Just a few months before the 150^th anniversary of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, a newly released Zogby poll shows that the American public overwhelmingly rejects Darwinian theory in favor of intelligent design. When asked if life developed “through an unguided process of random mutations and natural selection,” a standard definition of Darwinism, only 33 percent of respondents said they agreed with the statement. But 52 percent agreed that “the development of life was guided by intelligent design.”

The poll results come from one of four questions commissioned by Discovery Institute for a national Zogby telephone survey conducted earlier in 2009. Results from the other three questions were released previously to coincide with the bicentennial of Charles Darwin’s birth. The new results are highlighted below, and the full report is available here.

Question about Intelligent Design

Now, I am going to read you two statements about the development of life. Please tell me which statement comes closest to your own point of view—Statement A or Statement B?

Statement A: The development of life came about through an unguided process of random mutations and natural selection.

Statement B: The development of life was guided by intelligent design.

Statement A 33%
Statement B 52
Neither 7
Other/Not sure 8

Click here to download the full report

Posted by Anika Smith at 2:24 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Last December, I wrote a post about a book titled Life on Other Planets, aimed at junior-high-aged kids. I found it at a local library. The book promoted materialist science fiction about the origin of life on earth.

More recently, the Seattle Public Library system had its annual booksale, and I loaded up. One now-former library book I bought was Journey from the Dawn: Life with the World’s First Family, by Donald Johansen and Kevin O’Farrell (Villard, 1990). I liked this book far better than Life on Other Planets, but instead of promoting materialist science fiction to kids on the origin of life, this one promoted science fiction to kids regarding paleoanthropology and the origin of humans.

The book starts by telling readers that it “presents a tantalizing glimpse into the ancient world of our ancestors” (pg. xi). So there’s no mistake: this may be science fiction, but it’s meant to be taken as realistic, plausible, and believable science fiction. It is intended to help inspire faith in the Darwinian story.

Johansen tells the story of how he famously discovered Lucy, a partial fossil skeleton identified as belonging to Australopithecus afarensis. Johansen admits that “we will never know what thoughts trickled through those small brains 3 million years ago or what emotions the creatures felt toward each other” (pg. xiii). This is an honest admission -- but then the author proceeds in the rest of the book to speculate about exactly what thoughts and emotions trickled through Lucy's brain, making a hard effort to to humanize Australopithecus.

Lucy Ponders the Stars?
The first page of the book’s story shows Lucy lying on her back at night, gazing up at the stars -- much like a human would do, pondering the meaning of life. The book claims that higher questions about the stars “did not matter” (pg. 2) to Lucy, but the picture tells a much different story; Lucy is depicted in a humanlike and deeply pensive pose. In fact, pictures in the book tell more of the story than the words: every page has full-color illustrations covering nearly the entire page with just a couple of small paragraphs of text.

The First Midwife?
More human-like qualities emerge in the australopithecines when Lucy’s mate, “Lorcan,” puts his hand on her pregnant stomach and feels the baby kicking inside -- much like a human would, of course. This leads to a scene where Lucy’s behavior becomes extremely human-like when she gives birth. Lucy walks up a ravine, using a walking stick again in a very human-like fashion, and her mother (who is named “Eba”) goes with her and functions as a midwife for the birth. Apparently all the australopithecines had names, and at this point Lucy “remembered Liber, the little male who had died the day after she had given birth to him a year before” (pg. 20). Eba helps deliver the baby precisely as a doctor or a midwife might do, holding her hands out to catch the newborn infant as Lucy pushes it out. In the book, the scene looks very, very human.

The infant is named "Lifi," and Eba acts as any grandmother would, taking care of Lifi as her own.

Australopithecine Discoveries?
In many scenes, the australopithecines make discoveries. If they aren’t human exactly, the message is that this is how they started to become human. In one episode, some of the australopithecine males discover fire. A volcano is erupting and what looks like a bomb explodes nearby, lighting a stick on fire. The illustration shows them holding the burning stick in the air, marveling over it. On another occasion, a member of the band of australopithecines, this one named "Lonnog," apparently discovers something in his reflection in the water:

Lonnog, chasing Ciar, slipped on the smooth clay and into a small puddle. Pulling himself up, he thought he saw something move in the water. Curious, he bent over and peered in. It was his own face looking back at him. Startled, he brought his palm down onto the reflection, shattering it, and watched it form again as the ripples died away. As he pulled back, his hand pressed deep into the mud. Removing it, Lonnog saw the print his hand had left slowly filling with water. He pressed his hand down again and withdrew it. He looked at the two prints for a moment as the water seeped in from the edges. He looked at his hand. For an instant, something sparked behind his eyes. He hooted softly and moved to put a third print between the first two. (pg. 40)

Playing Like Human Children
Lonnog and some other australopithecines then invent skimboarding (on their feet, as human children often do at the beach), running along a wet muddy surface and skidding along. They also have a mudfight. Later, Lucy and her family discover the omelette as some lava heats a nest containing some eggs.

Eventually the family of australopithecines meets a troop of baboons. The illustration shows Lucy’s daughter Liban smiling, “as is usual when two groups like this meet, the younger children break the impasse, playing chasing games” (pg. 56). Apparently these groups play just like human children.

Liban and her new baboon friend then find some ostrich eggs, which results in Lonnog (Lucy’s son) learning to shake an egg to determine if it was fertilized, and then using a stone to break the egg to remove the fetus. Lucy’s daughter Liban learns from Lucy’s hand-gestures to ignore the “mirages” on the horizon on hot summer days. Later, “Lorcan knew that Lucy was particularly fond of the red roots from one particular plant,” so he picks them for her. It’s one big happy human-like family.

Science Fiction Extraordinaire: Where Are the Trees?
As I discussed at My Pilgrimage to Lucy’s Holy Relics Fails to Inspire Faith in Darwinism, Lucy’s status as a bipedal hominid is not only questioned among scientists, but there is some evidence that she knuckle-walked (like a chimp). Many agree that if she did walk upright, then she couldn’t run in an upright fashion like modern humans do. Additionally, palaeoanthropologists largely agree that she and her species spent much of their time in trees.

But in this children's book, Johansen and O’Farrell largely dispense with the facts and portray Lucy and her family as a fully upright-walking ground-dwelling bipedal hominids. Throughout all of Lucy and her family’s adventures, the book portrays them as walking on the ground -- upright, very much like modern humans. There’s even talk of them running around. There is never any mention of their spending time in trees, knuckle-walking, or having a mode of locomotion that is anything but modern-human-like. Simply put, many of the major non-human-like attributes of the australopithecine lifestyle seem to have been excised from this book so as to make Lucy appear more human-like than she actually was.

Of course the notion of non-human species that use communication, play around, and even experience certain emotions is uncontroversial. But the explicit and implicit message throughout the story is that these non-humans do those things in a most human-life manner. Seemingly, we are supposed to believe we might be witnessing what could very well be historical fact. The message is that we have these traits because we are descended from individuals like these.

I don’t object to students reading books like this -- but at some point we have to ask, “What’s fact and what’s fiction?” At the very least, there’s a lot of pure speculation in the book. And when it comes to Lucy’s mode of locomotion, the book’s portrayal is downright counterfactual. The case for Lucy's status as a human-like ape is overstated so much that this can only be called science fiction.

One hopes students reading this book will understand that at the end of the day, this is a fictional and fanciful story based upon a single, controversial skeleton. But the book’s co-author is the famed Donald Johansen, and so students will be inclined to trust the account as scientifically accurate. Unless students do their own outside research, they will never have a clue just how much imagination, speculation, and pure science fiction went into Johansen’s book.

Posted by Casey Luskin at 7:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

CSC Director Stephen C. Meyer will be in the studio shortly with national radio host Michael Medved to discuss his new book, Signature in the Cell, for the full second hour of the program. His segment will air live at 1:00pm PDT, and you can go here to listen.

Posted by Anika Smith at 10:29 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

In March, I blogged about how the National Center for Science Education (NCSE) usually tries to project a religion-friendly image, but somehow their “talking points” they released for Texas State Board of Education meeting in January advocated that activists press the SBOE to adopt scientism as the state’s official ideology and expressly deny the existence of the supernatural as a matter of state education policy. As the NCSE’s talking points argued: “Science posits that there are no forces outside of nature. Science cannot be neutral on this issue.… All educated people understand there are no forces outside of nature.” Yet in a recent radio interview with the Minnesota Atheists, Eugenie Scott claims that the NCSE “doesn’t take a stand on religious views” [16:40], even though asserting “there are no forces outside of nature” sure sounds like a stance on religious views to me. In the Minnesota Atheists radio interview, Dr. Scott also made other comments that suggest she was taking a stand on certain religious views.

Now before I say any of this, it must be noted that Dr. Scott states upfront in the interview that the NCSE’s “goals are not to promote disbelief” [17:10] but rather that her organization’s “goals are to help people understand evolution and hopefully accept it” [17:20]. She applauds her organization for working with Christians, including evangelical Christians, and when she speaks she regularly discusses examples of Christians who accept evolution. That's all fine and good--but what does Dr. Scott believe personally about these issues? What happens, in Dr. Scott’s mind, when students do “understand evolution and hopefully accept it”? When asked why evolution is always “under siege,” she states in this interview:

“Evolution is the scientific explanation that has the most repercussions, shall we say, for people’s worldview and religious perspective. Evolution tells you that humans share kinship with all other creatures. For some, that’s a very liberating and exciting idea, and it makes them feel one with nature and it’s empowering and so forth. For others, it’s threatening. If your view is a human exceptionalism kind of view, that humans are separate from nature and special -- especially if they are special to God as in some Christian traditions, then evolution is going to be threatening to you.” [48:05-48:50]

Of course, Dr. Scott is entitled to her views on the stated incompatibility of certain Christian religious viewpoints with evolution, and she’s also wholly entitled to her self-stated position as a “philosophical naturalist” (Dr. Scott is a signer of the Third Humanist Manifesto). But this doesn't seem to jive well with her description of her organization's advocacy goals.

The NCSE may strive to be religion-friendly; and perhaps it is provided you believe in what the famous evolutionary biologist George Gaylord Simpson meant when he said that “evolution and true religion are compatible.” (Simpson, The Meaning of Evolution, pg. 5 (1949), emphasis in original.) Whatever is the case, for the record, the executive director of the nation’s leading pro-evolution activist group has stated that evolution is “threatening” to those who think that humans “are special to God as in some Christian traditions.”

Posted by Casey Luskin at 8:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

One of the many fascinating designs in biology is the workings of our senses. Here, for example, is a description of new findings on the actions of hair cells in the inner ear. It is yet another example of biology leaving evolution in the dust:

Microvilli (stereocilia) projecting from the apex of hair cells in the inner ear are actively motile structures that feed energy into the vibration of the inner ear and enhance sensitivity to sound. The biophysical mechanism underlying the hair bundle motor is unknown. In this study, we examined a membrane flexoelectric origin for active movements in stereocilia and conclude that it is likely to be an important contributor to mechanical power output by hair bundles. We formulated a realistic biophysical model of stereocilia incorporating stereocilia dimensions, the known flexoelectric coefficient of lipid membranes, mechanical compliance, and fluid drag. Electrical power enters the stereocilia through displacement sensitive ion channels and, due to the small diameter of stereocilia, is converted to useful mechanical power output by flexoelectricity. This motor augments molecular motors associated with the mechanosensitive apparatus itself that have been described previously. The model reveals stereocilia to be highly efficient and fast flexoelectric motors that capture the energy in the extracellular electro-chemical potential of the inner ear to generate mechanical power output. The power analysis provides an explanation for the correlation between stereocilia height and the tonotopic organization of hearing organs. Further, results suggest that flexoelectricity may be essential to the exquisite sensitivity and frequency selectivity of non-mammalian hearing organs at high auditory frequencies, and may contribute to the “cochlear amplifier” in mammals.

Posted by Cornelius Hunter at 8:31 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Yesterday, ENV spoke with Michael A. Flannery about his new book Alfred Russel Wallace’s Theory of Intelligent Evolution: How Wallace’s World of Life Challenged Darwinism (Erasmus Press). While credited as evolution's co-discoverer, Wallace fell away from the Darwinian faith and came to espouse a view remarkably suggestive of intelligent design. Now, the rest of the interview.

ENV: Scientifically, how does Wallace's culminating work, World of Life, stand up today as compared to Darwin’s Origin of Species?

MAF: That’s a complex question. Darwin’s Origin is really a metaphysical treatise supported by some biological speculations and those speculations give it the appearance of science. The thing that makes this question so difficult to answer is that for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was Thomas Henry Huxley’s brilliant public relations campaign on behalf of Darwin’s theory, Darwinism has lodged itself as the reigning biological paradigm and Origin is its magnum opus. All this means is that everyone has probably heard of (if not read) Darwin’s Origin, but few would even know who Wallace is, much less know his World of Life. That’s a big reason I wrote this book in the first place.

