CSC senior fellow Benjamin Wiker has had an opportunity to interview Oxford philosopher Antony Flew. Flew, an Oxford educated philosopher, held a number of distinguished teaching posts at British universities and had been a prominent atheist throughout the second half of the 20th century. Indeed, he was sort of Richard Dawkins before Dawkins, his name synonymous with staunchly materialistic beliefs.

Another CSC senior fellow, Jonathan Witt, first wrote on Flew abandoning his adherence to atheism back in 2004 in the Seattle Times. So this isn't exactly new news. However, Flew has now published a book explaining in more details his change of mind titled, "There Is A God." In it he explains his change as a journey into reason.

Flew told Wiker:

There were two factors in particular that were decisive. One was my growing empathy with the insight of Einstein and other noted scientists that there had to be an Intelligence behind the integrated complexity of the physical Universe. The second was my own insight that the integrated complexity of life itself – which is far more complex than the physical Universe – can only be explained in terms of an Intelligent Source.

I accept the God of Aristotle who shares all the attributes you cite. Like Lewis I believe that God is a person but not the sort of person with whom you can have a talk. It is the ultimate being, the Creator of the Universe.

Read the full interview here.

Posted by Robert Crowther at 12:46 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Mike Gene recently posted on Telic Thoughts responding to professor James F. McGrath, who accuses intelligent design (ID) proponents of being dishonest when they claim that ID does not identify the designer. This professor wrote: “That isn't an instance of humility, but of strategy, and we all know why the strategy is being used: to wedge ID into science classrooms by disconnecting it from religion.” Similarly, I recently read a law review article co-authored by Barbara Forrest where she asserts with Stephen Gey and Matthew Brauer that "an intelligent designer is simply a subtle reference to God." (More on problems with this article in Part 2.) Professor McGrath is perhaps unfamiliar with writings and position of ID proponents on this point. Thomas Woodward clearly explains the principled reasons why the biological evidence for ID may not allow us to identify the designer:

There is no ‘Made by Yahweh’ engraved on the side of the bacterial rotary motor—the flagellum. In order to find out what or who its designer is, one must go outside the narrow discipline of biology. Cross-disciplinary dialogue must begin with the fields of philosophy, sociology, history, anthropology, and theology. Design itself, however, is a direct scientific inference; it does not depend on a single religious premise for its conclusions.

(Thomas Woodward, Darwin Strikes Back: Defending the Science of Intelligent Design, pg. 15 (Baker Books, 2006).)

In other words, the flagellar machine itself indicates that it did not arise by a random and unguided process like Darwinian evolution, but rather arose by a non-random and intelligently directed process such as intelligent design. However, while biological structures may be scientifically explained via intelligent design, the structures themselves have no way of directly telling us whether the designer is Yahweh, Buddha, Yoda, or some other type of intelligent agency. Thus, in contrast to the professor’s incorrect accusation that this is part of a “strategy … to wedge ID into science classrooms,” ID’s non-identification of the designer stems from a scientific desire to take a scientific approach and respect the limits of science and not inject religious discussions about theological questions into scientific inquiry. In other words, using present knowledge, identifying the designer can’t be done by science. It is a strictly theological question, and thus for the theory of ID to try to identify the designer would be to inappropriately conflate science with religion.

Indeed, even the staunchly anti-ID website, TalkOrigins, admits that "an anthropomorphized designer need not be a deity. The atheistic religion of Raelianism, for example, proposes that humans were created by extraterrestrials." It's a rare instance to hear TalkOrigins sound like ID proponents, but they are correct. (It's likely that the author's motive is to protect atheism in light of nature's design rather than to formulate ID as a science that doesn’t investigate religious issues.)

David DeWolf, John West and I also address this issue in our recent Montana Law Review article:

It is important to stress that the refusal of ID proponents to draw scientific conclusions about the nature or identity of the designer is principled rather than merely rhetorical. ID is primarily a historical science, meaning it uses principles of uniformitarianism to study present-day causes and then applies them to the historical record in order to infer the best explanation for the origin of the natural phenomena being studied. ID starts with observations from “uniform sensory experience” showing the effects of intelligence in the natural world. As Pandas explains, scientists have uniform sensory experience with intelligent causes (i.e. humans), thus making intelligence an appropriate explanatory cause within historical scientific fields. However, the “supernatural” cannot be observed, and thus historical scientists applying uniformitarian reasoning cannot appeal to the supernatural. If the intelligence responsible for life was supernatural, science could only infer the prior action of intelligence, but could not determine whether the intelligence was supernatural.

(David K. DeWolf, John G. West, and Casey Luskin, “Intelligent Design Will Survive Kitzmiller v. Dover,” 68 Montana Law Review 7, 30 (Spring, 2007) (emboldened emphasis added)(internal citations removed).)

I wasn’t comfortable with the typical vocabulary that for the most part creationists were using because it didn’t express what I was trying to do. They were wanting to bring God into the discussion, and I was wanting to stay within the empirical domain and do what you can do legitimately there.

ID Does Not “Require Supernatural Causation”
ID as a scientific theory does not attempt to address religious questions about the identity or metaphysical nature of the designer. This has been the consistent view of ID proponents for the last two decades, and Judge Jones was presented with extensive documentation of this fact in amicus briefs filed by the Discovery Institute and FTE, which the text of his opinion seemed to have ignored. Judge Jones also ignored—or misinterpreted—key passages from the Pandas textbook that addressed this issue. For example, the published version of Pandas used in Dover schools explained that ID merely seeks to infer “intelligent causes” and is compatible with a wide variety of religious viewpoints, including pantheism and agnosticism:

The idea that life had an intelligent source is hardly unique to Christian fundamentalism. Advocates of design have included not only Christians and other religious theists, but pantheists, Greek and Enlightenment philosophers and now include many modern scientists who describe themselves as religiously agnostic. Moreover, the concept of design implies absolutely nothing about beliefs normally associated with Christian fundamentalism, such as a young earth, a global flood, or even the existence of the Christian God. All it implies is that life had an intelligent source.

One would think this passage would be highly relevant to the determination of the religious nature of ID, but Judge Jones did not even quote it in his ruling. Rather, he cited another passage from Pandas out of context in order to insist that ID requires supernatural causation:

[A]n explicit concession that the intelligent designer works outside the laws of nature and science and a direct reference to religion is Pandas’ rhetorical statement, “what kind of intelligent agent was it [the designer]” and answer: “On its own, science cannot answer this question; it must leave it to religion and philosophy.”

But an examination of the full passage cited by Judge Jones makes clear that he misused it. The passage does not state that an intelligent designer must be supernatural, but rather that science is unable to address this question:

If science is based upon experience, then science tells us the message encoded in DNA must have originated from an intelligent cause. What kind of intelligent agent was it? On its own, science cannot answer this question; it must leave it to religion and philosophy. But that should not prevent science from acknowledging evidences for an intelligent cause origin wherever they may exist. This is no different, really, than if we discovered life did result from natural causes. We still would not know, from science, if the natural cause was all that was involved, or if the ultimate explanation was beyond nature, and using the natural cause.

Indeed at one point, Pandas even seems to adopt methodological naturalism, stating that “intelligence . . . can be recognized by uniform sensory experience, and the supernatural . . . cannot.”

(David K. DeWolf, John G. West, and Casey Luskin, “Intelligent Design Will Survive Kitzmiller v. Dover,” 68 Montana Law Review 7, 28-30 (Spring, 2007) (internal citations removed).)

Posted by Casey Luskin at 9:55 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

Juno Walker at Letters from Vrai has responded to my post Dr. Pigliucci and Fundamentalism in Science Education. Dr Massimo Pigliucci published an essay in The McGill Journal of Education in which he made the absurd claim that effective science education would dissuade students from a belief in Heaven. I pointed out in my post that Heaven wasn’t exactly a proper subject for the scientific method and that the assertion that science education was even applicable to a belief in Heaven was fundamentalism — a kind of atheist fundamentalism. The conflation of methodological naturalism and philosophical naturalism — science and atheism — is no more acceptable pedagogy than the conflation of science and creationism. Atheism and creationism are philosophical inferences, and, irrespective of the truth of either faith, neither is consistent with the scientific method. The scientific method — methodological naturalism — is the data-driven study of nature. It’s based on natural, not supernatural, claims. The irony is that the McGill Journal of Education published Dr. Pigliucci's atheist broadsheet for fundamentalism in science education, but would never publish a creationist broadsheet for fundamentalism in science education.

Walker cites Darwinist philosopher Barbara Forrest to defend the assertion that atheism is a scientifically justifiable inference. Dr. Forrest:

…the relationship between methodological and philosophical naturalism, while not one of logical entailment, is the only reasonable metaphysical conclusion, given (1) the demonstrated success of methodological naturalism, combined with (2) the massive amount of knowledge gained by it, (3) the lack of a method or epistemology for knowing the supernatural, and (4) the subsequent lack of evidence for the supernatural. The above factors together provide solid grounding for philosophical naturalism, while supernaturalism remains little more than a logical possibility.

Dr. Forrest’s claim (3) that philosophical naturalism must be true because of "the lack of a method or epistemology for knowing the supernatural" is nonsense. The methods for knowing the supernatural are by definition beyond the scope of methodological naturalism and are properly philosophical methods, not scientific methods. Forrest's implicit assertion that there is no philosophical "method or epistemology for knowing the supernatural" is an assertion that two and a half millenia of Western philosophy don't exist. What of Platonic Forms, Thomist proofs for the existence of God, Anslem's and Descartes' and Plantinga's Ontological Arguments, and Kant's Argument From Morality? It's safe to say that most of Western philosophy addresses issues that transcend our direct experience of the natural world. Ironically, Forrest's use of the scientific method to assert that the supernatural world doesn't exist employs one of the few philosophical methodologies that can't address questions outside of the natural world.

Methodological naturalism — the scientific method — precludes all extra-natural philosophical constraints on interpretation of physical data. That’s the point of methodological naturalism — the method of data collection and interpretation must be without extra-natural assumptions. Colloquially, methodological naturalism is 'following the physical evidence, unencumbered by extra-natural inference.' The design inference is based on evidence about the natural world. It is a violation of methodological naturalism to categorically exclude the design inference based on the postulate that the supernatural does not exist. The scientific method hews to evidence, not to philosophical dogma.

The approach to science in the era before the scientific method, much like the approach of atheists and Darwinists today, was to apply a priori philosophical constraints to the study of natural phenomena. The ancients modeled planetary motion as perfect circles because of the philosophical assumption that heavenly bodies must move ‘perfectly,’ and non-circular motion was considered imperfect and thus impermissible. Johannes Kepler’s laws of elliptical planetary motion were an early triumph of the scientific method because Kepler discarded philosophical dogma and considered only the evidence. Of course, Kepler was a devout Christian (as were nearly all Enlightenment scientists), and he interpreted the laws of planetary motion as God’s geometrical plan for the universe. Philosophical constraints — a priori constraints — on interpretation of data are inconsistent with the scientific method, but philosophical reflection on the data isn’t. Newton derived his laws of motion from mathematical considerations and from data, yet he believed that the fabric of space and time in which the laws acted was the mind of God. Philosophical reflection on scientific data — including reflection on supernatural causation — has a long and quite honorable history.

So what of Forrest’s fourth claim: that the truth of philosophical naturalism is supported by "the subsequent lack of evidence for the supernatural"? It's a bizarre inference, as divorced from empirical evidence as could be imagined. The past several centuries of Western science have revealed a universe created ex nihilo, governed by astonishingly intricate mathematical laws accessible to the human mind and characterized by properties of forces and energy and matter so closely tied to the existence of human life that cosmologists have had to invoke the existence of countless other universes to elide the anthropic implications. Life itself depends on a code — remarkably like a computer language — to produce, run and replicate cellular components that are themselves best described as intricate nanotechnology.

Here’s the atheist interpretation of this scientific evidence: atheism is the only permissible explanation. Atheists are entitled to their opinion, but they have no business teaching students that atheist fundamentalism defines the limits of science.

Posted by Michael Egnor at 4:36 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Ken Miller was recently quoted in a campus news article saying, “We have the fossils. … We win." Professor Miller’s logical fallacy was pointed out years ago by those who attempted to clarify reasoning in paleontology, systematics, and evolutionary biology, and it led some scientists (like Colin Patterson) to the conclusion that a paleontological pattern may support or falsify an evolutionary hypothesis, but it can never absolutely prove one (i.e. fossils can’t make Darwinism positively “win”). As a result, some scientists (e.g., Brower, 2000) proposed a strict separation between paleontology and systematics on the one hand, and evolutionary theory on the other. Unfortunately, this clear-thinking approach has been largely abandoned or ignored by most paleontologists and evolutionary biologists. Those who are ignorant of this fallacy don’t realize that pattern observations are independent of process hypotheses. (For instance, just because I know the sun "rises" everyday does not mean my pet theory about its origin must be correct.) Rather than following the approach of authorities like Colin Patterson, Professor Miller seems to draw his amusing talking points on evolution from comedian Lewis Black, whom Jonathan Wells recounts in The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design makes the following authoritarian argument for Darwinism: “I don’t have to argue [evolution] any more. Fossils. Fossils. Fossils. I win.’’

The campus news article stated that Miller "demonstrated the 23 intermediate species that have been discovered as evolutionary stepping stones between land mammals and swimming mammals," and called whales "the poster children for macroevolution." I would have loved to have been there to see Miller "demonstrat[e]" all "23 intermediate species." That sounds a lot more impressive than University of Michigan whale paleontology expert Philip Gingerich's admission that currently the "poster children" merely have "fossils illustrating three or four steps that bridge the precursor of whales to today's mammals." Indeed, Kevin Padian noted that these "poster children" fossils have "distinguishing characteristics, which they would have to lose in order to be considered direct ancestors of other known forms." My suspicion is that Professor Miller didn’t delve into too many details, but rather used the fossil name-dropping approach to discussing alleged intermediates between land-mammals and whales. I have described this approach as follows:

[John] Wise and [Pia] Vogel also mention "whale-like tetrapods" and "tetrapod-like whales," name-dropping a long string of fossil names but leaving the reader with little, if any, information about this alleged evolutionary transition. ... So how good an example is this "poster child"?

Philip Gingerich admits that "[w]hales have not been collected on a fine enough time scale to see rapid change. This will be revealed through more fieldwork. So far we have fossils illustrating three or four steps that bridge the precursor of whales to today's mammals." To be fair, there are some fossils in this field with cetacean features, but some of the fossils cited by Wise and Vogel are land mammals that do not explain how whales become aquatic. For example, Wise and Vogel mention Pakicetus, a full-fledged land-mammal [whose only real claim to belonging in the alleged whale series is the fact that it had] ear-bones like a whale. Full-fledged land mammals don't provide much evidence when one is trying to document the evolution of fully-aquatic whales from land-mammals. So Wise and Vogel name-drop Ambulocetus. But this fossil also had strong load-bearing legs with "large hind limbs and enormous feet," a "long, muscular body," and a pelvis "like that of a land mammal" (Gingerich, 2001). These two fossils don't look like a "walking whale" (as they were called in National Geographic). Instead, Wise & Vogel subsequently name-drop Rodhocetus: it probably spent more time in the water than Ambulocetus, and did not swim like a whale, but had large feet and hands. One expert said Rodhocetus probably swam like Ambulocetus: "an otter-like pelvic paddler" or alternatively, that it had "[t]runk and limb proportions" that "are most similar to those of the living, highly aquatic, foot-powered desmans." Of course, desmans are a type of European mole that do just fine walking on land. Are the whales walking yet?

