A few months ago Nick Matzke of the NCSE was on a podcast giving the usual NCSE line that opposition to evolution is a fundamentally "Protestant" Christian phenomenon. Matzke stated, "I'm not sure if the evolution issue will go away until Biblical inerrancy declines in popularity," and he expressed his hope that, "maybe in a few hundred years people will get over it." Mr. Matzke should have attended a recent lecture, "Is Darwinism Kosher?," given at Discovery Institute by Jonathan Rosenblum, an Orthodox Jewish scholar and popular columnist of The Jerusalem Post. Mr. Rosenblum stated that he is comfortable with the literal meaning of Genesis being a "mystery" or an “analogy,” yet he rejects Neo-Darwinism. Speaking at Discovery Institute to a crowd that included many Orthodox Jews, Rosenblum explained that in his view, the literal meaning of the Torah may be reinterpreted, but its moral lessons and the theological truths are constant. Rosenblum explained that Orthodox Judaism has no objections to the claim that life undergoes change. But he repeatedly asked, “What’s the mechanism of that change?” According to Rosenblum, Neo-Darwinism, with its random mutations and lack of any goal, “cannot be reconciled" with the theological teachings of the Torah. Rosenblum was adamant that Orthodox Judaism in its reading of the Bible is not driven by a simple literal approach, but he maintained that Neo-Darwinian evolution stretches the theological truths of the Torah beyond their intended meaning.

Rosenblum clearly grasped the scientific issues. His article last year in the Jewish Observer challenged Darwin on the grounds of a lack of transitional fossils and the inability of natural selection to produce complex systems. Instead, Rosenblum, who himself is a graduate of Yale Law School and the University of Chicago, gave a lucid explanation of how Neo-Darwinism survives:

First step: Exclude all non-natural causes as a priori inadmissible. Second step: If Darwinian Evolution were true, it would explain observed taxonomic similarities between different living things. Third step: Since no alternative explanation exists to explain those phenomena, Darwinism must be true. … Fourth step: Since Darwinism is true, all explanations based on non-natural causes are vanquished. Note how that which was a priori excluded at the outset is now deemed to have been somehow disproved.

(Jonathan Rosenblum, “The Myth of Scientific Objectivity," Jewish Observer (May, 2006).)

[Under sociobiology a] newborn baby has less claim to life than a contented house cat, according to Singer. And the scope of those whom this son of Auschwitz survivors would see subject to euthanasia is wide - not only Downs syndrome babies, but even those with hemophilia, if their death would result in the parents producing a more perfect baby.

(Jonathan Rosenblum, “Think Again: Sociobiology isn't science,” Jerusalem Post (January 11, 2006).)

Regardless, Rosenblum showed that the case against Darwinism is not based on Biblical literalism of any faith, but rather involves much common sense and thoughtful reflection. This being the case, it seems that Mr. Matzke and the NCSE will be dealing with public opposition to evolution for a long time.

Posted by Casey Luskin at 1:27 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

We have blogged in the past about the growing numbers of doctors who are skeptical of Darwinian evolution to explain the complexity of life.

Those numbers are continuing to grow, and conesquently doctors are beginning to organize themselves and reach out to others who hold similar positions. Physicians and Surgeons for Scientific Integrity (PSSI) has for sometime had a website at www.doctorsdoubtingdarwin.com. Recently they have begun using the site to organize and promote conferences about Darwinian evolution around the world.

According to a recent e-mail, they have 264 members from 15 different countries and are planning a number of major events in the next 18 months, including a series of public events in Spain this January, titled "What Darwin Didn't Know," featuring CSC Fellow Dr. Geoff Simmons. Simmons' first book was What Darwin Didn't Know, and his most recent book is Billions of Missing Links.

Posted by Robert Crowther at 1:01 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The Daily News, a newspaper in the predominantly Buddhist nation of Sri Lanka, has an excellent article authored by Dr. V.J.M. de Silva expressing skepticism towards Darwinian evolution. Silva states, “This article is not meant to be a critique of any Buddhist doctrine, for which I have the highest regard,” and he then explains, “Life, it seems, did not wait for blind chance to roll the dice, but erupted at the first available instant, leaving Darwinists with no time at all for their probabilistic processes. . . . Evolution (neo-Darwinism) is not a theory that has been proved. It is not like physics and chemistry. However, it is presented in the news media as an accomplished fact of science and all intelligent people are supposed to accept it. It is really a highly speculative hypothesis.” He demonstrates a clear grasp of ID: “Intelligent Design allows the possibility of God, but does not specify God.” Silva also knows how to recognize the false information put out by the Darwinian community:

In 2001, the US Public Broadcasting System ran a seven part TV series on evolution, and the spokespersons for this presentation asserted that “all known scientific evidence supports Darwinian Evolution, as does virtually every reputable scientist in the world.”

In response to this, the Discovery Institute, a ‘think tank’ in the US, sought the opinion of reputed scientists. Over one hundred scientists from various specialties, most with doctorates from prestigious universities, responded immediately.

They said they were sceptical of what was shown on the TV series, especially its impartiality. These scientists ran a two page advertisement in The Weekly Standard of October 1, 2001.

“We are sceptical of the claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence for the Darwinian Theory should be encouraged.”

Since then, over 700 others have signed in, agreeing with the above.

(Dr.V.J.M.de Silva, "The origin of life in the universe ," The Daily News (July 12, 2007).)

Posted by Casey Luskin at 8:21 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

There's a new resource for those wanting to learn more about the ID debate. Jason Rennie, an Australian podcaster, has a series of 25 podcasts, called "Darwin or Design?"

Rennie has compiled 25 interviews with prominent thinkers on both sides of the ID debate into a sort of "audiobook" which gives the listener a chance to hear each individual in their own words (and voice!). Interviews include Mike Behe on irreducible complexity, Guillermo Gonzalez on The Privileged Planet, Joey Campana on ID research, and Denyse O'Leary on ID and the media. On the critics' side, evolutionists like Sean Carroll and PZ Myers gave their two cents.

Rennie is upfront about his own friendliness to ID, but he avoids pushing any agenda onto his subjects and lets them each have their own say... which quickly becomes very interesting. While the basic ID and Darwinist arguments are great to hear in this unfiltered format, the extended conversations on ID and the law and ID in the media will enrich the understanding of those who want to dig a little deeper.

Posted by Anika Smith at 4:08 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Fancisco J. Ayala is an esteemed evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Irvine, who was dubbed the "Renaissance Man of Evolutionary Biology" by the New York Times. Ayala is not only former president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), but he helped found, chair, and organize the AAAS Dialogues on Science, Ethics, and Religion. He’s widely acclaimed by the Darwinian scientific community as a guru on science and religion. So what does Ayala say about evolutionary biology and religion? In May, 2007 Ayala published an article in the prestigious journal Proceedings for the National Academy of Sciences USA entitled “Darwin’s greatest discovery: Design without designer,” explaining that “evolution conveys chance and necessity jointly enmeshed in the stuff of life; randomness and determinism interlocked in a natural process..." In case you think that leaves room for God-guided evolution, Ayala states, "In evolution, there is no entity or person who is selecting adaptive combinations.” In fact, Ayala believes that it was “Darwin’s greatest accomplishment” to remove "a Creator" from biology:

It was Darwin’s greatest accomplishment to show that the complex organization and functionality of living beings can be explained as the result of a natural process—natural selection—without any need to resort to a Creator or other external agent.

(Francisco J. Ayala, "Darwin’s greatest discovery: Design without designer," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, Vol. 104:8567–8573 (May 15, 2007).)

All this was published in the prestigious journal of perhaps the top scientific body of the entire world, by one of the top science-religion gurus in the Darwinian scientific community.

Posted by Casey Luskin at 1:22 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Last summer I reported how theistic evolutionist and biologist Kenneth Miller gave some inaccurate testimony during the Dover trial when he wrongly claiming that the phrase "[e]volution is random and undirected" exists only in the third edition of his textbook. Miller claimed, "[T]hat statement was not in the first edition the book, it was not in the second edition, it was not in the fourth edition." The problem is that the phrase "[e]volution is random and undirected" was in the first, second, and fourth editions. As I noted, “The facts are very different from Miller's testimony. All of the first four editions of his ‘elephant’ Biology textbook contain the phrase ‘[e]volution is random and undirected.’" Now, I have recently discovered a 5th printing of the "elephant" Biology textbook from 2000, and it also contains Miller's infamous phrase, "[e]volution is random and undirected.” Why is this significant? Miller admitted during the Kitzmiller trial that this phraseology was "about meaning and purpose" and "beyond the realm of science," implying it could be offensive to religion. Yet Miller is the Darwinian biologist that Josh Gilder observed was the “religious mascot” of the PBS Evolution Series. Miller was also the plaintiffs’ star biology expert witness in the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial, where he testified before Judge Jones that evolution does not conflict with religion. Judge Jones was so enamored with Miller’s testimony (as Gilder put it earlier, “all religious issues were reconciled, as it were, in his person”) that Judge Jones ruled it is “utterly false” to believe that evolution conflicts with religion. Yet combined with two editions of Biology: Discovering Life that state, "Darwin knew that accepting his theory required believing in philosophical materialism," it appears that no fewer than 7 editions of Miller’s textbooks have used language to describe evolution that many traditional theists might find offensive.

Posted by Casey Luskin at 1:24 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Orac over at Scienceblogs is starting to develop a reputation as someone more interested in calling his opponents names than in accurately representing their positions. His latest misrepresentation involves ENV contributor Casey Luskin and his post on junk-DNA, which Orac called “breathtakingly idiotic” (perhaps like Judge Jones calling ID “breathtakingly inane,” as anything which poses a challenge to the status quo must be to a Darwinist?). Orac explained to his readers that Luskin’s argument was that “’junk DNA’ somehow disproves evolution.”

This is a blatant mischaracterization of Luskin’s argument. According to Luskin,

Orac totally misrepresents my argument. I'm sure that evolutionary biology can accommodate the finding that "junk"-DNA has function, and such function does not "disprove" evolution (given Darwinist behavior, I wonder if it is even possible to disprove Darwinian evolution). The point of my post is that Darwinism's false presumption that non-coding DNA was "junk" had stopped science from investigating function for non-coding DNA and therefore hindered research.

Not content merely to attribute arguments to people who never made them, Orac goes on to attack Luskin for referencing a Scientific American article because, as he notes, it’s a popular science magazine. Aside from the fact that this is a rhetorically weak argument on its face (Orac ridiculously implies that Scientific American is necessarily wrong simply because it’s a lay magazine), Orac’s bigger problem is that Luskin’s argument regarding junk-DNA addressed a statement by John S. Mattick, director of the Institute for Molecular Bioscience at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. It’s not the authority of Scientific American he should challenge, but that of Dr. Mattick.

Throughout his angry blog post, Orac is doing everything he can to erase the simple historical fact that the false "junk"-DNA mindset originated from Neo-Darwinism. (Here are several examples of Darwinists promoting the "junk"-DNA view.) In response to the historical record, Orac brings up scientists who have sought function for "junk"-DNA. To quote Luskin, of course "some rogue Darwinian biologists have bucked the consensus and promoted the view that non-coding DNA isn't mostly junk. . . . We wouldn't even be having this conversation about the death of "junk"-DNA were it not for the fact that Neo-Darwinism gave it life in the first place.” Unfortunately for Orac, neither the existence of a few biologists who challenge the consensus nor any of Orac's name-calling and pejorative metaphors can change the fact that the false "junk"-DNA paradigm was created by Neo-Darwinism.

Posted by Robert Crowther at 4:06 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Mathematician and intelligent design supporter Granville Sewell has posted an article, entitled “How Evolution Will Be Taught Someday,” where he makes some interesting predictions about the future state of teaching science. He asks whether intelligent design will be taught and says, “probably not in my lifetime.” In Sewell’s view, "in the not-too-distant future, biology texts will refer to evolution as an amazing, mysterious ‘natural’ process, which scientists do not now understand, but hope to understand some day." Sewell continues to explain that this result would not be opposed by the Discovery Institute, which is not trying to push ID into schools:

But for most ID proponents, this will be a quite satisfactory outcome, certainly a huge improvement over the current sad state of affairs, where Darwin's natural selection is the only scientific theory around which enjoys widespread legal protection from scientific criticism in the classroom. The Discovery Institute , which actively promotes ID as a scientific theory, does not (contrary to common belief) support the teaching of Intelligent Design in science classrooms, they only hope that biology instructors will be allowed to "teach the scientific controversy" over Darwinism.

Perhaps after a few generations in which biology texts point optimistically toward future discoveries which may uncover the mechanism of evolution, eventually some will begin to recognize the obvious, that there is no possible explanation without design. Until then, I will be happy with texts which simply acknowledge that the idea that the survival of the fittest can turn bacteria into giraffes, and cause human consciousness to arise out of inanimate matter, is doubted by some scientists.

(Granville Sewell, “ How Evolution Will Be Taught Someday,” emphasis in original)

Posted by Casey Luskin at 1:36 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Question: What do you do when a theory logically predicts both (a) and not (a)?
Answer: Apparently you heavily promote it.

MSNBC recently published two articles promoting Darwinian just-so stories to the public. The first article about the evolution of Waterfowl genitalia contends, “Scientists had speculated that male waterfowl evolved longer phalluses to give them a competitive edge over those not as well-endowed when it came to successfully fertilizing females.” That makes sense, I suppose. But the article makes one admission that strikingly contradicts that little just-so hypothesis: “Most birds lack phalluses, organs like human penises. Waterfowl are among the just 3 percent of all living bird species that retain the grooved phallus…” If long phalluses are so advantageous for reproduction, why did so many birds supposedly lose them? Darwinists will look back retroactively and claim that under the environmental conditions or sexual selection pressures experienced by most bird species, long phalluses weren’t advantageous. The problem in so doing is that they now have a theory which can explain both (a) long phalluses, and also not (a).

The second article, “Why we quit aping around, began walking,” hypothesizes that humans began walking upright because “[t]raveling upright takes a quarter the energy of ‘knuckle-walking’.” It’s a nice anthropocentric story, but if falls into the same predicament as the first article. Our upright-walking species, Homo sapiens comprises one out of about 7 species of the species of the family Hominidae. This means that only 14% of living species of Hominidae were naturally selected to walk upright. So think about this from the apes’ perspective: If upright walking is so energetically favorable, why do apes still “knuckle-walk”? I’m sure that some armchair Darwinian paleoanthropologist would be happy to oblige us with a just-so story as to why living ape species did not evolve bipedal locomotion and instead found knuckle-walking more advantageous for survival. We would then have a theory which can explain both (a) complete bipedal locomotion, and also not (a). In cases like these, one cannot help observe that Neo-Darwinism is like a theory which can explain anything, and therefore actually explains nothing.