But that said, Darwin’s book had major problems from the start. For one thing, the title simply doesn’t deliver. It purports to be a book on the origin of species but tells us nothing of the origin of life itself, the very root of origins. Nevertheless, the book has had an influence far out of proportion to its actual value in moving science forward. For example, I can’t think of a single medical advance that is dependent upon it. In fact, Louis Pasteur, who exploded the old view of abiogenesis (biological life from nonliving matter), proved biogenesis — namely, that life must come from life — and gave us germ theory of disease, was a vocal opponent of evolution. Most of the so-called evolutionary “advances” in science we hear about have nothing to do with Darwin’s central theory of macroevolution, that random mutation eventually would produce speciation; they are really just examples of microevolution (species variation) which was wholly uncontroversial even in Darwin’s day. We could have gotten that from Wallace’s World of Life.

In contrast, Wallace’s book is a more complete and comprehensive work. It assumes common descent but argues that it is guided and infused with design. Its principle thesis presents what I call intelligent evolution, the idea of common descent based upon natural selection strictly bounded by the principle of utility in which nature is viewed as having design and purpose within a theistic context. Wallace understood that the origin of life could be addressed more simply as a problem of cellular complexity. Haeckel, an early and ardent Darwin supporter, had a very simplistic idea of the cell as merely a mass of protoplasm. Darwin held similar reductionist views. But Wallace knew better; the cell was a far more complex and intricate system. Wallace discusses this at length in The World of Life, thus making it far more prescient than the Origin.

In fact, I’d say that Wallace’s understanding of nature as comprising many biologically complex designed mechanisms is being vindicated in the literature. Indeed, the problem of understanding the human intellect in merely Darwinian terms, the issue that initiated Wallace’s disagreement with his elder colleague, is increasingly heading towards Wallace’s solution. In an April issue of Nature just this year, Johan Bolhuis and Clive Wynne asked, “Can evolution explain how minds work?” While they’re careful not to call for an abandonment of the Darwinian paradigm, they admit that recent “findings have cast doubt on the straightforward application of Darwinism to cognition.”

Let me conclude by pointing out something very important when considering their respective theories. Darwin came to his “science” (his theory of evolution) by way of his metaphysic; that is to say, he developed his theory from a preconceived materialistic philosophy. Wallace, on the other hand, came to his metaphysic (his teleological worldview) by way of his science; that is to say, his theory led him to seek deeper understanding of the natural world through a transcending, purposeful theism. Why? Because a purely materialistic explanation like natural selection was unequal to the task of answering for the complexity of nature. It remains so.

ENV: In World of Life, Wallace sought to explain the problem of natural evil and ended up anticipating arguments C.S. Lewis would later make about the problem of pain. You write fascinatingly about Wallace’s and Darwin’s contrasting attitudes to pain and discomfort. Darwin was a hypochondriac and complainer. The pain of losing his daughter Annie confirmed him in his religious unbelief. Wallace lost his son Bertie and this seemingly confirmed him in his spiritual convictions. Are these biographical coincidences, or do they relate to the worldview implicit respectively in Wallaceism and Darwinism?

MAF: I think Wallace was much better at handling adversity because he had to face it throughout his life. At one point Wallace lost most of his precious specimens and notes on his return from the Amazon in a shipwreck and spent ten days and nights in a lifeboat before being rescued. His response was not to rail against his misfortune, but, as he writes in his autobiography, My Life, “to bear my fate with patience and equanimity.” Wallace had to earn his living and when he married Annie in 1866, and when they started a family he had the additional burden of providing for them. These were responsibilities wholly unknown to Darwin.

By contrast Darwin lived something of a pampered lifestyle of wealth and privilege. Unfortunately, this didn’t translate into emotional stability for Darwin. He was beset by skin rashes, stomach cramps, debilitating nausea, and flatulence, and he used his illness to dodge unwelcome or difficult situations and responsibilities. In short, Darwin didn’t handle adversity well and used his illness as a shield.

At some level I think Darwin’s problem emanated from an obsession with notoriety and recognition, something he saw his theory could provide. But it literally ate him alive. It didn’t help to have only materialism — the here and now — as a comfort. Add to that his wife Emma’s fervent Christian belief and Darwin was a lonely man. When his daughter died, that was it. She was gone.

But Wallace knew Bertie had moved on and that his brief life here on earth was a temporary sojourn toward greater spiritual realms. So I would say that their very different responses to the problem of evil or pain in this world was a product of their backgrounds and their belief systems.

ENV: Wallace became a devotee of spiritualism, in ways that will strike many a modern reader as flaky. Does that invalidate his version of evolutionary theory in contrast with Darwin’s?

MAF: Not in the least. Wallace was a man of his times and in Victorian England (America too for that matter) spiritualism was not considered an illegitimate topic. Some of the best scientific minds on both side of the Atlantic believed it to be a valid — and indeed testable — hypothesis. In England the noted physicist William Crookes, anthropologist Andrew Lang, and philosopher Henry Sidgwick were spiritualists; in America there was Henry Bowditch, Dean of the Harvard Medical School and Simon Newcomb, head of the Smithsonian, to name just a few who actively promoted spiritualism.

I would also add that Wallace’s evolutionary theory was in no way dependent upon his belief in spiritualism. His theory was derived from what he believed to be the inherent limitations of natural selection. Had Wallace never expressed a belief in spiritualism, if he had never written one word on the subject, his theory of evolution would remain unchanged and intact.

ENV: Thank you for your time. Your book is a fascinating contribution!

MAF: Thank you, David, for your interest and this opportunity.

Posted by David Klinghoffer at 2:26 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Last year I wrote a series of posts about biomimetics (also called “biomimicry”), a term used to describe the way human engineers mimic nature in order to improve human technology. In fact, I recently blogged about how biomimicry of cuttlefish luminescence in new television technology further strengthens the case for intelligent design (ID) in biology. Even some members of the media cannot deny the relevance of biomimicry to the ID debate. A recent article in the London Telegraph was titled “Biomimicry: Why the World is Full of Intelligent Design.” It reported, “Forget human ingenuity -- the best source of ideas for cutting-edge technology might be in nature, according to experts in 'biomimicry'.” Of course the writer felt compelled to deny that there is any real design in nature, stating, “We humans like to think we're pretty good at design and technology -- but we often forget that Mother Nature had a head start of 3.6 million years” (NB: the writer probably meant to say “3.6 billion years”). Nevertheless, the article goes on to discuss various technological breakthroughs based upon biology. Some examples:

One of the most unfortunate aspects of the debate over Darwinian evolution and intelligent design is that so much of it is based on misunderstandings, caricatures, and an unwillingness to engage in genuine dialogue. Sadly, even those who claim to be for open dialogue often aren’t. Thus, Stephen Barr’s willingness to engage in a serious exchange of views on evolution, theism, and intelligent design is commendable—and refreshing. Even if we do not persuade each other about our respective positions, we may help illuminate the real points at issue, and that is certainly a positive result.

After Barr’s latest salvo, I can say that we agree on at least one thing: The need for “clear thought” when it comes to Darwinian evolution. Alas, we seem to differ on what clear thought entails. In an effort to promote the clarity we both desire, I’d like to pose three questions to Dr. Barr:

1. Since you reject the Darwinian idea that evolution is undirected, why not make that disagreement perfectly clear and call your version of evolution “teleological evolution” or “directed evolution,” rather than trying to conflate your view with the terms “Darwinism” or “Darwinian evolution,” which only adds confusion to the discussion?

Barr in the original version of his latest response acknowledged that “very many and even perhaps the great majority of evolutionary biologists are atheists who do believe that the randomness of the genetic mutations that fuel evolution contradicts the idea that evolution is guided by God. But in my view, the fact that many people think that A implies B does not require that we believe it.” (This passage has since been deleted by Barr.)

Barr misstated my position. I am not claiming that because evolutionary biologists believe evolution is undirected that we must believe evolution is undirected. I am saying that modern evolutionary biologists define evolution as blind and undirected (just like Darwin himself did), therefore it would lead to greater clarity if those who have a different definition of evolution didn’t try to conflate their view with “Darwinism.” Barr's conflation promotes confusion, not clarity. By the way, as I have pointed out previously, it isn’t just atheistic evolutionists who define evolution as undirected, even though that seems to be how Barr wants to portray things. It’s also mainstream theistic evolutionists like Ken Miller and George Coyne who think evolution is undirected.

Barr thinks it relevant to point out that I am not a scientist. Well, okay. But neither is Barr an evolutionary biologist; and unlike Barr, I am willing to let evolutionary biologists define their own theory. It seems to me presumptuous to think that one can single-handedly redefine Darwinism to mean something it doesn’t. Barr thinks it is unscientific for biologists to define Darwinian evolution as an undirected process because he thinks “random” need not mean undirected. Fine. But that is how Darwin’s theory has been defined from the very start. Rather than offering a new idiosyncratic definition of Darwinism, wouldn’t it be better for Barr to simply state that Darwinian (undirected) evolution is unscientific? Why is Barr so insistent on trying to present his view as compatible with “Darwinism” when it’s not? Barr’s muddying of the meaning of Darwinism promotes the very type of confusion and lack of clear thinking that he says he wishes to avoid.

Barr’s attempted redefinition of Darwinian evolution is somewhat like a person insisting that Marxism—properly defined—need not be in tension with Christianity. Yes, the person might say, most Marxists think atheism is central to their philosophy, but we know that they are wrong to think this. Voila! Marxism and Christianity are now compatible. Most people would understand the hollowness of such a “solution” to the tension between Marxism and Christianity. If you excise the materialism from Marxism, you no longer have Marxism, but something else. One might add that the result of convincing Christians that Marxism isn’t antithetical to Christianity is not to make Marxism safe for Christianity; it is to lull Christians into believing (wrongly) that Marxism is not a threat to their worldview. Another result is to open the door to strange debasements of Christianity such as the “liberation theology” popular during the 1980s. Wouldn’t a far better approach be to admit that Marxism is in tension with belief in God, but to go on to say that there are other forms of socialism that aren’t?

Similarly, wouldn’t it promote greater clarity if the proponents of theistic evolution who believe that evolution is guided came up with another term rather than trying to offer an idiosyncratic redefinition of Darwinism that most leading practitioners of evolutionary biology would reject? Again, what purpose is served by trying to conflate views that are in reality contradictory? Surely not Barr’s stated purpose of clear thinking. For someone who rejects the core idea of Darwinism (that evolution is unguided), Barr seems to go to great lengths to avoid any appearance of disagreement with Darwinian evolution. Why?

2. Since you indicate that you affirm that God knows and directs the outcomes of evolution, why don’t you and Francis Collins clearly repudiate the views of mainstream theistic evolution proponents like Ken Miller and George Coyne who do promote undirected evolution?

It is interesting that in his responses to me, Barr says nary a word about the mainstream theistic evolutionists I criticized such as biologist Kenneth Miller and former Vatican astronomer George Coyne who claim that God does not direct or know the specific outcomes of evolution. Why not? Barr and Francis Collins both publicly criticize proponents of intelligent design because they disagree with them. Why aren’t they equally forthright in criticizing mainstream theistic evolutionists who claim that God does not know or plan the specific results of evolution? Far from criticizing theistic evolutionists who hold this view, Francis Collins has praised the work of Kenneth Miller and delivered a keynote address to a conference of “open theists” who explicitly claim that God does not know the future. Barr criticizes me for finding equivocation in Collins where he thinks there is none, but it seems to me that Collins has made it quite easy to misunderstand his position. If Collins embraces the exact same view as Barr (i.e., that God knows and specifies all the outcomes of evolution), why is Collins going out of his way to associate himself with and praise those who argue otherwise? For the sake of clarity, why don’t Barr and Collins both publicly disclaim the position of these theistic evolution proponents?

Near the end of his recent blog post, Barr tries to diminish the role of design in the Christian theological tradition by offering an unduly constricted reading of the Apostle Paul’s statement that God can be known “by the things that are made.” (Romans 1:20) Barr suggests that Paul is echoing a passage from the book of Wisdom, which explicitly references God’s design in the heavens. However, Paul (unlike the author of Wisdom) does not reference the stars or planets, and it is a questionable interpretive strategy to base one’s reading of a passage on something the author did not say. Taken on its own terms, Paul is clearly offering a general statement of principle that applies to all sorts of created things, not just those in the heavens. Interestingly, even the passage from the book of Wisdom doesn’t really sustain Barr’s point. The author of that book goes on to make a general statement that “from the greatness and the beauty of created things their original author, by analogy, is seen.” Here the author offers a general point that presumably applies not only to the heavens but to created things as a class. Unless Barr is somehow trying to argue that living things are not “created things” in the same way as planets and stars (an untenable proposition from the standpoint of traditional Christian theology), Barr’s effort to restrict the design argument to areas outside biology fails.

Even if Barr’s constricted readings of Paul and the book of Wisdom were to be accepted, they would not cancel out Jesus’ citation of the lilies of the field as evidence of God’s care and provision for the world, nor would they cancel out the consistent writings of the early church fathers, which repeatedly reference evidence for design in biology. Frankly, Barr’s effort to keep the design argument outside of biology seems to be dictated more by a desire to achieve peace at all costs with Darwinism than a fair rendering of historic Christian teaching.