But let's acknowledge that theses fossils do have some skeletal characteristics which appear intermediate between the features of land-mammals and whales. Have Darwinian paleontologists made their case? The aforementioned bird evolution expert, Alan Feduccia, observes that "the evolution of whales (the 'poster child' for macroevolution) from terrestrial ungulates is well documented at < 10 million years." Think about that for a moment. Whales, with all of their complex adaptations for aquatic life evolved from a "primitive little mammal" (Steven Stanley, The New Evolutionary Timetable, pg. 93) to a full-fledged whale in less than ten million years. Whales have a long generation time, meaning that there were perhaps only a few million generations at best to allow for the change to add up. If they had a generation time as short as 5 years, Haldane's dilemma predicts that only a few thousand mutations could become fixed into an evolving population during that time period. (See Walter ReMine, The Biotic Message.) [In other words, the fossil record permits dramatically insufficient time to convert a land-mammal into a whale.]

Wise and Vogel can name-drop whatever fossils they like, but if the amount of time allowed by the fossil record for this evolutionary transition is too short to accommodate the vast genetic and morphological changes that must have taken place, critical thinkers have good reasons to be skeptical of this evolutionary story. The exceedingly short timescale of the alleged evolution of whales from land mammals is a major problem with this Neo-Darwinian story, but this point is never mentioned by Wise and Vogel as they name-drop their supposed fossil evidence.

(Casey Luskin, "A Reply to Dr. John Wise and Dr. Pia Vogel's Evidentiary Response to Intelligent Design")

Click here to view a PDF of the full cover. (file size is 3mb)

Posted by Robert Crowther at 1:34 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

In a bold move, the little-known group Florida Citizens for Science are excommunicating all scientists who raise any concerns about neo-Darwinism from the "scientific community."

In an Orlando Sentinel story about the adoption of new science standards, Joe Wolf, president of Florida Citizens for Science and newly anointed spokesperson for the worldwide "scientific community," had this to say about the scientific problems with neo-Darwinism:

"It's a PR issue," he said. "And it's a religious issue. In the scientific community, it's not an issue."(emphasis mine)

Here are members of the scientific community to whom it is an issue, and who I am sure will be surprised to be so unceremoniously booted from the "scientific community":

Jeery Fodor, State of New Jersey Professor of Philosophy, Rutgers University, Guggenheim Fellow, Fullbright Fellow (Oxford), Woodrow Wilson Fellow (Princeton):

The ironic upshot is that at a time when the theory of natural selection has become an article of pop culture, it is faced with what may be the most serious challenge it has had so far. Darwinists have been known to say that adaptationism is the best idea that anybody has ever had. It would be a good joke if the best idea that anybody has ever had turned out not to be true. A lot of the history of science consists of the world playing that sort of joke on our most cherished theories.

Natural selection based solely on mutation is probably not an adequate mechanism for evolving complexity.

"We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged."

Eugene Koonin, senior research scientist at the National Center for Biotechnology Information, National Library of Medicine, and National Institutes of Health recently published a paper that claims:

The relationships between major groups within an emergent new class of biological entities are hard to decipher and do not seem to fit the tree pattern that, following Darwin's original proposal, remains the dominant description of biological evolution. ... No intermediate "grades" or intermediate forms between different types are detectable.

Proposed standards for seventh-graders, for example, would require that students should be able to "recognize and describe that fossil evidence is consistent with the idea that human beings evolved from earlier species."

How big (or productive) will the "scientific community" be when all Darwin-doubters are forced out?

Posted by Robert Crowther at 12:42 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Micheal Behe has a three-part post titled Kenneth R. Miller and the Problem of Evil (part 1, part 2, part 3)on his Amazon author's page in which he makes a pretty bold assertion about one of his loudest critics:

Kenneth Miller is an intelligent design proponent.

Behe's posts come as a response to a second, needless to say negative, review of his new book The Edge of Evolution by Miller in the Catholic magazine Commonweal.

Despite Darwinist's efforts to affect a sort of crib death by attacking the book relentlessly, The Edge of Evolution is doing well in terms of sales to those interested in science:
#1 in Books > Professional & Technical > Engineering > Bioengineering > Biochemistry
#2 in Books > Science > Evolution > Organic
#3 in Books > Science > Agricultural Sciences > Biochemistry

Posted by Robert Crowther at 8:44 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Sometimes you run across something so head-shakingly wrong that you have to ask yourself, where did they come up with that? Take this editorial today in the Arizona Daily Wildcat for example. Upon hearing the basis for the new movie “Expelled,” student columnist Taylor Kessinger actually calls for more academic persecution to rain down upon ID proponents:

On the other hand, does science discriminate against proponents of intelligent design? Well, sure, but only in the same sense that a university discriminates against bad students or the stock market discriminates against people who make poor financial decisions.

If anything, the problem is that there isn't enough discrimination against this idea. (emphasis added)

Kessinger discounts any claim that professors deserve academic freedom by asserting that “freedom of speech doesn't protect the rights of professors to make claims with no scientific backing without repercussions. Universities don't stand for professors who waste funds and time researching astrology, parapsychology or other pseudoscientific ideas, and they never should.”

There are two false assumptions under which Kessinger is operating here, and they’re leading him further from the truth and rational discussion than he surely would want. To that end, we’ll do him the favor of pointing out his error. Hopefully his youth will help him overcome his embarrassment and win out over any inclination to intellectual laziness in relying on, say, Wikipedia to do his research for him.

His first mistake is in believing that design proponents who face academic persecution deserve what they get, so to speak. It’s tragic that this discrimination occurs against such renowned and respected scientists as Guillermo Gonzalez, but the tragedy is compounded by the ignorance which leads students to think it’s OK when views outside the consensus are punished – not for (as Kessinger seems to think) being taught in the classroom or taking away funds from other research, but for merely being advocated outside of the university.

Sadly, Kessinger is not the only student who has been taught that it’s good and entirely appropriate to discriminate against intelligent design supporters. I once told a good friend of mine in college about a professor I knew who lost his job over his support of intelligent design. Her response? “Silly ID people — that’s what you get.” Upon further examination, she admitted that she didn’t know much about intelligent design, just what her professors taught her — that it was merely a negative argument against Darwinism without any scientific research.

This second misapprehension is what students are being taught by many Darwinist professors about intelligent design, and this is why some actually support persecuting ID proponents. Much like my friend, the author of this editorial was told somewhere along the way that “[i]ntelligent design simply asserts that structures like the human eye and bacterial flagellum couldn't possibly have formed by random chance, so an intelligent designer is needed.”

Nevermind that this is not the definition used by proponents of intelligent design. What we have here is the next generation’s inheritance from the likes of Eugenie Scott and PZ Myers, filtered on down to local professors who teach their students to ignore the truth about intelligent design. This ignorance becomes even more obvious in the editorial's conclusion, which laughably challenges ID proponents to “define intelligent design in unambiguous terms [and] outline exactly what the theory predicts and explain how it can be tested.”

Gladly. Anyone who cares to ask an actual design proponent will hear a clear definition along the lines of intelligent design holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection. Is that still too ambiguous? Maybe you should check out some of the peer-reviewed ID research. Oh, and you wanted some predictions, right?

Posted by Anika Smith at 3:08 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

In Part 1, I discussed the fact that the Council of Europe (CoE) has recently adopted a resolution alleging that intelligent design (ID) is “a threat to human rights.” The CoE resolutions carry no force of law, but regardless, it’s difficult to keep a straight face that these European politicians would let their dogmatism shine so brilliantly that they would label the questioning of Darwinism as a threat to human rights. As mathematician and Parisian David Berlinski stated, “if this is what a threat to human rights amounts to, count me among its supporters; I’m threatening away with the best of them.” It’s also worth noting that only about 7% of the total members of the CoE’s Parliamentary Assembly voted in favor of this resolution, making one wonder if the CoE’s own members took the resolution seriously. This second installment will assess some of the most dogmatic, intolerant, and undemocratic features of the resolution.

Dogmatic and Unscientific Treatment of Evolution
The resolution treats the debate over evolution in an unscientific fashion, stating: “From a scientific view point, there is absolutely no doubt that evolution is a central theory for our understanding of life on Earth.” Any sentence which begins with the words “From a scientific view point,” should never then go on to say, in contradiction, “there is absolutely no doubt...” The CoE’s resolution does not treat evolution as a tentative matter, but rather as a dogmatic faith.

The U.S. National Academy of Sciences’ “Teaching About Evolution and the Nature of Science” contains an essay by Ernst Mayr emphasizing the tentativeness of scientific knowledge:

One of the most characteristic features of science is this openness to challenge. The willingness to abandon a currently accepted believe when a new, better one is proposed is an important demarcation between science and religious dogma. (“Teaching About Evolution and the Nature of Science,” pg. 43)

This skepticism and encouraging of “Careful examination of the evidence” seems to be the type of mindset that belongs in science, not the “there is absolutely no doubt” mindset of the CoE.

Finally, the resolution even complains that “creationists seek to … sow doubt” in people’s minds regarding evolution. Here the CoE makes its intent clear: It simply wants prevent “doubt” and stop the public from doubting evolution at all costs. By labeling such doubts as a “threat to human rights,” this resolution is part of their strategy to make such thoughts unpopular by equating Darwin-skepticism with the highest thought-crime possible. But isn’t science supposed to permit – and even embrace – skepticism and doubt? By equating Darwin-doubting with a thought-crime against humanity, the resolution exposes the CoE as being the very types of dogmatists they claim to eschew.

Elevating Science As Superior To Religion
Finally, the resolution states that creationism aims to “impose religious dogma” and asserts we must avoid “the advent of an ‘all things are equal’ attitude, which may seem appealing and tolerant but is actually disastrous.” In other words, “religious dogma” is not “equal” to Darwinian evolution. This reminds of the Orwellian propaganda in the book Animal Farm which famously said: "All things are equal but some things are more equal than others." Whatever you or I may think of that position, there can be no mistaking that they are claiming that religion is less “equal” than science. The CoE has explicitly adopted the position that religion is inferior to science.

Conclusion
Much more could be said about problems with the CoE’s resolution, “The dangers of creationism in education.” In the end, it appears to nothing more than a recapitulation of Darwinist misinformation about ID that managed to get the endorsement of 48 European politicians, amounting to 7% of Europe’s largest human rights body. Since less than 12% of the Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly apparently showed up to vote on the resolution, this was enough support to pass the resolution. But the resolution carries no force of law, and when closely scrutinized, even less force of persuasion.

It’s worth ending this analysis by reiterating the words of the European Center for Law and Justice in its memorandum in opposition to the resolution:

The result of passing the Resolution would be the prevention of academic and educative discussion between the theory of intelligent design and the theory of evolution. This approach can only hamper the educational progress of students by restricting their examination of competing scientific ideas and will necessarily violate the right to freedom of expression, including academic freedom, and the right to free exercise of religion in education. Therefore, the Parliamentary Assembly should reject the Resolution as incompatible with the goals and ideals of the Council of Europe.

Posted by Casey Luskin at 8:05 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

It's worth remembering that the struggle for academic freedom is not limited to professors being denied tenure or government scientists facing persecution. It extends to college and high school classrooms, affecting students as well as teachers.

Now the people behind "Expelled" have launched a new feature at their website to expose the depth and breadth of this campaign to deny academic freedom to Darwin-doubters:

Ever sat in class and had your professor straight up challenge your intelligence for suggesting even the possibility of an intelligent design in the universe?

Tired of being labeled merely for questioning aspects of the Darwinian theory of evolution?? Ever been scoffed at or ridiculed in front of your peers?

Well, here’s your opportunity to tell your story on our Website AND possibly be in the movie, “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed”! Tell the world some of the outrageous things your professors say about your questions.

You and your story just might be chosen by our producers to be in the film, “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed”! Let your voice be heard!

Posted by Anika Smith at 12:52 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Dr. Massimo Pigliucci is a colleague of mine here at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He’s a professor of evolutionary biology and philosophy. I don’t know him personally, but by all reports he is a fine scientist and teacher. He’s written an essay in the McGill Journal of Education about improving science education in light of the controversy between Darwinism and intelligent design. It’s a fascinating essay. Dr. Pigliucci writes well, and he reveals much about Darwinists’ approach to the scientific and educational conflict between intelligent design and Darwinism.

His abstract sums it up:

The creation-evolution “controversy” has been with us for more than a century. Here I argue that merely teaching more science will probably not improve the situation; we need to understand the controversy as part of a broader problem with public acceptance of pseudoscience, and respond by teaching how science works as a method. Critical thinking is difficult to teach, but educators can rely on increasing evidence from neurobiology about how the brain learns, or fails to.

The creation-evolution problem is more acute and difficult to overcome precisely because it is not a scientific controversy.

The real controversy— and it is a raging controversy— is about intelligent design. Intelligent design is the scientific theory that there is evidence for intelligent agency in some aspects of biology, for example in the genetic code and in the intricate molecular machines inside cells. Intelligent design isn’t a religious belief. It’s a scientific inference. Of course intelligent design scientists are mostly theists, just as Darwinists are mostly atheists.

Scientists who support intelligent design are a very small fraction of scientists, at least a small fraction of biologists. Yet the controversy between intelligent design and Darwinism is a scientific controversy. Whether a controversy is scientific or not is a qualitative question, not a quantitative question. A scientific controversy is generated when even one scientist asks a perceptive and important question. Dr. Pigliucci knows the difference between creationism and intelligent design, and he knows that the issues raised by I.D. scientists — such as irreducible complexity — are genuine scientific issues. Yet he misrepresents the controversy in the first sentences of his essay. If Dr. Pigliiucci is to improve science education, honesty about the issues is a good place to start.

Dr. Pigliucci goes on to stress the need for science education to eradicate belief in ‘unscientific’ stuff, such as UFOs and the paranormal. He points out (candidly, to his credit) that training in science is no barrier to such belief. If anything, studies suggest that scientifically trained students are more likely to believe in UFOs and the paranormal than students trained in the liberal arts. The most ardent apostle of S.E.T.I. and of belief in the existence of alien civilizations in the 20th century was atheist astronomer Carl Sagan. Dr. Pigliucci points out, perceptively I think, that liberal arts education is more likely than scientific training to foster effective critical thinking.

Then he makes a point that is, well, jaw-dropping. He proposes better science education as a tonic against belief in Heaven:

In fact, the connection between education (science education in particular) and belief in paranormal phenomena or explanations is an empirical matter...a survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press (as cited by Goode, 2002) found that belief in heaven as a real (physical) place does diminish according to increasing levels of education from 92 percent among people with less than a high school education to 73 percent among people with a postgraduate education.

Dr. Pigliucci goes on to sneer at the overwhelming majority of Americans who believe that Heaven is a place:

...but three out of four people with a college-level education in the US still believe in the physical existence of Heaven!

What scientific evidence is there that ‘places’ don’t exist outside of our routine experience with nature? Actually, modern physics and cosmology make liberal inference to places outside of our perception, such as higher spatial dimensions curled up in String Theory and multiverses conjured up to circumvent anthropic inferences. Yet despite abundant scientific inference to places outside of our world as we experience it, Dr. Pigliucci believes that adequate science education would dissuade students from their religious beliefs — from their beliefs in the world outside of nature.