Posted by Casey Luskin at 6:31 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Materialist neuroscientist and blogger P.Z. Myers gave a talk Sunday to the Minnesota Atheists entitled: “There Are No Ghosts in Your Brain: Materialist Explanations for the Mind and Religious Belief”. I wish I could have been there! Hopefully P.Z. will post a transcript, or put up the Powerpoint file. The program looks like it was a treat. Quoting Myers:

We've made great strides in the past century towards understanding the cellular and molecular mechanisms that drive brain function, and I will briefly present an overview of some of the major conclusions of that work. In short, though, what we have are sophisticated molecular regulators and sensors and effectors and modulators that generate patterned impulses in pathways throughout the brain, and the mind is ultimately reducible to highly organized chemistry—there's no room for ghosts, souls, or spirits, and no need for them, either.

"Recently, researchers have made progress in identifying the neural substrates of higher level patterns of thought. This work is much more tentative, and we have to be aware of the limitations of our interpretations, which is a consequence of the complexity of the data. I will discuss one narrow aspect of this research, the neural basis of religious belief, and explanations for its evolution. Religious belief is an emergent consequence of much broader genetically determined properties of the brain; I will make the argument that there is no "god gene", no specific hard-coding of religion into human brains, and that religion itself is a kind of conceptual parasite that takes advantage of other desirable and even "virtuous" intrinsic qualities of the brain."

I presume it went well, but I would like to suggest some strategies to P.Z. for future materialist neuroscience talks to atheist organizations:

1) Avoid going into too much detail about actual materialistic theories of the mind. Avoid discussing Behaviorism, which was the materialist vogue in the early and mid-20th century (remember Skinner’s box?) Don’t remind the audience that Behaviorists actually believe that internal mental processes are irrelevant to the study of psychology, and all that matters in psychology is what you can observe. And especially don’t mention the Eliminative Materialists, like Paul and Patricia Churchland, you know, the real materialists of the mind! They assert that the mind doesn’t even exist, and that our perception of subjective existence and internal mental processes are illusions (how someone can have an illusion without having real subjective experience is an uncomfortable question that you want to avoid). Disclosure of what materialist philosophers of the mind actually think (or whatever they call mental processes) would be indiscreet. A tactical error. If they ask you anything specific about materialist theories of the mind, pretend you're having trouble with the microphone.

2) Especially, avoid Daniel Dennett’s ’multiple drafts’ theory that the mind is simply an emergent property of the massive parallel processing in the brain. It leads to the uncomfortable observation that the paradigm Dennett uses to explain the brain (i.e. the computer) is an intricate piece of manufactured hardware run by software that is written by programmers. The computer is a beautiful model of intelligently designed dualism. If anyone in your atheist audience picks up on this, things could get nasty. Even tacit endorsements of I.D. or of dualism are unwise in front of an atheist audience. Atheists seem like an amiable lot, but, as the history of the 20th century attests, they can get a bit…testy. Play it safe.

3) Avoid any reference to the self-refuting nature of materialist neuroscience. If your mind is merely an emergent property of your brain, then your opinions are completely determined by your neurophysiology. But neurophysiology is determined by physics and chemistry. Can physics and chemistry ascertain truth? Don’t remind your audience that by the very act of asserting your theory you inherently stake a claim to credibility not normally accorded to meat.

4) Be delicate about the assertion that religious belief is explained by evolution. Although you can’t expect a whole lot of real skepticism from atheist ‘skeptics’, there may be a few in the audience who aren’t gullible enough to accept the assertion that ‘religion is an evolved adaptation’ without noting the obvious corollary: ‘atheism is an evolved adaptation’. Since your real goal is to discredit religious belief by telling a story about the pedestrian manner in which it supposedly arose (see the Genetic Fallacy), a couple of the less credulous skeptics in your audience might notice that the same fallacy can be applied to atheism, materialism, Darwinism, etc. Be careful of this.

5) Your argument that “religion itself is a kind of conceptual parasite” is brilliant! After all, ideas copy themselves and spread from organism to organism. You’ve got variation, natural selection, the whole Darwinian package! Why not call it a ‘meme’ or something. But you have to be careful here, too. An astute atheist might say: ‘how can natural selection apply to ideas, just like it applies to genes? Ideas and genes are completely different things. If natural selection works on both of them, then natural selection is true regardless of the substrate on which it acts. Doesn’t that imply that natural selection is a tautology?’ Bad denouement. Don’t push the gene-meme thing too far. People do just fine studying ideas without recourse to 'natural selection'. They might see that they can do just fine studying biology without recourse to 'natural selection'.

6) Because you are promulgating 19th century materialist ideology, avoid any reference to quantum entanglement and the ‘observer effect’ in quantum mechanics. Material reality at the quantum level only sharpens into focus when it is observed by a mind. The implication is that the mind, in an important and fundamental way, is distinct from matter, and in fact is a prerequisite for discrete physical reality at the quantum level. The observer effect in quantum mechanics adds credence to the dualist theory of the mind. Don’t remind the audience.

7) Especially avoid pointing out that the assertion that neuroscience proves the non-existence of the soul is inconsistent with the Darwinist assertion that ‘I.D. isn’t science’. If science can adjudicate the existence or non-existence of the soul, it obviously can adjudicate the existence or non-existence of design in living things. Disproof of transcendence presupposes the capacity to prove transcendence. If ‘soul detection’ is science, ‘I.D. detection’ is science. Oops.

8) By all means, use neuroscientific jargon. The only way you could even hope to convince a room full of thoughtful people (or even conscious people) that their minds are merely the secretion of a couple of pounds of meat is to cloak the assertion in jargon. Assert confidently that ‘phase locked oscillations in neurons in the hippocampal CA1 region and the subinculum give rise to sophisticated molecular regulators and sensors and effectors and modulators that generate highly organized chemistry and patterned impulses in pathways throughout the brain yielding states of arousal we that interpret as consciousness …,' or something like that. Dress your ideology up, or it won’t sell, even to atheists.

9) Above all, be assertive! Drive home how neuroscience proves that materialism is the only respectable view for ‘Brights’. Avoid gratuitous reticence. Your audience might realize that the "limitations of our interpretations" are due less to the "complexity of the data" than to the 'inadequacy of the ideology'. Don't reveal too much.

All this aside, I’m sure Myers did fine. He had a very receptive audience, and I’m sure my conundrums listed above never occurred to any of them. Cognitive dissonance isn’t a big problem for materialists.

I’m sure the chemistry was just right.

Posted by Michael Egnor at 12:15 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

Our recent podcast interview with Robert Marks, Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Baylor University, discusses his new Evolutionary Informatics lab at Baylor University. Additionally, Mario Lopez recently has posted an interview with William Dembski at the IDEA Center's website discussing Dembski's research with Robert Marks's Evolutionary Informatics lab at Baylor University. Dembski thinks the lab's research puts ID “in a position to challenge certain fundamental assumptions in the natural sciences about the nature and origin of information.” Dembski’s work has long-been a lightning rod for ID-critics who take a science-stopping approach to ID by alleging that areas of Dembski’s continued ID-research actually represent unsolvable problems for the science of ID. In essence, some of Dembski’s critics have taken an approach that goes like this: “If Dembski hasn’t yet finished the research to provide what I consider would be a full answer to my objections, then I’m going to engage in character assassination against Dembski.” Some ID-critics have even tried to actively shut down Dembski's research programs: then-NCSE staff member, Molleen Matsumura (also a “past Vice President of the Internet Infidels”) was part of the group that recommended shutting down Dembski’s previous Michael Polanyi Research Center he was trying to start at Baylor to do ID research! Nonetheless, Dembski continues to do research, as he describes in the interview:

CA: Dr. Dembski, ID has come a very long way since its inception; and ID proponents are making inroads in a vast array of scientific disciplines such as astronomy, biology, and chemistry. How has your own work in mathematics (namely, The Design Inference and No Free Lunch) helped or influenced the development of novel ways of doing science?

WD: It’s too early to tell what the impact of my ideas is on science. To be sure, there has been much talk about my work and many scientists are intrigued (though more are upset and want to destroy it), but so far only a few scientists see how to take these ideas and run with them. There’s a reason for this slow start. My work in The Design Inference was essentially a work on the philosophical foundations of probability theory, trying to understand how to interpret probabilities in certain contexts. This led naturally to some ideas about information and the type of information used in drawing design inferences. My book No Free Lunch was a semi-popular overview of where I saw the ID movement headed on the topic of information. The hard work of developing these ideas into a rigorous information-theoretic formalism for doing science really began only in 2005 with some unpublished papers on the mathematical foundations of intelligent design that appeared on my website (www.designinference.com). With the formation of Robert Marks's Evolutionary Informatics Lab in June 2007 (Marks is a distinguished professor of electrical and computer engineering at Baylor University), and work by him and me on the conservation of information (several papers of which are available at http://www.EvoInfo.org), I think ID is finally in a position to challenge certain fundamental assumptions in the natural sciences about the nature and origin of information. This, I believe, will have a large impact on science.

CA: Your critics (such as Wein, Perakh, Shallit, Elsberry, Wolpert and others) seem unsatisfied with your work. They charge your work as being somewhat esoteric and lacking intellectual rigor. What do you say to that charge?

WD: Most of these critics are responding to my book No Free Lunch. As I explained in the preface of that book, its aim was to provide enough technical details so that experts could fill in details, but enough exposition so that the general reader could grasp the essence of my project. The book seems to have succeeded with the general reader and with some experts, though mainly with those who were already well-disposed toward ID. In any case, it became clear after that publication of that book that I would need to fill in the mathematical details myself, something I have been doing right along (see my articles described under “mathematical foundations of intelligent design” at www.designinference.com) and which has now been taken up in earnest in a collaboration with my friend and Baylor colleague Robert Marks at his Evolutionary Informatics Lab (www.EvoInfo.org).

CA: Are you evading the tough questions?

WD: Of course not. But tough questions take time to answer, and I have been patiently answering them. I find it interesting now that I have started answering the critics’ questions with full mathematical rigor (see the publications page at www.EvoInfo.org) that they are largely silent. Jeff Shallit, for instance, when I informed him of some work of mine on the conservation of information told me that he refuse to address it because I had not adequately addressed his previous objections to my work, though the work on conservation of information about which I was informing him was precisely in response to his concerns. Likewise, I’ve interacted with Wolpert. Once I started filling in the mathematical details of my work, however, he fell silent.

(Mario Lopez’s "An Interview with Dr. William A. Dembski")

Posted by Casey Luskin at 12:49 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The best way to rewrite history is to delete the views of those who remember it personally. The Scientist's editor Richard Gallgaher's recent article on "junk"-DNA mentions that Dr. Andras J. Pellionisz suggested that The Scientist publish an "obituary" for "junk"-DNA. Gallagher wrote:

Andras J. Pellionisz, to whom I am grateful for bringing this notable 35th anniversary to my attention, suggested that The Scientist publish an obituary to "formally abandon this misnomer." Pellionisz's objection is that scientific progress is being inhibited, and declaring junk DNA dead would align us with his own organization, the International PostGenetics Society (postgenetics.org), which disavowed the term on the 12th of October last year. Pellionisz is not alone.

(Richard Gallagher, "Junk Worth Keeping," The Scientist, Vol. 21(7):15 (July, 2007).)

Darwinists at Pandas Thumb can rewrite history if they want, but as I noted, "The fact remains that the entire false 'junk' DNA paradigm was born out of the neo-Darwinian mindset, which taught that cells were constantly subjected to random evolutionary forces and genetic parasites that littered the genome with 'junk.' There is no denying that the whole dead-end concept of 'junk'-DNA came from the Neo-Darwinian paradigm, and that’s what matters here." The backpedaling at Panda's Thumb is an exercise in stressing irrelevancies. We wouldn't even be having this conversation about the death of "junk"-DNA were it not for the fact that Neo-Darwinism gave it life in the first place. With his permission, I reprint Dr. Pellionisz's e-mail below:

-----Original Message-----

From: Dr. Andras J. Pellionisz
To: Casey Luskin
Subject: Integrity of Panda's Thumb

Dear Casey Luskin,

Under the heading of "Unintelligent move" by Panda's Thumb, obviously appearing as an attempt to "back-pedal" by citing claims that "a strict application of the Darwinian paradigm, also known as “panselectionism” or “adaptationism”, led many prominent evolutionary biologists to initially resist the idea that some DNA may be non-functional"

I tried to post my following note, as one of the first in the debate. I cited the case of my friend and fellow-pioneer Dr. Simons (a Darwinist) who bet his life more than one way since 1987 that "Junk DNA" was not junk at all.

My posting never appeared as the reply screen claimed "protection". This was the *third* time that my opinion was suppressed in Panda's Thumb.

Malcolm' story, "a triumph and tragedy", however is perhaps the strongest documentation of the ruthless oppression by Primitive Darwinists (who Malcolm is obviously not) of any view that might not be fully consistent with what they would like to dictate.

Since informing the public about facts is important, and so is the quest to scientifically investigate the algorithmic design of the Genome, such that people like Malcolm suffering from "Junk DNA diseases" could be helped, I hereby give my permission that my posting that I intended as a reply in "Panda's Thumb" might appear in your column.

I would add to your statement that "for the scientific method (i.e. observation, hypothesis, and experimentation)" one need not (indeed, ideally should not) have any ideological predilection. Scientist must be free to have any belief that they might have, but must pursue the scientific method as you state.

"Those who can do the reseach to find out how 98.7% of human Genome works - just do it. Those who can't, please get out of our way with any ideology - saving lives is much too important".

Sincerely,

Dr. Andras J. Pellionisz

---

On September 1, 2005 when I originated the International PostGenetics Society http://www.postgenetics.org and established PostGenetics ("Genomics beyond Genes") we reached the edge of the "eye of the JunkDNA cyclone"; with an organization standing up against out casting 98.7% of human Genome as "Junk" the overwhelming wind was no longer blowing individual scientists into a junky direction. There appeared an organization led by scientists to provide anchorage of research of what this 98.7% of the Genome is actually doing. On the 12 of October 2006, on the "European Inaugural" of IPGS there appeared the first international organization that formally abandoned the "JunkDNA" misnomer as a scientific term.

On the 14 of June, 2007, with the publication of the NIH-led ENCODE-report(with $53 M tax-dollars spent), we have arrived at the dead-center of the eye of the cyclone. Yes, as appeared in The Scientist "Gallagher Editorial" "http://www.the-scientist.com/2007/7/1/15/1/", in July, the discredited misnomer will liver forever as a memento of "framing" Genetics into an establishment where for the purposes of researching "Junk DNA" resources were denied, papers were rejected (ask e.g. Mattick and Taft of their excellent manuscript which was never accepted as intended, or even Rigoutsos whose breakthrough publication on pyknons sustained at least a year of delay). Worse, as I pointed out in my "comments" to The Scientist, and elaborated in more detail in my "Obituary of Junk DNA "http://www.junkdna.com/#obituary_of_junk_dna" uncounted millions of people died miserable deaths while scientists were looking for the "gene" causing their illnesses - and were not even supposed to look anywhere but under the lamp illuminating only 1.3% of the genome (the genes).