Having said this, I agree with Barr that “[t]o say that there is evidence of design in the world does not mean that every single thing one sees in the world, taken by itself, standing alone, constitutes persuasive evidence of that design.” Who claims otherwise? But Darwinism doesn’t just exclude one or two things from providing evidence for design. It purports to explain the entire development of complex life, including the development of human beings, as the product of a blind and undirected process. That seems to be a pretty frontal assault on the idea that God has revealed Himself throughout nature. Barr seems satisfied that if we can still talk about design in physics and cosmology, we don’t need to bother about it in biology. But surely from the standpoint of historic Christian theology, living things—including human beings—do not show less evidence of design than stars or planets! Indeed, if human beings are the crown of creation, one would think they might show a lot more evidence of design than, say, the planet Uranus.

The sad thing is that Barr’s redacted version of historic Christian theology seems to be driven by an unbounded—and unwarranted—faith in the claims of Neo-Darwinism. The idea that natural selection acting on random mutations can produce the sort of finely-tuned complexity we see in biology is simply not supported by the scientific evidence. At best, the Darwinian mechanism seems capable of producing trivial changes. Those who doubt this should read Michael Behe’s book The Edge of Evolution, or look at some of the debates inspired by that book here and here.

By the end of his post, Barr appears to recognize that completely repudiating design in biology is unsustainable, and so he suggests that when all is said and done there may be evidence of design in biology after all:

The fact that I would criticize certain biological design arguments as shaky or simplistic doesn’t mean that I think all biological design arguments are. I think good biological design arguments can be made, but it is a challenging task to formulate them in a way that will be persuasive to knowledgeable people today

If Barr truly believes that “good biological design arguments can be made,” then I would consider him an intelligent design proponent. However, Barr also says that “not all design arguments based on biology are of the kind made by the Intelligent Design movement, and not all of them presuppose that Darwinian evolution is false."

I am not exactly sure what arguments in biology Barr thinks the intelligent design movement is making. There are in fact a variety of arguments made by design proponents, and not all design proponents agree on all arguments. What design proponents do share is an openness to the detectability of design throughout nature based on evidence and arguments that do not depend on the Bible or other sacred teachings. If Barr shares this commitment, then he would seem to agree with the scientists and philosophers in the "intelligent design movement."

Nevertheless, I am confused by his statement that “not all design arguments based on biology… presuppose that Darwinian evolution is false.” The design arguments in biology I know about do not “presuppose” that Darwinism is false. Instead, they make an argument based on evidence that the Neo-Darwinian mechanism of natural selection and random mutations cannot produce what it claims; then they go on to explain that intentional design is a better explanation. But perhaps Barr merely intended to claim that there are biological design arguments that are consistent with Darwinian evolution. If that is Barr’s claim, then I wish he would say more about the kinds of arguments he is thinking about, because he might find that we agree.

If Barr merely means that design arguments in biology need not challenge Darwin's theory of common ancestry (as opposed to Darwin's undirected mechanism of selection and random variations), he is surely right. Design arguments in biology need not challenge common ancestry. Of course, this is a point that has been made time and again by intelligent design proponents for the past decade, and it is a point I emphasized in my book Darwin's Conservatives.

Similarly, if Barr means that there are design arguments about the origin of the first life that need not conflict with Darwinism because Darwinism assumes the existence of the first self-replicating organism, then I also would agree—as would the leading proponents of the “intelligent design movement.” Stephen Meyer, in fact, has just come out with a book, Signature in the Cell, which provides a compelling argument for design based on the origin of the first life. Meyer explicitly acknowledges that Darwin’s theory does not address the origin of the first life.

However, if Barr means that there are design arguments based on the development of biological complexity after the first life that do not conflict with Darwinism, then that claim seems hard to sustain. Even in Barr’s redefinition of Darwinism, the development of life is supposedly driven by “random” mutations. As I understand it, Barr defines “random” as meaning that from a human standpoint that an event displays no discernible pattern and cannot lead to any predictions. Yet if evolution is driven by “random” events in this sense, it is difficult to see how the development of complex life can provide any evidence of design. It’s one thing to claim that “random” mutations are somehow known or planned by God even though from our standpoint they show no discernible pattern. It’s quite another thing to claim that such “random” events provide us with evidence of design.

This leads to my final question for Dr. Barr:

3. If Darwinism is true and the development of life really is driven by random mutations that display no discernible pattern and cannot lead to predictions, then in what sense do you think biology provides evidence of intelligent design?

Posted by John West at 8:06 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

To judge from previews, the new Darwin biographical movie Creation will emphasize the challenge Darwinian theory posed from the beginning to religious belief. Yet the life of evolution’s co-discoverer, Alfred Russel Wallace, suggests that properly understood, and that’s a major proviso, evolution needn’t upset faith at all. On the contrary, Wallace reasoned from what he knew about life’s history to a belief that an “Overruling Intelligence” guided life’s development, much as intelligent design (ID) does today. Science historian Michael A. Flannery calls Wallace’s evolutionary thinking a “preamble” to ID.

An opportunity to evaluate this provocative claim is now before us in the form of Flannery’s new edition of Wallace’s great work, A World of Life (1910), which slims the dense and massive volume down to a manageable size and includes an illuminating introduction by Flannery. His book is Alfred Russel Wallace’s Theory of Intelligent Evolution: How Wallace’s World of Life Challenged Darwinism (Erasmus Press).

Wallace famously arrived at his own version of evolutionary theory while Darwin was still sitting on his. When Wallace made contact and shared his thoughts, Darwin panicked and rushed to make his theory public so as not to be scooped. Yet the two men did not formulate their ideas in exactly the same way. As Flannery writes, “Wallace emphasized the ‘principle of utility,’ namely, that ‘no organ or attribute can exist in a natural species unless it is or has been useful to the organisms that possess it.’”

This emphasis led to the increasingly rapid unraveling of Wallace’s confidence that natural selection by itself could account for the most interesting features of life: major items like sentience, the complexity of the cell and of the hemoglobin molecule, the origin of life itself, and more discrete features like a bird’s wing and feathers (evidence of a “preconceived design,” Wallace wrote) and the “unnecessarily elaborate” patterns and coloration of butterfly wings. Vladmir Nabokov — novelist, lepidopterist, and Darwin doubter — would make that same observation in the middle 20th century, as I’ve noted in this space previously.

Adding to all this Wallace’s comfort with the idea of common descent, it starts to sound like a mix of Michael Behe, Stephen Meyer, and William Dembski. ENV was intrigued, naturally, and caught up with Flannery to pose a few questions.

ENV: Didn’t Darwin also presuppose a “principle of utility,” if not under that name?

MAF: He did. The issue isn’t that Wallace was somehow corrupting Darwin’s principle, it’s that Darwin, in my view, had a corrupted view of nature. In other words, Darwin viewed all aspects of the natural world from a materialistic viewpoint—even thoughts were mere “secretions of the brain” and man was an animal different in degree rather than kind. If that’s your view of nature then the temptation to apply a wholly naturalistic principle (like the principle of utility) to everything becomes irresistible.

Darwin hedged a bit on his own principle, admitting that some characteristics might “reappear from the law of reversion,” but by and large natural selection operated through this principle. Underlying his principle, however, was Darwin’s belief in the inheritance of acquired characteristics, an old Lamarckian notion that was subsequently proven to be utterly false.

ENV: You suggest that Wallace was reluctant to stand up to Darwin in part because he was intimidated by the class difference between the two men. What was Wallace’s social background like and why would that influence him to keep his criticism in check?

MAF: Wallace wasn’t poor but his social roots could best be described as struggling “middle class.” As a child, he was comfortable but there’s a sense that money was always an issue around the house. The Wallaces were frequently moving around in search of affordable housing and financial opportunity. By contrast, Darwin was independently wealthy and came from a family of settled rank and position. Darwin attended the University of Edinburgh and Cambridge, while Wallace attended the Mechanic’s Institute at London. Wallace taught himself botany and zoology, while the young Darwin had access to some of the period’s best naturalists in England. English Victorian society was much more stratified than in America and far, far more stratified than today. Social rank defined much more than income, it defined where you were educated, who you associated with, who you married, who your children associated with, where you worshiped, and so on. Wallace would have naturally deferred to a man of Darwin’s rank, it was an assumed expectation.

But this class difference had a more practical consequence. Wallace’s famous Ternate Letter, sent in February of 1858, in which he outlined his theory of natural selection to Darwin, caused Darwin to rush On the Origin of Species to press. But it raised the obvious question, what do we do with Wallace’s paper? Darwin consulted with Charles Lyell and Joseph Hooker and it was decided to read both Darwin’s and Wallace’s paper jointly at the July meeting of the Linnean Society. Thus, despite the fact that he was still thousands of miles away in the Malay Archipelago, Wallace got entry into one of London’s most prestigious scientific societies. It’s something Wallace never could have pulled off on his own. Darwin gave him access that would have otherwise been denied. I think Wallace always kept this in mind.

ENV: Wallaceism and Darwinism led to very different social and political views — for example, on the sanctity of life. How so and why?

MAF: To understand Wallace’s social and political views it’s best to start with Darwin’s to see how dramatically different they really were. Darwin was intimately tied to the rising tide of unbridled industrial capitalism and his theory expresses the harsh “survival of the fittest” mentality so intrinsic to that system. His materialistic theory easily lent itself to social application and so the term Social Darwinism is quite apt. Darwinists try to distance them from this (and for good reason), but even a cursory reading of his Descent of Man (1871) is full of principles and concepts that would later be labeled by his cousin, Francis Galton, eugenics. This would take on horrific form in the late 19th and early 20th centuries culminating in the Nazi atrocities of Adolf Hitler. I’m not saying that Darwin was a Nazi, I’m saying his theory of evolution, especially as it was applied to humans, contributed logically toward eugenics and Nazi biology.

Wallace was appalled by eugenics. We must remember that Darwin died in 1882 before the eugenics movement really got up and running, while Wallace lived until 1913 and could see the movement in full swing. Wallace hated such artificial manipulations of the people. Wallace called it “the meddlesome interference of an arrogant scientific priestcraft.” Instead Wallace believed that women needed to be freed from the constraints of Victorian convention to make free choices in marriage. The misguided attempts by the few to selectively breed their preconceived view of “the fit,” struck Wallace as artificial selection of the worst kind.

ENV: Tomorrow, more with Michael Flannery on Alfred Russel Wallace!

Posted by David Klinghoffer at 2:04 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

If you hvaen't got your copy of Signature in the Cell yet here's a chance to try before you buy. You can get a good sneak peek inside SITC over at the Harper Collins website. Click here to Browse Inside.

Posted by Robert Crowther at 8:07 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

A recent paper in BioEssays, "MicroRNAs and metazoan macroevolution: insights into canalization, complexity, and the Cambrian explosion," admits the lack of a "materialistic basis" -- that is, a plausible materialistic explanation -- of the Cambrian explosion. As the article states:

Thus, elucidating the materialistic basis of the Cambrian explosion has become more elusive, not less, the more we know about the event itself, and cannot be explained away by coupling extinction of intermediates with long stretches of geologic time, despite the contrary claims of some modern neo-Darwinists.

(Kevin J. Peterson, Michael R. Dietrich and Mark A. McPeek, "MicroRNAs and metazoan macroevolution: insights into canalization, complexity, and the Cambrian explosion," BioEssays, Vol. 31 (7):736 - 747 (2009).)

Beginning some 555 million years ago the Earth’s biota changed in profound and fundamental ways, going from an essentially static system billions of years in existence to the one we find today, a dynamic and awesomely complex system whose origin seems to defy explanation. Part of the intrigue with the Cambrian explosion is that numerous animal phyla with very distinct body plans arrive on the scene in a geological blink of the eye, with little or no warning of what is to come in rocks that predate this interval of time. The abruptness of the transition between the ‘‘Precambrian’’ and the Cambrian was apparent right at the outset of our science with the publication of Murchison’s The Silurian System, a treatise that paradoxically set forth the research agenda for numerous paleontologists -- in addition to serving as perennial fodder for creationists. The reasoning is simple -- as explained on an intelligent-design t-shirt.

Fact: Forty phyla of complex animals suddenly appear in the fossil record, no forerunners, no transitional forms leading to them; ‘‘a major mystery,’’ a ‘‘challenge.’’ The Theory of Evolution – exploded again (idofcourse.com).

Although we would dispute the numbers, and aside from the last line, there is not much here that we would disagree with. Indeed, many of Darwin’s contemporaries shared these sentiments, and we assume -- if Victorian fashion dictated -- that they would have worn this same t-shirt with pride.

(Kevin J. Peterson, Michael R. Dietrich and Mark A. McPeek, "MicroRNAs and metazoan macroevolution: insights into canalization, complexity, and the Cambrian explosion," BioEssays, Vol. 31 (7):736 - 747 (2009), internal citation numbers removed, emboldened emphasis added.)