Why would Dr. Pigliucci make such a silly assertion, that science in some way, properly taught, ought to dissuade students from belief in the existence of Heaven? This is why: Dr. Pigliucci conflates methodological naturalism — the systematic data-driven study of the natural world — with philosophical naturalism — the philosophical assertion that nature is all that exists. He conflates science with atheism.

That’s standard Darwinist boilerplate as well. Dr. Pigliucci is a ‘skeptic’ who has written a column for The Freethinker On-Line, and his personal disdain for religious belief is obvious. What influence does his personal metaphysical ideology have on his recommendations for improving science education? Quite a bit, one suspects.

In point of fact, Dr. Pigliucci proposes to teach students philosophical naturalism veiled in scientific naturalism. His purpose is ideological. Ironically, the indoctrination he proposes would raise the same issues of neutrality in religious instruction in public schools that Darwinists invoke about the teaching of biblical creationism. Fundamentalists of all stripes can't seem to keep their religious views out of science. Dr. Pigliucci — a professor of philosophy as well as of evolutionary biology — knows the difference between atheism and science. His choice not to be forthright about the difference is emblematic of the fundamentalist approach — the Darwinist approach — to science education.

Posted by Michael Egnor at 12:42 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

In Part 1, I recounted how Darwinists are deeply invested in the rhetorical value of the emotional argument that humans and chimps have a 98% - 99% genetic similarity. Anthropologist John Marks reports that sometimes Darwinists even use this statistic to contend that our lives are “meaningless”! To explore this debate, I recently blogged about a Science news article entitled “Relative Differences: The Myth of 1%” that reported that the 1% human/chimp genetic difference statistic was a "myth," because “studies are showing that [humans and chimps] are not as similar as many tend to believe.” The Science news article reported that improved genome comparison modeling methods indicate that humans and chimps are “6.4%” genetically distinct from one another.

Apparently my discussion of the Science news article concerned its author, Jon Cohen, whose e-mail response to me I also posted in full in Part 1. Oddly, Mr. Cohen’s response backpedals and promotes the importance of the 1% human/chimp genetic-difference statistic—despite the fact that his Science article had forcefully emphasized the decreasing importance of that statistic. Perhaps he wasn’t quite ready to share any of the responsility for Darwinists losing their rhetorical investment in the 1% statistic. I now publish my response to Mr. Cohen below. I hope that this exchange not only provides an educational object lesson to readers regarding the quality of counter-arguments from the Darwinian science-writing community, but also helps readers understand why the 1.23% human/chimp genetic difference statistic is not all it appears to be. Here is my reply to Mr. Cohen:

Dear Mr. Cohen,

Greetings and thank you for e-mailing me about your concerns, and for also passing on many articles pertinent to this subject. I think it’s best to start this off by saying that I saw your bio on the AAAS website that noted that you are a UCSD graduate who lives in San Diego county. In light of the tragic fires that are currently threatening many in San Diego, I wanted to say that I hope the best for you and your family and I hope you are safe tonight.

Regarding your e-mail, when I read the subject of your e-mail, "Errors in your posting," I expected your e-mail to document actual errors in my posting. Instead, I merely found you making accusations against me that I "selectively and out of context" "fail to scrutinize what the original reports," and that I am "sloppy, inaccurate, and overtly biased." These assorted accusations sound serious, and if they proved true, of course I would be concerned and I would want to issue some correction. But in fact your accusations were not backed up by anything you said in your e-mail.

Please allow me to discuss your concerns below.

Concern 1. You wrote that "our genes--in contrast to what the Scientific American posting states--are only 1.23% different" (emphasis yours). My post never said otherwise, but your implication is that I should have devoted my post to pushing the 1% DNA sequence-difference statistic rather than the 6.4% gene-copy difference statistic. But my post was reporting on your Science news article, and the Scientific American blog post, and since those two sources dealt primarily with emphasizing the importance gene copy percent similarities between humans and chimps rather than DNA-sequence differences, my post dealt with gene copy percent differences between humans and chimps. Thus, I focused on quoting those sources where those sources stated, "human and chimpanzee gene copy numbers differ by a whopping 6.4%” and "humans may have as little as 99% of their genes in common with one another, and, by the same analysis, as little as 95% of their genes in common with chimpanzees."

Your e-mail seems to imply that you feel I should have promoted the 1% human/chimp DNA-sequence difference statistic as the more important figure, but in fact I was simply following the approach you took in your Science news article where you printed the following descriptions about the 1% DNA-sequence difference statistic:

"myth"

“truism [that] should be retired”

“more a hindrance for understanding than a help”

“the 1% difference wasn’t the whole story.”

“studies are showing that they are not as similar as many tend to believe”

To respond directly to your concern, my post never stated nor implied that the 1% figure was itself incorrect in its context. Rather, I followed your approach by quoting you calling it a “myth” or by characterizing it as "becoming a thing of the past" (following you when you suggested it may be a “truism [that] should be retired” or quoting a scientist who called it “more a hindrance for understanding than a help”. To reiterate: I never said that the 1% figure was itself incorrect, I just implied that it is becoming irrelevant due to more important statistical methods of comparison related to gene copy number—doing my best to convey to our readers the message of your article.

I do not see any grounds for complaint on your part regarding my treatment of this matter since I was essentially following the very approach you took in your article. In fact, I find it ironic that you are now emailing me promoting the importance of the 1% sequence difference statistic when in fact your article calls that 1% statistic a "myth," a “truism [that] should be retired,” a “hindrance for understanding,” not “the whole story,” etc. Is the author of the “Myth of 1%” article is now trying to promote that same 1% myth after Discovery Institute blogged about your article and observed that humans and chimps “are not as similar as many tend to believe”? Your e-mail to me comes off like backpedaling.

Concern 2. You wrote: "You also state that my article ‘reports’ that copy numbers differ by 6.4%. Not only does this misleadingly imply that humans thus differ from chimps by 6.4% (it's probably closer to 5%), you fail to note that my article was not the source of this figure: I was citing a report that was done by a computational genomics researcher."

Regarding your charge that I imply that your article was the source of the 6.4% statistic, observe that my original blog post stated that your article was a "Science news article" that "reported" that gene copy numbers differed by 6.4% between humans and chimps. No informed reader would take your article as the original research source for that statistic, but rather they would take it precisely how I described it: a Science news source reporting on other research. To learn about the original source, the reader could look up your article (which my post links to). I find it ironic that you are criticizing me for doing exactly what you did: I quoted a source discussing the 6.4% research finding, and I noted my source.

Regarding your charge that gene copy similarity differs by 5% rather than 6.4%, and that I used the wrong statistical percentage, I first note that I quoted the Scientific American post where it stated that "humans may have … as little as 95% of their genes in common with chimpanzees." 95% “in common” of course equals a 5% difference, so the 5% approximation seems present in the quote I provided from Scientific American.

But there deeper problem with this complaint: you claim that my post is “misleading” because you say the 6.4% statistic is “probably closer to 5%”. Yet I am perplexed at how you complain to me here, because when I stated the 6.4% difference, I was simply quoting your article, and your article never says anything about a 5% gene copy difference statistic and in fact the statistic you give is 6.4%. If the 6.4% statistic is in error, then your article is the source of that error because my post directly quoted your article! It seems that you accuse me of propagating an error when I was just quoting you. If it was in error, have you corrected it publicly? If so, I’d be happy to update my post accordingly.

Here you employ an unfortunate example of Darwinian moral logic: I quote a pro-evolution science reporter, and then that pro-evolution science reporter claims that his statement was off by ~1.4% and accuses me of propagating an error by quoting him. Such Darwinian moral logic is incredible, but it does have a simple and clear-cut rule: if a Darwinist is wrong, it must be an ID guy’s fault.

Concern 3. You wrote: "The 1.23% is a hard fact: It's based on sequencing the entire human genome and the chimpanzee genome" (emphasis yours). I'm more than willing to believe you when you wrote “The 1.23% is a hard fact" — and as I noted above, I never claimed that the statistic was wrong. To repeat, the only language I used to describe the 1% statistic was language that you yourself used in your article (i.e. “Myth”) or characterizing it how you did (i.e. “truism should be retired”), etc. Nonetheless, despite your article's emphatic diminution of the importance of the 1% statistic, I am more than willing to accept that the 1.23% sequence difference statistic “is a hard fact.” But I do have some comments in this regard:

In fact, the distinction between (i) the 6.4% difference in non-coding DNA and gene-copy number and (ii) 1.23% difference between the gene sequences is not one of estimate versus “hard fact,” but rather represents different kinds of estimates. The 1.23% difference is every bit as much an estimate as the 6.4%. For example, the 1.23% comes from sequence alignments that were performed only when homologous genes were available from both genomes. Indeed, your Science news article concedes this fact, as it admits that “the figure reflects only base substitutions, not the many stretches of DNA that have been inserted or deleted in the genomes.” What do you do when the chimp genome has no homologue to a human gene or non-coding DNA sequence? Do you add all those residues to the error column? No, you ignore them altogether. So the 1.23% is not really a "hard fact," unless you are careful to so caveat the result: it ignores insertions and deletions (“indels”), especially genes that are present in one species but absent in the other.

Given that (quite large) caveat then yes, the 1.23% figure probably has much less uncertainty than the 6.4% figure. But given that the 1.23% statistic requires such a weighty caveat (your article admits that the indels may account for up to 3% differences between the two genomes — more than twice as great as the 1.23% difference statistic itself!), one is not unjustified in holding skepticism towards claims that the 1.23% statistic is really all that impressive or meaningful.

There is also the problem that the 1.23% value does not have a lot of meaning since there is quite a bit of variance between genes. Many human-chimp gene comparisons show identical or near identical alignments, but so do some human-banana alignments. More importantly, certain types of human-chimp alignments show substantial differences, but the 1.23% statistic averages over all of them. Yes, it provides an overall average value which might be helpful when merely comparing different genomes, but given the all-important caveats, its importance is dubious.

In the end, it seems like you are now backpedaling by stridently promoting the 1% similarity statistic to me in your e-mail, calling it a "hard fact" when you yourself reported in your article that it was a "myth," suggested it may be a “truism [that] should be retired,” quoted a scientist calling it “more a hindrance for understanding than a help,” and reported it “wasn’t the whole story,” etc. Regardless, the wording I used in my blog post simply followed the wording of your article, so if there is any error here, it cannot be attributed to me for following the approach you took in your Science news article.

Concern 4. You wrote: "The claim that humans are as different from each other as was previously thought we were different from chimps also is misleading and inaccurate." Regarding this complaint, I was simply quoting the Scientific American article when it stated, “Humans turn out to be as genetically different from one another as it was previously thought they were different from chimps.” If you take issue with that claim, then again I have 2 questions:

(1) Did you e-mail the author of the Scientific American post, the original source for that claim, to state your objections?
(2) If not, why not?

Again, I was simply quoting a science news source, Scientific American. If their source was in error, I would love to know about it so I can make it clear to our readers that Scientific American was wrong. But it seems to me that if you have concerns, you need to take the issue up with them, as they are the ones who said it.

Again, I see an astounding type of Darwinian moral logic at work here: if a Darwinist is wrong, it must be an ID guy’s fault. I’ll be happy to correct anything if Scientific American posts any changes on this matter.

Concern 5. You observe that "None of the original studies I cited in my article or Venter's genome paper suggest in any way that their findings challenge Darwinian evolution, and I doubt that any of those researchers would support that conclusion from their data." In response I ask you, where did I state that any of these papers "challenge Darwinian evolution"? I am simply discussing a scientific debate of interest to our readers, namely the degree of genetic similarity between humans and chimps, and my post made no conclusions about the validity of Darwinian evolution. Again, I see no error, but you’re putting words in my mouth that I simply did not state. In fact, I specifically stated that biologists will have to sort out the implications of these data, as I wrote: "The implications of these differences remain to be sorted out by biologists."

Concern 6. You wrote: "The bottom line is that your post is so distant from the sources that you have completely garbled the data to support Intelligent Design." I’ve already established that I followed the sources I quoted accurately and that I myself did not “garble” anything. But here’s the more pertinent question: where did I state that any of these papers "support intelligent design"? I am simply discussing a scientific debate of interest to our readers, namely the degree of genetic similarity between humans and chimps, and my post made no conclusions about the validity of intelligent design.

Again, I see no error, but you seem to be putting words in my mouth that I did not state. And I reiterate that my post specifically remained neutral on the issue of larger implications of these data by stating "The implications of these differences remain to be sorted out by biologists."

This now raises a question, what are the implications of these findings? As your piece discussed, these comparisons have been raised by evolutionists, and evolutionists have claimed these comparisons as powerful evidence for the theory. Subsequent modification and elaboration on these data are naturally going to be of interest to our readers, even if hard and fast conclusions are not immediately obvious.

We might reasonably ask the evolutionist why the 1% difference value was considered to be such powerful evidence for Darwinian evolution, and at what point does the comparison cease to support Darwinian evolution? 2%? 3%? 6.4%? 10%? Is there an objective metric for falsification here?

Of course there are no answers to these questions, because the reasoning behind the claim that 1% difference was powerful evidence for evolution was never elucidated in the first place. This is why I wrote:

From a technical scientific perspective, the degree of genetic similarity between humans and chimps seems to be of questionable relevance when one is trying to determine whether two species share a Darwinian past. After all, designers regularly re-use parts that work, especially programming components, so there’s no reason to presume that mere genetic similarity necessarily implies common descent over common design. Moreover, even if such genetic similarities were to imply common ancestry, they don’t demonstrate a plausible stepwise Darwinian evolutionary pathway.

Your insistence that the evolutionists find no problem with these newer data is no surprise. But this hardly means the data are of no interest.

Conclusion
You wrote: "You are welcome to post my e-mail in its entirety, but given the errors that you made in your post by selectively quoting from other posts, please do not excerpt this for a public posting."

I appreciate your kind offer. As you identified no errors in my post (#s 1-6); made accusations against me which are much more strongly applicable against you given that I was simply following your approach (#s 1-3); accused me of making errors when in reality, if there are errors, then those are the errors of authorities whom I quoted and not errors on my part (#s 2 & 4); and finally falsely accused me of saying things I never said (#s 5-6); the only reason I think it would be worth responding publicly would be to show people your apparent backpedaling, and to reveal the quality of your objections. But I can assure you that if I do choose to respond, I will most certainly respect your request and I will post your reply to me in its entirety.

Finally, to end on a friendly personal note, I’m also a UCSD alum and I lived in San Diego for many years. In fact I spent much time yesterday checking on my friends in San Diego in light of the fire (some of whom are still waiting to see if their homes survive). One of my friends, like you, lives in Cardiff by the Sea, and his family has evacuated to Los Angeles. So I wish you and your family safety, health, and peace during this time.

If you have time to reply, I look forward to any answers you may have to my questions. Thank you for your time.

Sincerely,

Casey Luskin
UCSD Classes of 2000 (B.S.) and 2001 (M.S.)

