Ciencia Alternativa has many ID resources in Spanish. Their latest addition is El Argumento Positivo de Diseño (The Positive Case for Design). Take a look at their Artículos page for a full listing of resources.
In recent years, a number of states have apologized for their role in promoting the Social Darwinist crusade known as “eugenics” through forced sterilization laws. In “It’s never too late to say you’re sorry,” writer Knute Berger of the internet newspaper Crosscut is calling on Washington state to apologize for its forced sterilization law, noting that Washington was the second state to adopt such a law. He’s right. Washington state—and other states—should apologize for their role in promoting eugenics. This is a sad and disturbing chapter in American history, and citizens need to know about it (although the new Kansas State Board of Education seems to think otherwise).
Berger is also right that it is far too easy for us today to dismiss the eugenics experience as fringe science promoted by a few crackpots. In fact, eugenics was the consensus view of the scientific community for many years during the early part of the twentieth century:
We're generally horrified by that idea now — especially following the full application of eugenics practices by the Nazis — but in the early 20th century, the idea not only had mainstream support, including the endorsement of the U.S. Supreme Court, but was on the cutting edge of progressive ideas for maintaining public health and welfare. Hitler said U.S. eugenics and immigration laws gave him ideas for how to cleanse Germany.
And there is a relevant lesson to be drawn from eugenics for today's disputes over science and public policy:
There are many unsettled issues, and it's also fair to say that even scientific consensus is open to challenge. Again, eugenics, now seen as at best crackpot and at worst monstrous and genocidal, was once not only mainstream but viewed as liberally enlightened. (emphasis added)
2007 is the centennial of the world’s first forced sterilization law passed in the name of eugenics. In commemoration of that event, I will be giving a free public lecture on the topic on Monday, April 16 at 8:00 pm at Seattle Pacific University in Demaray Hall 150. The lecture is sponsored by the Department of Political Science and Geography at SPU and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. My lecture will trace the Social Darwinist roots of eugenics, describe the impact on public policy, and explore the lessons we can learn for the future.
The SMU physics department went to the trouble of housing this fun little site, where they’ve even compiled a list of news articles referring to the event and pithy responses to ID proponents (i.e., they’ve resorted to calling us “IDiots”).
It’s worth the quick glance it takes to see how reactionary these responses are, which may explain how some SMU students, like the anthropology major who wrote in the student newspaper today, have come to think that the Discovery Institute “preaches a religious message masked in a capsule of pseudoscience.”
That student went on to accuse Discovery of corrupting science. Such an accusation prompts the question: what is pure science, according to what this student has learned? It seems the answer lies in what you find on this website: Pure and undefiled science according SMU is to ridicule minority viewpoints and show disrespect to your opponents.
Is it any wonder that students brashly display their ignorance of intelligent design when their professors refuse to seriously address the issue?
Ignorance Is Bliss When It Comes to Many Opponents of ID
A student at Southern Methodist University (SMU) has provided more evidence for why there needs to be events like tonight’s Darwin v. Design conference on college campuses. In today's campus newspaper, anthropology student Ben Wells offers a jeremiad against the purported evils of Discovery Institute and intelligent design. Unfortunately, his article is so incredibly off-base that all he ends up doing is displaying his complete ignorance of the topic. Not that he is alone. Last week, journalist Lee Cullum wrote a similarly ill-informed opinion piece for the Dallas Morning News. The problem for many critics of intelligent design is that they are so sure they are right, they don’t bother to read the people they are denouncing. As a result, they end up attacking a straw man rather than refuting the actual claims made by ID proponents.
That is why we get such inane coments as:
this [Discovery] Institute, which is on our campus, this weekend does not seek to debate ideas in an academic, scientific or even rational setting... The claims they make, claims based purely on religious or supernatural grounds, can NOT be tested in the material world.
Mr. Wells alleges that Discovery Institute “does not seek to debate ideas in an academic, scientific or even rational setting.” That must be why we invited the biology, geological sciences, and anthropology departments at his own university to send representatives to our event tonight to share the platform and present their objections to intelligent design. (They declined.) That also must be why ID scholars write academic books for such publishers as Michigan State University Press and Cambridge University Press and technical articles for such science journals as Protein Science and the Journal of Molecular Biology. (For a bibliography of peer-reviewed and peer-edited scholarly publications supportive of intelligent design, see here.) If Mr. Wells truly believes that academic publications--and invitations to debate other scholars on college campuses--somehow constitutes proof that we do not want to "debate ideas in an academic, scientific or even rational setting," then I wonder what type of evidence would persuade him otherwise?!
As for his assertion that the claims made by ID proponents are “based purely on religious or supernatural grounds,” I guess that is why Michael Behe (a practicing biochemist) devotes most of his book Darwin’s Black Box to detailing the intricate biochemical evidence of design; or why Jay Richards and Guillermo Gonzalez (the latter a practicing astronomer) go into such detail about the cosmological data supporting design in The Privileged Planet; or why philosopher of science Stephen Meyer presents in such detail the empirical evidence relating to the development of new genetic information in his peer-reviewed biology journal article on “The Origin of Biological Information and the Higher Taxonomic Categories.” Observational evidence supplies one of the foundations of the design inference in nature. (Also contrary to Mr. Wells, intelligent design is testable in precisely the same ways as Darwinian evolution. For more information, see here and here and here).
Alas, I seriously doubt whether either Mr. Wells or Ms. Cullum has read any of the numerous academic and scientific publications written by scientists and other scholars supportive of intelligent design. I e-mailed both of them asking what they have read by ID proponents, but thus far I have received no response. Their silence is telling. For many critics of ID, it is all too clear that ignorance is bliss. Rather engage in a genuine exchange of ideas, they are content with attacking straw men and tilting at windmills.
Yale Darwinist Dr. Steven Novella Takes on the "Rubes"
Dr. Steven Novella doesn’t think much of people who disagree with him about Darwinism. Dr. Novella, a Yale neurologist, assistant professor and specialist in neuromuscular disorders, is also a ‘skeptic’ and co-founder and president of the New England Skeptical Society. He’s quite unskeptical about Darwinism:
…evolutionary theory is complex. Evolution is a beautiful and subtle theory – one of my favorite scientific theories to study. I have spent years reading about it, learning from the best like Dawkins, Leakey, and Gould…
He took issue recently with those of us who doubt the adequacy of Darwin’s theory to account for all natural biological complexity:
…there is enough complexity in all of this that if someone smart and eloquent – like ID’ers Behe or Demski [sic] – want to create confusion they easily can. They pull an intellectual three card monte and the evolutionary rubes buy it.
I’m an "evolutionary rube" myself. Dr. Novella insists:
This is not an excuse for Dr. Egnor’s ignorance – he threw his hat into the ring, he deserves what he gets. He should have had the proper humility to stay out.
Actually, all I did was ask a question: how much biologically relevant information can Darwin’s mechanism of chance and necessity actually generate? I didn’t settle for hand-waving or for reassurances that "Darwin’s theory is a fact." I wanted a measurement of biological complexity, with empirical verification, in a way that was meaningful to biology. I never got an answer to my question.