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

As David Klinghoffer reported yesterday, Dr. Meyer kicked off his new book Signature in the Cell with an address to the Heritage Foundation in Washington DC, during which he explained why materialistic theories are drawing a blank in origin of life research. They can't explain where biological information comes from. Now you can watch Dr. Meyer as he talks about how he answers the question that evolutionists can't in his new book.

Posted by Robert Crowther at 8:06 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

CSC director Stephen C. Meyer launched his important new book, Signature in the Cell: DNA and Evidence for Intelligent Design, with a speech today at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C. In Signature, Dr. Meyer exposes the increasingly evident hopelessness of materialist explanations of life’s origins and makes a fresh, powerful, and seemingly conclusive new scientific argument for intelligent design.

Dr. Meyer began by noting that in this Charles Darwin dual anniversary year, we should keep in mind that Darwin’s presumed “primary legacy is that he refuted the design argument.” That argument, in turn, had long been regarded as the most compelling that exists for religious belief. The phenomenal success of the New Atheist movement, represented by Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens & Co., is based on the premise that Darwin successfully explained “the appearance of design without real design.” But what if the premise is mistaken?

In Washington, Dr. Meyer alluded to the business of the capital city, comparing the complex path by which a bill introduced in Congress becomes a law to the far more complex path by which genes encoded in DNA are translated into proteins, the building blocks of life.

"The biological information in DNA runs the show in biology," Meyer said. Explaining where it comes from is the enigma faced by life-origins researchers.

Materialist solutions of the enigma all face insuperable challenges, Meyer continued. For example, theories that hypothesize the operation of “pre-biotic natural selection presuppose what needs to be explained in the first place, namely the existence of self-replicating organisms,” without which no advantageous feature that is selected could be retained and passed on. It is a “question-begging explanation,” Meyer said.

Meanwhile, theories of “self-organization” have their own problems. If the original matrix from which life developed was something like a regularly patterned salt crystal, then that still leaves unexplained the enigma of biological information — which, like all information, is defined by not being regularly patterned but rather by specified complexity.

Meyer asked, “What cause, based on our experience, is capable of producing information?” The only such known cause is intelligent agency.

The question and answer period after the speech gave a preview of the avenues of attack that critics will take on Signature in the Cell. One questioner asked, “What’s the big deal here? Give science a little time!” There are always gaps to be filled in our knowledge, and science always manages to fill them.

As Dr. Meyer suggested, that would be a cogent objection if the case for intelligent design were based on a “God of the gaps”-style “argument from ignorance.” “But that’s not actually how we’re arguing,” Meyer pointed out. The design argument is based on positive knowledge about the only sort of cause known to produce information.

Another questioner posed the inevitable “Who designed the designer?” challenge. Meyer answered that if the designer is assumed to be immanent in nature, that could be a strong objection. “But then there’s the idea that the intelligence [responsible for the design of life] is transcendent,” meaning outside nature, as Meyer himself supposes. What’s known by modern science about the origin of the universe, the singularity from which all physical existence burst forth, demands that we suppose exactly such a cause. Before the Big Bang, of course, there was no nature. Whatever caused the Big Bang is, therefore, necessarily transcendent.

Still another questioner asked how Dr. Meyer thought Richard Dawkins or Daniel Dennett would respond to his DNA-based case for intelligent design. Meyer replied that Dawkins himself has admitted “no one knows how life first originated.”

The answer that Signature in the Cell gives to the DNA enigma, Dr. Meyer acknowledged, will not be to the liking of everyone, neither to Dawkins and his followers nor to others — one thinks of theistic evolutionists — who are committed to opposing any idea that science can have something to say about ultimate questions, including religious ones.

“But the primary obligation of a scientist,” Meyer concluded, “is to follow the evidence where it leads.”

Posted by David Klinghoffer at 12:20 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Today marks the arrival of the highly anticipated book, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design, by CSC Director Dr. Stephen C. Meyer. Several years in the making, the book arrives just as the information age is coming to biology and scientists are delving deeper into the mystery of the origins of life. In Signature in the Cell Dr. Meyer lays out a radical new and comprehensive argument for intelligent design that readers will likely never have encountered before, and which materialist scientists cannot counter.

Appearances this week:

Two recent papers, one in the Journal of Morphology and another in Ornithological Monographs, as well as a ScienceDaily news release titled "Discovery Raises New Doubts About Dinosaur-bird Links," contain criticisms by evolutionists of the dino-to-bird hypothesis that you would normally expect to hear only from skeptics of neo-Darwinism. Their remarks not only cover problems facing the dino-to-birds hypothesis, but also lament the politically motivated drive to push that hypothesis and ignore scientific dissent. The ScienceDaily article observes that some aspects of bird morphology are simply incompatible with the standard hypothesis that birds evolved from maniraptoran theropod dinosaurs:

It's been known for decades that the femur, or thigh bone in birds is largely fixed and makes birds into "knee runners," unlike virtually all other land animals, the [Oregon State University] experts say. What was just discovered, however, is that it's this fixed position of bird bones and musculature that keeps their air-sac lung from collapsing when the bird inhales.

Warm-blooded birds need about 20 times more oxygen than cold-blooded reptiles, and have evolved a unique lung structure that allows for a high rate of gas exchange and high activity level. Their unusual thigh complex is what helps support the lung and prevent its collapse.

"This is fundamental to bird physiology," said Devon Quick, an OSU instructor of zoology who completed this work as part of her doctoral studies. "It's really strange that no one realized this before. The position of the thigh bone and muscles in birds is critical to their lung function, which in turn is what gives them enough lung capacity for flight."

However, every other animal that has walked on land, the scientists said, has a moveable thigh bone that is involved in their motion – including humans, elephants, dogs, lizards and – in the ancient past – dinosaurs.

The implication, the researchers said, is that birds almost certainly did not descend from theropod dinosaurs, such as tyrannosaurus or allosaurus. The findings add to a growing body of evidence in the past two decades that challenge some of the most widely-held beliefs about animal evolution….

"But one of the primary reasons many scientists kept pointing to birds as having descended from dinosaurs was similarities in their lungs," Ruben said. "However, theropod dinosaurs had a moving femur and therefore could not have had a lung that worked like that in birds. Their abdominal air sac, if they had one, would have collapsed. That undercuts a critical piece of supporting evidence for the dinosaur-bird link.

(Discovery Raises New Doubts About Dinosaur-bird Links, ScienceDaily (June 9, 2009).)

Theropods examined in this study uniformly lacked the specialized sternal and costal features of modern birds (Hillenius and Ruben, 2004a). Theropods also exhibited significantly less pelvic cross-sectional space with which to have accommodated abdominal air-sacs similar in development to those in modern birds. In addition, the deep, vertically-oriented lateral body wall of theropods apparently lacked lateral skeletal support for caudally positioned (e.g., abdominal) air-sacs: the theropod ‘‘lumbar’’ rib cage was reduced and the vertical, free-swinging femur almost surely could not have contributed to a rigid lateral abdominal wall (see Fig. 5). Notably, the gastralia (imbricating slender ‘‘belly ribs,’’ Fig. 5) do not articulate solidly with other bony elements nor do they significantly invest the lateral body wall (Claessens, 2004b). Thus, in the absence of a bird-like ribcage, a dearth of space to accommodate fully avian sized abdominal air-sacs in the caudal body cavity or a skeletal mechanism to resist their paradoxical collapse, theropods were unlikely to have possessed functional bird-like abdominal air-sacs

(Devon E. Quick and John A. Ruben, "Cardio-Pulmonary Anatomy in Theropod Dinosaurs: Implications From Extant Archosaurs," Journal of Morphology (2009).)

It has been previously argued that postcranial pneumatization signals the existence of functional abdominal air-sacs in theropods. Supposedly, these air-sacs could have been ventilated via relatively unmodified rib cages with well developed gastralia or uncinate processes or a combination of both (Carrier and Farmer, 2000a; O’Connor and Claessens, 2005; Tickle et al., 2007; Codd et al., 2008). However, there are several reasons to question these arguments. Skeletal pneumatization is well documented in pterosaurs, sauropods, some early birds, numerous theropods and possibly even the Late Triassic archosauriforms Erythrosuchus and Effigia (Nesbitt and Norell, 2006; O’Connor, 2006). Given so wide a phylogenetic distribution, postcranial pneumatization is likely plesiomorphic for Ornithodira (birds, dinosaurs and pterosaurs) and possibly as ancient as basal Archosauria (O’Connor, 2006)….

Interpretation of vertebral pneumatization as a lock-step indicator for the presence of a fully functional avian style lung air-sac system ignores the widespread distribution of posterior, nonvascularized air sacs in many living reptiles and undoubted selective pressures for skeletal mass reduction. Furthermore, as discussed earlier, reconstruction of theropods with modern avian lung air-sac anatomy and function neglects the absence of requisite skeletal morphology necessary for its ventilation in modern forms.

(Devon E. Quick and John A. Ruben, "Cardio-Pulmonary Anatomy in Theropod Dinosaurs: Implications From Extant Archosaurs," Journal of Morphology (2009).)

Of course Darwin-skeptics have been noting for years that there are key morphological differences between birds and theropod dinosaurs that challenge claims of an evolutionary link. Another recent extensive review of the standard hypothesis that birds evolved from maniraptoran theropod dinosaurs (called the “BMT” hypothesis) found “no [cladistic analysis-based] statistical difference between the hypothesis that birds were a clade nested within the Maniraptora and the hypothesis that core clades of Maniraptora were actually flying and flightless radiations within the clade bracketed by Archaeopteryx and modern birds (Aves).” (Frances C. James and John A. Pourtless IV, "Cladistics and the Origins of Birds: A Review and Two New Analyses," Ornithological Monographs, 66:1-78 (2009).)

In other words, statistical tests show that when compared to the BMT hypothesis, it’s just as likely that the maniraptoran theropod dinosaurs were not the ancestors birds, but were actually descendants of birds and were simply secondarily flightless birds. (Such views are shared by a variety of other experts.) This alternate view is made even more convincing when one considers an admission by zoologist John Ruben in the aforementioned ScienceNews news release. He notes something that many Darwin-skeptics have pointed out in the past, that maniraptoran theropod dinosaurs don’t appear in the right place in the fossil record to be ancestors of birds:

"For one thing, birds are found earlier in the fossil record than the dinosaurs they are supposed to have descended from," Ruben said. "That's a pretty serious problem, and there are other inconsistencies with the bird-from-dinosaur theories.

(Discovery Raises New Doubts About Dinosaur-bird Links, ScienceDaily (June 9, 2009).)

Additional statistical tests showed that both the “early-archosaur” and “crocodylomorph” hypotheses are at least as well supported as the BMT hypothesis. These results show that Theropoda as presently constituted may not be monophyletic and that the verificationist approach of the BMT literature may be producing misleading studies on the origin of birds….

Our cladistic and statistical analyses of our new data set indicate that several predictions derived from the BMT hypothesis are not supported and that alternatives to the BMT are at least equally viable. Altogether, three hypotheses for the origin of birds -- the BMT, early-archosaur, and crocodylomorph hypotheses -- are most compatible with currently available evidence.

(Frances C. James and John A. Pourtless IV, "Cladistics and the Origins of Birds: A Review and Two New Analyses," Ornithological Monographs, 66:1-78 (2009).)

But these alternative hypotheses are not without their own problems. One problem facing these alternative hypotheses is not that birds arrive before their alleged ancestors (as is the problem with standard BMT hypothesis), but rather that anything remotely qualifying as an possible ancestor of birds appears many tens of millions of years (i.e., 70+ million years) before birds, with no fossils documenting the evolution of the first uncontroverted bird, Archaeopteryx. Needless to say, many evolutionist don’t like this hypothesis because it leaves them with an uncomfortably large gap.

The bottom line is that all of the various theories that birds descended from reptiles face some severe difficulties.

”Old Theories Die Hard”
What is most interesting about these papers and the news release is the way they make clear how closed off the mainstream Darwinian scientific community has been to challenges to the dino-bird hypothesis. The ScienceDaily news release states:

"The conclusions add to other evolving evidence that may finally force many paleontologists to reconsider their long-held belief that modern birds are the direct descendants of ancient, meat-eating dinosaurs, OSU researchers say….

OSU research on avian biology and physiology was among the first in the nation to begin calling into question the dinosaur-bird link since the 1990s. Other findings have been made since then, at OSU and other institutions, which also raise doubts. But old theories die hard, Ruben said, especially when it comes to some of the most distinctive and romanticized animal species in world history.

"Frankly, there's a lot of museum politics involved in this, a lot of careers committed to a particular point of view even if new scientific evidence raises questions," Ruben said. In some museum displays, he said, the birds-descended-from-dinosaurs evolutionary theory has been portrayed as a largely accepted fact, with an asterisk pointing out in small type that "some scientists disagree."

(Discovery Raises New Doubts About Dinosaur-bird Links, ScienceDaily (June 9, 2009).