Posted by Casey Luskin at 2:29 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

From a technical scientific perspective, the degree of genetic similarity between humans and chimps seems to be of questionable relevance when one is trying to determine whether two species share a Darwinian past. After all, designers regularly re-use parts that work, especially programming components, so there’s no reason to presume that mere genetic similarity necessarily implies common descent over common design. Moreover, even if such genetic similarities were to imply common ancestry, they don’t demonstrate a plausible stepwise Darwinian evolutionary pathway. Nonetheless, on a rhetorical level, the claim that humans and chimps are 99% the same is a powerful emotional argument aiding those seeking to evangelize for Darwinism. For example, last year a cover story of Time magazine proclaimed: “chimps are our nearest evolutionary cousins, roughly 98% to 99% identical to humans at the genetic level.” In his 2002 book, What it means to be 98% chimpanzee, University of North Carolina Charlotte anthropologist Jonathan Marks (an avowed evolutionist himself) laments how Darwinian scientists abuse this statistic:

[W]hy should it really matter whether we are descended from arboreal hairy primates or not? … The reason it matters to so many people is that scientists have made it matter, and they’ve done so in the worst possible way. They’ve taken a proposition …”We are descended from apes”—and stretched it into a series of additional propositions, often both authoritative and odious. Thirty years ago, in a widely read scientific-philosophical work called Chance and Necessity, the French molecular biologist Jacques Monod argued that evolution shows life to be meaningless.

(Jonathan Marks, What it means to be 98% chimpanzee, pg. 281 (University of California Press, 2002).)

But what would people think about evolution if Time magazine instead printed the following hypothetical story:

“Chimps are our nearest evolutionary cousins, and we used to think they were 98% to 99% identical to humans at the genetic level, but since we’ve sequenced the chimp and human genomes, scientists are calling that statistic a 'myth' because improved methods of comparing genomes reveal that chimps are only 94% to 95% similar to humans.”

Soon after my post went live, the author of the “The Myth of 1%” article, Jon Cohen, contacted me with various concerns about my blog post. To help readers explore this dialogue, below I reprint Jon Cohen’s article to me in full (with permission), and my response to Mr. Cohen can be read here.

From: Jon Cohen [snip]

Sent: Saturday, October 20, 2007 12:05 PM

To: Casey Luskin

Cc: [Snip]

Subject: Errors in your posting

Mr. Luskin,

I wrote the Science news article that you refer to in your recent posting on the Discovery Institute's "Evolution News and Views."

Given that "misreporting of the evolution issue is one key reason" for that site, which complains that "much of the news coverage has been sloppy, inaccurate, and in some cases, overtly biased," I wanted to point out that your own post contains several errors and apparent misunderstandings. I realize that you are largely reporting what others have written, but you do it selectively and out of context--and you also fail to scrutinize what the original reports said.

As I wrote in my article, chimps and humans do differ genetically by more than 1%, but our genes--in contrast to what the Scientific American posting states--are only 1.23% different. The bulk of the differences between chimps and humans exist in noncoding regions of the genome that regulate our genes and in gene copy number variation/segmental duplication, which ultimately determine how much product (typically protein) they produce. You also state that my article "reports" that copy numbers differ by 6.4%. Not only does this misleadingly imply that humans thus differ from chimps by 6.4% (it's probably closer to 5%), you fail to note that my article was not the source of this figure: I was citing a report that was done by a computational genomics researcher. In other words, it's a model, which is another way of saying it's an estimate, not a hard fact. (The 1.23% is a hard fact: It's based on sequencing the entire human genome and the chimpanzee genome.)

The claim that humans are as different from each other as was previously thought we were different from chimps also is misleading and inaccurate. No credible study that I know of ever suggested that one human's genes differ from another human's gene by 1.23%. The Scientific America posting--which is referring to an AP story in USA Today that's referring to the PLoS Biology paper about Craig Venter's genome--does not explain that Venter reported a 0.5% difference between his inherited genome from his mother and father, which once again is measuring not simply gene differences but differences in noncoding regions that include inserts and deletions (that may sometimes contain copied or deleted genes or may impact regulation).

None of the original studies I cited in my article or Venter's genome paper suggest in any way that their findings challenge Darwinian evolution, and I doubt that any of those researchers would support that conclusion from their data. And indeed, the fact that we differ genetically by more than 1%, largely for gene regulatory reasons, was predicted in Science more than 30 years ago (again as my article notes)--and the 1975 article was co-authored by one of the world's leading evolutionary biologists at the time, Allan Wilson.

The bottom line is that your post is so distant from the sources that you have completely garbled the data to support Intelligent Design. It's sloppy, inaccurate, and overtly biased.

Your are welcome to post my e-mail in its entirety, but given the errors that you made in your post by selectively quoting from other posts, please do not excerpt this for a public posting.

I'm also attaching original papers that discuss these issues. It's complicated stuff, and I hope these papers help clarify the details.

Jon Cohen

Posted by Casey Luskin at 2:05 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Last night Ben Stein showed up on The O'Reilly Factor to talk about his forthcoming documentary, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, and the fact that scientists are being persecuted for simply questioning Darwinism in some case, or for researching and advancing the theory of intelligent design in others. Interestingly, I would bet that none of the scientists who will appear in Expelled (and by all accounts there will be a LOT of them) are creationists. Unfortunately, Bill O'Reilly simply conflates intelligent design with creationism, mistakenly defining it as an attempt to find a divine designer. Not so. (see here, here and here to start) Compare O'Reilly's misunderstanding with this letter from a guy who clearly gets it.

It was unfortunate too that Ben referred to the "gaps" in Darwin's theory, as if those are the only issues that intelligent design theory addresses. To be sure there are shortcomings with Darwinism, the scientific literature of late is full of them. However, intelligent design also provides a robust positive case, and a serious scientific research approach. This is the news that O’Reilly’s viewers need to hear about.

Posted by Robert Crowther at 12:04 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Posted by Anika Smith at 5:34 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The mainstream media in the United States—and some of the conservative press, for that matter—are loathe to own up to the racist and anti-Semitic history, and the anti-individual rights posture, of applied Darwinism. They want people to think that eugenics is not really traceable to Darwin, or to think that if some (many) of Darwin’s kin undeniably were leading early eugenicists, there no longer is support for their kinds of ideas among today’s Darwinists.

So thank you, Johnjoe McFadden, professor of genetics at the University of Surrey, for using the current flap over the views of Dr. James Watson, co-discoverer of DNA, to set the record straight. And congratulations to The Guardian for printing the McFadden article.

The eugenics movement never died out. It has many contemporary variants and highly praised elite proponents—who, not surprisingly, are opposed to any scientists who challenge Darwin’s theory and want them drummed out of academia.

Read about it in John West’s new book, Darwin Day in America, coming out from ISI Press in three weeks. The book is authoritative and detailed. And the details are sobering and scary.

Posted by Bruce Chapman at 5:09 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Note: This is one of a series of posts adapted from my new book, Darwin Day in America. You can find other posts in the series here.

A key point of my book Darwin Day in America is that materialism did not begin (or end) with Charles Darwin.

One of the pre-Darwin champions of materialism I cover in my book is physician Julien Offray de la Mettrie (1709-1751), author of the provocative tract Man a Machine (L’Homme Machine), published in 1748. According to La Mettrie, “the human body is a machine which winds its own springs” and the “the diverse states” of the human mind “are always correlative with those of the body.” In other words, human beings are mechanisms whose rational life is completely dependent on physical causes. Those causes include everything from raw meat to heredity.

In what has to be one of the more interesting passages in culinary analysis, La Mettrie opined:

Raw meat makes animals fierce, and it would have the same effect on man. This is so true that the English who eat meat red and bloody, and not as well done as ours, seem to share more or less in the savagery due to this kind of good.

A substantial part of La Mettrie’s treatise was devoted to attacking the belief that an unbridgeable gulf separated human beings from animals. According to La Mettrie, there was nothing mysterious in how to raise apes to men, because there was nothing mysterious in how men acquired their own rational faculties:

Man has been trained in the same way as animals. He has become an author, as they became beasts of burden. A geometrician has learned to perform the most difficult demonstrations and calculations, as a monkey has learned to take his little hat off and on, and to mount his tame dog.

Underlying every part of Man a Machine is La Mettrie’s steadfast faith that there is no mystery in attributing mind to matter. Indeed, La Mettrie asserted that “given the least principle of motion, animated bodies will have all that is necessary for moving, feeling, thinking, repenting.”

More than a century later, the kind of extreme reductionist thinking championed by La Mettrie was developed in a far more convincing manner by Charles Darwin in his book The Descent of Man. You can read about Darwin’s effort to apply materialism to human beings and human culture in “Darwin’s Revolution,” chapter 2 of Darwin Day in America.

To order Darwin Day in America click here. To find out more information about the book (and watch the trailer), visit the book’s website here.

Posted by John West at 12:36 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

In a recent ID the Future podcast interview, Dr. Scott Chambers discusses the fact that the expansion rate of the universe implies an incredibly high degree of cosmic fine-tuning to allow for the existence of life. Just a few weeks ago, Newsweek columnist Sharon Begley also discussed the universe’s expansion rate. This issue has huge implications for the debate over cosmic design, but you wouldn’t know it from reading Begley’s article. Begley tries to steer the reader into believing the wildly speculative multiverse hypothesis—a pet philosophical favorite of materialists—while barely even hinting that the alternative, and much more elegant explanation, is intelligent design of the cosmos. For those who are informed on this subject, her article comes off as if she is trying to hide the design inference from the reader as a reasonable conclusion to explain the incredible fine-tuning of the universe. Begley writes:

If Einstein’s cosmological constant truly is the source of dark energy, then something else cancels out all but a smidgen of the energy from the popping particles. That something else is anyone’s guess. Worse, the precision of the required cancellation—erase the ink on every magazine ever printed except for exactly one comma, here,--strains credulity.

(Sharon Begley, “In ‘Dark Energy,’ Cosmic Humility,” Newsweek, October 1, 2007, pg. 43.)

But Begley doesn’t even mention the design inference as one possible explanation. Rather, she forces the unknowing reader to wear her own philosophical blinders by encouraging them to consider methods of improving the odds of getting such an improbable universe. In fact, we know that she is trying to steer the reader away from the design inference because she immediately launches into a 3-paragraph promotion of the “multiverse hypothesis,” a favorite escape-pod for materialists seeking to avoid the conclusion of cosmic design. Thus Begley writes, “Unless ‘the’ universe is actually only one out of many universes.”

Here, Begley begins to explicitly promote materialism, stating that if we have such multiverses then “there is no deeper explanation,” and that ultimate answers to inquiries about cosmic fine-tuning reveal the answer “just because.” Unfortunately, she tries to make this sound scientifically reasonable by writing, “Cosmologists are seriously entertaining this possibility.” But consider how Nature dealt with this issue last year when it admitted that this isn’t a testable concept:

Since the early 1980s, some cosmologists have argued that multiple universes could have formed during a period of cosmic inflation that preceded the Big Bang. More recently, string theorists have calculated that there could be 10⁵⁰⁰ universes, which is more than the number of atoms in our observable Universe. Under these circumstances, it becomes more reasonable to assume that several would turn out like ours. It’s like getting zillions and zillions of darts to throw at the dart board, Susskind says. “Surely, a large number of them are going to wind up in the target zone.” And of course, we exist in our particular Universe because we couldn’t exist anywhere else. It’s an intriguing idea with just one problem, says Gross: “It’s impossible to disprove.” Because our Universe is, almost by definition, everything we can observe, there are no apparent measurements that would confirm whether we exist within a cosmic landscape of multiple universes, or if ours is the only one. And because we can’t falsify the idea, Gross says, it isn’t science.

(Geoff Brumfiel, "Outrageous Fortune," Nature, Vol 439:10-12 (January 5, 2006).)

There are really two fundamental problems with [the multiverse hypothesis].

One, we don't have any observational evidence for any universe other than our own.

And secondly, if you think about the implications of the multiverse model, the universe that we have ought to be just barely adequate to support life. And so things like good-stating food and bright colors and so forth ought not to happen. And yet the world that we live in is a fabulous place to live and I wouldn't want to live anywhere else. I think that the obvious conclusion, the one that first comes to mind, is that of design and the multiverse is a way of squirming around that.

It’s sad that Newsweek is allowing its science editorials to blatantly promote materialist philosophy without recognizing it as such, and without recognizing the alternative position. But one thing is for sure: the evidence for fine-tuning is driving materialists to make extreme proposals — and to hide the alternative explanations — implicitly admitting that there is something about our universe needing explanation by an external cause.

Posted by Casey Luskin at 12:19 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

This month the Council of Europe (CoE) adopted a resolution regarding “The dangers of creationism in education,” which calls intelligent design (ID) “a threat to human rights.” The CoE is a non-governmental body in Europe that aims to protect human rights, but its resolutions carry no force of law. Even if the CoE’s edicts did carry the force of law, it’s difficult to take this resolution seriously due to its assertion that questioning Darwin somehow threatens human rights. David Berlinski, a mathematician and Discovery Institute senior fellow who lives in Paris and has made many scientific critiques of Darwinian evolution, has given us an insightful analysis of the resolution, here. As Dr. Berlinski puts it, “if this is what a threat to human rights amounts to, count me among its supporters; I’m threatening away with the best of them.”

We previously assessed the resolution and the rebuttal from the European Center for Law and Justice here, but it’s worth looking closer at this resolution as an example of the fusion of bad science, bad education, and dangerous politics. Additionally, it’s worth noting that although the CoE’s Parliamentary Assembly has over 640 members, only 48 voted in favor of this resolution (~7%). Two weeks ago I e-mailed the CoE’s press office inquiring why so few votes were cast on the resolution; as of yet, I have received no reply to my question.

Misinformation, Beginning with the Resolution’s Title
The title of the resolution, “The dangers of creationism in education,” inappropriately lumps ID as “creationism.” Next, in its first sentence, the resolution wrongly asserts that, “Creationism in any of its forms, such as ‘intelligent design’, is not based on facts, does not use any scientific reasoning.” This statement is blatantly false.

First, intelligent design is different from creationism. Creationism starts with some religious text and tries to see how the findings of science can be reconciled to it. ID starts with the empirical evidence of nature and seeks to ascertain what scientific inferences can be drawn from that evidence. Unlike creationism, ID does not claim that modern biology can identify whether the intelligent cause detected through science is supernatural. Michael Behe explains this point:

The most important difference [between modern ID and Paley] is that [ID] is limited to design itself; I strongly emphasize that it is not an argument for the existence of a benevolent God, as Paley's was. I hasten to add that I myself do believe in a benevolent God, and I recognize that philosophy and theology may be able to extend the argument. But a scientific argument for design in biology does not reach that far. Thus while I argue for design, the question of the identity of the designer is left open. Possible candidates for the role of designer include: the God of Christianity; an angel--fallen or not; Plato's demi-urge; some mystical new age force; space aliens from Alpha Centauri; time travelers; or some utterly unknown intelligent being. Of course, some of these possibilities may seem more plausible than others based on information from fields other than science. Nonetheless, as regards the identity of the designer, modern ID theory happily echoes Isaac Newton's phrase hypothesis non fingo. (Michael Behe, "The Modern Intelligent Design Hypothesis," Philosophia Christi, Series 2, Vol. 3, No. 1 (2001), pg. 165, emphasis added.)

The resolution and its accompanying report fail to recognize these basic facts about ID and its differences from creationism. (For further detailed information about why ID is different than creationism, see here or here.)