One person with a Junk DNA disease " http://www.junkdna.com/junkdna_diseases.html " is my dear friend and fellow-pioneer of Junk DNA scientific research; Dr. Malcolm J. Simons, the Honorary Chairman of IPGS "http://www.junkdna.com/ipgs_staged/founders.html"

As documented in the full transcript of the video Genius of Junk "http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/s898887.htm" award-winning science documentary (never aired in the USA, guess why), Malcolm, as a Darwinist voiced in the 2003 filming his 1987 conviction against the "Junk Frame" this way:

Under Darwinistic notions you would think that junk would drop off under the theory of natural selection just like species drop off if they hit ecological niches which is incompatible with survival. If they can adapt to those niches, then those that can survive and those that can't die. There's the notion. If you apply that to the DNA sequence, then the coding region genes which survived have a function and by the way the non coding sequences have survived as well. So the proposition would have to be that if they're there, they've got a function [MJS]

How do you think his fellow-Darwinist scientists received his assertion (1987) that "Junk DNA" had a function?

When I showed the professional geneticists the data, which indicated to me that the 95% non-coding region wasn't junk, and was ordered…The reaction was smiling disbelief at best - you're off your friggin' head and if you're any good at squash - stick to your day job [MJS]

(For those asking, I may give you a copy for your personal perusal of the video that you would never in your life forget - especially if you or your loved ones encounter one the gezillions of "junk DNA diseases". If you have gotten rich - and old enough that some of these regulatory diseases start popping up - your best investment may be to endow frantic research precisely for PostGenetics Centers. Probably unlike dear Malcolm himself, you might actually buy some years to live)

Thus, although when we are already re-entering the cyclone with an opposite wind building up with accelerating speed, "it is too easy" (and looks quite childish, though very human) to "back-pedal" in post-June 2007 on the issue of attributing function to "Junk DNA". Most everything is on record, already.

Instead of engaging in a "blaming game" (that may not be the best use of time, unless one enjoys it), one may wish to drop shouting over some arbitrary ideological trenches and do actual R&D towards the "Algorithmic Design" of the Genome. We are all united on that one - Malcolm and myself even published (yes, in peer-reviewed science journal…) experimental support "http://www.junkdna.com/fractogene/05_simons_pellionisz.pdf" of quantitative predictions.

Yes, FractoGene even passes "the Onion-test" (of Panda's thumb) at least as well as any competitor "Junk DNA theories"…

Posted by Casey Luskin at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

A recent ID the Future podcast interviews Mario Lopez, founder of Ciencia Alternativa, discussing how intolerance against intelligent design and threats of persecution for ID-proponents are alive and well, sadly, not just in the English-speaking countries but also in Spanish-speaking nations. While searching the net recently, I stumbled across the blog of a Spanish-speaking Darwinist paleontologist who confirms this. His "Paleofreak blog" reports on a lecture by intelligent design proponents Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay Wesley Richards in an uninviting post titled “Go home!” The post also includes an odd picture of some bizarre character with the title “Creacionismo Go Home”:

[Update 1, July 23, 2007, 10:30 am: Apparently this Darwinist is so enamored with his own intolerance that he has now posted a response on his blog titled "Go home! Go home! Go home!" that says "we will continue saying GO HOME!" (quote translated, all emphases added). Taking a typical Darwinist approach, he justifies his intolerance by citing the "wedge document" (see here and here to understand why this is a fallacious response). The "Paleofreak" blog's response is saddening: if only such Darwinists were interested in expanding scientific diversity and building bridges rather than promoting such discrimination and intolerance.]

[Update 2, July 24, 2007, 4:00 pm: While namecalling us "IDolaters," Darwinist blogger Josh Rosenau now claims that in this post, "Casey Luskin acknowledges that ID is creationism." Nothing could be further from the truth. This post never calls ID creationism, rather the word "Creationismo" was used by the "Paleofreak" blogger, in a fashion that I simply quoted from the title of "Paleofreak's" blog post. There is obviously nothing in this post that asserts that I believe ID is creationism, and given that I have always contended that ID is not the same as creationism (see here for my latest of dozens of such examples), there is also no doubt that Josh Rosenau knows he has made a false statement. When Darwinists knowingly resort to such false arguments, it is clear they are desperate enough to resort to any argument possible to label ID as creationism, no matter how false that argument is.]

Posted by Casey Luskin at 2:31 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The ever observant Denyse O'Leary over at the Post-Dawrinist blog has an interesting little post about NCSE's Eugenie Scott's recent attempts to spin the "inside story about the Discovery Institute, the well-financed 'think tank' promoting intelligent design and other far-right causes." (Well financed? What, compared to the average biology department at the average college? Our budget is a tiny fraction of just a tiny fraction of all the Darwin dominated budgets out there. And, far-right causes? What, like green hybrid vehicles or passenger ferry service?

Among other things Scott apparently refers to us as "right wing libertarians" with a "road map to theocracy". What in the world is a libertarian theocrat you might wonder? A former DI colleague (who asked to remain unnamed because he was worried about being associated with such "conspiracies") sarcastically explained to me that it must refer to "robber barron capitalism and a state church that regulates the hell out of peoples' sex lives."

For accuracy and clarity you won't get from the NCSE website go here. Among the numerous truth sheets on this page are these two which I'm sure completely unspin Scott's alleged "inside" story.

Discovery Institute and "Theocracy"
Overview: Periodically certain Darwinists make false and unsubstantiated claims that Discovery Institute advocates “theocracy” or is part of the “radical Christian right” or supposedly supports something called “Christian reconstructionism.” These charges are little more than smears, and they show the bankruptcy of the Darwinists’ own position. Rather than argue about the substance of the scientific debate over neo-Darwinism, all Darwinists can do is engage in baseless ad hominem attacks.

The “Wedge Document”: How Darwinist Paranoia Fueled an Urban Legend
Overview: In 1999 someone posted on the internet an early fundraising proposal for Discovery Institute’s Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture. Dubbed the “Wedge Document,” this proposal soon took on a life of its own, popping up in all sorts of places and eventually spawning what can only be called a giant urban legend. Among true-believers on the Darwinist fringe the document came to be viewed as evidence for a secret conspiracy to fuse religion with science and impose a theocracy. These claims were so outlandish that for a long time we simply ignored them. But because some credulous Darwinists seem willing to believe almost anything, we decided we should set the record straight. For a more detailed response please read "The Wedge Document: So What?".

Posted by Robert Crowther at 12:11 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I stated in my previous post that “ID has long-predicted that junk-DNA has function, and ID was right.” So what has Neo-Darwinism done with respect to "junk"-DNA? The Panda's Thumb post cited by Richard Gallagher in his recent attack on ID in The Scientist cites an ID-proponent that found that some Darwinian biologists predicted that "junk"-DNA would have function, and the implication is that Neo-Darwinism has not forestalled research into "junk"-DNA. So what if some biologists did buck the trend and investigate function for non-coding DNA? Good for them for being observant, and good for them for not relying upon the neo-Darwinian consensus! The fact remains that the entire false “junk” DNA paradigm was born out of the neo-Darwinian mindset, which taught that cells were constantly subjected to random evolutionary forces and genetic parasites that littered the genome with "junk." There is no denying that the whole dead-end concept of "junk"-DNA came from the Neo-Darwinian paradigm, and that’s what matters here.

I discussed a few examples of Darwinian biologists proclaiming the lack of function for “junk” DNA in a previous post:

In 1994, the authoritative textbook, Molecular Biology of the Cell, co-authored by National Academy of Sciences president Bruce Alberts, suggested (incorrectly!) that introns are "largely genetic 'junk'":

Unlike the sequence of an exon, the exact nucleotide sequence of an intron seems to be unimportant. Thus introns have accumulated mutations rapidly during evolution, and it is often possible to alter most of an intron’s nucleotide sequence without greatly affecting gene function. This has led to the suggestion that intron sequences have no function at all and are largely genetic “junk”…[2]

Soon thereafter, the 1995 edition of Voet & Voet's Biochemistry textbook explained that "a possibility that must be seriously entertained is that much repetitive DNA serves no useful purpose whatever for its host. Rather, it is selfish or junk DNA, a molecular parasite that, over many generations, has disseminated itself throughout the genome..."[3]

In 1996, leading origin of life theorist Christian de Duve wrote: "The simplest way to explain the surplus DNA is to suppose that it is a parasite or at best a harmless but useless passenger, hitching a ride in the survival machines created by the other DNA."[4] Another leading biologist, Sydney Brenner argued in a biology journal in 1998 that: "The excess DNA in our genomes is junk, and it is there because it is harmless, as well as being useless, and because the molecular processes generating extra DNA outpace those getting rid of it."[5]

Again I ask, so what if some Darwinian biologists bucked the clear consensus that under Neo-Darwinism, the “excess” DNA was probably useless junk? As Dembski would say, emphasizing such biologists is an exercise in stressing irrelevancies. The important fact is that the false "junk"-DNA paradigm was born and bred within the Neo-Darwinian mindset. You would never catch a clear-thinking ID-proponent saying something like, “The simplest way to explain the surplus DNA is to suppose that it is a parasite or at best a harmless but useless passenger, hitching a ride in the survival machines created by the other DNA.”

I Saw It with Mine Own Eyes
It’s tough to beat the testimony of an eyewitness. In this case, I am an eyewitness to the fact that Darwinian biologists contended that types of non-coding DNA were “junk” that couldn't possibly have been designed. In 2000 I took a graduate seminar at Scripps Institution for Oceanography where my fellow classmates argued to me that our DNA was not designed because Alu repeats could not possibly be anything but "junk." Then in 2003, Hakimi et al. published in Nature, "A chromatin remodeling complex that loads cohesin onto human chromosomes," which reported function for human Alu sequences. Indeed, Richard Gallagher’s article now provides a discussion of the functions for Alu repeats:

It's been all downhill [for junk-DNA]. Since, undermined by discoveries of the complexity of gene structure, the sophisticated nature of translational controls (which includes a role for Alu repeats, on the face of it the most meaningless junk of all), and the reach and scope of transposons. Recently, and damningly to the concept of junk, we've had the revelation of regulatory RNA networks.

(Richard Gallagher, "Junk Worth Keeping," The Scientist, Vol. 21(7):15 (July, 2007).)

Posted by Casey Luskin at 6:46 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The Scopes trial is often depicted as an apocalyptic struggle between the forces of light (scientific Darwinists) and the forces of darkness (benighted citizens of Tennessee who didn’t want Darwinism taught to their children). Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee’s 1950s play “Inherit the Wind,” a fictionalized account of the Scopes trail, portrays the trial as a struggle between scientific enlightenment and ignorant fundamentalism and has become a staple of high school English classes. Yet the Scopes trial wasn’t, as a matter of law, just about teaching Darwinism in an abstract sense. Scopes violated the Tennessee law by teaching from a textbook—George William Hunter's A Civic Biology: Presented in Problems (1914).

In a recent essay in the weekly standard, A Book for No Seasons: the forgotten aspects of John Scopes’ famous biology textbook, Garin Hovannisian recounts the truth about the biology textbook that was at the center of the Scopes trial.

Hovannisian observes:

George William Hunter's A Civic Biology: Presented in Problems (1914) was the book that sparked the controversy. Condemned as heretical in 1925, today it would seem to be a manual for enlightenment's battle against religion's perceived mysticism. Yet if John Scopes were to teach the very same Civic Biology in a modern classroom, he would probably be put on trial again. Because buried under the dust of history is the fact that this progressive, pro-evolution text was also quite racist.

At the present time there exist upon the earth five races or varieties of man, each very different from the other in instincts, social customs, and, to an extent, in structure. These are the Ethiopian or negro type, originating in Africa; the Malay or brown race, from the islands of the Pacific; the American Indian; the Mongolian or yellow race, including the natives of China, Japan, and the Eskimos; and finally, the highest type of all, the Caucasians, represented by the civilized white inhabitants of Europe and America.

Hunter was also a proponent of eugenics. "[T]he science of being well born," his text instructed, is an imperative for sophisticated society. "When people marry there are certain things that the individual as well as the race should demand," he wrote, arguing that tuberculosis, epilepsy, and even "feeble-mindedness are handicaps which it is not only unfair but criminal to hand down to posterity." "If such people were lower animals, we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading," Hunter lamented in Civic Biology. "Humanity will not allow this but we do have the remedy of separating the sexes in asylums or other places and in various ways preventing intermarriage and the possibilities of perpetuating such a low and degenerate race."[emphasis mine]

Subsequent editions of the textbook, like the ones I found at the Library of Congress, were cleansed of such views. Terms like "civilized white inhabitants" were disappeared, while references to "evolution" were replaced with "development of man." But these revisions were chiefly the design of Hunter's publishers who, in spite of the author's protests, sought to "omit statements that are likely to give offense to large numbers of people in control of the schools."

Outraged by the "emasculation" of his work and out of patience by 1926, Hunter wrote, "I have never felt so depressed and disgusted with a revision as this one. I thought I had the material for a mighty good book and it was before you people spoiled it."

You won't learn about A Civic Biology in Inherit the Wind. The lessons Scopes actually proposed to teach the schoolchildren of Dayton have been expunged from popular memory, as well as from the Library of Congress. Yet Inherit the Wind wasn't entirely inaccurate—the Scopes trial was indeed a struggle between two worldviews. The struggle between a 'benighted' and an 'enlightened' understanding of man continues to this day. The people of Tennessee objected to the lessions taught in A Civic Biology, and they objected to the Darwinist 'science' that was the explicit basis for Hunter's textbook. In rejecting dogmatic Darwinism as an ideology unfit for the education of their children, the people of Tennessee were a bit ahead of their time.

Posted by Michael Egnor at 9:22 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The Des Moines Register is continuing the rewriting of history regarding Guillermo Gonzalez. Last week the Des Moines Register published an article by Lisa Rossi which misrepresented the accomplishments of Guillermo Gonzalez and vastly understated his grant funding. In response, I submitted the following letter-to-the-editor to the Des Moines Register, but they would not run the letter because it didn't "add anything new to the dialogue." It seems the Des Moines Register doesn't regard positive information about Guillermo Gonzalez as adding anything new to the discussion. Regardless, as my letter concluded, “Rossi's fuzzy math and selective presentation of ISU's tenure policies obfuscate the obvious fact that Gonzalez's tenure denial was due to intolerance of intelligent design.” I reprint the letter below:

Dear Editor, Lisa Rossi's article, "ISU professor appeals denial of tenure," ignores Guillermo Gonzalez’s professional accomplishments while grossly miscalculating the funds that Dr. Gonzalez received during his time at ISU.

Rossi never once mentions Dr. Gonzalez’s outstanding record of scholarship, though that would seem worth noting in a story about a professor’s tenure. Guillermo Gonzalez leads all tenured ISU astronomers in citations in scientific papers since 2001 (normalized), and he has published over 350% more than the number of peer-reviewed publications his department requires for tenure.

In addition (pardon the pun), Rossi’s numbers don’t add up. She reports that Dr. Gonzalez received only $22,661 in outside grant money since joining ISU in 2001. In fact, Dr. Gonzalez received $64,000 from the NASA Astrobiology Institute from 2001-2004 and $58,000 from the Templeton Foundation from 2000-2003. Additionally, in early, 2007 Dr. Gonzalez obtained a five-year $50,000 grant from Discovery Institute to collect new observational astronomical research data.