Nonetheless, Dr. Novella is disdainful of Darwin-doubting "evolutionary rubes" who lack his immersion in the field:
Now I don’t blame the rank and file for not having read dozens of books and hundreds of articles on evolution. But I do blame them for thinking they deserve to have an opinion if they haven’t…
It seems that those of use who "don’t deserve to have an opinion" also haven’t been thinking the right way:
Also, it is obvious in their arguments that they do not have a proper mental image of what genetic information is like.
He tells us that "a proper mental image" of genetic information is books:
Each time this volume of books is copied there is the potential to make mistakes. Because of the complexity, the arrangement of paragraphs in a chapter can change, altering the meaning of the chapter in some way. Entire chapters that are active can become skipped, and vice versa. Entire chapters can be copied twice, and rarely entire volumes can be duplicated. Imagine the text of these books. A change might cause a sentence to go from “today is a sunny day” to “today is a foggy day” (remember, in this language every possible three letter combination has meaning – there are no nonsense words).
With a reasonable working model of genetics, it is much easier to imagine how shuffling around information, duplicating, and altering the information could easily result in meaningful and even useful new information.
Distancing himself from his literary metaphor (it's hard for rubes to relate), he switches to a farm-machinery metaphor. Dr. Novella explains how Darwin’s theory of chance and necessity can account for all natural biological complexity:
Evolution is like a two-cycle engine: mutations increase the amount of information and then natural selection gives that information specificity.
Dr. Novella is missing a much better example of random mutation and natural selection that’s not metaphorical at all. Cancer is a test of Darwin’s theory. Cancer is real biological evolution by random mutation and natural selection, writ fast. There’s no reason to invoke encyclopedia typos or tractor engines in order to understand what "chance and necessity" can do to a living system. Brain tumors are perfect little Novellian "two-cycle engines" nestled inside the skull, "random mutations" coming out the ears, and "natural selection" like there’s no tomorrow (excuse the metaphors). Brain tumors are constantly generating new biological variation, and they are avatars of natural selection. They provide a tremendous spectrum of variation, from "variation jet-engines" like malignant glioblastoma multiforme to "variation tortoises" like benign pilocytic astrocytomas. Cancer wards are full of patients brimming with "two-stroke engines" of evolutionary change.
Dr. Novella, again:
…it is [easy] to imagine how shuffling around information, duplicating, and altering the information could easily result in meaningful and even useful new information.
The best real biological test of "shuffling around information, duplicating, and altering the information" is cancer. According to Dr. Novella’s reasoning, brain tumors ought to be generating quite a bit of "meaningful and even useful new information." Better neuroanatomy and better neurophysiology ought to be popping up "easily." Better frontal lobes and cognition, from cancer. Better temporal lobes and memory, from cancer. Better cerebellums and coordination, from cancer. If random mutations and natural selection—Dr. Novella’s "two stroke engine"—is the source of all functional integrated biological complexity, brain tumors ought to help our brains evolve in some way.
Perhaps Dr. Novella has data that show real evolutionary improvements in the brain caused by brain tumors. If he has, he should show us.
I'm just a rube, not a Darwinist from Yale. But I’ve never seen cancer make a brain better.
As Rob Crowther noted earlier, Dr. Ronald K. Wetherington, anthropology professor at Southern Methodist University, has penned an article in the SMU Daily Campus defending himself and other faculty who object to a conference on Darwin versus Design that will be held on the SMU campus this weekend. Wetherington wants to assure readers that he and other objecting faculty are all for debate, so long as it's in the proper time and place. In fact, he notes that the university actually sponsored an evolution debate back in 1992.
In 1992, mind you! Wow, how could we have forgotten that? Congratulations! It's just too bad that that the SMU students of today were not even in grade school back then.
Discovery Institute scientists offered a real debate, to take place this Friday night, entirely on the science issues of Darwin's theory and the alternative of intelligent design. We sent an invitation to the heads of the departments of biology, geological sciences, and Wetherington's own department of anthropology. Wetherington's department declined due to a scheduling conflict, but the other two did not respond at all. Now perhaps we know why. After all, they had that debate on campus 15 years ago.
The title of the article by Prof. Wetherington is "Free Speech versus License." The professor is for the former, but against the latter. Free speech, you see, is what happens when a university lets me speak. License is when they let you speak.
Are we all clear now?
Good, so please don't raise this subject again until 2022.
There have been a couple of stories out in recent days about the pope’s views on science and religion as revealed in a new book. Given their bias and preoccupation, it probably was inevitable that some in the media would try to discern more than is present in a 2006 paper of the Holy Father’s that runs in a new German language book. Largely missing is the context. In case you forgot, last September, as he does each fall, Pope Benedict XVI met with his former theology students and discussed a topic of mutual interest. Two years ago the topic was Islam and the West; this year it was science and religion. The meeting, held at Castel Gondolfo, was well-covered in the media and the papers that were delivered were later turned into the present German language volume. (Almost all the meeting participants, understandably, were German speakers, having studied under the pope when he was Fr. Dr. Ratzinger.)
The media, of course, wanted to know what the pontiff and others had said about intelligent design, but ID was not the topic of the meeting. Philosophy, rather, was the focus. Hence, the breathless report by Reuters now that the paper by the pope fails to back ID is, well, silly.
Here is how our friend and former colleague (now at Acton Institute) Dr. Jay Richards aptly describes it:
In reading all the buzz about the pope’s recent statements on the nature of science and religion (see "Pope says science too narrow to explain creation," Reuters, April 11 2007), I suspect there's a translation problem here. Reading between the lines, it looked like Benedict said some pretty strong things. Of course he's challenging scientism and calling for a broader concept of reason than is contained in experimental science. That's easy for classically informed philosophers to understand. But you can be sure that exactly 0% of reporters and 1% of readers will understand that. What every reporter will take away is that all this talk about God, purpose, and design are private, since in modern parlance, only ‘science’ constitutes public knowledge. Thus the story ends:
’This ... inevitably leads to a question that goes beyond science ... where did this rationality come from?’ he asked. Answering his own question, he said it came from the ‘creative reason’ of God.’
Thus is the dispute domesticated into categories acceptable to the secularist. God gets to be discussed in conversations that go ‘beyond science,’ along with fairies and the Easter bunny.
This issue is just not that complicated, despite the sociological pressures to keep the fog machines going at all times. Either some or all of the history and complexity of life are the product of design or they're not. Either that design is discernible or it's not. Evolution is either purely random or it's not. Not even God can direct an undirected process. Complicated discussions about the definition of ‘philosophy,’ ’reason,’ and ‘science’ are dull blades. The reader is thus left to vaguely believe something that I'm sure is not true: that the Pope endorses a two-truths view, according to which Darwinism works as ‘science’ (narrowly defined) but theological types get to talk about God as long as they call it philosophy and promise not to make trouble for the Darwinists.