Second, ID does use scientific reasoning and is based upon empirical data. The scientific method is commonly described as a four-step process involving observations, hypothesis, experimentation, and conclusion. ID begins with the observation that intelligent agents produce complex and specified information (CSI). Design theorists hypothesize that if a natural object was designed, it will contain high levels of CSI. Scientists then perform experimental tests upon natural objects to determine if they contain complex and specified information. One easily testable form of CSI is irreducible complexity, which can be discovered by experimentally reverse-engineering biological structures to see if they require all of their parts to function. When ID researchers find irreducible complexity in biology, they conclude that such structures were designed.

The charge that ID is "creationism" is a rhetorical strategy on the part of Darwinists who wish to delegitimize ID without actually addressing the merits of its case. The CoE has deftly applied this strategy, asserting ID’s illegitimacy without making any critique of the actual methods advocated by design proponents for detecting design. Instead, the resolution depends on a report of Parliamentary Assembly member Guy Lengagne, which dismisses ID by wrongly equating it with a supernatural explanation, and making the bald assertion that ID employs “blatant scientific fraud, intellectual deception or communication that blurs the nature, objectives and limits of science.” No examples are given to back up the claims of “fraud” or “deception,” and ID proponents have in fact long explained why even methodological naturalism does not disbar ID from being science.

Is ID Science?
In its “Teaching About Evolution and the Nature of Science,” the U.S. National Academy of Sciences defines science as follows:

Science is a particular way of knowing about the world. In science, explanations are restricted to those that can be inferred from the confirmable data—the results obtained through observations and experiments that can be substantiated by other scientists. Anything that can be observed or measured is amenable to scientific investigation. Explanations that cannot be based upon empirical evidence are not part of science.

Intelligent causes can be inferred through confirmable data. The types of information produced by intelligent causes can be observed and then measured. Scientists can use observations and experiments to base their conclusions of intelligent design upon empirical evidence. Intelligent design limits its claims to those which can be established through the data. In this way, intelligent design does not violate the mandates of predictability and reliability laid down for science by methodological naturalism (whatever the failings and limitations of methodological naturalism). (Traipsing, page 37)

Part 2 will further assess the dogmatism in the CoE’s resolution.

Posted by Casey Luskin at 10:52 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Last July, David Tyler wrote an insightful post at ARN stating,

For over 30 years, the public have been led to believe that human and chimpanzee genetics differ by mere 1%. This 'fact' of science has been used on innumerable occasions to silence anyone who offered the thought that humans are special among the animal kingdom. ‘Today we take as a given that the two species are genetically 99% the same.’ However, this ‘given’ is about to be discarded.

The implications of these differences remain to be sorted out by biologists, but those seeking to understand evolution and genetics should realize that the 99% similarity statistic between humans and chimps is now admitted to be a “myth.”

Posted by Casey Luskin at 6:47 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

The furor over Dr. James Watson's comments on the supposed racial inferiority of black people—resulting from evolution—caused cancellation of at least one of the Nobel scientist's speeches in England this week. He may even have lost his job at Cold Spring Harbor. This brings a new element into the story.

John West has explained that Watson's science is in thrall to his materialist philosophy and is wrong as science. Further, West points out that this is how we got to eugenics in the first place. It is a didactic history he tells with concussive force in his book out next month from ISI, Darwin Day in America. If you want to know why appalling views like Dr. Watson’s enjoy such covert scientific support, read West. Race theory and eugenics are not accidents, but the logical product of Darwinian thought—going back to Darwin’s work itself. Perhaps your local church pastor might like to read about it before he declares St. Darwin's birthday a holiday in February, as has been happening at some of the more gullible and latitudinarian chapels of the land. Watson's candor actually helps illuminate the radical ideological content of Darwinism when unadorned by political fig leaves.

But cancellation of Dr. Watson's speech in England raises a separate issue, one of a serious procedural nature. Surely, Darwinists will deplore the loss of a venue for Dr. Watson to speak, however much his scientific views may give offense. Popularity, not to mention political correctness, cannot be the test of a scientific proposition. So let him make his argument as cogently as possible. That would be the truly liberal way and the scientific way.

I happen to sympathize with that view completely. Let him speak and treat him politely. Then use evidence and reason to demolish his thesis.

I hold to that position, indeed, even though Dr. Watson and other Darwinists refuse to accord such courtesy and civility, let alone curiosity, to scientific critics of Darwin's theory of evolution. Free speech for them is, well, free speech for them.

Posted by Bruce Chapman at 5:23 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

This week's Human Events features a piece by Logan Gage which addresses, among other things, Hillary Clinton's unsurprising take on evolution:

Following liberal science writer Chris Mooney’s successful book “The Republican War on Science,” Clinton repeatedly lumps these issues together using the “war” metaphor. “Mrs. Clinton has used the phrase ‘war on science’ frequently on the campaign trail, and it has reliably drawn applause from Democratic audiences,” according to The New York Times. Her website declares she will “end the Bush Administration’s war on science.”

But who is really politicizing science? In February 2008, comedian, economist, and actor Ben Stein will release a feature-length documentary film titled “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.” It chronicles the many scientists who have been harassed and denied tenure by their colleagues, despite overwhelming scientific credentials, because they either dissent from Darwinism or the larger worldview of materialism.

Posted by Anika Smith at 8:17 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

So, along with their October issue, Wired has published a Geekipedia supplement, 149 People, Places, Ideas & Trends You Need To Know, and nestled between innovation and internet radio is intelligent design.

An intricate organ like the eye relies on specialized parts, none of which work without the others. It's hard to imagine, they say, such a system evolving by natural selection (although the work of scientists like Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Dawkins provides some ideas on how it might happen). Their preferred explanation: an "intelligent designer" who drafted the blueprint for life.

The Geek's treatment is just a bit better than Wikipedia (not hard to accomplish), but needs some help. For instance, they claim: "And since it can't be tested, they add, it's not a theory at all." Of course, this is false — intelligent design ideas are testable. (Something is empirically testable when it is either falsifiable, confirmable, or both. Moreover, something can be confirmable but not falsifiable, as with the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) or the existence of a cosmic designer. Both of these claims are still empirically testable. See here, here, here. And here. Oh, and here too.)

Clearly, intelligent design as an idea isn't going away. If anything, it is gaining momentum and popularity among the public as they learn more about it.

Posted by Robert Crowther at 6:08 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Today (or yesterday depending on which side of the pond you’re on), evolutionary philosopher Jerry Fodor has stepped out and published an article that puts his entire career at risk, not to mention possibly kissing good-bye any chance he’ll ever get another research grant.

In fact, an appreciable number of perfectly reasonable biologists are coming to think that the theory of natural selection can no longer be taken for granted. This is, so far, mostly straws in the wind; but it’s not out of the question that a scientific revolution – no less than a major revision of evolutionary theory – is in the offing. Unlike the story about our minds being anachronistic adaptations, this new twist doesn’t seem to have been widely noticed outside professional circles. The ironic upshot is that at a time when the theory of natural selection has become an article of pop culture, it is faced with what may be the most serious challenge it has had so far. Darwinists have been known to say that adaptationism is the best idea that anybody has ever had. It would be a good joke if the best idea that anybody has ever had turned out not to be true. A lot of the history of science consists of the world playing that sort of joke on our most cherished theories.

Fodor, it should be noted, is a complete materialist — just not as complete as Darwinists want him to be. (You know how it is, some materialists are more equal than others.) So, what’s to worry? It’s his heresy when considered in light of the dogmatism of the Darwinists who hold the purse strings that is surprising. Yet, Fodor appears to be partially aware:

It wouldn’t be unreasonable for a biologist of the Darwinist persuasion to argue like this: ‘Bother conceptual issues and bother those who raise them. We can’t do without biology and biology can’t do without Darwinism. So Darwinism must be true.’ Darwinists do often argue this way; and the fear of hyperbole seems not to inhibit them.

Posted by Robert Crowther at 10:42 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Michael Behe has just published another response to attacks on his book, The Edge of Evolution, this one addressing an exchange that he and Sean Carroll had in letters published in Science.

Carroll had published a review in Science which Behe responded to here, as readers will recall. Science also published part of a letter Behe wrote, which Carroll then responded to. The back-and-forth between these two is well worth reading.

For more on Behe's responses to his critics, visit his Amazon blog.

Posted by Anika Smith at 10:40 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Eminent evolutionist James Watson, winner of the Nobel Prize for co-discovering the structure of DNA, is sparking controversy in Great Britain for suggesting that blacks are inferior to whites due to evolution. But there is nothing particularly extraordinary about Watson's views. As I document in chapter 7 of my forthcoming book Darwin Day in America, there is a long history of evolutionists using Darwinism to justify racism—including Darwin himself.

Watson is past director and current Chancellor of the prestigious biological research lab at Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island. Ironically, that lab has deep connections to Darwinian racism of years gone by. Early in the twentieth century it was the headquarters for one of the most virulent American eugenics groups, the Eugenics Record Office, which promoted forced sterilization and opposed immigration to America by ethnic groups considered lower on the evolutionary scale than Anglo-Saxon whites. Back then the lab was directed by Harvard-trained geneticist Charles Davenport. A member of the National Academy of Sciences, Davenport held views about blacks and evolution hauntingly similar to Watson's.

The current flap started with a profile of Watson in the Sunday Times in England, where Watson's views were described thus:

He says that he is “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really”, and I know that this “hot potato” is going to be difficult to address. His hope is that everyone is equal, but he counters that “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true”. He says that you should not discriminate on the basis of colour, because “there are many people of colour who are very talented, but don’t promote them when they haven’t succeeded at the lower level”. He writes that “there is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so”. [Emphasis added.]

Watson's comments are inspiring a furor in England, where he has just arrived for a speaking tour.

What is truly remarkable is how similar Watson's current views are to Charles Davenport's. I discuss Davenport's use of evolution to justify racism in my new book Darwin Day in America (coming out in early November). Here is part of what I say there:

Biologist Charles Davenport claimed that racial differences arose as evolutionary adaptations: “Each race of man that has long persisted in a distinct environment has gained, by preservation of useful mutations, certain adaptations to that environment. The useful phaenotypical adaptations have enabled their possessors to survive and the genotype that produced them continues the characters of the race.” For example, “the high intelligence and the ambition of the European races” could be regarded “as an adaptation to the competition and crowding arising in a life largely devoted to barter and commerce.” Similarly, “the fear of darkness, in the negro race,” could be explained as an adaptation to “a country where lions and other predaceous animals prowl at night.” As the latter example suggests, not all evolutionary adaptations remained beneficial in civilized society, according to eugenists. As a result, some races were better equipped by evolution to deal with the challenges of modern life than others. “We have abundant evidence today of an innate difference in capacity of learning, of forming judgments, of profiting by experience in different strains of humans,” wrote Davenport. “In fact it seems probable that in the same country we have, living side by side, persons of advanced mentality, persons who have inherited the mentality of their ancestors of the early Stone Age, and persons of intermediate evolutionary stages.”…

Charles Davenport explained that the reason “a smaller proportion” of blacks than whites exhibited “self control,” a “special regard for property rights,” and an “appreciation of cause and effect” was that “the Negro from Africa . . . had not evolved in the direction of these traits.” Davenport further implied that blacks brought to America on slave ships had been fitted by nature for slavery. “Scores of thousands of black men from the interior of Africa . . . had been kidnapped by the more enterprising natives that lived along the coast. These negroes represented some of the mentally feeblest races of the globe, with an inborn docility and fidelity which made them good slaves.”

To substantiate their claims of Negro mental inferiority, Davenport, East, and others cited the results of Army intelligence tests of recruits during World War I. After those tests were discredited, Davenport trumpeted new research in Jamaica purporting to show that “in tests involving some organization, foresight and planning . . . the negroes seem to be inferior to the whites.”

You can find more information about the connections between Darwinism and racism in my book, which can be pre-ordered here.

Posted by John West at 2:46 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

For decades, Darwinists have been telling us that an alleged lack of function for the human appendix demonstrates that our species once walked on 4 legs and ate a vegetarian diet. As a result, many believe the Darwinian urban legend that the appendix is a "vestigial organ" that has no function, and that this demonstrates that humans evolved from quadrupedal mammals. But now CNN is reporting that the “Purpose of appendix believed found” in a story that reads:

The appendix "acts as a good safe house for bacteria," said Duke surgery professor Bill Parker, a study co-author. Its location _ just below the normal one-way flow of food and germs in the large intestine in a sort of gut cul-de-sac -- helps support the theory, he said. Also, the worm-shaped organ outgrowth acts like a bacteria factory, cultivating the good germs, Parker said. That use is not needed in a modern industrialized society, Parker said. If a person's gut flora dies, it can usually be repopulated easily with germs they pick up from other people, he said. But before dense populations in modern times and during epidemics of cholera that affected a whole region, it wasn't as easy to grow back that bacteria and the appendix came in handy.

Additionally, Loren G. Martin, professor of physiology at Oklahoma State University, listed various likely functions for the appendix on Scientific American’s website, including:

being “involved primarily in immune functions”

“function[ing] as a lymphoid organ, assisting with the maturation of B lymphocytes (one variety of white blood cell) and in the production of the class of antibodies known as immunoglobulin A (IgA) antibodies.”

helping with “the production of molecules that help to direct the movement of lymphocytes to various other locations in the body”

“suppress[ing] potentially destructive humoral (blood- and lymph-borne) antibody responses while promoting local immunity”

Additionally, it is “an important 'back-up' that can be used in a variety of reconstructive surgical techniques”

Dr. Theobald happens to have authored the notorious TalkOrigins’ "29+ Evidences for Macroevolution" where he claims that the appendix is a “vestige of our herbivorous ancestry” whose lack of a robust function provides evidence for macroevolution (he admits that the appendix may have “a function of some sort” but contends this is a vestige of its once-important function). But now that we’ve found robust function for the appendix, Dr. Theobald claims, "It makes evolutionary sense."

David Tyler at Access Research Network has documented similar arguments from Darwinists, such as Ernst Mayr and Charles Darwin himself, who had previously cited the now-defunct vestigiality of the appendix as evidence for evolution. (See Tyler's "The human appendix - from rags to riches" for the details.)

In other words, when we thought the appendix fulfilled no important function for modern humans, that was evidence for human evolution. But now, if we learn that the appendix fulfills some important function for human beings, that’s also evidence for human evolution. If this Darwinian logic seems fallacious, perhaps Dr. Theobald is just helping us to understand what he means by, “It makes evolutionary sense.”

Posted by Casey Luskin at 11:38 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Posted by Robert Crowther at 10:29 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

UPDATED: Today's response is the fourth and final in this series of responses to critics. This reponse addresses Dutch biologist Gert Korthof and is available here.

Michael Behe's book, The Edge of Evolution, has hit a nerve with Darwinists by using mainstream scientific research to highlight the distinct limits of Darwinian evolution. Earlier this week he began another series of responses to critics attempting to refute the book's conclusions.

As I wrote in The Edge of Evolution, Darwinism is a multifaceted theory, and to properly evaluate the theory one has to be very careful not to confuse its different aspects. Unfortunately, stories in the news and on the internet regularly confuse the facets of Darwinism, ignore distinctions made in The Edge of Evolution, or misstate the arguments of intelligent design. The disregard for critical distinctions blurs the issues badly. Over the next few days I will briefly respond to four separate stories.

Response to a post from Panda's Thumb.
Response to Microbe Magazine on the bacterial flagellum.