Rossi's implication is that Professor Gonzalez was denied tenure because he didn’t receive enough grant money. Ironically, this is refuted by an op-ed the Des Moines Register printed by ISU physicist John Hauptman, who admitted that his vote against Gonzalez's tenure was based solely on Gonzalez's support for intelligent design. Moreover, Gonzalez actually received more grant money than many of those given tenure at ISU this year, and he has more peer-reviewed publications than nearly all of those approved for tenure. Clearly, it is incredible to believe that Gonzalez was objectively less qualified than the 91% of ISU faculty applying for tenure in 2007 who were approved.

Given that the tenure policies of Gonzalez's own department don't even mention grants as a criterion for gaining tenure, Rossi's fuzzy math and selective presentation of ISU's tenure policies obfuscate the obvious fact that Gonzalez's tenure denial was due to intolerance of intelligent design.

Sincerely,

Casey Luskin
Discovery Institute
Seattle, Washington

Posted by Casey Luskin at 12:51 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

This week's WORLD Magazine features an interview (available here to subscribers) with biochemist Michael Behe, "Darwin Slayer" and author of this year's The Edge of Evolution, his first book since the groundbreaking Darwin's Black Box back in 1996. As Marvin Olasky writes, "[A] book once every decade or so is about as much as Darwinians can take. Behe's new work shows that Darwinism's random mutation and natural selection explain little about how one species has led to another."

WORLD asks thoughtful questions and receives insightful answers, as seen in the following interchange:

WORLD: If macroevolution is like taking a gradual route to a distant pinnacle, why is it biologically unreasonable—given enough time—"to expect random mutation and natural selection to navigate a maze to get there"?

BEHE: Darwin's most radical claim was that evolution is utterly blind—unlike an intelligent agent, it can't "see" whether a mutation will be helpful in the long run. Random mutation and natural selection can only select whatever changes confer an immediate advantage, regardless of whether the changes are constructive or destructive. We see that starkly in human genetic responses to malaria, where many genes have been broken, diminished, or warped (like sickle cell). Yet in order to build complex coherent molecular machinery, evolution must avoid destructive changes and select ones that will be helpful in the future. A blind process can't do that.

Posted by Anika Smith at 11:04 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

My Darwinist interlocutor Orac, the surgical oncologist who blogs anonymously to hide his professional identity, but who takes umbrage at my observation that his posts are sometimes unprofessional, repeated his claim recently that Darwin’s theory is essential to medicine. That’s an odd assertion, even at first glance, given that Darwin’s theory isn’t taught in medical school and there are no specific requirements that pre-medical students have any grounding in the theory. There are lots of things that medical school admissions and curriculum committees recognize as indispensable to medical practice and research—calculus, physics, chemistry, organic chemistry, physiology, anatomy, pharmacology and pathophysiology, to name a few—but Darwin’s fundamental assertion—that all natural functional biological complexity arose by non-teleological variation and natural selection—isn’t a part of the required curriculum. How can Darwin’s actual theory of the non-purposeful origin of all life be indispensable to medicine, but not taught as a part of medical education, nor even required as a part of pre-medical education?

Yet Darwinists have insisted that Darwin’s theory is indispensable to medicine in three ways:

• 1) It is indispensable for our understanding of comparative medicine, which is the study of the similarity between humans and other species.
• 2) It is essential to genetics
• 3) It is indispensable to our understanding of population biology, particularly as regards bacterial resistance to antibiotics and the growth of cancer cells

As I have pointed out in several previous posts, the first two claims are nonsense. Darwin’s theory isn’t the basis for comparative medicine. Comparative medicine antedates Darwin by several millennia. Aristotle developed a system of comparative biology, and Galen, the father of classical medicine before the Enlightenment, used the principles of comparative biology in his dissection of Barbary apes and other animals as the basis for his system of human anatomy. The pioneers in seventeenth and eighteenth century anatomy and physiology, such as William Harvey and William Hunter, based nearly all of their research on extrapolation from animal to human biology, which of course is comparative biology. The father of modern comparative biology—the modern system of classification of species—was Carol Linnaeus, who worked a century before Darwin was born. Most of biological science before Darwin was comparative biology. Darwin offered one particular explanation for the similarities and differences between species, but the similarities and differences were known centuries before he lived. Darwin’s theory depends on our understanding of species similarity (and differences), but the converse is not true. Our knowledge of these similarities and differences doesn’t depend on Darwin’s theory. Comparative medicine depends on the actual study of human and non-human biology, not theories as to how these similarities came about. Darwin’s theory depends on the data, but the data for species similarity and differences is independent of Darwin’s theory. And it is the data, not the conjecture, that is essential to modern comparative medicine.

Neither does our knowledge of genetics depend on Darwin’s theory of non-teleological variation and natural selection. Our knowledge of genetics depends on physics, chemistry, biochemistry, molecular biology, etc. The proposal that biological complexity is non-teleological, which is the cornerstone of Darwin’s theory, contributes nothing to the study of genetics. In fact, by definition, virtually all experimental research in genetics involves genetic engineering (design) and artificial selection in the laboratory, both of which are quite purposeful and thus are examples of breeding, not of Darwinian evolution. Advocates for Darwin’s theory of course use modern genetics in their work, but the converse is not true. Molecular geneticists gain little or nothing from the assertion that all biological complexity arose by "chance and necessity." Genetic engineering, which is the real basis for most of our progress in molecular genetics, is, in a very real sense, the antithesis of Darwin’s theory.

Orac’s assertion that Darwin’s theory is essential to the understanding of bacterial antibiotic resistance and cancer growth is a bit more subtle, but is no less nonsense than the first two. Darwin’s theory has been applied to bacterial antibiotic resistance and cancer growth in two ways:

• 1) Darwin’s theory asserts that in a population of cells the traits of surviving bacteria (or cancer cells) will eventually be more common than the traits of non-surviving cells. Colloquially, "survivors will eventually outnumber non-survivors." This trivial observation is obvious—it’s essentially a tautology—and Darwin’s exposition of this tautology is of no use to physicians or to medical researchers. It’s like claiming that the observation that "heat is hot" is indispensable to physicists studying thermodynamics.
• 2) The growth of bacteria and cancer cells can be modeled with mathematical techniques, most prominently, statistical methods and the application of non-linear dynamics (such as Van der Pol oscillations, which can also be used to explain several important phenomena ranging from insect infestations to irregular heartbeats and activity in neural networks). Indeed, several of the pioneers of the application of mathematical statistics to biology, such as Galton, Pearson, and Fisher, were Darwinists. But, obviously, the application of mathematical techniques to biology doesn’t depend on Darwin’s theory of the non-purposeful origin of all biological complexity. The techniques of mathematical statistics can be applied to many things—economics, sociology, psychology—that are obviously studies of purposeful variation and have nothing to do with Darwin’s theory. Modern iterations of Darwin’s theory certainly make use of mathematics. Yet mathematics, applied to biology, doesn’t depend at all on Darwin’s theory. The mathematical methods applied to biology, and spuriously credited to Darwin’s theory, are routinely applied to designed systems and owe nothing to Darwin’s actual theory. Darwin himself used no mathematics, and his theory contributes nothing to our mathematical understanding of biological systems. Mathematics is the source of our mathematical understanding of biology.

Orac misunderstands the genuinely inconsequential role of Darwin’s theory of chance and necessity in medicine. Mathematical methods are certainly important in medicine, but Darwin's theory that all life arose without design contributes nothing to the mathematical methods actually used in research. And Darwinian tautologies (e.g., "unkilled bacterial eventually outnumber killed bacteria") are of no real value to researchers or to practicing physicians.

So I ask Orac: give me the specific examples of medical practices or advances in medical research in which Darwin’s fundamental assertion—that all natural functional biological complexity arose by non-teleological variation and natural selection—has played an essential role, or any role.

Posted by Michael Egnor at 10:27 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

In part 1, I explained that The Scientist’s editor Richard Ghallager wrote a politically charged article to avoid acknowledging that ID proponents have long-predicted the death of junk-DNA. But have ID proponents made these predictions? In a previous post, I gave about 4 or 5 examples of predictions from pro-ID or ID-sympathetic scientists from 1994 to the near-present who were predicting the end of the junk-DNA mindset. But does ID logically predict that we should find more and more function for “junk”-DNA? In a post that Telic Thoughts called, "A Dubious "Opportunity" for IDers,” it was recounted that one evolutionary biologist challenged ID proponents to “Specify the basis” for predicting function for junk DNA. I’ve done this multiple times here, as I previously explained why ID would lead us to expect that junk-DNA has function: “Intelligent agents typically create functional things, and thus Jonathan Wells has suggested, ‘From an ID perspective, however, it is extremely unlikely that an organism would expend its resources on preserving and transmitting so much junk.'”

Some may complain that this appears too simple, but ID’s prediction regarding junk-DNA is straightforward and is based upon the scientific method (i.e. observation, hypothesis, and experimentation).

Intelligent design begins by studying the types of complexity produced by intelligent agents. We observe that intelligent agents produce things for a purpose, that is, to fulfill some function. This leads ID proponents to an expectation—yes, a prediction—that DNA will not tend to contain meaningless junk but will contain structures that have (or once had) a function for the organism. ID does not lead us to the expectation that our cells' DNA will be largely non-functional garbate. The hypothesis—that "junk"-DNA will have function—is obviously experimentally testable. In fact, I know pro-ID biologists studying the function of junk-DNA who were inspired to do such research due to intelligent design. One biologist in particular is not yet tenured, and so I will not disclose his/her name. Suffice it to say, for this biologist, finding function for non-coding DNA was directly inspired by intelligent design.

Twisting Intelligent Design
As I noted in part 1 Richard Gallagher cites Panda's Thumb claiming it gives “[a] withering critique” of ID that is “educational” on "junk"-DNA. Yet Gallagher's source states: “ID is based on the observation or at least argument that a particular feature cannot (yet) be explained by science. … The reason ID fails is simple, it lacks any predictive power beyond ‘X cannot be explained by Y’.” This is a blatant misrepresentation of ID.

As noted, ID is based upon our observation-based understanding of the types of complexity produced by intelligent agents. ID then seeks to find objects in nature containing the types of complexity that, in our experience, come from intelligence. This is Dembski 101 – experience teaches that specified complexity is a type of information which is derived only from intelligence sources. Stephen Meyer explains this:

Our experience-based knowledge of information-flow confirms that systems with large amounts of specified complexity (especially codes and languages) invariably originate from an intelligent source from a mind or personal agent.”

Stephen C. Meyer, “The origin of biological information and the higher taxonomic categories,” Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, Vol. 117(2):213-239 (2004).

“Substantive objections are bypassed. Irrelevancies are stressed. Tables are turned. Misrepresentations abound.”
Finally, the question must be asked, why should Panda's Thumb resort to such a blatantly false caricature of ID by claiming it’s merely a negative argument against evolution? It’s much easier to invent a false caricature than to actually engage the arguments of your opponents. Darwinists like those at Panda's Thumb are famous for promoting false caricatures of ID. William Dembski explains that novices to this debate often expect ID-critics to actively engage ID arguments, but Dembski’s experience with this debate would teach us to not be fooled by seemingly reasonable statements by ID-critics:

Our critics have, in effect, adopted a zero-concession policy toward intelligent design. According to this policy, absolutely nothing is to be conceded to intelligent design and its proponents. It is therefore futile to hope for concessions from critics. This is especially difficult for novices to accept. A bright young novice to this debate comes along, makes an otherwise persuasive argument, and finds it immediately shot down. Substantive objections are bypassed. Irrelevancies are stressed. Tables are turned. Misrepresentations abound.

(William A. Dembski, “Dealing with the Backlash Against Intelligent Design”)

One last point: Panda's Thumb also tries to claim that ID’s predictions about junk-DNA are really derived from creationist arguments. The post then cites to an Answers in Genesis article. Logically speaking, this makes the correlation equals causation fallacy. One might as well claim that the rare Darwinian biologist that claimed junk-DNA had function was inspired by creationists.

Posted by Casey Luskin at 1:10 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I recently predicted recently that Darwinists would try to erase the historical fact that Darwinism led to the long-standing presumption that non-coding DNA was largely genetic junk. In the latest issue of The Scientist, editor Richard Gallagher does no less, citing sources that wrongly imply that Neo-Darwinism did not hinder research into function for junk-DNA, and even stating that “[t]he latest iniquity to befall junk DNA is the attempted hijack by proponents of Intelligent Design.” Gallagher’s usage of a terrorism metaphor fits well with Gallagher’s own admission that his article’s purpose is more rhetorical than factual:

While I did start this editorial off with a working title of "The Life and Death of Junk DNA," a few hours of browsing convinced me that we've benefited from a classic "framing" of science. Framing is a recent proposal from Mat Nisbet and Chris Mooney 3 : When scientists engage the public they deliberately select, or frame, the information for the desired audience.

(Richard Gallagher, "Junk Worth Keeping," The Scientist, Vol. 21(7):15 (July, 2007).)

Gallagher then claims that “[s]ome [ID proponents] would have us believe that their movement has provided the tools to find function in junk DNA.” Of course, Gallagher claims that ID proponents are manipulating the information, but in fact, it is the Panda’s Thumb blog, Gallagher’s source for rewriting history, that is a master at deliberately selecting, or framing, the information for the desired audience.

Citing to the Panda’s Thumb post as “[a] withering critique” of ID that is “educational,” Gallagher’s source is wrong from its first two sentence. It states: “Salvador Cordova, makes the common and fallacious argument that ID somehow predicted function in ‘junk DNA’. In fact, there is no logical foundation for this claim as ID lacks predictive power beyond ‘Darwinism does not explain X’.”

That’s what Darwinists would like ID to say because it fits with their invented story that ID is an untestable, unfalsfiable concept, nothing more than a negative argument against evolution. This statement directly mirrors the false information about ID promoted by the Darwinists at the Dover trial. As I will discuss in upcoming posts, it is simply an historical fact that ID-proponents have long-predicted, in the words Richard Gallagher chose not to use, the "Death of Junk DNA." It’s also an historical fact that neo-Darwinism inappropriately forestalled the "Death of Junk DNA." It will also be shown why, logically speaking, ID predicts increased discovery of function for "junk"-DNA.

Posted by Casey Luskin at 1:20 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

According to an article in Scientific American:

Homo sapiens is the only species that keeps detailed records. That is why biologist Virpi Lummaa of the University of Sheffield in England started in 1998 to comb through Finnish church records from two centuries ago for clues about the influence of evolution on reproduction.

Posted by Bruce Chapman at 8:39 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Michael Behe has posted his response to Richard Dawkins' review of The Edge of Evolution on his Amazon blog, and it's worth noting for what it reveals about how Behe differs from many of his critics.

If you've been reading any of Behe's Amazon blog, you understand that Michael Behe is a gentleman. In fact, when TIME Magazine asked him to write a profile on Richard Dawkins for their "TIME 100" issue, he addressed Dawkins while maintaining his characteristic civility and gracious humor.