We have pursued two goals: evaluation of whether the BMT hypothesis is as well supported as has been claimed, and evaluation of alternative hypotheses for the origin of birds within a comparative phylogenetic framework. We conclude that, because of circularity in the construction of matrices, inadequate taxon sampling, insufficiently rigorous application of cladistic methods, and a verificationist approach, the BMT hypothesis has not been subjected to sufficiently rigorous attempts at refutation, and the literature does not provide the claimed overwhelming support. Our analyses and independent data indicate that two of the alternatives to the BMT hypothesis are as probable as the BMT and are potentially supported by specific osteological data. These alternatives are the early-archosaur hypothesis, positing a sister-group relationship between Longisquama and Aves, and a variant of the crocodylomorph hypothesis. Both hypotheses include the proposition that some maniraptorans are actually birds more derived than Archaeopteryx.

(Frances C. James and John A. Pourtless IV, "Cladistics and the Origins of Birds: A Review and Two New Analyses," Ornithological Monographs, 66:1-78 (2009).)

Posted by Casey Luskin at 9:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

Evolutionists group species by similarities, thinking this reveals patterns of common descent. Then they find another similarity (not surprisingly with the same pattern) and they conclude it must have evolved. After all, it fits the pattern.

The logic is laughable, and here's a funny example. Evolutionists are now concluding that laughter evolved in a common ancestor of the great apes and humans. And how do they figure this? First, they tickled 22 apes and three humans (your tax dollars at work). Then they discovered similarities. As the BBC reports:

Because the sounds of the most closely related apes matched most closely in the analysis of the laughter, the researchers believe the work is proof of laughter's shared evolutionary origin, followed by adaptation to its form in the species we see today.

Editor's Note: This is crossposted at Cornelius Hunter's blog, Darwin's God.

Posted by Cornelius Hunter at 9:15 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Before you head to the beach this summer, don't forget to grab a few good books. Over at ID the Future, I've attempted to aid you by interviewing a number of authors with new books out this month. You can listen to these authors discuss their books and judge for yourself what is most interesting:

First, I interviewed J. Budziszewski on his latest book on natural law theory, The Line Through the Heart: Natural Law as Fact, Theory, and Sign of Contradiction.

Second, see my interview with Benjamin Wiker on his new biography The Darwin Myth: The Life and Lies of Charles Darwin.

Third, check out this interview with John Mark Reynolds on his new introduction to classical and Christian thought, When Athens Met Jerusalem: An Introduction to Classical and Christian Thought.

Posted by Logan Gage at 9:31 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Blogger David T. at Life’s Private Book has a good post on our modern priesthood. David quotes Baron d’Holbach from the18th century:

"Man has been forced to vegetate in his primitive stupidity; nothing has been offered to his mind, but stories of invisible powers, upon whom his happiness was supposed to depend. Occupied solely by his fears, and unintelligible reveries, he has always been at the mercy of his priests, who have reserved to themselves the right of thinking for him, and directing his actions."

David notes that we still have priests, but they are secular priests—Experts—and they provide us with a semblance of meaning and healing:

…the referents have changed. The "invisible powers" offered to man today are not angels and demons, but obscure material forces...

He observes that modern man, in the place of priests of old,

…[has] "experts" who dispense therapy and pills to relieve his depression, other experts who construct government education and welfare programs, without which obscure social forces will inevitably turn him into a criminal, and yet other experts who inspect his genetic code like tea leaves and tell him that he is doomed to be a loser anyway. Instead of confession, we have therapy; instead of the sacrament of baptism, we have the sacrament of abortion; instead of Calvinism, we have genetic determinism.

We need priests because the fundamental state of man is our contingency. We are in a state of ‘primitive stupidity’ in the sense that we do not intrinsically know metaphysical truth, the answers to such questions as ‘why is there anything’ and ‘why are we here’. Much of our lives are implicitly or explicitly devoted to answering these questions, and we depend, and have always depended, on priests. Our answer is to worship. We differ in the priests we consult, and by what we worship.

Our scientific pursuits are part of our effort to understand our contingency, and to take some control over our lives. That scientific endeavor has arisen from, and not despite, fervent religious belief, generally of the orthodox Judeo-Christian variety. The dependence of the rise of modern science on Judeo-Christian theology, philosophy, and social and economic structures is a matter of historical fact.

We are entering an era in which a substantial and loud minority of atheist scientists and philosophers are claiming that science validates and depends on atheism and materialism. A ferocious fight has broken out in the pro-Darwinist blogosphere over this question: are philosophical naturalism and atheism essential to good science? Some of those on the side of accommodation with religion no doubt are atheists who believe that accommodation of religious beliefs is necessary for tactical reasons; others, such as Ken Miller and Francis Collins, are scientists who are Christians and who see their science as entirely compatible with their theism.

This debate is about whether worship at the materialist/atheist altar is a prerequisite for good science. My sense of it is that the accomodationists have easily gained the upper hand. The atheist insistence that science depends on and validates atheism is historically ignorant and philosophically incoherent.

That theists and open-minded agnostics and atheists on the pro-Darwinist side of this debate are finally engaging the same fundamentalist atheist dogma that intelligent design proponents have engaged for several decades is a good sign. Fundamentalist atheists are of course fighting back ferociously, because they understand, as perhaps the accomodationists don’t, the profound implications of an understanding of the natural world that is not causally closed.

Teleology is obvious in nature. Atheists and materialists intrinsically deny the reality of teleology-- Aristotelian final causation-- in nature, yet nothing in the natural world can be understood without reference to teleology. Science is saturated with reference to purpose and goals of natural things. Atheists deny teleology, because acceptance of teleology in nature raises devastating questions about their atheist faith.

Fundamentalist atheists-- secular priests-- fight ferociously to extinguish challenges to their faith, because they understand that to raise the question of teleology in nature is to answer it. Atheism, for good reason, fears questions.

Posted by Michael Egnor at 10:17 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

This is the final installment of three posts responding to Stephen Barr. The first post can be found here, and the second post can be found here.

The Collins/Barr Approach: A God Who Misleads?
Stephen Barr identifies himself with the position of Francis Collins who argues that although evolution looks like “a random and undirected process,” it nevertheless could have been guided by God. “Evolution could appear to us to be driven by chance, but from God’s perspective the outcome would be entirely specified.” [Collins, The Language of God, p. 205.]

Barr takes me to task for highlighting Collins’ use of the word “could” because I implied that “Collins is not sure whether God did in fact know beforehand. Anyone who has read Collins’s book, however, should realize that Collins absolutely and unequivocally holds the belief that God knows all events from all eternity.” Really? In the same book that Collins says that God “could” have known and specified the outcome of evolution, he also claims that much of our DNA is basically junk that certainly was not the product of God’s intentional design. In particular, Collins goes on at length about “Ancient Repetitive Elements,” which he disparages as “genetic flotsam and jetsam” that make up “roughly 45 percent of the human genome.” Collins concedes that “some might argue that these are actually functional elements placed there by the Creator for a good reason, and our discounting of them as ‘junk DNA’ just betrays our current level of ignorance. And indeed, some small fraction of them may play important regulatory roles. But certain examples severely strain the credulity of that explanation.” [Language of God, p. 156, emphasis added] In other words, Collins rejects as credulous the idea that such DNA were planned by God for a reason. So much for the idea that God knew and specified the outcomes of evolution from eternity.

It should be pointed out that Collins’ claims about the human genome being “littered” with “junk DNA” are spectacularly wrong. Virtually every week new studies come out showing that the DNA Darwinists previously wrote off as “junk” perform incredibly important functions in the genome (for additional information on this point see here and here and here.)

Collins’ arguments on behalf of junk DNA certainly raise questions about whether he truly accepts directed evolution in the way that Barr thinks. Additional ambiguity about Collins’ position comes from the fact that Collins delivered the keynote address at a conference on “Open Theology and Science” in 2008. “Open” theists explicitly deny that God knows the future, and this denial presumably would extend to the outcomes of evolution. Did Collins embrace, repudiate, or dodge open theism in his keynote address? If he did not repudiate open theism, why not, if he holds the position Barr thinks? Unfortunately, the recording of Collins’ talk has been lost, according to conference organizers. Too bad. It might have shed light on Collins’ actual beliefs in this area. One more fact worth considering: Collins has lavished praise on the works of biologist Kenneth Miller, who (as mentioned previously) denies that God knows or wills the specific outcomes of evolution. To my knowledge, Collins has not publicly criticized Miller’s heterodox approach. Why not, if Collins really believes that God knows and specifies the outcomes of evolution?

Regardless of Collins’ real views, I’m perfectly willing to analyze Collins’ proposal on its face. Collins suggests that God could have created a process that looks random and undirected even though He actually directs it and specifies its outcomes. As I pointed out in my book Darwin’s Conservatives, I accept Collins’ proposal as a logical possibility. In the abstract, God could have chosen to create a guided process that looks to us as if it is unguided. The relevant question for a Christian or Jew, however, is did God create life in that way based on what we know about His character and own self-explanations to us? The answer to that question seems clear:

While Collins’ view is logically compatible with the idea that God actively guides the development of His creation, it is still in tension with the traditional Biblical understanding of God. Both the Old and New Testaments teach that human beings can recognize God’s handiwork in nature through their own observations rather than special divine revelation. “The heavens declare the glory of God; And the firmament shows His handiwork,” proclaimed the psalmist. The apostle Paul likewise argued that “since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made....” The idea that God’s action in the world is in principle undetectable by us seems hard to reconcile with the traditional Judeo-Christian view that God’s design in nature is clearly evident to all human beings through the use of their reason. [Darwin’s Conservatives, pp. 69-70.]

Contra Barr, the issue here has little to do with the validity of “secondary causes.” No one I know doubts that God acts through secondary causes. The issue is whether human beings can discern evidence of God’s activity in nature through the things He created. Darwinists deny this, and Collins and Barr seem to as well (at least in the area of biology). Joe Carter is exactly right that the Collins’ position seems strangely similar to the view embraced by some Biblical creationists that God has misled us by creating things that look like they are ancient even though they aren’t. Similarly, Collins and Barr suggest that God created life through a process that looks “random and undirected” even though it’s not.

Historic Christian theology—Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox—presents a radically different picture of God’s creative activity in nature. In addition to the passages from Psalms and Romans I referenced in Darwin’s Conservatives, Jesus himself pointed to the feeding of birds and the exquisite design of the lilies of the field as observable evidence of God’s active care towards the world and its inhabitants. (Matthew 6:26-30) The observability of design was a key theme in the writings of the early church fathers as well. Responding to the Epicureans’ denial of any sort of creator, early Christians repeatedly affirmed that nature provided evidence that it was the product of purposeful design. In the words of Theophilus (115-188 AD), Bishop of Antioch in the 2nd century: “God cannot indeed be seen by human eyes, but is beheld and perceived through His providence and works… as any person, when he sees a ship on the sea rigged and in sail, and making for the harbor, will no doubt infer that there is a pilot in her who is steering her; so we must perceive that God is the governor [pilot] of the whole universe.” [Theophilus, Theophilus to Autolycus, Book I] What were these “works” through which we could see the intelligent activity of God? Theophilus went on to list the regularities of nature from astronomy, the plant world, the diverse species of animals, and the ecosystem.

Similar arguments about how nature displays clear evidence of design were made by Dionysius (200-265 AD), Bishop of Alexandria; Lactantius (240-320 AD), known as the “Christian Cicero”; and John Chrysostom (347?-407 AD), Archbishop of Constantinople. Anyone who doubts the key place of design in Christian theology should read the passages collected here or the recently published anthology The Patristic Understanding of Creation. Barr tries to invoke the authority of Augustine and Aquinas on behalf of Collins’ view, but his discussion obscures the central fact that both Augustine and Aquinas, just like the early church fathers, clearly believed that nature supplied evidence of rational design. They certainly did not believe that God created life through a guided process that was made to look like it was “random and undirected.”

Of course, the argument that nature provides evidence of intelligent design predates Christianity and Judaism (one can find it in Plato, among others), and it definitely is not restricted to Christianity and Judaism. But the idea that nature displays the hallmarks of design unquestionably has been a standard part of Jewish and Christian teaching for thousands of years.

The tensions between Darwinian (undirected) evolution and Christianity are legion. For the vast majority of evolutionary biologists (starting with Darwin himself), undirected evolution means just that: undirected, and it contradicts the idea that evolution was guided by God or any intelligent cause. For theists like Ken Miller and George Coyne, preserving undirected evolution means abandoning traditional teachings about God’s omniscience and omnipotence. For Collins and Barr, accepting Darwinism apparently requires the repudiation of the view of the church from its founding that God’s design can be detected throughout the natural world in the things that he made. God’s action in nature becomes hidden—at least in the process that led to us (human beings). Interestingly, both Collins and Barr seem open to finding evidence of design in physics and astronomy. Only in the area of biology do they carve out an exception where it’s verboten to raise the question of intelligent design. Of course, it is biology that has the most impact on how we view the human person, not physics and astronomy. It is strange indeed for Christians to be willing to accept evidence of design when it comes to the generation of things like stars and planets, but not the development of living things like human beings.