Kurt Vonnegut, RIP: A Thoughtful Skeptic of Darwinism
Noted novelist Kurt Vonnegut died on Wednesday at age 84. Although Vonnegut described himself as a secular humanist, last year on NPR he voiced his skepticism of Darwinism. Calling our human bodies “miracles of design,” he faulted scientists for “pretending they have the answer as how we got this way when natural selection couldn’t possibly have produced such machines.” When asked whether this meant he “would favor teaching intelligent design in the classroom,” he replied:
If I were a physics teacher or a science teacher, it’d be on my mind all the time as to how the hell we really got this way. It’s a perfectly natural human thought and, okay, if you go into the science class you can’t think this?
For a transcript of his remarks and further information, see this post by Jonathan Witt from last year.
The Physics Department at SMU criticizes intelligent design as bad science and has a number of invidious things to say about the supposed motivations of ID proponents. In a campus bulletin it then suggests that, in contrast, there will be a "good science" program on Friday—a showing of the film Inherit the Wind! Apparently, they are not joking. The film (and the play that preceded it) is a 1950s-era attack on McCarthyism. The Scopes Trial is roughly a metaphor for anti-communist hysteria. The film as a whole is not history at all, since (for example) it seriously scrambles and exaggerates actual events. A few years ago Ed Larson's award-winning book Summer for the Gods explained the real and very different history. (And you Darwinists can trust Ed; he's a Darwinist, too).
So, if this fictional film is the Physics Department's idea of "good science," that would help explain why the SMU protestors can't think straight about the issues that will be addressed at the Discovery event this weekend.
Some SMU Faculty May Need a Refresher Course on What Their University Stands For
A helpful correspondent directed us to the following statement on the website of Southern Methodist University, the location of the upcoming Darwin v. Design conference this Friday and Saturday:
Founded in 1911 by what is now The United Methodist Church, SMU opened in 1915 with support from Dallas leaders. The University is nonsectarian in its teaching and committed to freedom of inquiry. (emphasis added)
SMU faculty who want the Darwin v. Design conference banned from their campus might benefit from re-reading--and heeding--this statement.
Fifteen years ago debating intelligent design at SMU was done with "no intimidation" and "no censorship." So, a decade and a half ago, intelligent design was discussed on campus allegedly without threat of censorship. How many times has that happened since then? Not so many.
The truth of this may be hard for some at SMU to grasp because, frankly, truth is something a bit more elusive, according to SMU professor Ronald Wetherington in a piece published in the SMU Daily Campus. Truth, according to Wetherington, "grows and changes." Perhaps it is subjective to the consensus of the era?
Regardless of what professor Wetherington thinks about science, truth, or intelligent design, at the end of the day there is still digital code in DNA and molecular machines in cells that point to intelligent design. The evidence will win out in the end.
Darwinist blogger Orac recently took issue with my observation that Darwin’s theory plays no important role in medicine. Orac, a surgical oncologist, insisted that Darwin’s theory is very helpful in modern cancer research. He wrote:
Now, using the principles of evolution, Maley et al have found one potential indicator of which patients with Barrett's esophagus will progress to cancer and which will not. Basically, they adapted a diversity measure from ecology and evolution known as the Shannon diversity index. I'm going to have to leave it to my evolutionary biology colleagues to tell me more whether this was appropriately done, but for purposes of this paper the authors treated each sample ot as a single organism but as thousands of cells. Diversity was measured as the number of distinct clones of cells within the specimen. Using various measures of genetic diversity, including loss of heterozygosity (LOH), microsatellite instability, and differences in chromatin content and telomere length, the number of distinct clones in each patient was estimated and the Shannon index calculated. These were then correlated with the occurrence of cancer. The investigators also controlled for established genetic risk factors, such as loss or mutation of the p53 tumor suppressor gene.
Darwin’s contribution to the understanding of cancerous transformation in Barrett’s esophagus is negligible. Orac asserts that the authors treated each tissue sample not as “a single organism” but as “thousands of cells.” That’s not new. The view that tumors are heterogeneous aggregates of “thousands of cells” dates to Virchow, in the mid-19th century. All pathologists think of tumors (and pre-cancerous tissue) as thousands of cells, and no oncologist treats tumors as “a single organism.” Chemotherapy and radiation therapy are designed with the view that the tumor is a heterogeneous collection of cells. That’s why radiation therapy is usually delivered in fractionated doses over a period of time, to destroy cells that are cycling through intervals of sensitivity and insensitivity. Is the view that pre-cancerous lesions are “thousands of cells” and not just a “single organism” really novel to Orac, who is a surgical oncologist? Of course not.
We have known since the 19th century that abnormal “diversity” of cells makes cancerous transformation more likely. This is the traditional basis for the microscopic classification of tumors as benign or malignant. Maley, et al have applied Shannon’s diversity index to counting genetic clones of cells in pre-cancerous lesions. The more genetic diversity, the more likely the lesion is to become cancerous. Their statistical method may provide more reliable predictions than the traditional less-quantitative methods, but the basic concepts are very old, and they gain little from Darwin’s theory.
Yet Darwin’s theory is related to cancer, in a very important way. Darwin asserted that all natural integrated biological complexity arose by random variation and natural selection. Cancer does seem to grow in accordance with Darwin’s mechanism. The “variation” of cancer cells seems random, and cancer cells are certainly “naturally selected,” in the tautological sense that replicating cells eventually outnumber non-replicating cells. Darwin’s theory can be applied to cancer, trivially.
The converse is more interesting: cancer can be applied to Darwin’s theory. Cancer is a Darwinian process, unlike the examples of experimental molecular design and artificial selection that Darwinists often cite inappropriately as applications of Darwin’s theory. Darwinists claim that “random variation and natural selection” is a model of cancer growth, and they’re right.
However, Darwinists also claim the antithesis. Darwinists claim that all functional biological complexity—the seamless integration of cells, tissues, organs, and systems—arose by random mutation and natural selection. Yet cancer demonstrates the destructive power of random mutation and natural selection. Cancer cells don’t make better organs and they don’t create new integrated physiological systems.
The evolutionary biology literature is generally tangential to Darwin’s central claim that all natural biological complexity arose by chance and necessity. It is the cancer literature that actually addresses Darwin’s mechanism—random variation and natural selection—as applied to functional biological complexity. It is a model of biological disintegration.
Cancer is the clearest empirical test of Darwin’s theory. Tumors, without exception, degrade biological function and integration. Darwin’s mechanism of “random mutation and natural selection” never gives rise to life. It destroys it.
Dupré fears that Rosenberg’s adherence to strict physicalist reductionism (“Darwinian Reductionism”), where “everything is ultimately determined by what happens at the physical level—and that this entails that the mind is ‘nothing but’ the brain,” is based upon a failure to understand why most philosophers of biology have abandoned such reductionism rather than a new revelation. As Dupré points out, most philosophers have abandoned this view because, among other reasons, genes have a “many/many” relationship with phenotype.
More specifically, his [Rosenberg’s] portrayal of the genome as a program directing development, which is the centerpiece of his reductionist account of biology, discloses a failure to appreciate the complex two-way interactions between the genome and its molecular environment that molecular biologists have been elaborating for the past several decades.