Now, when Dawkins' own review of Behe did not reciprocate his courtesy, Behe maintains his good manners. Note the first part of his response:

Other Darwinist reviewers have blustered; Dawkins is the only one who has dripped venom. I will pass on replying to that. He makes just two substantive points in his review. (emphasis added)

Posted by Anika Smith at 5:10 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

This week’s WORLD Magazine cover story is about teaching the controversy and focuses primarily on Explore Evolution, the new textbook which teaches both the strengths and weaknesses of Darwin’s theory. The article features an interview with Discovery senior fellow Dr. John West, along with Doug Cowan, a high school biology teacher who plans on incorporating the textbook in his curriculum next year.

According to the article:

This fall, the 34-year teaching veteran will restructure his evenhanded presentation around a new textbook from the Seattle-based Discovery Institute. Explore Evolution: The Arguments for and Against Neo-Darwinism (Hill House Publishers, 2007) does not address alternative theories of origins but succinctly lays out the scientific strengths and weaknesses of the most critical elements of Darwinism. “It's made my work a lot easier,” Cowan said.

Author Mark Bergin goes on to quote CSC associate director John West, saying:

"The policy that we've recommended turns out to be the precise common-ground approach we said it would be. It reduces the decibel level; you don't get sued; you get good education; and the Darwinists don't have a leg to stand on."

Posted by Robert Crowther at 3:10 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

It’s beyond dispute that the false “junk”-DNA mindset was born, bred, and sustained long beyond its reasonable lifetime by the neo-Darwinian paradigm. As one example in Scientific American explained back in 2003, “the introns within genes and the long stretches of intergenic DNA between genes ... ‘were immediately assumed to be evolutionary junk.’” But once it was discovered that introns play vital cellular roles regulating gene production within the cell, John S. Mattick, director of the Institute for Molecular Bioscience at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, was quoted saying the failure to recognize function for introns might have been “one of the biggest mistakes in the history of molecular biology.”

Now it’s turning out that this "mistake" of ignoring function for junk-DNA may have also hindered discovery of the causes of colon cancer. A news article from Science reports: “Three independent groups have hit on the first common genetic variant that appears to raise the risk of colorectal cancer, albeit by a small amount, and which they estimate is found in half the world's population. Although rare genes have been linked to the disease before, this is the first evidence of common DNA--and also notable because it falls outside a gene, in so-called ‘junk DNA.’” The Washington Post also reported that causes of Type II diabetes may be linked to malfunctions in non-coding “junk” DNA. How much earlier might these non-coding “junk” DNA causes of disease have been recognized had scientists operated under an intelligent design paradigm rather than a Neo-Darwinian one?

Update 7/17/07: Wired Magazine's blog network is now reporting that "junk"-DNA's regulatory function may be the key to improving the techniques used to treat diseases in gene therapy: "[T]he findings could explain why gene therapy that transfers genes but not junk DNA hasn't fulfilled its promise, and [one scientist] illustrated it thusly: 'And we know what happens when a foreman doesn’t turn up on a building site: you get the tea-drinking and wolf-whistling, but not much building.'" Now it seems that Darwinism's failure to inspire research into function for non-coding "junk" DNA may have also hampered our understanding of how to use gene therapy to treat diseases!

Posted by Casey Luskin at 1:07 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

[Editor’s Note: This post was written by a Discovery Institute legal intern, Guillermo Dekat. Mr. Dekat is a law student at St. Mary’s University in San Antonio, Texas. He holds a bachelor’s degree in biology from the Air Force Academy.]

A review of Science’s Blind Spot: The Unseen Religion of Scientific Naturalism
By: Cornelius G. Hunter (Brazos Press, 2007)

In law, one who sells a product in a defective condition unreasonably dangerous to the user is held strictly liable for the physical harm to the injured party. One way for the injured party to win a case is to successfully argue that there is a design defect in the product. Put another way, the plaintiff is entitled to damages because there is something wrong with the blueprints for the product. At this point, expert witnesses are found to testify to the design’s integrity or its defectiveness.

Perhaps the most common blind spot that inhibits the proper functioning of a product is the quite literal blind spot we experience when driving our cars. If modern science and the pre-suppositions that support it were an automobile, then Dr. Hunter’s new book would be the testimony of an expert witness who has found a significant design defect. The defect has created a blind spot that is not necessary for the proper functioning of science.

Dr. Hunter begins his book by pointing out the design defect: “The problem is that religion has joined science.” (Hunter, 2007, pg. 9) He goes on to explain that, while today’s science is thought to be empirical and free of theological premise, nothing could be further from the truth. Dr. Hunter examines the complex interaction between religion and science in history and arrives at what may be a surprising conclusion for many: the modern design of science is based on theological naturalism, a phrase he uses to describe the restriction of science to naturalism for religious reasons.

But Hunter goes further and refutes a common argument that naturalism is a result of atheism or empirically based findings. Instead, he lays the responsibility for naturalism at the doorstep of theists, who were largely thinkers inside the church hundreds of years ago. Hunter explains that theological naturalism is not opposed to religious ideas, because the philosophy is itself religious. It makes theological assumptions for a number of different reasons and then mandates a non-intervening “god.” This mandate allows the stream of thought to necessarily flow from theological naturalism to methodological naturalism—the idea that science ought to pursue naturalistic explanations. According to Dr. Hunter, this philosophy of theological naturalism predated the theories that we argue about today.

Dr. Hunter then makes the connection between the philosophies and the blind spot that was created in science:

The problem with science is not that the naturalistic approach might occasionally be inadequate. The problem is that science would never know any better. This is science’s blind spot. When problems are encountered, theological naturalism assumes that the correct naturalistic solution has not been found. Non-natural phenomena will be interpreted as natural, regardless of how implausible the story becomes…. Theological naturalism has no way to distinguish a paradigm problem from a research problem. It cannot consider the possibility that there is no naturalistic explanation for the DNA code. If a theory of natural history has problems — and many have their share — the problems are always viewed as research problems and never as paradigm problems.

(Cornelius G. Hunter, Science’s Blind Spot: Unseen Religion of Scientific Naturalism, Brazos Press, 2007, pg. 44-45)

As an expert witness, Dr. Hunter excels. Not only does he examine the current design of modern science, he also offers a design that will address the defect and allow science to function properly. Perhaps it may function even better. With his testimony complete, the jury is out. Will the scientists of today and the next generation choose to drive an automobile with this defect, or will they choose a different design, one without this blaring blind spot? Regardless, they would all do well to read Cornelius G. Hunters’ Science’s Blind Spot: The Unseen Religion of Scientific Naturalism.

Posted by Guillermo Dekat at 12:23 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Science writer Denyse O’Leary is the latest to weigh in on The Edge of Evolution over at her popular blog, Post-Darwinist. She actually has three insightful posts related to Behe, and of course Behe’s constributions to the overall debate over Darwinism.

She sums up The Edge of Evolution this way:

Behe calculates that, based on the available evidence of observed Darwinian mutations, events less likely than ten to the twentieth power are generally beyond the edge of (Darwinian) evolution (145).

There is the main argument in a nutshell, minus the supporting material. Many people, of course, will feel the need to argue for or against the thesis of The Edge of Evolution without bothering to read it. Despite the fact that it is very clearly written - a masterpiece of simple explanation, accessible to anyone who can read National Geographic or Scientific American.

She also takes on some of the Darwinian reviews of the book (and one wonders if these are the same people she noted above who would feel the need to attack it without having read it):

When a book that challenges a consensus comes out, it is prudent to read the book before reading the reviews. Chances are, the reviews are written by prominent defenders of the status quo and - critically - you stand little chance of getting a clear sense of either the book's content or the thrust of its argument. Sometimes, careers depend on obfuscating the issues. The response to Edge of Evolution provides an excellent demonstration of this effect.

• Behe's Edge of Evolution: A turning point in the evolution vs. intelligent design controversy?
  
• The Edge of Evolution: What exactly does Behe say about Darwinism?
  
The response to Edge of Evolution: Dogs, Dover, Darwinists, and Deals

Posted by Robert Crowther at 12:57 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Over the past year or so I've corresponded with a pro-Darwin graduate student in biology at a major public research university on the east coast. Unfortunately, I had to end the correspondence because, despite my repeated pleas for civility and personal forgiveness towards him, he simply could not restrain himself from personal attacks against me. Though I ended any personal correspondence with this Darwinist, he recently asked me a question worth answering here on Evolution News & Views. To give some background, his question asks how I calculated that a mouse "pseudogene," if it were truly a non-functional pseudogene, would tend to be rewritten by neutral mutations in about 125 million years:

I had a question about a figure you derived in your review of Carroll's book [The Making of the Fittest]. Could you explain how you arrived at the figure 125 mya?:

"Carroll claims that the mutation rate for mice is 2 x 10^-9 per base pair per generation, and other sources indicate that mouse generation time is 3 months. This means that a non-functional mouse 'pseudogene' should be completely rewritten in about 125 million years. According to Neo-Darwinists, humans and mice supposedly shared a common ancestor between 75 and 125 million years ago, which means that any such shared 'pseudogenes' could have been 60%-100% rewritten by neutral mutations. Could we still recognize a 'pseudogene' [were it] 60% rewritten? 75%? 100%?"

The calculation is fairly simple to perform, and I'll break it in 3 steps:

(1): Mutation rate = 2 * 10^-9 mutated-base-pair / generation = 0.000000002 mutated-base-pair / generation.

(2): 0.000000002 mutated-base-pair / generation * 4 generations / year = 0.000000008 mutated-base-pair / year.

(3): Take the inverse to make the units "years per mutated-base-pair" (i.e., how long will it take to guarantee that a given base pair is mutated or "rewritten"), and you get 125,000,000 years per any given mutated-base-pair.

One can also frame the calculation slightly differently by recognizing that there are 4 generations per year for mice:

0.000000002 mutated-base-pair / generation * 125,000,000 year * 4 generation / year = 1 mutated-base-pair.

The implications of this calculation are as follows: Sean B. Carroll constantly says in his book The Making of the Fittest that in biology, the rule is "Use it or Lose it." The converse would seem to also be true: if you haven't lost something, then that implies you're probably still using it, and it has function. So why do so many allegedly non-functional "pseudogenes" persist in mice and humans?

In short, if humans share pseudogenes with mice, then according to the standard Darwinian story, those pseudogenes have been sitting around in the genome doing absolutely nothing for around 125 million years. If these pseudogenes are really doing nothing, then they should no longer exist in the mouse genome, as mutation rates and statistical averages would dictate that a functionless stretch of mouse DNA should have been completely rewritten due to random, neutral mutations over such a long time period.

If the rule is "use it or lose it," then the fact that these "pseudogenes" haven't been lost implies that they may actually be performing some function in the cell. The Washington Post recently reported that "the vast majority of the 3 billion "letters" of the human genetic code are busily toiling at an array of previously invisible tasks." The argument presented here provides evidence that pseudogenes may not all be simply functionless "junk"-DNA, but like most other types of non-coding-DNA, they too are toiling at some task.

Posted by Casey Luskin at 10:35 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The Darwinists devoutly desire to avoid the true history of their creed, and usually the media assist in the cover up—unknowingly, I would like to think. The "Inherit the Wind" trope that is monotonously employed by journalists—not to mention Judge Jones of Dover, PA fame—derives from the play and movie of that name. But this cliché, which is the source of what many journalists think about the subject, was fiction and not even aimed at the evolution issue so much as the danger of McCarthyism in the 1950s. The real Scopes trial in 1925 was rather different. And so was the biology textbook that was at the heart of the Scopes trial.

Hunter's A Civic Biology was racist. It advocated therapeutic eugenics. It was widely used in schools around America, not just in Tennessee. John West’s forthcoming book, Darwin Day in America: How Our Politics and Culture Have Been Dehumanized in the Name of Science, includes an extensive examination of the subject as it relates to the popularity of eugenics in general. Today’s PC guardians at least pretend not to know about this, but it was well-known and well-accepted by the "brites" of the 1920s. Just as self-referential sophisticates of 2007 nurse bigotries they decline to examine, so it was with the supposed opinion makers of a century ago. “The Sage of Baltimore,” reporter and satirist H. L. Mencken, cleverly mocked William Jennings Bryan and the townspeople of Dayton, Tennessee, and delighted his fellow reporters in doing so. Ever since then his sneering style has been consciously or unconsciously imitated by Darwinist propagandists. His rewritten character in Inherit the Wind captures only part of Mencken, who in real-life was not only a scourge of the general public (the “booboisie”), but also a robust racist and anti-Semite. And he remained a bigot, by the way, long after the fashion passed among America's literary set.

Congratulations therefore go to Garin Hovanissian, who brings up the topic of the Hunter biology textbook in The Weekly Standard. We are coming up on the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth in 2009, so you can be sure that Inherit the Wind will be shown in thousands of high school and college classrooms, where it will be lovingly presented as an approximation of the truth. It might be useful before then to dig up all the speeches of William Hunter, the racist and eugenicist, and of his champion, the great H. L. Mencken. The fullness of the truth will be found there. How hard will the Darwinists fight to keep the students from learning about that?

Posted by Bruce Chapman at 2:32 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Michael Behe's new book, The Edge of Evolution, continues to garner attention. Not surprisingly, Darwinists are not making the same mistake they made with Darwin's Black Box, only now they are working overtime to ensure EoE suffers crib death. They simply can't afford for another Behe book to get any traction. So, Behe is having to work overtime as well, responding to his critics. Today he has the first of two responses to a recent review in Nature magazine by Ken Miller. His full Amazon author's page has all of his responses thus far to Jerry Coyne, Sean Carroll, and Michael Ruse, as well as answers to some common questions about the book.

Posted by Robert Crowther at 7:51 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Pro-intelligent design astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez is appealing his denial of tenure at Iowa State University to the Iowa State Board of Regents. Dr. Gonzalez's first appeal was rejected by ISU President Gregory Geoffroy on May 31. On June 19, Gonzalez filed notice with the ISU President's office that he would make a further appeal to the Board of Regents. Gonzalez's current appeal will play out over the next couple of months as the record in the case is forwarded by the university to the Board of Regents and both Gonzalez and the university file their written arguments in the case. If Gonzalez's denial of tenure is not overturned, he will be out of a job at the end of the 2007-08 academic year.

An outstanding scientist and scholar, Gonzalez has had his scientific work featured in Science, Nature, and on the cover of Scientific American. He is co-author of a major college astronomy textbook published last year by Cambridge University Press. But he has been viciously attacked by Darwinists and various atheists for co-authoring with Jay Richards The Privileged Planet, which makes a scientific argument for the intelligent design of the universe based on the empirical evidence from physics and astronomy. It should be noted Gonzalez's book does not discuss the evidence for design in biology, and thus it does not deal with Darwin's theory of evolution. That hasn't spared Gonzalez from persecution.

Gonzalez was denied tenure despite the fact that he has published 68 peer-reviewed scientific articles, exceeding by 350% his own department's stated standard for demonstrating the research "excellence" needed for tenure. Moreover, Gonzalez's articles published since 2001 (the year he arrived at ISU) have the highest normalized citation count among all of the astronomers in his department according to the authoritative NASA/Smithsonian Astrophysics Data System. Gonzalez also has the second highest normalized number of publications among all the astronomers in his department.