This essay has focused on the theological challenges posed by Darwinism, but I want to be clear that whatever Darwinism’s implications, the truth or falsity of Darwin’s theory needs to be determined by the evidence. However, an open and robust discussion of the evidence for and against Darwin’s theory is not helped by papering over the very real implications of the theory for religion and culture. One reason it is important to have a genuine debate over the evidence for Darwin’s theory is that the stakes of the outcome are so high.

Posted by John West at 7:23 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

This is the second of three posts responding to Stephen Barr. The first post can be found here.

Mainstream Theistic Evolution: Directed or Undirected?
In the initial decades after Darwin proposed his theory, theistic evolution typically was presented as a form of guided evolution. Although Darwin himself rejected the idea that evolution was guided by God to accomplish particular ends, many of Darwin’s contemporaries (including those in the scientific community) rejected undirected natural selection as sufficient to explain all the major advances in the history of life. Instead, according to historian Peter Bowler, there was widespread acceptance of the idea “that evolution was an essentially purposeful process... The human mind and moral values were seen as the intended outcome of a process that was built into the very fabric of nature and that could thus be interpreted as the Creator’s plan.” [Bowler, Darwinism (1993), p. 6]

This view of evolution as a purposeful process began to disintegrate early in the twentieth century after Darwinian natural selection underwent a resurgence due to work in experimental genetics. Once Darwin’s theory of undirected evolution became the consensus of the scientific community, the task for mainstream theistic evolution became considerably harder: Now one had to reconcile theism not just with the idea of universal common ancestry, but with the idea that the development of life was driven by an undirected process based on random genetic mistakes. But how can God “direct” an “undirected” process? The answer of many leading theistic evolutionists is clear: God didn’t.

For example, former Vatican astronomer George Coyne claims that “not even God could know… with certainty” that “human life would come to be.” [“The Dance of the Fertile Universe,” p. 7] And biologist Kenneth Miller of Brown University, author of the popular book Finding Darwin’s God (which is used in many Christian colleges), insists that “Evolution is a natural process, and natural processes are undirected” and flatly denies that God guided the evolutionary process to achieve any particular result—including the development of human beings. Indeed, Miller insists that “mankind’s appearance on this planet was not preordained, that we are here… as an afterthought, a minor detail, a happenstance in a history that might just as well have left us out.” [Finding Darwin’s God (1999), pp. 244, 272]

Miller does say that God knew that the undirected process of evolution was so wonderful it would create some sort of rational creature capable of praising Him eventually. But what that something would be was radically undetermined. How undetermined? At a 2007 conference, Miller admitted that evolution could have produced “a big-brained dinosaur” or a “mollusk with exceptional mental capabilities” rather than human beings. [Quoted in West, Darwin Day in America, p. 226]

Similar claims that God doesn’t know or guide the specific outcomes of evolution can be found in the writings of Georgetown University theologian John Haught.

So, contra Stephen Barr, even many leading theistic evolutionists insist that Darwinian evolution must really be undirected. Again, Barr can try to redefine modern Darwinian theory to allow for guided evolution. But because Barr’s attempted redefinition of evolution is rejected by most evolutionary biologists (not to mention many leading theistic evolutionists), it does nothing to resolve the tension between modern evolutionary biology as currently understood and practiced and Judeo-Christian theism.

Be this as it may, what can one say about Barr’s redefinition of evolution on its own terms? If one were to accept Barr’s redefinition of Darwinian evolution, would that actually solve the tension between evolutionary biology and Judeo-Christian theism? I will examine the matter further in my third and final post responding to Barr.

Posted by John West at 6:30 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (2)

Theistic evolutionist Stephen Barr is a serious and thoughtful man, and on the First Things blog, he has raised some serious and thoughtful objections to an essay I wrote for The Washington Post as well as to reflections on that essay by Joe Carter (also at the First Things blog). Unfortunately, I think Barr’s criticisms confuse matters more than they clarify them. Nevertheless, I’m grateful that he has aired his objections, because some of his misunderstandings are shared by other conservative intellectuals, and they deserve a response. This is the first of three posts responding to Barr.

False Dilemma or Wishful Thinking: Is Darwinian Evolution Undirected or Not?
Barr first claims that Joe Carter and I “are trapped in a false dilemma” because we wrongly think that random processes cannot be directed by God. Barr points out that even random events, properly defined, are part of God’s sovereign plan. Just because something is random from our point of view, doesn’t mean that it is outside of God’s providence. Barr may be surprised to learn that I agree with him. Indeed, most, if not all, of the scholars who believe that nature provides evidence of intelligent design would agree with him. The problem with Barr’s argument is not with his understanding of the proper meaning of random, but with his seeming blindness to the fact that the vast majority of evolutionary biologists do not share his view. Barr’s ultimate disagreement here is not with me or Joe Carter, but with the discipline of evolutionary biology itself.

Barr claims that “[w]hen scientists say that certain things in nature are random, this does mean that Nature is in a certain sense blind; it does not imply anything about God’s knowledge or purposes.” I don’t know which “scientists” Barr thinks he is speaking for, but they surely aren’t most evolutionary biologists. When Darwinian biologists say that natural selection is a blind process fueled by random biological changes, they most assuredly think that this claim contradicts the belief that evolution is guided—by God or any other intelligent cause. It should be noted that the insistence that evolution is undirected goes back to Darwin himself, who explicitly framed natural selection as a blind and non-teleological process. Criticizing those who believed that evolution was somehow guided, Darwin wrote:

no shadow of reason can be assigned for the belief that variations... which have been the groundwork through natural selection of the formation of the most perfectly adapted animals in the world, man included, were intentionally and specially guided. However much we may wish it, we can hardly follow Professor Asa Gray in his belief “that variation has been led along certain beneficial lines,” like a stream “along definite and useful lines of irrigation.” [Charles Darwin, The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication, second edition (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1883), vol. II, pp. 428-429]

The insistence that evolution acts without plan or purpose has been a standard refrain by evolutionary biologists over the past century. The view expressed by famed Harvard paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson was typical: “Man is the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind.” [Simpson, The Meaning of Evolution: A Study of the History of Life and of Its Significance for Man, revised edition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), p. 345] Or to cite a more recent example: In 2006, 38 Nobel laureates sent an open letter to the Kansas Board of Education insisting that evolution is “the result of an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection.” (emphasis mine)

The same insistence that evolution is undirected can be found ad nauseum in biology textbooks over the past several decades. According to the college biology text A View of Life (1981), evolution is “a natural process without purpose or inherent direction.” [pp. 586-587] According to Evolutionary Biology (1998), “[b]y coupling undirected, purposeless variation to the blind, uncaring process of natural selection, Darwin made theological or spiritual explanations of the life processes superfluous.” [p. 5] According to Life: The Science of Biology (2001), accepting “the Darwinian view... means accepting not only the processes of evolution, but also the view that... evolutionary change occurs without any ‘goals.’ The idea that evolutionary change is not directed toward a final goal or state has been more difficult for many people to accept than the process of evolution itself.” [p. 3]

The belief that Darwinian evolution is undirected probably explains why biology is more dominated by atheists and agnostics than any other scientific discipline. According to a 1998 survey of members of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), nearly 95% of NAS biologists are atheists or agnostics; and according to a 2003 survey of leading scientists in the field of evolution, 87 percent denied outright the existence of God, 88 percent disbelieved in the existence of life after death, and 90 percent rejected the idea that evolution is directed toward an “ultimate purpose.” Even among rank and file biologists at all American universities and colleges, more than 60% classify themselves as atheists or agnostics.

In sum, when it comes to the field of evolutionary biology, Barr’s assurance that “scientists” don’t think random processes imply anything about whether God directed evolution is plainly wrong. His view comes close to being an exercise in wish-fulfillment. Barr essentially tries to redefine Darwinian evolution so that it no longer excludes the idea that evolution could be directed. But one can’t resolve the debate over the implications of Darwinism by definitional fiat. Barr may be frustrated that Darwinian biologists misunderstand the real nature of randomness, but that doesn’t change the fact that the vast majority of evolutionary biologists think natural selection is an undirected process by definition. That’s their theory. If Barr wants to come up with a new definition of evolutionary theory that is not inherently undirected, fine. But he shouldn’t try suggest that it is somehow consistent with mainstream evolutionary biology. It’s not, and intimating otherwise simply spreads confusion, not clarity.

As it turns out, it’s not only atheistic evolutionists who disagree with Barr. Even many current “theistic” evolutionists insist that evolution is genuinely undirected. That will be the subject of my next post.

Posted by John West at 8:01 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

Once upon a time scientists were supposed to be skeptical. Scientific theories, we were taught, were to be questioned. Yes scientists were to formulate theories, but they were also to search for evidence against theories, even their own. And while such a noble action as searching for problems with one's own theory might be too much to ask, certainly scientists were never to protect a theory against contradictory evidence or mislead the public. That would be the ultimate scientific sell out. Scientists were to be objective, and to follow the evidence where ever it may lead.

Those days are gone — long gone. Misleading the public, covering up evidence, protecting theories — that is all standard fare today. We have now arrived at the sad state where evidence that is contrary to evolution — any contrary evidence — is not allowed. Consider this recent exchange between Yudhijit Bhattacharjee of Science magazine and evolution crusader Eugenie Scott:

Science magazine: How has this battle changed in the past 20 years?

Eugenie Scott: The enemy has become more diverse. When I started, it was just creation science. Now we have creation science, intelligent design [ID], and straight-up antievolution in the form of "evidence against evolution."

Editor's Note: This is crossposted at Cornelius Hunter's blog, Darwin's God.

Posted by Cornelius Hunter at 8:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Today’s New York Times features an article by science writer Nicholas Wade highlighting what Wade calls “surprising advances [that] have renewed confidence that a terrestrial explanation for life’s origins will eventually emerge.”

Yet the scientists quoted in the article fail to address the fundamental issue that has generated the longstanding impasse in the field: the problem of the origin of biological information.

Wade describes the various developments in pre-biotic chemistry that are making some scientists more optimistic about solving the problem of the origin of life. Yet, the central problem facing them is not the synthesis of pre-biotic building blocks or even discovering an environment in which life might have plausibly arisen—difficult as these problems have proven to be. Instead, the fundamental problem is getting the chemical building blocks to arrange themselves into the large information-bearing molecules (such as DNA and RNA) that direct the show in living cells.

Even the experiments of Gerald Joyce that Wade describes do not address this problem. The “self-replicating” RNA molecules that Joyce constructs are not capable of copying a template of information from free standing chemical subunits as the polymerase machinery does in actual cells. Instead, in Joyce’s experiment, a pre-synthesized specifically-sequenced RNA molecule merely catalyzes a single chemical bond, thus fusing two other pre-synthesized partial RNA chains. More significantly, Joyce intelligently arranged the matching base sequences in these RNA chains. Thus, as my forthcoming book Signature in the Cell shows, Joyce’s experiments not only demonstrate that self-replication itself depends upon information-rich molecules, but they also confirm that intelligent design is the only known means by which information arises.

Posted by Stephen C. Meyer at 2:51 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Yesterday, ENV interviewed molecular biophysicist and Discovery Institute fellow Cornelius Hunter on his new web-book Darwin's Predictions. Our conversation continued:

ENV: A typical instance of a failed prediction would be that Darwin himself expected the geology and paleontology would confirm that the earth is at least 400 million years old, because that’s how long he thought it must need to evolve its repertoire of species. We now know that while the earth and life are much older than that, the time frame for the development of most animal body plans or phyla in the Cambrian explosion occurred in a geological flash of probably of less than 10 million years. What do you think is the most devastating failed prediction you discuss? How would you crystallize it simply, perhaps as cocktail-party ammunition?

CH: That’s a difficult question, there are so many. Of course today DNA is a popular topic, so the finding of long stretches of identical DNA in distant species is a good one. Evolutionists have worked hard to figure out how this could be, but have not even come up with a good epicycle yet.

Then there is the evolution of contradictory behavior patterns, such as altruism. Evolution has undergone a big makeover in the past fifty years in trying to explain such behaviors. The evolution narrative has become incredibly creative in explaining every behavior imaginable. Loyalty, sacrifice, honor, suspicion, obligation, shame, remorse, moral indignation — the list goes on and on of the incredible powers of evolution.

But I think my favorite is that the minor, adaptive, changes that we do observe in populations is now known to be responsive to environmental pressures. Organisms have complex cellular mechanisms that intelligently and rapidly respond to environmental changes. Again, it is fundamental to the theory of evolution that biological variation be blind, not responsive, to environmental pressures. The only epicycle available to evolutionists is that evolution created phenomenally complex mechanisms so that evolution could occur.

ENV: I can imagine a Darwinist objecting that these predictions are outdated. Theories naturally develop, and as they do they, scientists throw off new predictions — predictions that in Darwinism’s case, the theory can in fact pass. Your response?