Previously, Behe responded to a number of reviews of The Edge of Evolution.

• Beyond the Edge of Evolution: The New York Times Story
  
• Response to Richard Dawkins
  
• Response to Kenneth R. Miller
  
• Response to Kenneth R. Miller, Continued
  
• Back and Forth with Jerry Coyne, Part 1
  
• Back and Forth with Jerry Coyne, Part 2
  
• Back and Forth with Jerry Coyne, Part 3
  
• Response to Critics, Part 1: Jerry Coyne
  
• Response to Critics, Part 2: Sean Carroll
  
• Response to Critics, Part 3: Michael Ruse
  
• Questions about my new book?

Posted by Robert Crowther at 12:30 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Expelled may be the latest film, and certainly the most prominent, to look at the suppression of academic freedom in regards to criticism of Darwinian evolution, but it isn't the first.

In 2001 Coldwater Media produced Icons of Evolution, a film that highlighted the academic persecution of a high school teacher who challenged the dogmatic teaching of Darwinian evolution.

The film wove two story lines together. The first played off of the name of Jonathan Wells' book, Icons of Evolution, which showed that a number of the typical "proofs" of Darwinian evolution were false and really didn't lend evidentiary support to Darwin's theory at all. The second told the story of Roger DeHart and a particularly egregious example of Darwinian persecution that occurred in 2000 and 2001 in Burlington, Washington. DeHart, then a veteran Washington state High School biology teacher, tried to supplement his biology textbook with articles critical of Haeckel’s embryos and peppered moths from mainstream science publications, such as The American Biology Teacher, Natural History, The Scientist, and Nature. You can guess what happened next. The American Civil Liberties Union issued veiled threats of legal action, and the National Center for Science Education, a pro-Darwin lobby group, insisted that DeHart teach only the evidence that allegedly supports Darwinism. Bowing to the intimidation, the superintendent of DeHart’s school district prohibited him from distributing the articles—or even talking about them. DeHart was subsequently removed from his biology teaching position, replaced by a junior faculty member with a degree in physical education. When he applied for a job teaching biology in a neighboring district, he was initially promised the position, but when school officials there realized how controversial he was they reneged on their offer. Finally, DeHart left public school teaching, and Washington state, altogether.

Posted by Robert Crowther at 9:40 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

In this excerpt from “Molecular Machines and the Death of Darwinism,” CSC senior fellow and mathmatician William Dembski explains how Darwinists use complex living systems like the mammalian eye to support Darwinian evolution without supplying adequate sequential evidence. In response, Dembski says, ID proponents focus on molecular machines such as the bacterial flagellum to understand their complexity and directly address Darwinist claims.

This DVD is available from Access Research Network.

Posted by Robert Crowther at 10:44 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I’ve already commented on the paper by Eugene Koonin and the Darwinists' concern that it might show that there is a serious controversy over the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life at all, let alone in a gradual step-by-step process over eons of time.

Koonin challenges the standard Darwinian view of the tree of life. His research shows that it lacks the ability to explain life's complexity, but he hasn’t been fired from the National Center for Biotechnology or lost his funding from the National Institute’s of Health (yet).

Like Koonin, Michael Behe in his latest book The Edge of Evolution shows what evolution can do and what it can’t. Professor Robert Marks at Baylor uses the Evolutionary Bioinformatics Lab to showcase some of the limits of Darwinian evolution. Both have suffered serious repercussions. But not Koonin (yet).

How is it that his showcasing the limits of Darwinian evolution don’t result in his being vilified? Of course, we have seen a first glimpse of that. The Darwinist thought-policeman, Nick Matzke, has reminded comrade Koonin that he should show more caution when publicly challenging the reigning Darwinist orthodoxy.

Perhaps Koonin avoids further persecution by paying lip service to Darwin and denouncing intelligent design:

Comment by one of the paper’s peer-reivewers: "In each major class of biological objects, the principal types emerge "ready-made", and intermediate grades cannot be identified." Ouch, that will be up on ID websites faster than one can bat an eye.
Author's response: Here I do not really understand the concern. I changed "ready-made" to "abruptly", to avoid any ID allusions and added clarifications but, beyond that, there is little I can do because this is an important sentence that accurately and clearly portrays a crucial and, to the very best of my understanding, real feature of evolutionary transitions. Will this be used by the ID camp? Perhaps – if they read that far into the paper. However, I am afraid that, if our goal as evolutionary biologists is to avoid providing any grist for the ID mill, we should simply claim that Darwin, "in principle", solved all the problems of the origin of biological complexity in his eye story, and only minor details remain to be filled in. Actually, I think the position of some ultra-darwinists is pretty close to that. However, I believe that this is totally counter-productive and such a notion is outright false. And, the ID folks are clever in their own perverse way, they see through such false simplicity and seize on it. I think we (students of evolution) should openly admit that emergence of new levels of complexity is a complex problem and should try to work out solutions some of which could be distinctly non-orthodox; ID, however, does not happen to be a viable solution to any problem. I think this is my approach here and elsewhere. (emphasis mine)

Koonin does not accept ID. He doesn't need to. What he is doing is challenging Darwinism and one is not allowed to do that, not even a little. If Koonin's paper continues to reverberate, he will have to be brought into line. The question of federal research grants, for example, will have to be brought up.

Posted by Robert Crowther at 4:46 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

A professor at London’s Institute of Education, Michael Reiss, suggests that teachers respond vigorously to the apparently growing “creationist” tendencies of their students. He attributes some of the alarming trend to the influence of Muslim students in the UK.

The mistake here is in thinking that you can defend Darwinian theory by attacking “creationism” and by broad-brush associating intelligent design with the image of creationism. That approach will merely create a wall between teachers and students, however, and most teachers won’t want to take part in that.

I agree that students should learn about Darwin’s theory, and I see the difficulty that many teachers are reluctant to get into the subject because of the growing controversy. But the way to persuade them—and their students—is not to attack creationism, but to let students know more about Darwin’s theory, including the scientific evidence for and against it. That is the purpose of the textbook, Explore Evolution. It doesn’t get into possible implications of the theory or its alternatives. It is honest about the science on both sides.

Students and their parents will have their own ideas about the implications of the subject, whether theism, theistic evolution or atheism. The teacher can respond that they are welcome to such views, but that they are not the subject of the course.

The Darwinists, I am afraid, however, would rather have teachers teach nothing about evolution than teach the scientific evidence for and against Darwin’s theory. Their agenda going in is ideological.

Posted by Bruce Chapman at 12:04 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I’m grateful to Dr. Alan Packer, Senior Editor of Nature Genetics, for his thoughtful comments on my recent post Spit-Brain Research, in which I addressed claims made by Perry et al. about their paper "Diet and the Evolution of Human Amylase Gene Copy Number Variation." Dr. Packer makes some good points with which I agree, and some points with which I disagree.

Dr. Packer correctly points out that my reference to the authors’ paper linked not to the research paper itself but to the authors’ press release about their paper. Of course, the journal in which the paper was published (Nature Genetics) was clearly indicated in my post, and the authors’ press release to which I linked gave the issue (September 9th), so readers of my post had no difficulty locating the Nature Genetics article if they chose to do so. Regrettably, Nature Genetics limited public access to the paper by charging a non-trivial fee to access it. A brief abstract was available for free, but I see nothing wrong with my link to the press release. The press release is the authors’ own explanation and promotion of their research to the media and to the public. Evolution News and Views’ primary purpose is to “presen[t] analysis” of “news coverage [that] has been sloppy, inaccurate, and in some cases, overtly biased.” Critiquing scientists’ irresponsible public claims for Darwinism is entirely within ENV’s primary purpose.

Dr. Packer does raise some scientific issues that warrant discussion. He correctly points out that “[i]n fact, the paper by Perry et al. makes no claim whatsoever for a link between 'spit' and human brain evolution (the word 'brain' never appears in the paper)." Yet in their press release the authors credit their research with groundbreaking insight into brain evolution three times:

A new ability to supplement the diet with calorie-rich starches could have fed our large brains and…fueled our unrivaled colonization of the planet, Dominy said. [emphasis mine]

For Dominy and his coauthors, the finding goes beyond the mouth. In pondering human origins, Dominy said, anthropologists have long been stumped by the sudden, nearly simultaneous increases in our brain size….[emphasis mine]

”That’s the big mystery of paleoanthorpology,” Dominy said. “What changed? Why did our earliest human ancestors deviate from the pattern we see in living apes to evolve this incredibly large brain…"[emphasis mine]

I will be more careful in the future to distinguish between evolutionary biologists’ public claims about their research and the actual scientific evidence that they publish in journals. Evolutionary scientists often inflate the implications of their research to the public — highlighting specious materialistic interpretations of their work — while maintaining a softer and more professional tone in scientific journals.

Dr. Packer next takes exception to my satire of the authors’ work. Yet I merely quoted or paraphrased their press release, which begins, “To think that world domination could have begun in the cheeks…” The authors make wild assertions about their saliva research, repeatedly claiming relevance to brain evolution and referring to insight that it provides into “…the big mystery of paleoanthropology…” and "...our unrivaled colonization of the planet...". My references to the authors’ statements were simply quotes or paraphrases from the authors themselves. That was the point of my post — evolutionary biology is difficult to satirize, because the outlandish quality of its claims leaves little room for exaggeration. In admonishing me for satirizing the authors’ claims, Dr. Packer inadvertently makes my point. Evolutionary biology is the only scientific discipline in which mere quotation or paraphrase can invoke credible allegations of satire.

Finally, Dr. Packer implies that I underestimated the importance of the science in the paper — that is, that I underestimated the importance of the authors’ study of the comparative genetics of salivary amylase in humans and several non-human primates. I’m not a geneticist, but I don’t doubt Dr. Packer’s opinion on the importance of inter-individual gene copy variation. He noted that it is “likely to explain a significant amount of human variation.” Interesting stuff, but Dr. Packer’s implicit characterization of the current state of knowledge of the phenotypic expression of gene amplification as cutting edge research raises a troubling question. Darwinists have claimed for quite a while that gene amplification is a clear and well understood process by which random genetic variation can give rise to new functional biological complexity. Of course, the only way that gene amplification could be preserved by natural selection is if it has phenotypic expression, and the only way that we could be sure that gene amplification was indeed a real source of novel biological complexity would be if we had a deep understanding of the phenotypic expression of gene amplification. Yet Dr. Packer characterizes the phenotypic expression of multiple gene copies as “one of the most exciting areas of human genetics.” Which of course means that the phenotypic expression of gene amplification isn’t the least bit clear and well-understood.

Either gene amplification is a well-understood way to increase functional biological complexity, or the research on the phenotypic expression of gene amplification is an “exciting area of human genetics.” Dr. Packer's faux pas is an example of a common evolutionary motif: the emphatic claim that some evolutionary assertion is a ‘fact,’ and the subsequent announcement of groundbreaking research confirming it. Evolutionary biologists would do well to meet periodically to reconcile their stories. Either gene amplification is a well-understood source of new biological complexity, or it’s an exciting new area of research. It can’t be both.

As for Perry et al.’s paper in Nature Genetics, readers are invited to read it and judge for themselves. It’s rather technical, of course, and the discussion seems a bit desultory. The authors describe various facets of their comparative genetics of human and non-human primate salivary amylases, particularly variations in copy number and in inter-individual copy variation and variation in salivary amylase protein expression. While (as noted) the authors make no reference at all to the brain, they refer repeatedly to evolution and to natural selection:

Hominin evolution is characterized by significant dietary shifts…[emphasis mine]

Studies of evolution of amylase in humans and our close primate relatives may provide insight…[emphasis mine]

Natural selection may have influenced AMY1 copy number…[emphasis mine]

These CNV’s have experienced similar evolutionary pressures…[emphasis mine

…natural selection has shaped AMY1 copy number…[emphasis mine]

We favor a model in which AMY1 copy number has been subject to positive or directional selection…[emphasis mine]

To understand better the evolutionary context of human AMY1 copy number variation…[emphasis mine]

…this expression pattern may have evolved to facilitate the digestion…[emphasis mine]

…demonstrating the importance of starchy foods in human evolution…[emphasis mine]

The characterization of copy number variation among humans and between humans and other primates promises considerable insight into our evolutionary history.

What if humans had low salivary amylase gene copy number, and apes had high copy number? How could the authors invoke evolutionary theory to explain these observations? The authors could assert that human vulnerability (our relative inability to digest tubers) led to a need for interdependence and socialization to ensure survival, and gave rise to human cooperation, altruism, language, and civilization. This is of course explained by natural selection. The press release: ‘We Were Weak, So Now We’re Strong: Evolutionary scientists report groundbreaking research on how an evolutionary vulnerability led to the emergence of humans...’

What if humans had low intraspecies salivary amylase copy variation, and apes had high intraspecies variation? No problem. The evolutionary theory: low human intraspecies copy variation is evidence for strong evolutionary conservation — providing further evidence that human ability to digest tubers provided enhanced energy for evolutionary adaptation or that human vulnerability (inability to digest tubers) generated a need for interdependence, gave rise to cooperation, brain growth, altruism, language, and civilization. Natural selection is consistent with either of the evolutionary hypotheses! The press release: ‘Old Genes Are Good Genes!: Scientists make groundbreaking discovery linking surfeit (or lack) of critical enzymes in saliva to human evolution and world domination...’

What if humans and apes both had high salivary amylase gene copy numbers? The evolutionary explanation: abundant salivary amylase was essential for human and ape evolution, because it allowed digestion of energy-rich tubers, thereby facilitating human and ape brain growth and giving rise to intraspecies cooperation and altruism. More evidence for natural selection! The press release: ‘Scientists Discover What Makes All Primates’ Mouths Water…”

What if humans and apes both had low salivary amylase copy numbers? The evolutionary explanation: paucity of salivary amylase is essential for human and ape evolution — lack of ability to digest energy-rich tubers caused need for interdependence gave rise to ape cooperation, and to human brain evolution, altruism, language, civilization. Clear evidence for natural selection! Press release: Hard Times Make Good Species: Could world domination have begun in the cheeks…”

Perry et al.’s inference to natural selection is irrelevant to the specific data in their paper. ‘Natural selection’ could be invoked for any permutation of their data. Yet in science, inferences must depend on data, and must be subject to falsification by data. Inferences that are independent of data, such as the inference that amylase gene copy number and variation are explained by natural selection, aren’t scientific inferences at all, because the inference to selection could be drawn from any data on the comparative genetics of salivary enzymes. Of course, individual stories as to how the adaptation arose can be adjusted to fit data, but the fundamental inference to ‘natural selection’ is untested.

At the core of Darwin’s theory of evolution are two hypotheses: heritable variation arose randomly, without teleology, and individuals that were rendered more reproductively successful by heritable variation were more reproductively successful. When applied to several-million-year-old genes for salivary enzymes, the first hypothesis — that heritable variation arose without teleology — is untested, and the second inference — that reproductively successful individuals are reproductively successful — is a tautology. The inference to ‘evolution’ in the authors’ paper is an inference to the untested and to the tautological. The authors would have us believe that their inference to evolution is cutting-edge science. Yet the synthesis of ‘untested’ and ‘tautological’ isn’t science at all.