Incredibly, ISU's President Geoffroy denied tenure to Gonzalez while approving 91% of those applying for tenure this year. Geoffroy also promoted to full professor one of Gonzalez's chief persecutors at ISU, atheist religion professor Hector Avaloz, who believes that the Bible is worse than Hitler's Mein Kampf. Geoffroy, it seems, has a very perverse view of academic freedom.

The Gonzalez affair is one of the most outrageous examples of academic discrimination and abuse targeting scholars who are supportive of intelligent design. ISU's spin-machine has tried to create the impression that the denial of tenure to Gonzalez isn't about intelligent design, but the day after ISU's president announced his rejection of Gonzalez's first appeal, a member of ISU's Department of Physics and Astronomy published an article in the Des Moines Register openly admitting that Gonzalez's support for intelligent design was the only reason he voted against tenure for Gonzalez. Two other members of the department have acknowledged that Gonzalez's intelligent design views played a role in their deliberations, and still other members of the department have been tied to national statements condemning intelligent design. In short, the claim that ID had nothing to do with Gonzalez's tenure denial at ISU is preposterous. This is a clear case of discrimination against an outstanding scientist based on his support of intelligent design. Let's hope that members of the Iowa State Board of Regents are more supportive of academic freedom than the faculty and administrators at ISU.

While Gonzalez continues his tenure appeal, Discovery Institute has filed multiple public records requests with ISU in order document in detail what actually happened to Gonzalez. You can expect a significant amount of additional information to come out about the Gonzalez case in coming weeks and months.

Posted by John West at 12:08 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Something just doesn't smell right about this story.

The Denver Post reports:

University of Colorado police are investigating a series of threatening messages and documents e-mailed to and slipped under the door of evolutionary biology labs on the Boulder campus.

According to Boulder Police:

"It basically said anybody who doesn't believe in our religious belief is wrong and should be taken care of."

In all the years of the ongoing evolution debates, nothing like this has ever happened that I've heard of, at least not from creationists. When such things have happened in the past, it was a Darwinist who claimed to be physically attacked by creationists. Remember Paul Mirecki at University of Kansas? (Need to jog your memory? Here, here, and here.)

I suspect that if these guys are ever caught, they won't turn out be creationists, or even very religious people.

Posted by Robert Crowther at 5:16 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

When I go to the dog park, my 4 year old lab retriever Kali shows some obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) tendencies. No matter how tired she is, how thirsty she might be, or how out of breath, when I throw the tennis ball she races off after it at top speed. She can't not chase the ball.

Darwinists can't not claim that that intelligent design is an argument from ignorance. In fact, not only are they fond of insisting this, they show OCD-like tendencies about it. No matter how much information you provide showing that ID is not an argument from ignorance, like Kali with her tennis ball, they switch into high gear.

Last week on ID The Future, we featured a short video clip of Dr. Jay Richards discussing the Darwinist's favorite question for ID theorists, so who designed the designer? Inevitably in any lengthy discussion of ID with a Darwinist, they resort to asking that question as if it makes some ultimate point that will settle the issue once and for all. The video of Richards' answer to this is short and definitive.

Still it raised hackles over at The Panda's Thumb.

PvM writes:

Indeed, if the designer could be established by empirical evidence, it would immediately eliminate the ‘Intelligent Designer’ as proposed by ID, namely a supernatural designer called ‘God’.

But then PvM goes all OCD and states:

So how does ID infer design? Simply by arguing that a particular system or event cannot be explained by natural processes and thus should be seen as evidence for design.

Fortunately, over at Uncommon Descent Crandaddy has weighed in with a very insightful post:

Neither Pim nor any other ID critic I have encountered has ever given an adequate explanation of just what evidence for a designer would look like, or if they have, I have yet to see it. The best they seem to be able to do is refer to instances of design produced by humans and say that we understand the “means, motives, opportunity, capability and so on” of such beings the way Pim does. The problems with this approach, however, are severe and intractable, and it continues to baffle me how any intelligent person who devotes much thought to this position could continue to hold it.

Posted by Robert Crowther at 1:57 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Darwinian logic often contends that because a given proportion of ID proponents are creationists, ID must therefore be creationism. It's a twist on the genetic fallacy, one I like to call the Darwinist "Genesis Genetic Argument." As noted, it implies that each and every argument made by a creationist must be equivalent to arguing for full-blooded creationism. This fallacious argument is easy to defeat on logical grounds by pointing out that some ID proponents are not creationists, and in fact have been persuaded to support ID in the absence of religion. Thus something other than creationism or religion must be fundamental to the set of views underlying ID (big hint: it's the scientific data indicating real design in nature)!

Michael Egnor recently observed that William Provine and Gregory Graffin have published the results a poll which provides a poignant rhetorical rebuttal to the Darwinian "Genesis Genetic Argument." Provine and Graffin (both evolutionary biologists) surveyed 149 evolutionary biologists and found that 78% were "pure naturalists," and strikingly, "[o]nly two out of 149 described themselves as full theists."

So the next time a Darwinist tries to tell you that ID is creationism because some percentage of ID proponents are creationists, you can remind them that polls indicate that the vast majority of evolutionary biologists are atheists who reject traditional theism. By the logic of the Darwinist "Genesis Genetic Argument," evolutionary biology would be equivalent to "pure naturalism." Of course, that logic is false, which is why ID is not creationism any more than evolutionary biology is atheism.

Posted by Casey Luskin at 12:46 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

A colleague intimately familiar with the debate over evolution offered the following insight, which I thought would be of interest to a number of our readers.

Understanding why someone holds to a particular position -- understanding how holding that position supports the person's goals in life -- is important to figuring out what will be necessary to cause that person to change position. I came across an observation in a different context that I feel also applies to the evolution/origins debate.

The 'different context' is the current Iraq war and the dismissive treatment the mainstream media has afforded to a report of atrocities. An independent free-lancer, Michael Yon, reported a massacre that he documented with photographs and interviews. The killers were al-Qaeda, the victims civilians, and the mainstream press did not follow-up the reports, even though the massacre is horrific and normally would garner coverage. Why not? A mainstream journalist e-mailed "instapundit" to explain that:

"Yon's story doesn't get attention because it is humiliating. It is humiliating because it is obvious that we media ... can't do squat about such determined use of force. Our words, images, arguments and skills can't stop the killing ... [so instead] we focus our emotions and attention on the somewhat-bad domestic things that we can 'fix' ... such as Abu Ghraib, wiretapping, etc. When we 'fix' them, then we get status, applause, power, new jobs, ego, etc."

It seems to me that a similar psychology affects the evolution/origins approach of the mainstream science side. Mainstream scientists are experts in materialistic, naturalistic causes and effects. Living things are, of course, material things, and they comprise a vast proportion of the things that human beings are interested in learning more about. If life is to be attributed to a cause that is outside materialism and naturalism, that is humiliating to scientists, because it means life is something that, to use the words of the quote above, science cannot 'fix' with its available 'words, images, arguments and skills.'

I think it is probably a quite common element of human nature that a person who has developed an expertise or skill is likely to see that expertise or skill as being useful in solving a wider variety of problems than do other people who are looking at how to solve the same problems. Certainly anyone who is in the process of trying to find a new job, or change careers, is strongly predisposed to make arguments as to how that person can bring her or his skills to bear to solve problems in new fields or in new job situations. Indeed, that's how we market ourselves, by convincing potential employers or clients that our existing skills will solve their new problems.

Asking the mainstream science community to declare that new discoveries in molecular biology and DNA render materialism inadequate to explain life is like asking someone to declare that his skills have become outmoded and obsolete, unable to solve the new problems facing us. To ask someone to declare his own obsolescence triggers some pretty strong emotions, and some powerful emotional resistance, and counter-accusations. In the words of the poet Dylan Thomas, they "Do not go gentle into that good night" and they "rage, rage against the dying of the light." Thus, the emotional vehemence exhibited by the mainstream side is what we should expect.

Posted by Robert Crowther at 11:31 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Now that Michael Behe has started addressing his critics over at his Amazon blog, some of them are beginning to take notice. Jerry Coyne, University of Chicago evolutionary biologist, has posted a reply to Behe at TalkReason.org. Now Behe is including a few of his salient points and his responses to them on his Amazon blog so we can all keep track of the conversation. So far he has posted part 1 here — hopefully part 2 isn't far behind.

Posted by Anika Smith at 12:39 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

On June 26 the New York Times ran an article by Douglas H. Erwin, senior scientist at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, in which he stated as demonstrated fact the power of natural selection to create the eye. We now can see (forgive the pun) that natural selection “is the primary agent in shaping new adaptations.”

His example? “Computer simulations,” he declares, “have shown how selection can produce a complex eye from a simple eyespot in just a few hundred thousand years.”

Really, Dr. Erwin? Where is your proof of this important fact? What computer simulations, published where and when and by whom? Just a citation or two will do.

One also might scoff at the exaggerated faith shown computer simulations in general, since they frequently cannot even predict next week’s weather accurately. But leave that topic alone for now. Let’s just have the evidence of published computer simulations referred to by Dr. Erwin.

One suspects that the Erwin claim is based on Dan Nilsson & Susan Pelger’s study, “A Pessimistic Estimate of the Time Required for an Eye to Evolve,” Proceedings of the Royal Society, London B (1994) 256, 53-58. However, as Dr. David Berlinski pointed out a few years ago in Commentary, that paper contains no computer simulation whatsoever, a point obvious to anyone reading it and confirmed in writing by its senior author. It was Richard Dawkins who conveyed the widespread impression to the contrary, both in River out of Eden (1995) and The New Statesman of July 16, 1995. The thesis that there exists a computer simulation for the development of the eye is an urban myth that has built upon Dawkins’ uncorrected error.

Details may be found in Volume 115, Number 4 of Commentary, April 2003, under the title “A Scientific Scandal.”

The New York Times should retract Dr. Erwin’s claim or substantiate it. So should Dr. Erwin. This isn’t hard to research and the reply should not be fudged with the name-calling and hand waving that has become standard Darwinist dialogue. Either there are actual computer simulations that back the Dawkins/Erwin/New York Times assertion about evolution of the eye by natural selection, or there are not.

Posted by Bruce Chapman at 12:43 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

On June 18th, blogger Pat Sullivan posted his thoughts on the difficulties that Darwinists are having with the public acceptance of their theory. Pat is an entrepreneur and a marketing expert who is the creator of ACT! and SalesLogix, software programs that help businesses with marketing and customer relations. When it comes to marketing, he knows what he’s talking about. He observes:

What interests me as a marketing observer is this; after tens of thousands of exposures to the Darwin marketing "message" only some 34% of people buy the message. And with almost NO exposures to the contrary message except in Sunday school and mom and dad, 66% of people believe we were created by a designer. Personally, I believe the main reason this is the case is the ease with which people look at the world and readily conclude it looks designed. The arguments to the contrary just are really hard to follow.

Pat notes that I.D. makes a lot more sense to people:

An example. The concept of "irreducible complexity" put forth by Dr. Michael Behe in his book "Darwin's Black Box". I read the book and it was very easy to follow. He uses the concept of a mousetrap to get his point across. I came across a rebuttal to Behe's concept written by longtime Darwinist Dr. Ken Miller, author of "Finding Darwin's God". Now I am not a scientist but I probably would not be considered stupid by most people. (For sure some though!) I read his entire rebuttal of Behe's work. I don't follow the logic of it at all. It is too complex. I find that generally this is true of most stuff I read by Darwinist's rebutting ID stuff. I really try to follow their arguments and find myself bewildered. As a marketer this explains why most people simply say, "it looks designed, it is designed, next question".

Pat concludes:

If Darwinism is ever going to succeed it is going to have to find ways to explain itself in easy to follow, yet credible ways to get people to believe it. You should not have to be a trained biochemist to understand Darwinism. I expect this won't happen and ID as a scientific idea will gain a lot of ground in the mind of the marketplace.

The Darwinists’ reply to Pat’s observations was scathing. Pat was attacked by Darwinists Orac and P.Z. Myers. In reply to a rhetorical question that Pat asked about the historical emergence of writing, Myers opined:

This should win a prize for the dumbest excuse from a creationist that I've heard in, oh, about 24 hours...

This same creationist also makes a "marketing" argument, that creationism is better because it is easier to understand than evolution. He claims to have read both Darwin's Black Box by Behe and Finding Darwin's God by Miller, and that Behe's book was easier and used a mousetrap to "get his point across", while Miller's book was too complex. That's an interesting example of selective memory: both books deal with similar subjects on a roughly similar level. Behe's book has details (some of which are wrong) of cilia and blood-clotting cascades and such, all of which seemed to have slipped out of this creationist's memory. Miller's book deals with similar subjects, but doesn't make the stupid errors Behe's does.

Yet all Mr Marketer remembers is that mousetraps don't evolve.

Darwinists would be well-advised to pay careful attention to Pat’s observations about Darwinism's problems with public acceptance. Contrary to Pat’s self-deprecating comments, he’s obviously a very smart guy. Pat has real insights into Darwinism's credibility problems, and Pat speaks for millions of Americans who question Darwinists’ dogmatic assertions and their venomous denigration of thoughtful people who ask questions about their science. Sneering ad hominem attacks from a scientist (Myers) and from a physician (Orac) are lamentable, and Myers’ and Orac’s unprofessional behavior contributes to Darwinism’s growing problem with public credibility.

Posted by Michael Egnor at 1:05 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

When my copy of Alister and Joanna Collicut McGrath's The Dawkins Delusion: Atheist Fundamentalism and the Denial of the Divine recently arrived, I was struck by its short length. I immediately wondered if it was short because Richard Dawkins himself provided scant substance in his The God Delusion to which to respond. According to the McGraths, my suspicions were correct:

It is, in fact, actually rather difficult to write a response to this book [The God Delusion]--but not because it is well-argued or because it marshals such overwhelming evidence in its favor. The book is often little more than an aggregation of convenient factoids suitably overstated to achieve maximum impact and loosely arranged to suggest that they constitute an argument. To rebut this highly selective appeal to evidence would be unspeakably tedious and would simply lead to a hopelessly dull book that seemed tetchy and reactive.

(Alister McGrath and Joanna Collicut McGrath, The Dawkins Delusion: Atheist Fundamentalism and the Denial of the Divine, pg. 13 (InterVarsity Press, 2007).)

Getting Into the Gaps
One of the highlights of The Dawkins Delusion is the McGraths's refutation of Dawkins' favorite "Who designed the designer?" objection. Dawkins claims that God is "more improbable" than any other explanation for our existence because we can't account for His origin. The McGraths explain why Dawkins' conclusion is built upon faulty logic:

Dawkins points out the sheer improbability of our existence. Belief in God, he then argues, represents belief in a being whose existence must be even more complex--and therefore more improbable. Yet this leap from the recognition of complexity to the assertion of improbability is highly problematic. Why is something complex improbable? A "theory of everything" may well be more complex than the lesser theories it explains--but what has that to do with its improbability?