Dupré excoriates Rosenberg for thinking of natural selection as an actual physical law rather than mere differential death. (Natural selection is, of course, the latter and much more akin to the "Stuff Happens" bumper sticker on the TV version of Forrest Gump.) Finally, Dupré also goes after Rosenberg for thinking “genes literally embody a program that produces development,” for seemingly adhering to the notion that 95% of DNA is “mere junk,” and for not keeping very current on molecular biology. For more, see the rest of Dupré’s excellent but tough review “Is Biology Reducible to the Laws of Physics?”
Chapman and West in The Dallas Morning News: Why not Debate?
This morning's Dallas Morning News features a bold op-ed by Bruce Chapman and John West calling for critics at SMU to employ the method of Charles Darwin himself: engage in the discussion.
The article, "Are the Darwinists afraid to debate us," is a response to the SMU science professors who called on their university to ban the conference from campus.
Rather than "ludicrously comparing ID proponents to faith healers or even Holocaust-deniers," as one columnist did last week, Chapman and West suggest that critics of intelligent design "engage ID scholars in a serious discussion." They pointedly ask, "what is so frightening about allowing it [the evidence for design] to be heard at SMU?"
While critics at SMU declined to engage in a dialogue with ID scholars at the Darwin vs. Design conference this weekend, Chapman and West are not surprised:
Unfortunately, this behavior is all too common among defenders of evolutionary theory. They publicly disparage intelligent design (often showing through their comments that they know very little about what it actually proposes), but they refuse to engage in genuine dialogue.
What a different approach from that modeled by Darwin himself, who humbly and patiently responded to objections to his theory and who frankly acknowledged that "a fair result can be obtained only by fully stating and balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each question."
What are today's Darwinists so afraid of?
It's a question that more people at SMU might want to consider.
The published letters of Charles Darwin reveal a man who debated about design in a manner that seems “more tolerant and humble” than one encounters in the current debate, says Anthony Barnes in a book review in The Independent (U.K.). It could also be noted that Darwin was treated better by his critics 150 years ago than his followers—the dominant neo-Darwinists—treat their critics today.
Darwin himself obviously thought a lot about religion, but, like his successors, he had what seems like a rather puerile understanding of theology and philosophy. He told the American botanist Asa Gray that Darwin’s own nose, which he considered large and unattractive, was evidence against design. “Will you honestly tell me that the shape of my nose was ordained and guided by an intelligent cause?” he chided Gray.
The existence of what appears to be sub-optimal design is a sad argument that cannot be evaluated scientifically. There is nothing in the scientific question of design to suggest that the source of design had to have our particular understanding of optimal design in mind. What appears sub-optimal at one time (the appendix, for example) turns out later to have had serious functionality. Furthermore, considerations of beauty (noses, female girth, etc.) are often products of culture, not science. Flaws in nature, likewise, do not disprove design.
What a shame that Darwin’s faith and his knowledge of philosophy was not up to the quality of his scientific inquiry.
Recently on Panda’s Thumb, Darwinist and biologist Reed Cartwright takes issue with my observation that Darwin’s theory had nothing to do with Watson and Crick’s discovery of the structure of DNA and the genetic code:
Egnor is completely and utterly wrong. This is a total distortion of the actual research that went into determining the genetic code. The research program of Crick, Brenner, Benzer, and colleagues relied heavily on applying Darwinian principles (random mutation and selection) to model organisms. Specifically, they isolated mutations in bacterial viruses (phages), and then used selection to find revertants under controlled experimental conditions. With such data, Crick et al. (1961) were able to demonstrate that each residue in a protein was encoded by a non-overlapping triplet of nucleic-acid residues. In another example, with the same system Benner et al. (1967) used selection experiments on mutations to argue that UGA did not code for an amino acid and specifically argued that it must have an important function “because otherwise natural selection would have certainly allocated it to an amino acid.”…So in spite of Egnor’s egnorance, Darwin’s ideas were not only a help but very essential “in decoding the genetic language of DNA.”
He continues:
Now the biotech industry is founded on the application of Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Selection is an essential part of the process that creates transgenic organisms, like bacteria that produce human insulin. Humans are unable to create transgenic organisms directly, instead they use recombination DNA technology, which randomly creates transgenic organisms from building blocks provided by the researcher. The result is a population of organisms, in which a small minority contains the desired transgenic trait. The researcher then uses Darwin’s mechanism, selection, to evolve a population that is enriched for the desired trait. And voila [sic], with what to someone like Dr. Egnor must seem like wizardry, a population of bacteria can now produce human insulin, enriching and saving the lives of millions, all thanks to Charles Darwin.
Dr. Cartwright is mistaken. Darwin asserted that all natural biological complexity arose by random undesigned variation and natural selection. The intentional alteration and intentional selection of microorganisms is a nice example of designed variation and artificial selection. Dr. Cartwright's application of Darwin's theory to intentional design and breeding of bacteria is pseudo-Darwinism.
Pseudo-Darwinism—in this case, the attribution of Darwin's theory to design and artificial selection—is the antithesis of Darwin's theory. Crick and colleagues chose variants to study and artificially selected them. Their work was carefully planned. It wasn’t random and it wasn’t natural. The biotech industry breeds bacteria, combining molecular biology with ancient principles of breeding. Darwin learned from breeding; he didn't invent it or any of its principles. Darwin's theory is not a theory of design by artificial selection. It's a theory about biological change without design and without intentional selection. It has nothing to do with Crick's experiments or with the biotech industry.
Watson and Crick deduced the structure of the DNA molecule by designing models based on x-ray diffraction, Chargaff’s rules and physical chemistry of nucleotides. They used molecular biology and physical chemistry to establish the design specifications, and they built models to make sure they had the design right. Their technique was biological reverse engineering.
The subsequent discovery of the genetic code was reverse engineering as well, using molecular biology, physical chemistry, and carefully designed experiments. Crick and his colleagues discovered the “technological principles” of DNA, and learned to read the letters, words, sentences, punctuation, syntax, and semantics of heredity. It was a stunning vindication of the power of the inference to design in biology. The inference to design was implicit, not explicit, but even the implicit inference to design is a remarkable tool.
Dr. Cartwright, by inappropriately applying Darwin's theory of non-teleological change to the purposeful (designed) breeding of bacteria, inadvertently reveals much about modern Darwinism. Darwin published his provocative but evidence-lite theory in 1859. In the early 20th century, biologists developed Neo-Darwinism, which is the synthesis of Darwin’s theory and modern genetics. Neo-Darwinism dominated evolutionary biology until the last quarter of the 20th century. With the rise of biotechnology, Darwinists have claimed credit for the insights gained by molecular biologists and by the design and breeding of organisms.
This is the age of pseudo-Darwinism. Pseudo-Darwinism is the synthesis of Darwin’s theory and ‘anything you can think of.’ We have the synthesis of Darwin's theory and the discovery of the genetic code. We have the synthesis of Darwin’s theory and the biotech industry (transgenic organisms are designed and bred to produce human insulin—thanks to Darwin!). We have the synthesis of Darwin's theory and cancer research. We have the synthesis of Darwin’s theory and psychology (evolutionary psychology), Darwin’s theory and sociology (sociobiology), Darwin’s theory and culture (memes), Darwin’s theory and literature (literary Darwinism), Darwin’s theory and cosmology (multiverses), and Darwin’s theory and, well, everything (Dennett’s universal acid). None of these have anything to do with Darwin’s theory—the theory that all natural biological complexity arose by non-teleological variation and natural selection.