CH: Again it comes back to the reaction. It certainly is true that some false predictions can be remedied by quite reasonable theory adjustments. For instance, I can predict how far a cannon ball will fly, but if I ignore the atmospheric drag I will consistently overestimate the distance. Then I learn about atmospheric drag, incorporate it into my theory, and my predictions are more accurate. The adjustment corresponds well to new knowledge about an observable phenomenon in nature -- atmospheric drag. It is clear that atmospheric drag is not merely a contrived epicycle. It can be empirically studied. The evolutionary epicycles, on the other hand, have become intricate and complex, and quite disconnected from any observable phenomenon in nature.

ENV: How do you think an honest Darwinist, who’s not fooling himself, would reply to your thesis?

CH: I really don’t think there is such an evolutionist. I’ve discussed and debated the evidence with many evolutionists, and to a person they simply do not address the issues squarely. I’d like to think that this is all a misunderstanding about the evidence; that evolutionists, or their skeptics, or both are simply confused about the science. I’d like to think that this could all be cleared up with a sober assessment of the empirical data. But the discussion never even approaches such a high point. When you interact with evolutionists, you quickly realize that it is not about science and the evidence. It never was.

ENV: Darwinists seem blind to this pattern of false predictions because, as you write, they’ve arrived at their theory by a process of elimination, limited by a metaphysical doctrine that rules out other plausible explanations of life’s development, such as design. For them, Darwinism has to be true because there’s no other possibility. So Darwinists are compelled to mold their interpretations of data to match the preconceived theory. Is the really ultimate problem that metaphysical assumption ruling out design? If so, where does it come from?

CH: Yes, that sums it up. The metaphysics underlying evolution, and its history, are somewhat complex, but the bottom line is they rule out design. Ironically, the metaphysical mandates for evolution come from a spectrum of Christian traditions in the West — primarily Anglicans, Lutherans and Roman Catholics. Darwin’s work was loaded with religious claims about God — those were the strong arguments for evolution. Darwin had to explain away the empirical data, but the religious arguments were quite powerful. This religious incursion into science by no means began with Darwin. You can trace the intellectual history of these mandates for at least two centuries before Darwin. Today, evolutionists make these arguments all the time without even realizing the non-scientific premises they are relying on. The whole debate can be quite subtle.

ENV: I hope you’ll get a chance draw together this material into a printed book form at some point. It’s great. Thanks again for your time!

CH: Thank you so much. Let me just say that I have written three books on this subject and I felt the need to make the information accessible on the Internet. Of course DarwinsPredictions.com does not contain all the details in my books, but it does give me a chance to update the information with the latest scientific findings.

Posted by David Klinghoffer at 7:44 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

As we are ever quick to point out here at ENV, the case for Darwinian evolution has been crumbling in recent years as scientific research points to design in nature. Now a unique, new argument for intelligent design is about to revolutionize the debate over evolution.

On June 23, Dr. Stephen Meyer's long-awaited Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design (HarperOne) will break open the radical and comprehensive new case, revealing the evidence not merely of individual features of biological complexity but rather of a fundamental constituent of the universe: information.

Learn more about the book at the new website, SignatureInTheCell.com, and look for continuing updates here at Evolution News & Views.

Posted by Anika Smith at 12:40 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The testability of scientific ideas by making predictions about reality is a favorite theme with Darwinists and the atheists who love them. In The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins endorses a new atheist Ten Commandments, whose seventh commandment reads: “Test all things; always check your ideas against the facts, and be read to discard even a cherished belief it if does not conform to them.” Incidentally, that would replace the old seventh commandment, “Thou shalt not commit adultery.”

Dawkins hails evolution’s “strong prediction that if a single fossil turned up in the wrong geological stratrum, the theory would be blown out of the water.” He contrasts this with the Bible’s record of predictions. In another New Atheist tract, God: The Failed Hypothesis, physicist Victor Stenger writes, “We have no risky prediction in the scriptures that has come true.”

So with Darwinian activists, quite a lot hangs on predictions and testability. Intelligent design advocates argue that their idea is empirically testable, and Stephen Meyer lists a variety of applicable tests in his new book Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design. The heart of Dawkins’ argument for atheism is a critique of the design hypothesis. If it’s true that ID can be successfully tested by making predictions about empirical reality, what of Darwinian theory? Is it enough to say, as J.B. Haldane quipped, that Darwinism would be falsified if fossil rabbits were discovered in the Cambrian strata?

Molecular biophysicist and Discovery Institute fellow Cornelius Hunter puts Darwin to the test in a new website that is really a free, easily printed book in itself: Darwin’s Predictions. His argument? Darwinian evolution indeed makes predictions — which, however, routinely fail. This requires evolutionary scientists to come up with increasingly baroque additions to and speculations upon their theory to make the data fit with the theory. It all becomes increasingly, suspiciously complicated. For example, Darwinism has a very hard time explaining altruism. Selflessness, especially toward those outside one’s family, is not what you’d expect from the evolutionary scenario. Darwinists strain to come up with explanations, resulting in many serendipitous just-so stories that are less and less tethered to scientific fact.

ENV interviewed Dr. Hunter about Darwinism’s confounded expectations, which Hunter illustrates in areas including DNA coding, molecular processes, the genomes of similar and distant species, mechanisms of biological change, animal and human behavior, and more.

ENV: Thanks for taking the time to answer some questions, Dr. Hunter. And congratulations, Darwin’s Predictions is a very readable, very accessible, and provocative piece of writing. Devastating, I would think. First of all, your subject seems like such an obvious one. Have Darwinism’s failed predictions not been covered before? Were you the first to notice the pattern? How did the idea come to you?

CH: Well, believe it or not, evolutionists are not very meticulous when it comes to tallying their failures. In fact, quite the opposite, evolutionists are positively triumphant, saying that evolution is as much a fact as is gravity. So you can see that false predictions just don’t seem very relevant to evolutionists. Who cares? The theory is a fact.

ENV: Would you give us a little historical background on testing by prediction? It goes back famously to Karl Popper, but how did the idea enter the canon of scientific thinking?

CH: Yes, Popper tried to establish criteria for what constitutes legitimate science — the demarcation problem — but simply as a matter of practicing science, the idea of testing predictions was around long before Popper. The problem is, however, you cannot just use predictions alone to evaluate scientific theories. Many different theory-evaluation methods have been proposed, and there is no winner. There is no cookbook approach to deciding if a theory should be discarded. So theory evaluation for theories in the gray area can be difficult. But a great many of the theories developed by scientists are not anywhere close to the gray area. Most fall by the wayside because they are obviously not good theories, and they do not require complex philosophical thought to evaluate. Evolution falls into this category. I don’t say that evolution is false simply because statements about truth value carry a much greater burden. What is obvious, though, is that evolution is not a good scientific theory.

ENV: Does evolutionary theory make any successful predictions that are meaningful and interesting?

CH: Well, I like the way you phrase the question. Evolution certainly does make successful predictions, but meaningful and interesting ones are difficult to locate. For instance, evolution predicts many similarities in species that are close together in the evolutionary tree, and few similarities in species that are far apart in the evolutionary tree. And we find such evidence in biology. But we routinely find significant contradictions as well. So the prediction becomes a soft prediction rather than a hard prediction. The prediction predicts the pattern where the pattern is found, but not where the pattern is not found. So the prediction is really not very meaningful or interesting.

ENV: You compare the state of evolutionary thinking to geocentrism, the idea that the sun and planets go around the earth. To explain the way planets sometimes traveled one way then another in the sky, contrary to what a geocentric model would predict, astronomers invented fictional epicycles to make sense of their unexpected observations. Would you give us a simple example of a Darwinian “epicycle”?

CH: This is where things get interesting, I think. In order to fix a false prediction the theory needs to be adjusted so that it no longer makes the false prediction. So for geocentrism the false predictions were corrected by having the planets and other objects travel in very complicated patterns, involving epicycles. In fact, using epicycles the model became very accurate, and before Kepler and Newton there was no physical reason to think that objects in the sky could not move in such patterns. But the model became highly complex — it is a great illustration of the tradeoff that often occurs between the complexity and the accuracy of a scientific theory.

You can always maintain accuracy by adding more complexity to the explanation, but then the question arises: is the explanation a description of the way nature really works, or just a description of the observables? This is a key distinction in the philosophy of science, and geocentrism is a good example of a theory with very high accuracy that was merely describing the observables, rather than nature itself.

What I think is actually more interesting than evolution’s false predictions are the reactions to those false predictions, and the incredibly complex additions to the theory that were required. Like geocentrism, evolution has a large number of epicycles. For instance, dramatic similarities are sometimes found in otherwise distant species. The eye of the squid and the human, for example, are incredibly similar. Such design convergence is rampant in biology, in spite of the evolutionary expectation. Evolutionists explain convergences as arising from similar environmental pressures.

But it has always been absolutely fundamental to the theory of evolution that biological variation be blind, not responsive, to environmental pressures. Natural selection works according to the environmental pressures, but selection only works on preexisting designs. The idea that the incredibly similar complexity of the eye just happened to arise twice independently — in very different environments — is an excellent example of an epicycle.

Tomorrow: Part II of ENV's interview with Cornelius Hunter!

Posted by David Klinghoffer at 8:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

There was a time when most scientists were also deeply religious men. When scientists were not forced to choose between belief in God and the rigorous pursuit of scientific knowledge. But that all ended with Charles Darwin.

In his stunning new book, The Darwin Myth, CSC fellow Benjamin Wiker cuts through the politically correct lies and cultural misconceptions to reveal the true Charles Darwin: the man who separated God from science.

Now you can go here to get a free chapter and take a preview of Regnery Publishing's new book, The Darwin Myth.

Posted by Robert Crowther at 2:00 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Is it somehow petty, offensive, exploitative, and beyond the pale to point out how the Holocaust Memorial Museum shooter, who murdered a guard on Wednesday, writes about evolution in his sick manifesto? Should it be considered beneath one's dignity to quote the man and let his words speak for themselves?

James von Brunn, the suspect in question, is a white supremacist, a bitter anti-Semite, a Holocaust-denier, a wacked out conspiracy theorist, who served more than 6 years in a federal prison for attempted kidnapping. All this is fair game to report. Everyone agrees to that. But the fact that he writes of "Natural Law: the species are improved through in-breeding, natural selection and mutation. Only the strong survive. Cross-breeding Whites with species lower on the evolutionary scale diminishes the White gene-pool" -- that's somehow inappropriate to note in public?

That seems to be the message from the media, which has ignored the fact, and from some readers who have responded to my blog on the subject. I realize the topic is uncomfortable for all sides in the evolution debate. So let's try to step back and consider this rationally.

It's historically undeniable that Darwinian thinking forms a thread linking some of the most reprehensible social movements of the past 150 years. I and many other people, including professional historians (which I'm not), have written about this repeatedly and from many different angles. By all means check out my own most recent contributions on the theme of "Darwin's Tree of Death."

From Darwin's own musings on the logic of genocide, to his cousin Francis Galton's influential advocacy of eugenics, to the Darwin/monkey statuette on Lenin's desk, to Hitler's Mein Kampf with its evolutionary theme, to the biology textbook at the center of the Scopes trial that advocated racism and eugenics, to the modern eugenics movement right here in the U.S., to recent school shootings in which the student murderers invoked natural selection, to yesterday's tragedy at the Holocaust Memorial Museum, and much more along the way -- the thread is persistent, if widely ignored.

Should it be ignored? No, it shouldn't. I will give you an analogy. Our culture is very comfortable reminding us often of atrocities committed in the name of religion -- whether it's the Crusades, the Inquisition, or 9/11. Ironically, the day of the Holocaust Museum shooting, an interesting new Jewish web magazine, Tablet, published a fascinating scholarly essay by Paula Fredriksen about how under the Nazis, some German theologians tried to fit Jesus into a Nazi mold. They drew on anti-Jewish writings widely available in Christian tradition.

Is it "beyond the pale" to point this out? No, of course not. So what's the difference? I would say it's not only appropriate to document the dark side of religion. It's necessary. The Anti-Defamation League commented on the Holocaust Museum shooting, pointing to this "reminder that words of hate matter, that we can never afford to ignore hate because words of hate can easily become acts of hate, no matter the place, no matter the age of the hatemonger."

Exactly. It's also the case that ideas have consequences and knowing those consequences can rightly prompt us to look with renewed skepticism at a given idea, whether religious or scientific. 9/11 was a good reason to go back and take a second look at Islam. Not to reject it, but to consider it critically. The Crusades are a good reason to do the same with Christianity. Not to reject it, but to think twice. That's all.

Why would the incredibly popular and influential work called Mein Kampf not be a reason to think twice about Darwinism? Not to reject it, but to get yourself properly informed and make up your own mind rather than simply go along with the prestige culture and media view.

The legacy of Mein Kampf included the murder of 6 million Jews. As Richard Weikart meticulously documents in From Darwin to Hitler, Hitler's book was part of a stream of intellectual influence that began with Darwin and continued through to Hitler. It's with us today and it played a part in the demented thinking of James von Brunn, "a peripheral but well-respected figure among American white supremacists," as the ADL notes.

If you want a good chill, Google the phrase "natural selection" as it appears on the popular neo-Nazi website Stormfront.org. Here, I've done it for you.