But let's pause for a moment. The one inescapable and highly improbable fact about the world is that we, as reflective human beings, are in fact here. Now it is virtually impossible to quantify how improbable the existence of humanity is. Dawkins himself is clear, especially in Climbing Mount Improbable, that it is very, very improbable. But we are here. The very fact that we are puzzling about how we came to be here is dependent on the fact that we are here and are thus able to reflect on the likelihood of this actuality. Perhaps we need to appreciate that there are many things that seem improbable--but improbability does not, and never has, entailed nonexistence. We may be highly improbable--yet we are here. The issue, then, is not whether God is probable but whether God is actual.

(Alister McGrath and Joanna Collicut McGrath, The Dawkins Delusion: Atheist Fundamentalism and the Denial of the Divine, pgs. 28-29 (InterVarsity Press, 2007), emphases in original.)

The McGraths’s Wrong Turn on Intelligent Design
The Dawkins Delusion spends very little time discussing intelligent design so this is a very minor component of their argument overall. However, although I felt most of The Dawkins Delusion was well-reasoned and cogent, in my view the McGraths take a wrong turn when they claim that intelligent design is a "God-of-the-gaps" argument (pgs. 30-31). (As Oxford scholars, they also somewhat pejoratively state ID is "a movement, based primarily in North America" pg. 30.) Much like their fellow theistic evolutionist Francis Collins, the McGraths employ a double standard by inferring design from the intelligible complexity at the level of nature as a whole, but then refusing to apply such logical reasoning to investigate design at the level of biology.

Michael Behe addresses the charge that intelligent design is a "God-of-the-gaps" argument in his recent book, The Edge of Evolution:

If the great majority of cellular protein-protein interactions are beyond the edge of evolution, it is reasonable to view the entire cell itself as a nonrandom, integrated whole--like a well-planned factory, as National Academy of Sciences president Bruce Alberts suggested. This conclusion isn't a "God-of-the-gaps" argument. Nonrandomness isn't a rare property of extracomplex features of the cell. Rather, it encompasses the cellular foundation of life as a whole.

(Michael Behe, The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism, pg. 146-147 (Free Press, 2007).)

Rather than inserting "God" into "gaps," intelligent design invokes intelligence to explain specifically ordered complexity, which in our experience comes only from intelligence. The McGraths apply similar reasoning to infer design at the level of the universe due to its "intelligibility." Michael Behe simply asks why such a form of reasoning might not be applied at the level of biochemistry.

To be sure, the arguments have differences, but both arguments share a key logical similarity: both arguments invoke the appropriate causes for the observed data. In short, they make an inference to the best explanation. As Stephen C. Meyer and Scott A. Minnich explain, we don't infer design based upon what we don't know (i.e., a "gap"), but rather we infer design based upon what we do know:

In all irreducibly complex systems in which the cause of the system is known by experience or observation, intelligent design or engineering played a role the origin of the system. Given that neither standard neo-Darwinism, nor co-option has adequately accounted for the origin of these machines, or the appearance of design that they manifest, one might now consider the design hypothesis as the best explanation for the origin of irreducibly complex systems in living organisms. That we have encountered systems that tax our own capacities as design engineers, justifiably lead us to question whether these systems are the product of undirected, un-purposed, chance and necessity. Indeed, in any other context we would immediately recognize such systems as the product of very intelligent engineering. Although some may argue this is a merely an argument from ignorance, we regard it as an inference to the best explanation, given what we know about the powers of intelligent as opposed to strictly natural or material causes.

(Scott A. Minnich and Stephen C. Meyer, “Genetic analysis of coordinate flagellar and type III regulatory circuits in pathogenic bacteria,” Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Design & Nature, Rhodes Greece, edited by M.W. Collins and C.A. Brebbia (WIT Press, 2004), emphasis added.)

Once the strong positive case for intelligent design is understood, it seems that the "God-of-the-gaps" charge against ID does not stick. Rather, the design inference is made using reasoning that is no less scientific than an inference to Darwinian evolution: both are made based upon an inference to the best explanation based upon, as the McGraths say, "weighing evidence and judging probability." I enjoyed the rest of this book so much that it's unfortunate that the McGraths dismiss this "North American movement" much too quickly.

You Can Run, But You Can't Hide from Darwin's Universal Acid
The McGraths issued stern warnings to ID proponents against relegating God to the "gaps" and instructed ID to take "an approach which commends and encourages scientific investigation, not seek[ing] to inhibit it" (pg. 31). But the McGraths leave themselves open to the same types of criticisms: Despite the McGraths's call to let Darwinian science have its way, they put up a strong and lengthy fight against Dawkins' view that "[n]atural explanations may be given of the origins of belief in God." (pg. 57) In fact, they devote pages to (quite lucid) critiques of Dawkins' Darwinian explanations of the origin of religion. Why do they do this?

The McGraths are fully aware of Dawkins's quest for a "universal Darwinism" (pg. 59) that can explain nearly everything. I believe that Dawkins' universal acid threatens their sacred gap of the origin of religious belief, so they fight back against such Darwinian explanations with a vengeance. In fact, they conclude their chapter on the origin of religion by explaining that Dawkins is wrong to say "the origins of religion are purely natural," (pg. 74) and at one point they suggest that "the ultimate cause of religious experience is God." (pg. 67) Will these conclusions stop evolutionary theorists from trying to explain the origin of religion in "purely natural" Darwinian terms? Of course not. The McGraths will be accused of inhibiting "scientific advance" (pg. 31) and inserting God into the gap of the origin of religion.

If the McGraths wanted to rebut such charges, they would have to recount the many flaws in "purely natural" accounts for the origin of religion. This would require them to offer positive arguments that the origin of religion is precisely the type of gap into which it is proper to insert (at least in an ultimate sense) God. They would now be arguing that, when it comes to explaining the origin of religion, they are merely making an inference to the best explanation.

While ID does not necessarily infer God (ID merely infers intelligence), the McGraths would now be reasoning very much like proponents of intelligent design. To reiterate the words of Meyer and Minnich, "we regard [ID] as an inference to the best explanation, given what we know about the powers of intelligent as opposed to strictly natural or material causes."

In the end, both ID proponents and the McGraths approve, justifiably, of making inferences to the best explanation. Perhaps the McGraths need to reconsider their opposition to intelligent design on the grounds that it is a "God-of-the-gaps" argument, because ID isn't a God-of-the-gaps argument and because the McGraths would seemingly approve of the actual reasoning used by ID-proponents.

Conclusion
As I noted above, intelligent design plays a minor role in the McGraths rebuttal to Dawkins. Thus, regardless of these disagreements over ID, The Dawkins Delusion is overall a well-written book that covers an impressive array data from many fields, ranging from history, biology, physics, philosophy, and sociology. It is a must-read for anyone interested in a serious, thoughtful, and well-argued assessment of the present debate over religion and what Wired Magazine called "the New Atheism movement."

Posted by Casey Luskin at 12:04 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Next Fall ISI Books will release CSC associate director Dr. John West's important book, Darwin Day in America: How Our Politics and Culture Have Been Dehumanized in the Name of Science.

Darwin Day in America tells the disturbing story of scientific expertise run amuck, exposing how an ideological interpretation of Darwinian biology and reductionist science have been used to degrade American culture over the past century through their impact on criminal justice, welfare, business, education, and bioethics.

At the dawn of the last century, leading scientists and politicians giddily predicted that science—especially Darwinian biology—would supply solutions to all the intractable problems of American society, from crime to poverty to sexual maladjustment.

Instead, politics and culture were dehumanized as scientific experts began treating human beings as little more than animals or machines. In criminal justice, these experts denied the existence of free will and proposed replacing punishment with invasive “cures” such as the lobotomy. In welfare, they proposed eliminating the poor by sterilizing those deemed biologically unfit. In business, they urged the selection of workers based on racist theories of human evolution and the development of advertising methods to more effectively manipulate consumer behavior. In sex education, they advocated creating a new sexual morality based on “normal mammalian behavior” without regard to longstanding ethical and religious imperatives.

The book is based on extensive research with primary sources and archival materials. West tells the story of how American public policy has been corrupted by scientistic ideology. Marshaling fascinating anecdotes and damning quotations, his narrative explores the far-reaching consequences for society when scientists and politicians deny the essential differences between human beings and the rest of nature. It also exposes the disastrous results that ensue when experts claiming to speak for science turn out to be wrong. West concludes with a powerful plea for the restoration of democratic accountability in an age of experts.

Posted by Robert Crowther at 9:18 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

One of the key expert witnesses for the ACLU in the Dover trial was Barbara Forrest, a Professor of Philosophy at Southeastern Louisiana University. She recently authored a paper entitled "Understanding the Intelligent Design Creationist Movement: Its True Nature and Goals," (May 2007) in which a major theme is that, since nearly all of the leading intelligent design proponents are Christians who have expressed a preference for a Christian influenced culture, their scientific efforts cannot be trusted as bona fide science. Forrest's claim, echoing a common theme of Darwinists, is that since the vast majority of intelligent design promoters are Christians, their scientific work must necessarily be so biased by their religious beliefs as to be compromised. On this basis, Forrest essentially argues that anything Christian proponents of intelligent design say about science must be rejected as real science.

Forrest focuses exclusively on the alleged religious biases and motives of Christian proponents of intelligent design. This isn't surprising, given Forrest's role as one of the ACLU's hired guns in the Dover trial. It is Forrest's status as an ACLU hired gun that should cause us to question the objectivety of her own academic work.

Nevertheless, the corollary of Forrest's thesis would be that the religious beliefs of scientists adhering to non-theistic religious beliefs must be presumed to taint the scientific work of those scientists in the same proportion as the religious beliefs of Christian scientists supposedly taint their professional work.

Assuming arguendo the validity of Forrest's thesis that a scientist's religious beliefs necessarily inject a bias into a scientist's professional scientific work, let's see how it would apply to Darwinists and their work.

Leading Darwin proponent William Provine, a professor of biology at Cornell University, recently co-authored a study, "Evolution, Religion and Free Will," (Gregory W. Gaffin and William B. Provine, American Scientist, July-Aug. 2007) showing that less than 5% of evolutionary biologists believe in a personal God, and more than 95% Of evolutionary biologists are non-Christians and non-theists.

Applying Forrest's thesis, we would then have to conclude that the scientific work of over 95% of evolutionary biologists is infected with a non-theistic religious bias. According to Forrest's prescribed response to this bias, we would have to reject all of the scientific work of over 95% of evolutionary biologists based on the non-theistic religious bias that infects their work. Apparently, Forrest would urge rejection of the work of the remaining 5% of evolutionary biologists on the basis of the theistic religious bias that supposedly infects their work.

Clearly, Forrest's prescribed response to possible religious bias in science is unworkable. All scientists have some religious belief system, ranging from those scientists holding Christian or other theistic religious beliefs to scientists holding atheistic or other non-theistic religious beliefs. Applying Forrest's prescribed response to religious bias evenhandedly, we would be have to throw out the work of all scientists, since the work of all scientists is necessarily biased by their religious beliefs. Forrest's thesis and prescribed response is, at its core, anti-science, because it would require us to reject the scientific work of any scientist holding some sort of religious belief — i.e., 100% of scientists.

Let's get real and admit that the religious beliefs of all scientists probably influence their scientific work to some extent. So what is the proper response to this presumed religious bias in science?

Speaking from experience as a litigation attorney for the past twenty-eight years, I would propose an alternative remedy to the problem of religious bias in science, one that is routinely used in American courts. Any trial attorney can tell you that the opposing parties in civil trials routinely hire expert scientific witnesses to support their side of science issues in lawsuits. It is quite common to find some of the leading science experts in the world testifying in civil trials in America. The rules of evidence assume that all scientific witnesses are likely to have some bias. The most common bias is a bias in favor of the party that hired the witness. The legal system deals with the issue of bias by permitting the opposing party to expose this bias to the trier of fact through cross-examination of the witness. The scientist's bias does not disqualify the scientist from offering scientific opinion at trial. Rather, the rules of evidence and argument permit each party's attorney to expose the bias of the other party's science expert, and then to argue that the trier of fact should take into consideration that bias in evaluating the reliability of the expert's scientific opinion. Once the trier of fact sorts through the bias of each party's scientific witness, the trier of fact must determine which scientific expert's application of valid scientific analysis to the actual facts and scientific data presents the more valid rendition of reality.

It has been my experience that the most successful expert scientific witnesses are those who are most prepared to provide valid scientific explanations based on careful attention to the actual facts in the legal case.

I would propose that a similar model be used to deal with the issue of religious bias in scientific work relating to evolution. We would begin by assuming that all scientists hold some religious belief that will have an impact on their scientific work. Standard procedure should be to disclose that religious belief at the outset of any discussion of the scientist's work, so that the bias that presumably flows from that scientist's religious beliefs can be taken into consideration in evaluating the scientist's work.

But once the religious bias of the scientist is exposed and taken into consideration, the real focus in evaluating a scientist's work should be on how the scientist's scientific theory or hypothesis comports with the actual scientific data. The scientific work of scientists who are proponents of intelligent design and of scientists who are opponents of intelligent design should be judged by the same ultimate standard — how do their scientific theories or hypotheses about life's origins comport with the actual scientific data?

Under my proposal, the potential impact of a scientist's religious beliefs on their scientific work can be disclosed and taken into account in an appropriate way in assessing the scientist’s work. But the real focus of judging a scientist's work will be where it should be — to what extent does the scientist's work advance our knowledge of the truth about nature?

Posted by Larry Caldwell at 8:40 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Richard Dawkins reviewed Mike Behe’s new book The Edge of Evolution in the June 30 New York Times Book Review. Dawkins offered no surprises. Much of the review was simply a sneer:

I had expected to be as irritated by Michael Behe’s second book as by the first. I had not expected to feel sorry for him…[this] is the book of a man who has given up. Trapped along a false path of his own rather unintelligent design, Behe has left himself no escape. Poster boy of creationists everywhere, he has cut himself off from the world of real science.

Nothing new here. Dawkins uses the standard Darwinist ad-hominem attacks. What’s remarkable about the review is Dawkins’ lack of substantial scientific criticism of Behe’s point in Edge of Evolution. Behe makes the observation that there are limits to the amount of specified complexity that random mutation and natural selection can generate, and that there is reason, based on evidence such as the biochemistry of drug resistance of the malaria parasite, to infer that random mutation and natural selection may be adequate to explain some, but not all, observed biological complexity. It’s a fair and obvious question: how much functional biological complexity can random mutation and natural selection actually generate? Can it account for all of the biological complexity that we actually observe?

Dawkins answers Behe in three ways. First, after the sneers, he quotes Judge John E. Jones’s decision in the Dover case, labeling the Dover citizens’ efforts to discuss intelligent design and to freely criticize Darwin’s theory in schools “breathtaking inanity”. Then he extols biologist Ken Miller’s speculations as to how the bacterial flagellar motor ‘could have’ evolved as offering decisive refutation of Behe’s concept of irreducible complexity. Neither of Dawkins’ answers involves a scientific refutation of Behe.