Pseudo-Darwinism is a theory for all seasons. It's the application of Darwinism to everything. It's panic, not insight. When an otherwise thoughtful and skilled scientist like Dr. Cartwright attributes insight gained by experimental design and artificial selection to Darwin’s theory of random variation and natural selection, you know that a paradigm is dying. It will be replaced, soon.
From the very beginning, the Darwin vs Design conferences organized by Discovery's Center for Science & Culture were always envisioned as educational endeavors. Many people don't understand what intellligent design is, and they don't understand what it is that scientists and scholars at the Discovery Institute are arguing for in the ongoing debate over Darwinian evolution and ID. These conferences are a chance for us to present some of the work and research we've done on these subjects.
When some of the science faculty at SMU demanded that the conference planned for their campus be cancelled we decided to issue an invitation to them to come and air their objections to intelligent design in public, and to ask their most challenging questions of the conference speakers. We made the necessary plans to drastically rearrange the first evening of our conference in order to accomodate this. That turns out to have been unnecessary as the faculty don't want to engage in public debate on the issue. Fine, we'll proceed as originally planned. Likewise at future conferences we will plan them as educational events primarily, but will remain open to considering options to include public debates.
These conferences were never planned to be debates. We do a LOT of debating with Darwinists. Just this week we were notified that PBS's Think Tank with Ben Wattenberg has posted a two-part series that features Dr. Stephen Meyer debating Dr. Michael Ruse.
CSC Fellow Dr. Paul Nelson recently was part of a panel discussion on The Agenda on Canadian TV. Dr. John West appeared in late March on panel with Dr. Ken Miller at a conference in New Hampshire. Dr. Jonathan Wells appeared on Uncommon Knowledge alongside Dr. Massimo Pigliucci to debate intelligent design. Dr. Stephen Meyer debated Dr. Peter Ward at a major debate event in Seattle last year. Last year Biola University hosted the "ID Under Fire" event where five ID scientists were challenged with questions from a panel of Darwinists including biologists from Cal State Fullerton and Cal Poly Pomona. And our Fellows and staff often appear on TV and radio programs alongside Darwinists to discuss intelligent design.
We often hear Darwinists claim that there are no peer-reviewed science articles that support intelligent design, which clearly is not true. Of course, they also used to say no scientists doubted Darwinian evolution. Back when the PBS mini-series "Evolution" was produced the NCSE's Eugenie Scott proclaimed that "virtually every reputable scientist in the world argues that evolution is good science." So, we produced a list of 100 scientists who doubted Darwinian evolution. That was 2001, and today there are well over 700 who have courageously stepped forward and expressed their professional skepticism about Darwin's theory. Saying you doubt Darwin is dangerous. Such doubts do not go unpunished, just ask Richard Sternberg.
Conducting research on intelligent design and writing about it can be even more damaging, which is one reason that there are so many young research scientists not yet secure enough in their careers to risk such repercussions. Yet, there is a growing number of peer-reviewed articles championing intelligent design. And CSC senior fellow William Dembski has highlighted yet another over at his blog Uncommon Dissent.
Late yesterday we received notice that the Anthropology department at SMU will not take us up on our invitation for a public dialogue about intelligent design and Darwinian evolution.
Robert Kemper, chair of the Anthropology department writes:
Thank you for your invitation to participate in the Friday night session of your conference. We appreciate your recognition of the value of dialogue on issues that have such opposing viewpoints. Unfortunately, previously scheduled events and prior commitments prevent our department from taking advantage of this opportunity. We nevertheless remain committed to public understanding of these issues, and to providing the public with information to make intelligent choices.
We’ve yet to hear from the other science departments at SMU that we invited.
It’s interesting that these professors are willing to air their complaints and objections in public forums where there is no way for them to be “heatedly debated and discussed.”
This isn’t unusual. In 2005 the Kansas state board of education invited scientists from all over the world to come and present evidence supporting Darwinian evolution as well as evidence that challenges it. You’ll remember that this was highly publicized public event with lots of advance notice. Yet not one single Darwinist had the courage to come and defend the Darwinian viewpoint. Not one. Instead, they sent an attorney who questioned the scientists challenging Darwinian evolution but refused to be questioned himself.
In their opinion piece in the Dallas Morning News yesterday, some SMU science faculty tried to explain how science is done.
In science, progress depends on experimentation and observation using the scientific method. The evidence and reports are usually heatedly debated and discussed, sometimes for years and even decades. Consensus is reached in a nondemocratic way. If the hypothesis is not supported by the evidence, it is rejected.
Really? “Heatedly debated and discussed," well no, not in this instance. And, If the hypothesis is not supported by the evidence, it is rejected. Again, that’s not been true of Darwinism. Many of the alleged pieces of evidence proving the “fact” of evolution repeatedly have been shown to lack any basis in reality (Haeckel’s embryo drawings, peppered moths, Miller-Urey experiment, etc.), and yet Darwinian evolution is not being rejected on a wide scale. Yet.
At the Darwin vs. Design conference, scientists will be presenting empirical evidence based on observation that supports the theory of intelligent design. Dr. Stephen Meyer will explain how the digital code embedded in DNA is evidence supporting ID. Dr. Michael Behe will explain how the amazing nanotechnology—the molecular machines—are evidence supporting ID. And Dr. Jay Richards will show how the constants of the laws of physics and the incredibly precise fine-tuning of the universe is evidence supporting ID.
How is presenting this information, to an audience that wants to learn about it, in any way a danger to science? It isn’t, unless you are a dogmatic Darwinist who can’t abide any viewpoint but your own.
Then the profs go off on a wild tangent like some sort of conspiracy theorists.
The organization behind the event, the Discovery Institute, is clear in its agenda: It states that what the SMU science faculty believes to be so useful (science) is a danger to conservative Christianity and should be replaced by its mystical world view.
This is just simply a lie. No one affiliated with Discovery Institute has ever said any such thing. Some scientists, afraid to debate the merits of Darwinian evolution instead turn to making up inane assertions like this one.
Logan Gage has an insightful article on the forgotten history of eugenics in World Net Daily today. He reminds us that:
Eugenics was supposedly the "science" of human breeding. It was promoted by luminaries of biology at Harvard, Princeton and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. It was, in short, the consensus view of the cultural and academic elite. How did things get so twisted?
Hitchin’ a Ride: Darwinism is indispensable to Darwinists
Philip Skell, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a pioneer in antibiotic research, said it best: Darwinism is a "narrative gloss" on biology. Darwinists expropriate the work of other fields of science, then claim the credit for Darwin's theory. Nowhere in science is the truth of Skell’s observation more apparent than in the Darwinist claim that Darwin’s theory — the assertion that random variation and natural selection is the source of all biological complexity — is indispensable to modern medicine. It is a claim that, upon inspection, is almost delusional.