The authors would no doubt protest that some aspects of selection can be tested, and Dr. Packer points out that ‘robust’ statistical methods were applied to questions of positive selection, negative selection, and neutral drift. Yet what do these terms mean? Positive selection means the heritable variation helped, negative selection means it hurt, and neutral drift means it didn’t matter. Any heritable variation — non-teleological or teleological — would meet one of these three criteria, so how do the ‘robust’ statistical methods provide evidence for natural selection acting on random variation? One could apply the same ‘robust’ statistical methods to genetic engineering — some inserted genes improve a function, some hinder it, and some don’t matter. Yet one could not draw the inference that Darwin’s theory was at work — on the contrary, the variation was intelligently designed. Robust statistics don’t redeem unfounded inferences.

In the words of National Academy of Sciences member Phil Skell:

I found that Darwin's theory had provided no discernible guidance, but was brought in, after the breakthroughs, as an interesting narrative gloss. … Darwinian explanations for such things are often too supple: Natural selection makes humans self-centered and aggressive — except when it makes them altruistic and peaceable. Or natural selection produces virile men who eagerly spread their seed — except when it prefers men who are faithful protectors and providers. When an explanation is so supple that it can explain any behavior, it is difficult to test it experimentally, much less use it as a catalyst for scientific discovery.

(Philip L. Skell, "Why do we invoke Darwin?," The Scientist, Vol. 19(16):10 (August 29, 2005).)

Inquiry- legitimate scientific inference based on data (‘humans have high salivary amylase gene copy number and variation compared to non-human primates’)

Story- High salivary amylase gene copy number and variation facilitated an energy-rich diet of tubers...

Tautology- (i.e. Natural Selection) Hominina whose reproductive success was enhanced by this adaptation were more reproductively successful…

Hyperbole- …”promises considerable insight into our evolutionary history.”

Publicity- Press release: “That’s the big mystery of paleoanthorpology...Why did our earliest human ancestors... evolve this incredibly large brain...To think that world domination could have begun in the cheeks…”

What is the scientific legitimacy of the evolutionary inferences in Perry et al.’s paper? Carefully considered, the paper merely invokes stories about the digestive benefits of salivary enzymes (better digestion means that we have more energy!), draws an inference to ‘natural selection’ that is unlinked in any meaningful way to data, and claims significant new insight into the origin of man.

Evolutionary theory — the unmoored inference to ‘selection’ that can be drawn from any permutation of data — is less science than a speculative pastime, all too often antecedent to a press release. The publication of such unscientific evolutionary speculation in Nature Genetics, and its defense by a senior editor of that journal, demeans science.

Posted by Michael Egnor at 9:58 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Modern Darwinists like Richard Dawkins notwithstanding, there is nothing new in the effort to offer completely materialistic explanations of human beings and human culture. For more than two millennia various thinkers have been trying to reduce human beings to mere meat in motion. Many of these thinkers figure prominently in my new book Darwin Day in America, and over the next several weeks, I will be describing some of them here.

I start today with Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education, and self-proclaimed “evolution evangelist.”

When talking to the mainstream media, Scott goes to great lengths to argue that Darwin’s theory is perfectly compatible with religion and to distance herself from the fervor of anti-religious zealots like Richard Dawkins. Indeed, Scott’s group has gone so far as to develop a curriculum to promote evolution in churches and has even helped design a tax-funded website that attempts to persuade teachers that Darwin’s theory is good theology!

Since most Americans believe in God, these efforts undoubtedly represent clever public relations on Scott’s part. Whether they represent more than that is questionable. Like most leading evolutionists, Scott herself is certainly not personally sympathetic to religion. A few days ago, for example, she was a featured speaker at the “Crystal Clear Atheism” conference sponsored by the Atheist Alliance International. There she shared the podium with such atheist attack-dogs as Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens.

Scott’s PR campaign to smooth over the tensions between faith and Darwinism has drawn the ire of some fellow evolutionists. Biologist Massimo Pigliucci, for example, has accused Scott of being “intellectually dishonest” on the religion issue because she seems to argue publicly that modern science has no problem with a belief in “a personal god [who] intervenes in every day events.” In Pigliucci’s view, this is precisely the sort of religious belief that Darwin’s theory does refute, and he suggests that Scott is being less than candid in her public comments by not saying so. According to Pigliucci, Scott herself indicates that she is a philosophical naturalist who does not believe in God, but she says she embraces that position for “personal” rather than scientific reasons. Relying in part on personal correspondence with Scott, Pigliucci found Scott’s explanation wanting because the “personal reasons” identified by Scott turned out to be “her deep understanding of science and of evolution in particular.”

But one doesn’t need to rely on private correspondence to ascertain Scott’s real views on religion and evolution. In 2003 she signed a public document called the Humanist Manifesto III, which celebrates “the inevitability and finality of death” and proclaims that “humans are... the result of unguided evolutionary change.” By specifically citing “unguided evolutionary change” as part of its case for “a progressive philosophy of life… without supernaturalism,” this manifesto clearly suggests that evolution properly understood contradicts belief in a personal God. Did Scott fail to understand this document when she signed it along with such anti-religious zealots as Richard Dawkins and Michael Shermer? Do I really need to answer that question?

None of this is to deny that there are theistic evolutionists who sincerely believe that evolution and faith are compatible. Perhaps the most prominent of these theistic evolutionists is Roman Catholic biologist Ken Miller at Brown University, author of the book Finding Darwin’s God. For an examination of whether Miller’s arguments for the compatibility of Darwinism and faith are any more convincing than Scott’s, you can read chapter 10 of Darwin Day in America.

To order Darwin Day in America click here. To find out more information about the book (and watch the trailer), visit the book’s website here.

Posted by John West at 3:01 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

A senior research scientist at the National Center for Biotechnology Information has published a paper that claims: “The relationships between major groups within an emergent new class of biological entities are hard to decipher and do not seem to fit the tree pattern that, following Darwin's original proposal, remains the dominant description of biological evolution.”

The author is Eugene Koonin of the National Center for Biotechnology Information, National Library of Medicine, and National Institutes of Health, and the paper is entitled: "The Biological Big Bang model for the major transitions in evolution." It's now available on-line.

Koonin is widely regarded and is certainly at the center of the scientific establishment. So it is no surprise that the orthodox Darwinian priesthood were careful in denouncing his heresy.

Witness geographer Nick Matzke, a former staffer at the Darwin-only lobby group National Center for Science Education:

I will say at the outset that I have immense respect for Eugene Koonin and his contributions to numerous fields, and criticize his work with some trepidation. However, I think with this paper he has unfortunately tumbled into a series of mistakes that have repeatedly afflicted those trying to understand macroevolution without taking sufficient care in examining the concepts they are relying upon.

Paleontologists can and have put the Cambrian animals, e.g. arthropods and close fossil relatives, into cladograms, and the order of step-by-step acquisition of characters -- i.e., a gradual transition ('gradual' = 'graduated', =step-by-step, not 'smooth constant-rate-ism') has been reconstructed. These prove that the origin of characteristics that we now associated with the arthropod 'phylum' did not all originate at once, instead they were assembled piecemeal. The transitional grades do exist in this case, it's just that Koonin is unaware of them. The appearance of suddenness is based on staring at the living groups (or equivalently, staring at their molecular trees), treating them typologically, and then mistakenly assuming that the lack of living transitional forms means that there never were any. When you have a decent fossil record, this provides the stem groups below the crown, and inevitably (cambrian phyla, birds, whales, mammals, etc.) this shows that apparently puzzling 'big bang' transitions occurred in a long series of stages.

It is simply an unavoidable, automatic, intrinsic feature of phylogenies based on crown groups that you will have less and less information about events as you trace them back. And it is inevitable, automatic, and intrinsic that the crown groups will seem more and more distinct -- the modern organisms, which is what we have to look at, are actually less related, so they are more distinct! Assuming common ancestry of life on an arbitrary life-supporting planet, this would happen *no matter what* actually survived to be discovered by observers 4 billion years later. No matter what, eventually the phylogeny would trace back to a few fundamental groups, and these groups would appear to be the most distinct, the least information would be available about their origins, and they would provide the most fodder for speculation that something 'unusual' must have gone on.

In summary, I think Koonin should give a little credit where credit is due to gradual, stepwise evolution, and not try to argue that Darwin's eye discussion is all that orthodoxy has going for it. *Being revolutionary and unorthodox is much more fun, of course, but sometimes you've got to wonder how many hangovers (i.e., creationist quote-mining and general confusion over the status of evolution outside of the specialist community, and needless wrangling within the specialist community) could be avoided if scientists would exercise just a little caution during the party* (i.e., spending a little time soberly comparing their revolutionary ideas with more prosaic explanations).

Until this week I worked at the National Center for Science Education, where we oppose the ID/creationists and develop a finely-tuned sense of the sorts of things they will pluck from the literature and desperately portray as evidence that they aren't completely nuts. However, I am well aware that telling scientists to censor themselves to avoid giving creationists talking points is a non-starter, so hopefully my comments came out as being substantive rather than just the boring voice of orthodoxy.

Posted by Robert Crowther at 10:18 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Dr. Alan Packer, Senior Editor of Nature Genetics, contacted me recently and asked to publicly comment on my recent post on Evolution News and Views entitled Spit-Brain Research. My post was critical of a press release about an article published in Nature Genetics . I am grateful for his observations. My reply follows in my next post.

Michael Egnor has been kind enough to allow me to contribute a comment on his recent post ‘Spit-Brain Research’. The post discussed work by George Perry, Nathaniel Dominy and colleagues, published in a paper entitled “Diet and the evolution of human amylase gene copy number”. As one of the editors at Nature Genetics, where the paper was published, I was pleased to see the paper receive so much attention. I was concerned, however, by what in my view was the highly misleading nature of Dr. Egnor’s post. I would like to make three general points, so that readers of this site will have a fuller picture of what was in the paper, and what was not:

(1) “Spit-Brain Research’ opens with the assertion that evolutionary theory is outlandishly speculative, and in support of this notes that “a paper in Nature Genetics offers a new theory to account for the human brain: spit”. If you click on the word “paper”, however, you will go not to the manuscript by Perry et al. (or the freely accessible abstract), but to a press release put out by the University of California, Santa Cruz, where some of the work was carried out. A more forthright account would have explicitly stated that the entire post is based on a press release, not on the contents of the actual paper, as readers who failed to follow the link could be forgiven if they assumed Egnor was quoting directly from the published work. In fact, the paper by Perry et al. makes no claim whatsoever for a link between “spit” and human brain evolution (the word “brain” never appears in the paper). At the end of his post, Egnor says “Nature [sic] lauds a research paper that asserts that groundbreaking insight into the origin of the human brain can be gained by extrapolating from the comparative biology of spit”. Again, this is incorrect, as the research paper asserted no such thing.

(2) Egnor, in my view, also fails to represent accurately the content of the press release, putting words in Dr. Dominy’s mouth so as to make his comments seem outlandish. Egnor has Dominy “Solving the ‘big mystery’ of paleoanthropology” (human brain evolution). A fair-minded reader will see that Dominy nowhere makes such a broad claim. Rather, Dominy specifically focuses on the possible role of salivary amylase levels as one factor in the evolution of human diet and population growth.

(3) Finally, Egnor says that this research “would have languished on dusty shelves” if the authors hadn’t made claims related to human brain evolution. But the paper has received so much attention not for these nonexistent “claims”, but for the fascinating genetic data that Egnor dismisses. The authors follow up on published evidence that individuals have a different number of copies of the gene encoding salivary amylase by showing that this correlates with the amount of salivary amylase actually produced. The study of inter-individual gene copy number variation is one of the most exciting areas of human genetics, and is likely to explain a significant amount of human variation. Moreover, Perry, Dominy and colleagues report a correlation of salivary amylase gene copy number with the level of starch in the diet of various human populations. This strongly suggests that the human genome has evolved in response to changes in diet (the genetics of lactose intolerance is another recent example of this). This conclusion is supported by robust statistical methods for inferring positive selection in the genome.

Dr. Egnor may not accept any of this, or may think it’s uninteresting, but his misrepresentation of the scientific record suggests he doesn’t trust his readers to make up their own minds.

Alan Packer, Ph.D.
Senior Editor
Nature Genetics

Posted by Michael Egnor at 12:45 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

[Note: For a more comprehensive defense of Ben Stein's documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, please see: NCSE Exposed at NCSEExposed.org]

As Rob Crowther discussed, Cornelia Dean and the New York Times are once-again pushing Darwinism in an article titled “Scientists Feel Miscast in Film on Life’s Origin.” The article is regarding the documentary film Expelled, starring Ben Stein, that exposes the distressing nationwide pattern of persecution against scientists that question Darwin. The producers apparently interviewed various pro-Darwin scientists for the film, such as Richard Dawkins.

Cornelia Dean now reports that “Dr. Dawkins and other scientists who agreed to be interviewed say they are surprised — and in some cases, angered — to find themselves not in ‘Crossroads’ but in a film with a new name and one that makes the case for intelligent design.” So Dawkins is apparently angry because his interview is being used for a film that supports ID. Is this legitimate anger or just more Darwinist intolerance of intelligent design? One might argue that Dawkins is merely upset because he was allegedly deceived about the nature of the film (a claim that the producers vigorously dispute). In fact this is the angle Eugenie Scott takes in the article, as she claims she was misled (a claim the producers strenuously challenge). But there is good reason to suspect that Dawkins’ anger is simply due to the fact that the film challenges Darwin.

I recently discussed a different Dawkins interview where Dawkins was asked “Can you give an example of a genetic mutation or evolutionary process that can be seen to increase the information in the genome?” What was Dawkins’ emotional state after he was asked this question? You guessed it: in his own words, “anger”: “In my anger I refused to discuss the question further, and told them to stop the camera.” So the big news is here that Richard Dawkins (and perhaps “other scientists”) are angry because they were interviewed for a film that supports ID. What has happened here is that a film exposing the intolerance of many Darwinists has made Darwinists angry. Go figure.

It appears that I am not the only person who feels that Dawkins doth protest too much. The U.K.'s The Register has an editorial stating, "we can't really see that Dawkins has much to complain about" because "we suspect Dawkins and his mates are upset because their participation in the film makes them look a little foolish." The Register goes on to contend that the producers of Expelled did nothing wrong in obtaining interviews:

According to a letter Dawkins himself has made public, Mark Mathis, a producer for Rampant Films, the firm behind the documentary, sold the idea to one participant, Professor Paul Myers, as follows: "We are in production of the documentary film Crossroads: The Intersection of Science and Religion... we are interested in asking you questions about the disconnect/controversy that exists in America between evolution, creationism, and the intelligent design movement."

The title of the film changed, but there has been no suggestion from Dawkins that the interview did not proceed along these lines.

Here is a quick media studies lesson: like it or not, journalists don't have to tell you the full scope of an article or documentary they are working on, and will sometimes try to keep the full picture from you if they think you might be hostile to the story you are trying to tell. ... it happens all the time...

To reiterate, the big story apparently is that Dawkins (and some others) aren't happy because their interviews are being used in a film that supports ID and exposes the intolerance of ID's opponents. The Darwinist reaction to this film only further confirms that Expelled's basic plotline--the fact that some leading scientists are intolerant of anything that supports ID or challenges Darwin--is accurate.

Posted by Casey Luskin at 7:48 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

In this video clip, Richard Weikart delivers a presentation based on his book From Darwin to Hitler. Weikart explains that Darwin’s ideas about species competition not only inspired eugenics movements in Germany and the United States, but also influenced intellectuals like Friedrich Hellwald to view brutal human conflicts as a natural part of the human struggle to survive. In short, Darwinian principles greatly undermined notions about the value of human life.