Finally, Dawkins offers science, and I assume it’s his best shot. He points out that dog breeding provides evidence that mutation rates don’t limit evolutionary change. He cites Jack Russell terriers! We’ll leave aside Dawkins’ highly questionable assumption that the variation with which dog breeders work is primarily the result of new mutations, rather than established variation in the population. In his dog breeding analogy, Dawkins uses a bit of ‘pseudo-Darwinism’, a rhetorical tic in which Darwinists try to defend Darwin’s theory of random variation and natural selection by invoking either non-random variation (bioengineering) or artificial selection (breeding). Dawkins’ invocation of pseudo-Darwinism means one thing: he doesn’t have actual convincing examples of the generation of significant new specified biological complexity by real Darwinism- random mutation and natural selection. Which is Behe’s point.

Dawkins was unable to offer a convincing example of natural selection, so he used artificial selection. I’ll use an example of the real thing:

Imagine that I am a microbiologist, and I culture bacteria in a medium containing an antibiotic, and put the culture of bacteria in an incubator while I go on vacation. I return a week later. When I open the incubator, I find two changes in the culture. The bacteria have developed resistance to the antibiotic, and there are cockroaches crawling in the petri dish. I conclude two things:

1) Random mutation and natural selection are likely responsible for the bacterial resistance to the antibiotic.
2) Random mutation and natural selection are not responsible for the cockroaches. They didn’t evolve from the bacteria in a week. They came from somewhere else (they crawled into the incubator from the outside).

Yet, according to Darwin’s theory, cockroaches really did evolve from ‘bacteria-like’ ancestors over billions of years. So, what’s the threshold of time after which I could plausibly infer that random mutation and natural selection was an adequate explanation for the cockroaches, starting with bacteria? How long would I have to leave the bacteria in the incubator before it would be plausible to infer that the cockroaches evolved from the bacteria? A million years? A billion years? Perhaps a trillion years?

So I ask Dr. Dawkins:

1) How long could I leave the bacteria in the incubator before I could reasonably infer that the cockroaches evolved from the bacteria by random mutation and natural selection? Please provide me with the experimental evidence (data and journal references) that you use to arrive at your answer.
2) If you can’t tell me, then why isn’t Dr. Behe’s question- what are the limits to what Darwinism can accomplish- a fair question?

Posted by Michael Egnor at 7:54 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

WORLD Magazine Editor in Chief Marvin Olasky is a reader whose impeccable taste is matched only by his voracious appetite. In the last seven years he has noted around 400 "books worth reading," and now he has culled them down to 100 favorite books from July 2000 to now. William Dembski’s Signs of Intelligence and Uncommon Dissent: Intellectuals Who Find Darwinism Unconvincing were both included on the list, as was John West’s Darwin’s Conservatives: The Misguided Quest.

Olasky praises the books on this list in his characteristic pithy manner, using only a single sentence to describe each favorite. For Signs of Intelligence, he says, “Readily understandable essays illuminate the logical and evidential fallacies of Darwinism.” Darwin’s Conservatives, in contrast, required a semicolon to sum:

Critiques pundits and academics like George Will and James Q. Wilson who praise Darwin’s grinding materialism as a brake on liberalism’s utopian fantasies; West rightly points out that Darwinism corrodes religious beliefs and concepts of limited government. (emphasis added)

Posted by Anika Smith at 7:29 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

[Editor's Note: This is Part 4 of a 4-part response. The full response can be read here.]

In Part I of this series, I discussed Sean Carroll’s misrepresentations of Michael Behe’s arguments in The Edge of Evolution. Part II exposed a citation referenced by Carroll which, rather than refuting Behe, actually confirms him. Part III explained the fact that many of Carroll’s citations discuss meager examples of evolution that Behe finds fall well within the humble creative capabilities of Darwinian evolution. Carroll has thus far failed to engage Behe’s actual arguments. Carroll does make an attempt to tackle the origin of a couple complex biological features. Yet these attempts fail because they confuse the evidence for common descent from sequence similarity with evidence for natural selection. Again, Behe anticipates this mistake and provides ample rebuttals to Carroll’s citations. As discussed below, Carroll badly miscites one paper as showing that "new protein interactions ... can evolve fairly rapidly."

Carroll Spins the Flagellum
When discussing the flagellum, Carroll cites Pallen and Matzke’s review paper on the evolution of the flagellum. Yet this paper itself admits that “the flagellar research community has scarcely begun to consider how these systems have evolved.” Those that read the Pallen/Matzke paper will find vague generalities and nothing remotely approaching a specific step-by-step model for the evolution of the flagellum. In fact, readers will find attempts to give evidence of protein homology, evidence which Behe readily anticipates by citing to Pallen’s work and noting that “modern Darwinists point to evidence of common descent and erroneously assume it to be evidence of the power of random mutation.” (Behe, Edge of Evolution, pg. 95) None of the work cited by Carroll remotely attempts to explain the evolution of the complexity of flagellar assembly discussed in Appendix 3 of The Edge of Evolution.

Carroll’s Questionable Citation
Behe's recognition that evidence for common descent is not evidence for natural selection also provides a poignant rebuttal to one of Carroll's prized citations. Carroll relies on his claim that "new protein interactions ... can evolve fairly rapidly." Carroll's cites Budovskaya et al., "An evolutionary proteomics approach identifies substrates of the cAMP-dependent protein kinase," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 102:13933–13938 (Sept. 27, 2005). But this paper epitomizes Behe's recognition that “modern Darwinists point to evidence of common descent and erroneously assume it to be evidence of the power of random mutation.” (Behe, Edge of Evolution, pg. 95)

The study's methods were essentially as follows: (1) take a protein that is acted upon by a particular enzyme (called a cAMP-dependent kinase), (2) search protein databases to find proteins with similar sequences, and then (3) study those proteins with similar sequences to determine if they are acted upon by the same enzyme, the cAMP-dependent kinase. In fact, the paper didn’t even look for a function as such of these proteins; it merely demonstrated that the proteins identified by sequence analysis are likely targets of the same kinase. Budovskaya et al. (2005) even admits that it merely "uses sequence information to identify the biologically relevant occurrences of a protein motif of interest." In other words, the raw data is mere comparison of proteins through sequence similarity, and there's no direct testing of random mutation and natural selection here.

Indeed, the paper recognizes that its results support a strong correlation of "structure-function," due to the fact that one can completely remove common descent and Darwinian evolution from this picture and get the same results: All the study truly found was the mundane result that proteins with similar sequences tend to be acted upon by similar enzymes. Big deal. The paper then adds a lot of evolutionary gloss, but that's all it is: inference based upon assumptions, not hard evidence. It in no way demonstrates the power of random mutation and natural selection, and at best provides an example of how "Darwinists point to evidence of common descent and erroneously assume it to be evidence of the power of random mutation" (Behe, Edge of Evolution, pg. 95) (and even then, this assumes that sequence similarity is necessarily evidence for common ancestry).

Even if this paper had demonstrated natural selection, it still would fall well below Behe’s edge of evolution. By citing this paper, Carroll is referring to the interaction between enzymes that modify or cleave other proteins, and the protein binding sites recognized by those enzymes may be quite short. Carroll equivocates over the term “interaction motifs”: Behe is talking about the kinds of protein interactions that build enzyme complexes or structures like the ribosome or the cilium or the replication machinery of the cell. These kinds of interactions are stabilized by many amino acids, not the short motifs studied in this paper. These kinds of short motifs may be necessary for building molecular machines, but they are far from sufficient to build molecular machines where two or more proteins must dock together and stably interact.

Finally, even if Budovskaya et al. had demonstrated random mutation and natural selection (which it doesn't), Carroll cites this paper to claim that protein-protein interactions "can evolve fairly rapidly," yet the paper studied proteins in "a group of budding yeast species that are separated by up to 800 million years of evolutionary distance." 800 million years is not "fairly rapidly"—in fact, it represents nearly 1/4 of the entire history of life on earth. There appears to be no legitimate grounds whatsoever for Carroll citing Budovskaya et al. (2005) to claim that "new protein interactions ... can evolve fairly rapidly."

In the end, what is starkly missing from Carroll's review is anything that actually demonstrates the evolution of something that Behe argues is beyond the edge of evolution. It seems that Carroll is afraid of heights — by citing a number of irrelevant or unsupportive papers, Carroll never comes remotely close to meeting Behe’s challenge to explain the step-by-step Darwinian origin of anything beyond Behe’s proposed edge of evolution.

Posted by Casey Luskin at 9:21 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Perhaps the most striking feature of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion is its lack of science. I had thought that this was an anomaly, but Dawkins’ New York Times review (out Sunday) of Michael Behe’s The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism is the same patchwork of fallacies devoid of science as The God Delusion.

Let me count the ways…

First, Dawkins begins by trying to discredit Behe, noting that Behe’s own department has distanced itself from Behe’s work on intelligent design (ID). But this is not a refutation of Behe’s work. Rather it is poisoning the well.

Second, Dawkins claims that Jerry Coyne’s review of Behe was devastating. Great. Then why doesn't he recount the argument rather than claiming someone else has already refuted Behe? This is a subtle argument from authority.

Third, Dawkins says Judge Jones and the Dover Trial humiliated Behe. OK, but what exactly is the argument that humiliated him? What was the scientific evidence that undermined his case? Surely the fact that such technicalities would be complicated is not too much for the Charles Simonyi chair for the public understanding of science to relay to us. Dawkins writes that The Edge of Evolution is Behe’s attempt to soldier on and stage a comeback from the Dover defeat. Too bad that Dr. Behe was at work on The Edge long before the Dover school district ever enacted its policy.

Fourth, Dawkins asserts that The Edge of Evolution contains “little” about irreducible complexity, implying that Behe is backpedaling. In fact, The Edge actually extends the arguments Darwinism from irreducible complexity. Behe argues that irreducible complexity represents a form of biological complexity that random mutations cannot produce. But it’s an extreme example well beyond the reach of Darwinian processes. The quest of The Edge is to find the limit of how much biological complexity Darwinian processes can produce. And Behe finds that the limit is far below irreducibly complex machines. In other words, after this book, the case for evolution has gotten worse, not better.

That said, even though irreducible complexity is not the focus of the book, Behe nonetheless devotes much space to showing how the argument for irreducible complexity itself has only gotten worse for Darwinians. As it turns out, we now have more powerful microscopes and have found that there are irreducibly complex systems regulating the irreducibly complex systems! Behe points out that there are little trucks that build the irreducibly complex cilium. They bring in parts and take them away. The trucks even have forward and reverse motors! And they know when to stop work and conserve energy if there is damage. Moreover, these machines assemble via a complex set of assembly instructions that represent far greater complexity than the final irreducibly complex machine itself. Thus Behe says that biology contains not just irreducible complexity but “irreducible complexity squared” (pg. 93). I encourage you all to read this part of The Edge. See especially Figure 5.2.

Fifth, Dawkins misrepresents Behe as claiming that ID is correct because Darwinism can’t account for irreducibly complex (IC) systems. In other words, Dawkins wrongly understands ID as merely a negative argument against evolution, thus missing the true structure of the argument. Behe actually claims that Darwinian processes are insufficient for making IC systems and that intelligent processes are (note the positive aspect) capable. He is saying that when the two theories’ explanatory powers are compared, ID wins out, and we infer that ID is the best explanation.

Dawkins is stuck using old-school deductive arguments. But Behe is using a form of argumentation common to the historical sciences, viz., Inference to the Best Explanation, or abduction. It is a comparative style of argumentation where one lines up all the possible explanations and asks which ones are able to produce the phenomenon in question, among other things.

Dawkins also says that Behe’s claim that the bacterial flagellum will not work properly without all of its parts is “without justification.” Unfortunately for Dawkins, knockout experiments have been done, and so this assertion is not without justification. For example, Scott Minnich, microbiologist at the University of Idaho, testified at the Dover Trial about his knockout experiments which found that the flagellum is irreducibly complex with respect to its 35 or so genes. Judge Jones ignored this testimony, and so does Richard Dawkins. Why doesn’t Dawkins know the relevant science?

Finally in this regard, Dawkins again resorts to the “someone else refuted Behe” argument. He claims that at trial Ken Miller “showed how the bacterial flagellar motor could evolve via known functional intermediates.” Again, this is just false. What Miller did was to point to another irreducibly complex system, the Type III Secretory System and claim it as an intermediate—even though the best evidence shows it is derivative of the flagellum and not the other way around.

Sixth, Dawkins gets a kick out of telling audiences around the world that evolution is "not random" because natural selection selects for function rather than randomly. This is true but trivial. Dawkins fails to mention that all of the novelty which natural selection has to work with comes from random mutations! The creative part of the process is blind, as Dawkins himself has beautifully shown in his books. So Behe is correct to focus in on seeing what random mutations can produce. For if it cannot produce the right mutations, in the right quantities, in the right amount of time, then natural selection cannot act to preserve them!

Seventh, about ¾ of the way through the review Dawkins makes his first and only actual attempt at countering Behe with evidence. If Behe is correct that random mutations cannot produce the many precise mutations necessary to create the variety of species we observe today, asks Dawkins, then why do we observe such variation in dogs that we know humans have bred? But it is here that I wonder if Dawkins even read The Edge of Evolution. In it Behe claimed that changes within species are well within the creative power of natural selection and random mutation. Behe has claimed that the creative limit of the Darwinian process is somewhere between orders and genera. Perhaps Professor Dawkins missed the chart on the first page. Strawman.

At this point it seems that Dawkins’ argument amounts to “Wow! Look at the varieties of dogs that have been produced relatively recently! Surely Darwinism, then, can produce much more over a long time without the help of intelligent breeders!” And it is precisely because this sort of fuzzy argument is prevalent among hopeful Darwinists that Behe’s work in The Edge is important. Behe looks at studies of actual organismal populations to place limits on what random mutation can produce. Even Darwinists must admit that given the age of the earth and population sizes there must be some limit to what a Darwinian process can produce in a given population in a given amount of time. Dawkins should spend his time arguing (from the same body of data) for his own notion of where this limit lies rather than bashing Behe for attempting to define such limits at all.

Eighth, Dawkins chides Behe for daring to state something contrary to the beliefs of great evolutionary mathematicians and geneticists. Perhaps Dawkins will try to imagine if Darwin himself were not allowed to make an argument because the authorities of his day disagreed with him. This is another argument from authority and is completely invalid. (For fun, try inserting “Galileo” or which ever pathbreaking scientist you wish into the penultimate paragraph where you see “Behe.” It won’t totally make sense, but I think you’ll get my point.)

Finally, Dawkins says Behe must publish his work in scientific journals. Well, first of all, he has. As one example, Behe published computer modeling of the evolution of binding sites in different sized populations in the journal Protein Science. Second, as concerns intelligent design, I think Dawkins has already shown why pro-ID papers are dead-upon-arrival by revealing to us the prejudices of even Behe’s own department!

Indeed, Dawkins should find irony in the fact that The Origin of Species was not originally published in a scientific journal but as a book. But that aside, how on Earth can Professor Dawkins, who systematically refuses to debate ID scientists, chide Behe for not being willing to “rumble” for his ideas in the public square? This is shameful.

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