I’ve examined this claim in detail in a series of posts: here, and here and here. Darwinists claim that comparative medicine and biology, which is the study of the similarities between non-human organisms and humans, arose from Darwin’s theory. That’s nonsense. Comparative biology has been the been the basis for biological science for thousands of years, and many of the greatest medical advances, such as Galen’s and Vesalius’ studies of anatomy and Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of the blood, were the fruit of comparative biological research that antedated Darwin by centuries. The father of modern comparative biology was Carolus Linnaeus, who worked a century before Darwin was born.
Darwinists claim that modern medical genetics owes much to Darwin’s theory. That’s nonsense as well. Darwin contributed nothing original to our understanding of the basic mechanisms of heredity. His view of heredity was vaguely Lamarckian (the theory that traits acquired in adulthood could be passed to offspring) and he ascribed to the erroneous theory of ‘blending’ inheritance, which denied the existence of discrete units of heredity. The father of modern genetics was Gregor Mendel, an Austrian monk and a contemporary of Darwin, who worked out the basic rules of inheritance in plants in his garden in a monastery. The frenzy over Darwin’s theory distracted 19th century scientists, and Mendel’s seminal discoveries in genetics went unrecognized for half a century. Modern molecular genetics began with the discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953. Watson and Crick discerned the structure and function of DNA by designing models of the double helix, and subsequent work revealed the molecular language of heredity. The Darwinian inference of randomness as the origin of biological structure was obviously of no help in translating the genetic code, which is a symbolic language.
Finally, Darwinists claim that our understanding of bacterial resistance to antibiotics is dependent on Darwin’s theory of natural selection. But “natural selection” is a tautology, not a theory. The fit survive. Who are the fit? The survivors. Who are the survivors? The fit. The concept is true (how could it be false?), but it’s worthless to science and medicine. The observation that bacteria that aren’t killed by antibiotics aren’t killed by antibiotics is of no value in understanding or treating infectious diseases. We use microbiology, molecular biology, pharmacology, and statistical methods in population biology to understand and treat infections.
The astonishing Darwinian claim of indispensability in areas of science that antedate it by millennia (such as comparative biology) and in areas of science to which it is obviously tangential or merely tautological (molecular genetics or bacterial resistance to antibiotics) bespeak its irrelevance to biology and medicine. Some less-grounded Darwinists like Daniel Dennett have even gone further, claiming that the universe itself can be explained by Darwinian mechanisms. Darwinism is indispensable to cosmology!
There’s a reason for this almost delusional attribution of scientific progress to Darwin’s theory. Darwinism is based on the radical and unsubstantiated assertion that all natural biological complexity arose from random heritable variation and natural selection. It is the creation myth of contemporary philosophical materialism, which is the view that the material world (matter and energy) are the only things that exist. The materialist worldview depends critically on Darwin’s theory. We can do science just fine without Darwin’s theory, using molecular biology, biological statistics, and other well established fields of biology.
It’s time for fields of science on which Darwinism has hitched a ride to open the door and let it off. If Darwinists have real quantitative evidence that biological complexity arose entirely by chance and necessity, they should show us the evidence. Until then, Darwinists insult our intelligence when they claim that Darwinism is indispensable to any area of science or medicine. Darwin's theory is indispensible in only one way: Darwinists can’t do philosophy without Darwin’s theory.
"Intellectually Confused" Journalist Calls on Southern Methodist University to Censor Intelligent Design (ID) Supporters
In an over-the-top op-ed in today's Dallas Morning News, journalist Lee Cullum attacks the upcoming "Darwin v. Design" conference at Southern Methodist University (SMU) as "intellectually confused," complains that ID proponents "refuse to understand who and what they are," and asserts that Southern Methodist University "needs to rethink its policy regarded future use of its facilities" in order to prevent intelligent design proponents from expressing their views on the SMU campus in the future.
However, if anyone is "intellectually confused," it is poor Ms. Cullum, whose article displays her own breathtaking ignorance of both intelligent design and the principles of a free society.
It is clear from her op-ed that Ms. Cullum is almost completely ignorant of the real views of intelligent design proponents. Rather than attack intelligent design for what it actually proposes, all she can do is present a straw-man version of the theory:
Those who favor intelligent design seek to prove that evolution is impossible because the complexity of human systems is beyond the capacity of the Darwinian process to accomplish. Hence, humankind must have been created by a supreme designer.
Here are just some of the errors in Ms. Cullum's description of ID:
(1) Contrary to Ms. Cullum, ID proponents do not claim that ID proves that "evolution is impossible." In fact, ID is perfectly compatible with many types of evolution, as ID proponents have pointed out repeatedly.
(2) Contrary to Ms. Cullum, ID is not based simply on "complexity," but on what mathematician William Dembski has called "specified complexity," complexity that is highly-functional and highly-ordered for a certain purpose. And, yes, there is a lot of empirical evidence that the unguided Darwinian process of natural selection and random mutations cannot generate this kind of highly-functional complexity.
(3) Contrary to Ms. Cullum, ID is not just based on the "complexity of human systems," but on the specified complexity found throughout the biological world, and on the fine-tuning of the physical constants that allow the universe itself to exist. (Note: Even some prominent evolutionists who reject intelligent design in biology seem persuaded by the evidence for design in cosmology.)
(4) Contrary to Ms. Cullum, ID does not claim that the biological evidence for design proves that "humankind must have been created by a supreme designer," only that it provides strong empirical evidence that the development of life was the product of an intelligent process rather than an undirected process of chance and necessity like natural selection and random mutations. Intelligent design is certainly friendly to theism, but it does not claim that the facts of biology in and of themselves prove there is a "supreme designer."
As a matter of constitutional law, Ms. Cullum is correct that Southern Methodist University—unlike a state university—would not violate the First Amendment by denying the use of its facilities to ID proponents. But contrary to Ms. Cullum, such a denial certainly would be a blow against the principles of a free society. It is amazing how shallow the support for free and open debate is among some journalists. They are all for the right of those they agree with to air their views freely. But they seem to have no problem with the suppression of viewpoints with which they disagree.
Ms. Cullum attempts to justify excluding ID proponents from SMU's campus by comparing ID supporters to faith-healers and Holocaust deniers. You know that someone has run out of rational arguments when the person has to resort to such smears. Last time I checked, faith-healers weren't on the faculty of major medical schools, nor were Holocaust deniers on the faculty of history departments at reputable universities. Yet scientists and philosophers who support intelligent design are on the faculties of many American universities, and they hold Ph.D.s from mainstream graduate programs in such disciplines as biology, biochemistry, physics, astronomy, and mathematics. Moreover, the arguments for ID are being made in books, monographs, and technical articles published by mainstream academic presses and peer-reviewed journals.
Ms. Cullum presents the best argument for why this upcoming conference needs to take place. It is precisely because of the astounding ignorance of people like Ms. Cullum that scientists and scholars supportive of intelligent design need to have the right to speak for themselves about the evidence for their view. Ms. Culum should attend the conference. She might learn something.