This DVD is available from Access Research Network.

Posted by Robert Crowther at 5:19 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

When it comes to teaching intelligent design in social studies classes, not science classes, mind you, but social studies, ID critics were for it before they were against it.

Their strategy of attack has been simple: equate ID with creationism because creationism isn’t allowed in science classes. Thus, for years we’ve heard things like: “it may be appropriate to discuss these beliefs in a comparative religion or social studies classroom”; and "to present it as a valid alternative to evolution in a science class (as opposed to teaching about it in a social studies class) is unconstitutional."

The Darwin only lobby group National Center for Science Education published a piece advocating exactly this approach in 2004:

Elementary teachers have backbones, inherited from the earliest fish in ancient seas. Teachers should use their backbones to stand tall and teach basic science. Tell the kids who object that they don’t have to accept it, but they do have to understand it to graduate. Teach students about the wide range of creation stories, too, but do it during social studies.

Clearly for such dogmatists, intelligent design isn’t fit for science classes. Their alternative was that it should be taught in classes like social studies, worldviews, comparative religions or philosophy (yeah right, when was the last time you heard of a public high school with a philosophy class?). This has been the mantra that’s been repeated by the NCSE, People for the American Way, and countless other Darwin only activists. But not any more.

Now that they think they’ve succeeded in suppressing ID and stifling any dissent from Darwinism from being discussed in science classes, it’s apparently time to rethink that idea of letting such ideas be discussed anywhere on campus at all. Three years after endorsing censoring science classes and relegating intelligent design to discussion in social studies, the NCSE is now flip-flopping and praising censorship of social studies classes as well.

Social studies may, at first glance, seem to be a better fit for this approach to teaching intelligent design, but the same constitutional issues arise whether religious beliefs are taught in science or in the social studies curriculum. -- National Council for Social Studies

Try as they might, they can’t ban thinking about intelligent design. Thoughtful students will continue to explore what is so dangerous about this idea that no one can even be allowed to whisper its name.

Posted by Robert Crowther at 12:39 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

[Editor's note: This was the third installment of a three-part series. The full article, A Response to Dr. Dawkins’ “The Information Challenge”, can be read here.]

In Part 1 and Part 2 of this response to Richard Dawkins’ article, "The Information Challenge," I explained why gene duplication is not an adequate explanation of how Darwinian processes can produce new information. But Dawkins' article has other problems. He writes that “most of the capacity of the genome of any animal is not used to store useful information.” This is another good example demonstrating how Neo-Darwinism led may scientists to wrongly believe that non-coding DNA was largely junk. Dawkins’ statement is directly refuted by the findings of recent studies, which the Washington Post reported that scientists have now found that “the vast majority of the 3 billion ‘letters’ of the human genetic code are busily toiling at an array of previously invisible tasks.” That strikes a fatal blow to Dawkins’ argument:

Dawkins claims that there is “lots of repetitive nonsense” in the genome. But is it really “nonsense”? Recent studies are finding increasing function for allegedly non-functional repetitive DNA. Richard Sternberg surveyed the literature and found extensive evidence for function in repetitive DNA (also called repetitive elements, or "REs"). A listing of functions for REs reprinted from Sternberg’s paper is shown below:

• satellite repeats forming higher-order nuclear structures;
• satellite repeats forming centromeres;
• satellite repeats and other REs involved in chromatin condensation;
• telomeric tandem repeats and LINE elements;
• subtelomeric nuclear positioning/chromatin boundary elements;
• non-TE interspersed chromatin boundary elements;
• short, interspersed nuclear elements or SINEs as nucleation centers for methylation;
• SINEs as chromatin boundary/insulator elements;
• SINEs involved in cell proliferation;
• SINEs involved in cellular stress responses;
• SINEs involved in translation (may be connected to stress response);
• SINEs involved in binding cohesin to chromosomes; and
• LINEs involved in DNA repair.

(Richard Sternberg, "On the Roles of Repetitive DNA Elements in the Context of a Unified Genomic– Epigenetic System," Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, Vol. 981:154–188 (2002).)

But it isn't even clear that Darwinists have a good scientific justification to believe that junk-DNA, if it exists, would be naturally selected out of the genome. According to the 2006 edition of Voet and Voet’s Biochemistry, there is insufficient selection pressure on functionless repetitive “junk”-DNA to remove it from the genome:

No function has been unequivocally assigned to moderately repetitive DNA, which has therefore been termed selfish or junk DNA. This DNA apparently is a molecular parasite that, over many generations, has disseminated itself throughout the genome through transposition. The theory of natural selection predicts that the increased metabolic burden imposed by the replication of an otherwise harmless selfish DNA would eventually lead to its elimination. Yet for slowly growing eukaryotes, the relative disadvantage of replicating an additional 100 bp of selfish DNA in an 1-billion-bp genome would be so slight that its rate of elimination would be balanced by its rate of propagation. Because unexpressed sequences are subject to little selective pressure, they accumulate mutations at a greater rate than do expressed sequences.

(Donald Voet and Judith G. Voet, Biochemistry, pg. 1020 (Jon Wiley & Sons, 2006), emphasis added.)

It looks like Dawkins has some work to do if he is to update all of his arguments against ID and answer “The Information Challenge.”

Posted by Casey Luskin at 10:06 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The Catholic magazine, Crisis, is now online with an October article by two Discovery fellows, Benjamin Wiker and Jonathan Witt.

Their book, A Meaningful World, appeared in 2006 and forms a backdrop for their current reflections. Very much on their minds from 2006 is also the Regensburg address of Pope Benedict—not the Muslim comments, but the references to Reason.

It is another and interesting take on all the atheist fantasy tracts coming out of Darwin-land these days. Look at nature, Wiker and Witt say, but also look at the philosophy of science, the nature of genius, the beauty of mathematics and even works of art.

Posted by Bruce Chapman at 1:08 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Last year John West nominated Of Pandas and People as Banned Book of the Year after the ACLU tried to have it banned from Dover Science Classrooms. We are again celebrating Banned Books Week, and it is fitting to note that Baylor University is also observing Banned Book Week.

Baylor’s Banned Books Week events page states, “What do authors Harper Lee, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Steinbeck and J.K. Rowling have in common? They have all written books that were challenged and banned by libraries in the United States.” Although his work in question here is not a book, Dr. Robert Marks also has something in common with those authors: someone has banned his ideas. As we have recounted extensively here on Evolution News & Views, a Baylor University administrator originally ordered Dr. Marks to “disconnect this web site immediately” because he had “received several concerned messages this week about an [ID the Future Podcast] interview and web site dealing with evolutionary computing associated ID.” Dr. Marks’ website discussing his research that challenges Darwinian evolution was then banned from Baylor webspace without his knowledge or permission, and Baylor has yet to restore the website to its server. Thus, I would like to nominate Robert Marks’ Evolutionary Informatics Website as the banned item of the year for 2007. Banned Books week is supposed to be a celebration of tolerance and diversity, so in that spirit it seems fitting to discuss some of the research papers that Dr. Marks formerly had posted on his Baylor Evolutionary Informatics Lab website:

William A. Dembski and Robert J. Marks II, "Conservation of Information in Search: Measuring the Cost of Success":
Abstract: Conservation of information theorems indicate that any search algorithm performs on average as well as random search without replacement unless it takes advantage of problem-specific information about the search target or the search-space structure. Combinatorics shows that even a moderately sized search requires problem-specific information to be successful. Three measures to characterize the information required for successful search are (1) endogenous information, which measures the difficulty of finding a target using random search; (2) exogenous information, which measures the difficulty that remains in finding a target once a search takes advantage of problem-specific information; and (3) active information, which, as the difference between endogenous and exogenous information, measures the contribution of problem-specific information for successfully finding a target. This paper develops a methodology based on these information measures to gauge the effectiveness with which problem-specific information facilitates successful search. It then applies this methodology to various search tools widely used in evolutionary search.

William A. Dembski and Robert J. Marks II, "Active Information in Evolutionary Search":
Abstract: In his critique of intelligent design, Häggström [12] claims that the No Free Lunch Theorem (NFLT) [10, 24, 30], properly understood, poses no obstacle to biological evolution. He therefore rejects claims to the contrary [8]. To prove his point, Häggström cites several examples of evolutionary optimization. Yet his examples prove the opposite. As he admits, "In almost all concrete optimization problems, we have some prior information...." Far from showing that the NFLT places no restrictions on evolution, Häggström's examples show that the success of evolutionary searches depends on prior information concerning target location and search space structure. Consistent with the NFLT, this prior information, now increasingly referred to as "active information," is always external to the search and thus never a free lunch.

This research was formerly hosted at Dr. Marks’s webspace at Baylor University under the URL http://web.ecs.baylor.edu/faculty/marks/Research/EILab/Publications.html. Try clicking on this link now, and this is what you get:

It seems that it was too much for Baylor University to allow this research to be hosted under its webspace. It’s been well over a month now and the website still hasn’t gone back up. RIP Baylor Evolutionary Informatics Lab.

Posted by Casey Luskin at 12:02 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

CSC senior fellow Jay Richards used to joke that reporters covering evolution simply sit down at their keyboards and type ALT + CTRL + SCOPES, and out pops a complete story that simply reiterates the false storyline that the primary challenge to evolution is a religious one, just as was the case during the infamous Scopes Monkey Trial in the early days of the 20th century. I laughed when he told me, because I was familiar with how often that bogus storyline was repeated by reporters, and the idea of a computer macro being used to deploy it was funny.

It's not so funny now, though. It looks like the New York Times might indeed have some sort of macro in place for all stories concerning the ongoing debate over modern evolutionary theory. The Times has defaulted to this standard line: "There is no credible scientific challenge to evolution." This current line has survived mainly intact and been selected out of a number of mutations over the last few years. It's clearly been a guided and purposeful project, so it's not really evolution at all.

Since at least 2005, this has been reported as a fact by science writers at the Times, mostly Cornelia Dean. We've reported on this several times, but this is the first time we've listed out all of the articles in which this false statement is repeated.

• September 27, 2007, Scientists Feel Miscast in Film On Life's Origin
  
• July 17, 2007, Islamic Creationist and a Book Sent Round the World
  
• June 26, 2007, Science of the Soul? 'I Think, Therefore I Am' Is Losing Force
  
• May 19, 2007, Evolution Opponent Is in Line for Schools Post
  
• October 26, 2006, Scientists Endorse Candidate Over Teaching of Evolution
  
• July 25, 2006, Faith, Reason, God and Other Imponderables
  
• April 11, 2006, Eager to Tell the Stories of Science, a Biologist Evolves
  
• January 19, 2006, In 'Design' vs. Darwinism, Darwin Wins Point in Rome
  
• July 9, 2005, Leading Cardinal Redefines Church's View on Evolution
  
• June 21, 2005, Opting Out In the Debate On Evolution
  
• February 1, 2005, Evolution Takes A Back Seat In U.S. Classes

• Ian Fisher, September 2, 2006, Professor-Turned-Pope Leads a Seminar on Evolution
  
• Glen Collins, Nov. 7, 2005, Exhibit Focuses on Darwin's Life and Ideas, Not Controversy

Posted by Robert Crowther at 10:01 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

This is one busy week for debates.

• If you're in Alabama on Wednesday, you can take in the title bout between two Oxford heavyweights, Darwinist Richard Dawkins and Darwin skeptic John Lennox, The God Delusion Debate.
  
• If you're in Southern California on Thursday, you can take in the undercard bout between CSC fellow and ID proponent Paul Nelson and ID critic Michael Ruse. It's being billed as an undebate, as they examine what it would take for each of them to change their respective positions.
  
• Finally, if you're stuck in the UK Wednesday, you'll have to settle for Mary Midgely, Steve Fuller and others going the full ten rounds on Intelligent Design and Other Ideological Problems.

Posted by Robert Crowther at 1:00 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The Waco Tribune reported that “Baylor vice president for marketing and communications John Barry … denied that the matter has been drawn out because the content is related to intelligent design.” Does Baylor University actually expect us to believe that this has nothing to do with ID? William Dembski reports that the initial e-mail sent from Baylor administrator, Dean Kelley, to Dr. Marks explicitly stated that people were complaining about Robert Marks’s website precisely because it dealt with ID:

“I have received several concerned messages this week about an interview and web site dealing with evolutionary computing associated ID. Please disconnect this web site immediately and Cheryl will arrange a time for us to meet immediately upon my return.”

Baylor, of course, provides the usual pretexts that they are treating Dr. Marks like they would any other faculty. This makes it important to dispel Baylor’s pretexts for persecuting Dr. Marks on the grounds that he has done something wrong.

Dr. Marks is an innocent party. He was simply doing his own research, much like any other faculty might do, and he discussed it on a website. After Dr. Marks made the mistake of talking about his research on an ID the Future Podcast, some anti-ID forces at Baylor complained, and Baylor administrators sent Dr. Marks the threatening e-mail above and even took the website offline, without Marks’ permission and knowledge.

At a meeting between Baylor administrators, Dr. Marks, and his attorney John Gilmore, Baylor administrators apparently said the website could go back online if Dr. Marks would emplace a disclaimer on the website stating the website was not officially affiliated with Baylor. In fact, Dr. Marks agreed to do that. But then the Baylor administration reneged on that earlier agreement by NOT putting the website back up and adding additional requirements upon Marks. As World reported, these new requirements included:

Delete the title "The Evolutionary Informatics Lab" from the top of every page.

Delete the name and email address of a Baylor graduate student assisting Marks with his research.

Post at the bottom of every page and the top of the home page a 108-word public-relations statement denying any institutional support for the research and extolling Baylor's commitment to academic freedom.

Robert Marks has done nothing wrong here. He’s simply a researcher doing research and discussing that research publicly on his website. The American Association of University Professors’ Statement on Academic Freedom plainly supports his right to do as he has done:

Freedom in research is fundamental to the advancement of truth. Academic freedom in its teaching aspect is fundamental for the protection of the rights of the teacher in teaching and of the student to freedom in learning. It carries with it duties correlative with rights. … Teachers are entitled to full freedom in research and in the publication of the results, subject to the adequate performance of their other academic duties

While Baylor is a private entity and not subject to First Amendment law regarding “viewpoint discrimination,” it’s clear that Robert Marks is being singled out due to his views on ID. One might assert that the Baylor Administration is merely exercising its right to defend its reputation, but again, that appears to be just a pretext for persecuting people, for one could justify any amount of viewpoint discrimination on such grounds. The only crime committed by Dr. Marks was the thought-crime of questioning Darwin.

When we balance the university's right to "defend its reputation" against a tenured scientist's "entitle[ment] to full freedom in research and in the publication of the results, subject to the adequate performance of his other academic duties" (AAUP 1940 Statement), there is no contest: Robert Marks’ academic freedom to question Darwin should win out, unless we are to make a mockery of the meaning of academic freedom. But no one is reporting about the Baylor Administration issuing any of the requirements they are demanding of Marks upon scientists with other viewpoints.

It’s obvious why the Baylor administration is attacking Robert Marks: he’s a Darwin-skeptic, and some people at Baylor University don’t take kindly to Darwin-skeptics being on their campus.

Posted by Casey Luskin at 5:58 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)