Newsmedia are covering Discovery Institute’s invitation to SMU faculty to debate intelligent design. One Darwinist who urged against debating reportedly said: “ID and evolution are not two scientific theories to be weighed against one another, as if on a balance scale. One is a scientific theory, supported so massively and consistently by empirical evidence as to be virtually unassailable.” If that’s true, then the SMU faculty should have no trouble winning the debate, right? Since a recent Newsweek poll shows that at least half of Americans reject evolution, it would seem that Darwinists need to convince the public of the truth of their theory. Given that Darwinists (a) plainly have a need to convince people that evolution is true, and (b) claim that evolution is “virtually unassailable,” it will be most interesting to see if they are willing to debate.
Darwinist Mark Chu-Carroll: All Scientific Theories Can be Reduced to Tautologies, Just Like Natural Selection!
My observation that “Natural Selection” is a tautology, and therefore useless to modern medicine, seems to have set off quite a few Darwinists. Prominent Darwinist blogger Mark Chu-Carroll took me to task here, and comes up with an approach that he believes gets “Natural Selection” off the tautological hook: he asserts that all scientific theories are reducible to tautologies! Mark writes:
And this brings us to Egnor's idiocy. It's a common tactic among idiots to criticize various scientific theories as tautological… [but] you can derive a tautological statement from any scientific theory.
The theory of gravity? If you let go of something, it will fall - therefore, if you let go of something, it will fall.
Relativity? Light bends when it passed through a gravitational field - therefore, if I shine a light through a gravitational field, it will bend.
Evolution? The things that survive to reproduce are the things that survive to reproduce.
Mark errs. A tautology is a statement that is true by its logical structure. 'A is A' is a tautology, and 'survivors survive' is a tautology. It’s logically true, and it cannot be false. Scientific theories generally cannot be reduced to tautologies. Newton's law cannot be reduced to ‘If you let go of something, it will fall— therefore, if you let go of something, it will fall’. Newton’s law of gravitation, in its most 'reduced' form, states that the gravitational force acting between two masses is proportional to the product of the masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between the centers of the masses, and that the constant of proportionality is the gravitational constant. Newton’s law is not a tautology, and it can't be reduced to a tautology. It is not logically true. It’s empirically true, but it could have been false. The force of gravity could have been proportional to the inverse cube, not the inverse square. Neither is Einstein’s theory of relativity a tautology. The curvature of space-time is given by Einstein’s tensor equations. They’ve been confirmed experimentally, and they’re not the least bit tautological.
A salient characteristic of a strong scientific theory is the combination of its logical improbability and its empirical verification. A strong scientific theory is not tautological but is true empirically. It is, logically speaking, highly improbable that Einstein’s tensor equations would describe space-time accurately, but, empirically, they do.
All permutations of “Natural Selection”— “survival of the fittest,” “reproductive success,” “mechanisms that contribute to the selection of individuals that reproduce,” “sexual selection,” “gametic selection,” “compatibility selection”—reduce quite readily to “successful reproducers successfully reproduce,” or colloquially, “survivors survive.” The truth of Natural Selection is its logical structure. It can't be false. “Natural Selection” is logically true, but it’s a weak theory because it’s merely a tautology.
Later in his post, Mark inadvertently gets to the essence of “Natural Selection”:
A theory that consisted of nothing more than the fundamental statement "A=A" isn't a theory - it's gibberish dressed up to look like a theory.
Get your tickets for the Dallas Darwin vs Design Conference
A quick update for those who are planning to get tickets for the upcoming Dallas vs. Design conference, April 13-14 at SMU. The easiest way to get tickets is online through the conference website. If you are in Dallas and would like to purchase tickets in person, you can do so at Logos Bookstore, 6620 Snider Plaza, near the SMU campus.
Advance ticket sales will close both in person and online at 5pm CST on Thursday, April 12. If you don't have tickets by then you will have to take your chances at the door, where tickets will be on sale at the time of the event if there are still seats available.
Here's a nifty radio commercial you can listen to that is playing on stations around Dallas throughout this week. And if you're curious about what the conference will be like, you can read a short report on how things went at the Knoxville conference, or listen to a report from the conference coordinator and one of the speakers, Jay Richards, at ID The Future.
Orac’s Challenge: Do Scientists ever use the Design Inference in Biology? (Hmmm...let me think…)
Orac, a prominent Darwinist blogger who is also a surgical oncologist, recently challenged me:
Dr. Egnor… can put his money where his mouth is and present… some actual evidence to support his claims. Inquiring minds want to know: Will Dr. Egnor show us some of these wonderful insights into human biology and disease provided or facilitated by the design inference or will he simply keep repeating the same misinformation? You never know. Maybe he'll surprise us all.
It took me a while to answer, because there are so many examples of it that I was in the position of Buridan’s ass—I couldn’t decide what to pick first!
So I picked these guys. The natural place to start showing examples of the inference to design in medical research is the seminal biological discovery of the 20th Century—Watson’s and Crick’s discovery of the structure of DNA.
Notice that Watson and Crick aren’t standing next to a pair of dice. To untangle the structure of DNA, they inferred design, not chance. They reversed-engineered DNA. They collected physical data about the structure of DNA (X-ray diffraction studies, Chargaff’s rules, the physical chemistry of nucleotides, etc), and then they designed a model of the molecule to understand its structure and function.
It is probably impossible to build this structure with a ribose sugar in place of the deoxyribose, as the extra oxygen atom would make too close a van der Waals contact.
Full details of the structure, including the conditions assumed in building it, together with a set of coordinates for the atoms….
Furthermore, the design specifications revealed an elegantly simple method by which the genetic material could be copied:
It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.
What exactly is reverse engineering? From Wikipedia:
Reverse engineering... is the process of discovering the technological principles of a device or object or system through analysis of its structure, function and operation…Reverse engineering is essentially science, using the scientific method. Sciences such as biology and physics can be seen as reverse engineering of biological 'machines' and the physical world respectively. (Emphasis mine)
Watson’s and Crick’s work of course had nothing to do with Darwinism (except perhaps their laboratory politics, which is another matter).
This is not to say that Watson and Crick believed that DNA was designed by God. They were both atheists. Even molecular biologists who are avowed atheists use the design inference in their work.
Much of modern biological research, and most research in molecular biology, is reverse engineering. Some scientists infer design explicitly. Some use the design inference implicitly, even if they disagree with its philosophical implications. We can’t do modern biology, at least at the molecular level, without using reverse engineering, which is the inference to design.
So, in reply to Orac’s challenge, I ask: Which inference played a greater role in the discovery of the structure and function of DNA: the inference to Darwin’s theory of random variation and natural selection, or the inference to design, applying the principles of reverse engineering?
SMU profs challenged to debate at Darwin vs. Design conference
Late last week, Discovery Institute sent the letter below from Bruce Chapman to the chairs of the three departments at SMU which were calling for the Darwin vs. Design conference to be removed from campus, inviting them to a debate about intelligent design. It seems that The Dallas Morning News agrees with us that open discussion belongs at a university. On Saturday the DMN ran a brief editorial short on the SMU controversy:
But if there's any place where an idea like this can be examined and debated, you'd think that a university . . . would be it. But a group of SMU professors got the vapors and demanded that the university bar the Discovery Institute from campus. SMU's administration correctly told the prissy profs that the group had every right to be on campus.
Our letter, which was sent on Thursday, follows in its entirety:
I am writing to invite you or a representative from your faculty to participate in a dialogue about the theory of intelligent design on Friday night, April 13th, ahead of the formal commencement of our conference that evening on your campus.
We noted with interest the comment of one of your SMU faculty colleagues, Dr. Bretell, who stated in the Dallas Morning News that the science faculty plan to use the conference “as a teaching moment.”
As educators ourselves, we applaud you for this and would like to enhance the teaching opportunity for your students by creating a forum in which your faculty can participate in an open dialogue with proponents of intelligent design—in particular, with our three conference speakers, Dr. Michael Behe, Dr. Stephen Meyer, and Dr. Jay Richards.
If you accept our invitation, I will arrange for the first portion of our Friday night program to be devoted to this discussion. We propose the following format: one of our speakers would make a fifteen-minute presentation explaining the merits, from our point of view, of the theory of intelligent design. Then we would invite one of you to make a presentation explaining your main criticisms of the theory. We would then allow your panel to ask us a series of challenging questions of your own choosing. After that we would open the discussion to a few questions from the audience.
We are all committed to respectful scholarly dialogue and to the use of scientific methods of reasoning in the investigation of nature. In our view, science progresses in part as scientists and scholars discuss and evaluate competing interpretations of scientific evidence. We think that the format we are proposing will allow for such discussion and will, therefore, create a teaching moment for all who participate and observe the discussion.
We hope you will join us. May I ask you to respond at your earliest convenience by contacting [deleted].
Yours sincerely,
Bruce Chapman
President, Discovery Institute
Because the letter was sent just last week, it's still too early to tell what the reaction might be. Here's hoping that the profs at SMU are willing to engage in the debate and present their views on ID.
It looks like we're not the only ones waiting. Rod Dreher has a great column over at Beliefnet where he writes, "Sounds good to me. Will the professors agree to participate in this teaching moment? I'd love to hear both sides make their presentation, and I bet I'm not the only one."
The Positive Case for Intelligent Design Presented at Boise State University—Darwinists choose to "abstain."
On March 19 I lectured at Boise State University (BSU) to about 50 mostly-friendly students and community members on "The Positive Case for Intelligent Design." (The lecture was largely based upon a document I produced by the same title, available here.) BSU is the notorious home of their beloved undefeated-but-yet-#5-ranked Bronco football team, but my lecture was only sponsored by the IDEA Club at Boise State. The club’s leader reports that he’s recently received unfriendly e-mails from a hostile Darwinist. The club’s leader responded nicely, saying, “I hope that you would be willing to come [to Casey Luskin's lecture]," and also defended himself saying "I am quite content for someone to disagree with my view, but I do not respect those that resort to ad hominem attacks against my intelligence, ignorance, etc. Please come and check it out.” The Darwinist wrote, “I apologize for the lack of courtesy,” and in reply to the invitation said, "I appreciate the invite for the presentation but I will abstain" (emphasis added).
The Darwinist justified his abstention by claiming he would "save the need to debate such issues until I have gone through all of my formal schooling." I suppose he wants his education to include only pro-Darwin arguments, and doesn’t want to be exposed to non-Darwinian ideas. In fact, this Darwinist was not really an agnostic truth-seeker who wanted to postpone debate because he had been sending the leader of the Boise State IDEA Club multiple e-mails making strongly opinionated statements against ID. Here's a choice selection:
"There is nothing to be gained from learning ID or Creationism."
"ID and Creationism offer no such ability to understand reality."
"This is a fight between dogma and reality with dogma as the aggressor."
"ID does not have any merit."
This Darwinist claims he wants keep an open mind and oppose "dogma." That sounds reasonable, but do his actions prove his words? When asked to provide evidence, he wrote "Don't take my word for it, check it out." But then when he's invited to "check it out" by the IDEA Club leader, the Darwinist decides to "abstain." From what the IDEA Club’s leader says, this Darwinist is not an isolated example. Apparently many Darwinists were invited, but from what we could tell, virtually none showed up.
At the end of the day, all I can say is that it's their loss. That’s not because my lecture was so great, but because it's vital to listen and learn from those you disagree with. That's why I spent many dozens of hours sitting in courses covering evolutionary biology during my undergraduate and graduate studies at UCSD. Whether you’re a Darwinist or an ID-proponent, I recommend taking every opportunity you can to learn more about what your opponents believe. From my experience as an ID-proponent, doing that has only strengthened my scientific support for the intelligent design position, but more importantly it has taught me patience, tolerance, and a sincere desire for friendship towards those who disagree with my viewpoint.
I’m a faithful Catholic. I’ve often thought: what if Darwinism were true? I don’t mean all of the philosophical materialism that Darwinists drag along with the science. Materialism is nonsense, because if matter and energy are all that exist, then truth doesn't exist (it's neither matter nor energy). If truth doesn't exist, then materialism can't be true.
But what about Darwin’s central scientific assertion: that all biological complexity is the result of chance and necessity, at least as well as we humans can discern chance and design. What if experimental evidence demonstrated that we could account for biological information (or whatever we call the astonishing complexity of living things) without inferring design? Would I lose my faith?
No, I wouldn’t. I believe that God created us and all that exists, and that he holds us all in existence. I don’t pretend to understand all his designs, and I have no reason to be confident that I understand any part of his design in biology. We impute randomness where we can’t discern design. My ignorance of God’s design in biology would look to me like randomness, and my failure to discern design in biology would not shake my faith.
I think intelligent design is true because of the science. I believe that some biological complexity — the genetic code, the cellular nanotechnology, the astonishing integration of organs and systems — is best understood as the consequence of intelligent agency. Those who claim that randomness can generate biological complexity seem to lack an understanding of the vastness of what statisticians call “combinatorial space.” A grammatically correct, meaningful twenty-word English sentence cannot be generated by chance without an intelligently designed target that captures grammar and meaning. Did randomness generate the human beings who write English sentences? I have not seen any scientific evidence that would even suggest that it could or that it did.
I have no problem with evolution, understood as change in living things over time. I have no problem with the view that some of the changes were caused by random events. And the evidence that the earth is several billion years old looks good to me. If a “random” origin of biological complexity were shown scientifically to be true, I’d have no problem with it, as a scientist or as a Christian. I’d just figure that it was one more of God’s designs that's opaque to me.
I’d have some problems, of course, with Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett high-fiving, but I'd see it as my penance. Christians deal with suffering.
What if intelligent design were shown to be right, by scientific evidence? Most atheists would feel their faith in materialism greatly endangered, if not untenable. I suspect that is the cause for all their vitriol. Is Darwinism true? I’ll believe it if I see it. Is intelligent design true? Atheists won’t see it, because they won’t believe it.