It doesn't negate the point to remind me that Hitler put his own wicked spin on kindly Charles Darwin's words, one that Darwin himself would absolutely repudiate. Nor that evolutionists like James von Brunn have a crude grasp of evolutionary theory. Nor that today's evolutionary scientists, unlike their fairly recent predecessors, do not truck with racism (though some certainly do truck with anti-religious agitation, reserving special venom for the God of the Hebrew Bible).

All these same things could be said about religion-based haters of today and centuries past. They too distort their tradition. Yet they emerge from it, and so, again, that's a sound reason to give a second, skeptical look to the relevant religious traditions.

What's not reasonable is to give Darwinism's social influence a special pass, forbidding any mention of it as somehow out of bounds. Very far from reasonable indeed, it's nothing less than a cover-up.

Posted by David Klinghoffer at 2:44 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

This is the second part of a review of The Darwin Myth by Benjamin Wiker. Part one is available here.

An element of the Darwin story that may surprise many readers of Benjamin Wiker’s fine new biography The Darwin Myth is the ultimate disconnect between Darwin and many of his colleagues.

Wiker points out that many of Darwin’s avid supporters, who accepted and helped popularize his theory, rejected Darwin’s materialistic reductionism. They argued, indeed, that the evidence did not support Darwin’s materialistic understanding of evolution.

Biologist Asa Gray at Harvard was Darwin’s strongest champion in America. However, as Wiker tells us, “Gray believed that the human mind could not be explained as the material result of natural selection.” He did not see how mind could arise from instinct. Charles Lyell, Darwin’s friend and an eminent scientist in his own right, and Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-discoverer with Darwin of the theory of evolution through natural selection, both believed that the evidence did not show an evolutionary continuum between the mental faculties of apes and man. So-called “savages” (members of tribal and other non-European races) have intellectual capacities that far exceed their survival needs; there is no Darwinian way to account for this.

Darwin would have none of it. Privately, he let these friends and fellow-scientists know his displeasure. In the case of Asa Gray, Wiker writes:

The problem was, of course, that Darwin himself had designed the theory to eliminate any connection to God whatsoever. He disagreed with Gray’s theological spin entirely, and was perhaps peeved by some of Gray’s implicit criticisms of his atheism, and the materialistic foundation of his argument. That is not what he meant the theory to do, and in private letters he politely made his objections known to Gray. Yet—and this was typical of Darwin—he had no qualms about using Gray’s argument if it would smooth the way for acceptance of his theory. Once the theory was accepted, the theistic patina would be ground away by the hard, anti-theistic core of the argument.

According to Wiker, the motive behind Darwin’s endeavors was not to follow the evidence wherever it led. His real motive was to insist that science must embrace only unintelligent material causes. It was not enough that his mechanism explain a great deal. The mechanism must explain everything, so that all intelligent causes could be ruled out.

The repercussions of Darwin’s materialistic understanding of evolution can be seen in his later writings. Wiker’s biography of Darwin is notable in that it examines the ideas of not only The Origin of Species but the companion book The Descent of Man, or, as Wiker describes it, “One Long Argument, Two Long Books.”

Many writers on Darwin pay scant attention to The Descent of Man. Yet it is there where Darwin demonstrates the sweeping way that he applied his theory to human beings and human morality. Darwin makes clear in the book that the noble qualities of his own character, his devotion in marriage, his love for his children, even the compassion that fueled his opposition to slavery have no inherent value in his evolutionary system. If adultery or infanticide or even slavery of the weak by the strong (as practiced by red ants enslaving black ants) promoted the survival of a species, including the human species, then those things would be equally “good” according to the logic of Darwin’s argument, Darwin’s personal misgivings notwithstanding.

Anyone wishing to probe the broader implications of Darwin’s theory, as well as the contradictions of Darwin’s character, will want to read Wiker’s book.

Posted by Sonja West at 7:45 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

“Folks, this is one of the most exciting games in Super Bowl history! In case you just tuned in, here’s what’s happening: With only 8 seconds to go, the Buffalo Bills are trailing the New York Giants 20-19, but in the past two minutes Bills quarterback Jim Kelley has moved his team to the Giants’ 29-yard line, setting up kicker Scott Norwood for a field goal attempt. If Norwood makes it, the Buffalo Bills will win 22-20.”

Watched by tens of thousands in Tampa Stadium and millions more on TV, the Buffalo Bills line up for what will probably be their last play.

“OK, there’s the snap, and the kick. The ball is going, going—but it’s drifting wide to the right. Wait a minute! Some Bills players have pulled up the goalpost, and they’re moving it over—just in time! Norwood’s kick sails through the uprights! The Buffalo Bills win Super Bowl Twenty-Five!”

Of course, that’s not what happened in 1991; Norwood missed, and the Giants won. Football is played with rules and referees—and fixed goalposts.

Darwinism, unlike football, has only one rule: survival of the fittest. The fittest are those who survive, and Darwinists are determined to survive at all costs—even if it means moving the goalpost. In the June 2009 issue of Scientific American, Darwinist Steve Mirsky does just that.

Read more here.

Posted by Jonathan Wells at 11:02 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Given how routinely evolution fails to explain biology, it is remarkable that scientists still believe in the nineteenth century idea. One of the many problem areas is adaptation. Evolution holds that populations adapt to environmental pressures via the natural selection of blind variations. If more fur is needed, and some individuals accidentally are endowed with mutations that confer a thicker coat of fur, then those individuals will have greater survival and reproduction rates. The thicker fur mutation will then become common in the population.

This is the evolutionary notion of change. It is not what we find in biology. Under the hood, biology reveals far more complex and intelligent mechanisms for change, collectively referred to as epigenetic inheritance. You can read more about the challenge that this form of inheritance poses for evolution here. The take home message is that adaptation is routinely found to be not blind, but rather responsive to environmental pressures. The fur becomes thicker not by accident, but via cellular mechanisms responding to a need.

There is still much to learn about this phenomenal built-in adaptation capability, but it now is clear, and has been for several years, that epigenetic inheritance is a dramatic departure from evolutionary expectations. Indeed, this sort of adaptation is closer to the ideas of the long disgraced French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829). Lamarck's idea was that offspring inherit traits or characteristics that were acquired by the parents. Although epigenetic inheritance is far more complex than anything Lamarck imagined, he was remarkably close to what is now being discovered. You can see a recent review of what has been learned here. Only a few years ago positive references to Lamarck drew heated response. Such ideas were not tolerated. Now his name appears regularly in the epigenetics literature.

This leaves evolutionists in an awkward position, to say the least. For years many have been resisting these evidences. I raised these evidences in a debate once and the evolutionist flatly denied any such thing. The problem is that such intelligent adaptation capabilities suggest design, not accident. Evolution is left with the unlikely explanation that evolution constructed elaborate adaptation mechanisms so that evolution could then occur — hardly the obvious explanation. It is yet another example of how evolution is failing to explain biology.

Editor's Note: This is crossposted at Cornelius Hunter's blog, Darwin's God.

Posted by Cornelius Hunter at 8:30 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

According to Benjamin Wiker’s provocative new biography, The Darwin Myth: the Life and Lies of Charles Darwin, Charles Darwin was an honorable and likable man, a family man. He loved his siblings; he was devoted to his wife; he loved his children and grieved deeply over his daughter’s death.

But Darwin was also someone who presented to the public an elaborate and even deceptive story about himself and his work to advance a philosophical agenda.

While there are many biographies of Charles Darwin, Wiker’s deserves attention because of its fascinating account of the complex interaction between Charles Darwin, the man, and Darwinism, the theory he advocated and popularized. Wiker’s presentation of Darwin’s human contradictions is a valuable contribution to this Darwin anniversary year (the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Origin of Species).

Wiker demonstrates that Darwin coupled his theory of evolution — the idea that all living things descend from a common ancestor through a blind process of natural selection acting on random variations — with his persistent materialism. As Wiker writes: “The problem with Charles Darwin is not evolution itself, but his strange insistence on creating an entirely godless account of evolution. That evolution must be godless to be scientific is the Darwin Myth.”

To back his “myth,” Darwin created a story about himself which departs in significant ways from the reality, according to Wiker. For example, Darwin claimed that he had originally believed in not only religion, but orthodox Christianity. In his autobiography, written years later, Darwin talks about the time when he was considering the idea of entering the ministry. Wiker is skeptical:

So he read a few theology books, and “as I did not then in the least doubt the strict and literal truth of every word in the Bible, I soon persuaded myself that our Creed must be fully accepted.”

Given his background, this statement rather stretches credulity.

The belief that all reality is material and that everything that exists is derived from purposeless, material causes, has a long philosophical history. In Darwin’s case, it also had a long family history. As Wiker explains, before Darwin was born his grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, was an advocate of evolution (which he called “transmutationism”) and, like many European intellectuals, of atheism. Erasmus Darwin called himself a Deist, but according to Wiker his skepticism had gone so far beyond Deism that even Unitarian Samuel Taylor Coleridge, after meeting him, concluded: “He is an Atheist.” As Wiker explains, “Erasmus famously described Unitarianism as a featherbed to catch a falling Christian. Whatever Erasmus was, he was beyond that.” According to Wiker, Darwin followed in his grandfather’s footsteps:

for Darwin, the notion of a soul and the afterlife was by now [the time of his marriage] entirely unintelligible. He was a thoroughgoing materialist, just as his grandfather had been, just as his father remained.

We know this because for about two years he had been busy writing away in his very private notebooks, all his most private thoughts about transmutationism. And the notebooks make very clear that he was after a particular version of the transformation of species, an entirely materialist version, one that began, with the aid of his father, as a meditation on his grandfather’s Zoönomia. In his “MNotebook” of 1838, we find that he probes his father for information, and both are bantering back and forth about the Zoönomia. Again and again we find “my father thinks,” “my father says.”

Although in later years Darwin preferred to describe himself as “agnostic,” his writings make clear according to Wiker that for all practical purposes Darwin embraced atheism. Indeed much of Darwin’s preference for the term agnostic appeared to be prudential: Darwin did not want to further shock his wife, a theist who was already dismayed at her husband’s lack of faith, or his contemporaries.

Perhaps Darwin’s insistence on absolute rejection of any reality except material realities was really loyalty to his family, who had been atheists for at least three generations. However, Darwin was reluctant to acknowledge his debts to others, even his own ancestors. Although all Darwin’s basic arguments about the transmutation of species were already present in his grandfather Erasmus Darwin’s book Zoönomia, Darwin longed to claim that the theory of evolution was his alone:

One of Charles Darwin’s very few character flaws was this: he was oddly possessive about his theory, so much so that he failed to acknowledge his predecessors, including his own grandfather, until his detractors pointed out the glaring omissions. He wanted the theory of evolution to be his discovery, his creation, his baby.

I’ll have more on Wiker’s fine new book in a second post later this week.

Posted by Sonja West at 11:15 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The latest "junk" DNA finding is that pyknons have been found in the much studied plant Arabidopsis thaliana. Pyknons are short (about 20 nucleotides) DNA sequence patterns that are common, and show up in both genes and the "junk" regions of DNA (introns and intergenic).

In addition to their dual presence as (i) evolutionary "junk" (which increasingly is being found to be useful in spite of evolutionary expectations) and (ii) within genes, pyknons are also similar to regulatory RNA sequences, and have some interesting correlations and patterns regarding their chromosomal positioning.

So why are pyknons so prevalent in these "junk" DNA regions. The researchers think they are a by-product of the action of RNA gene silencing. In other words, it's just junk after all. If the history of evolutionary expectations is a useful guide, you can expect that this will be yet another one gone wrong.

Editor's Note: This is crossposted at Cornelius Hunter's blog, Darwin's God.

Posted by Cornelius Hunter at 8:26 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

One of the coolest animals on the planet has got to be the cuttlefish. They are notorious for their ability to change color to camouflage themselves, communicate with one-another, stand out and be intimidating, or confuse predators. According to a recent MSNBC article titled, “Color-shifting cuttlefish inspire TV screens,” scientists “are developing cuttlefish-inspired electronic ink and screens that use less than one-hundredth the power of traditional television screens.” According to the article, the screens are cheap to make and easy to assemble: “The screen is so easy to assemble, said Thomas, that he that is working with a Boston area science teacher to produce a version cheap enough, safe enough and simple enough for middle and high school students to build in chemistry class.” There are some drawbacks to this design: “Since the screens reflect light instead of creating light, they can only be used in a lit area.” Nonetheless, engineers are hopeful:

"The tunability of these systems is fantastic," said Stephen Foulger, a professor at Clemson University also working on reflective screens. "There is a huge span of colors and applications. ... this is a nice system that has a huge span of colors, and that can often trump problems like viewing angle."

So we may soon have affordable, energy-efficient, cuttlefish inspired flat screen TVs and computer monitors everywhere. But of course, there’s no design overtones to see here folks. None whatsoever.

Posted by Casey Luskin at 8:53 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Editor's Note: This is crossposted at Cornelius Hunter's blog, Darwin's God.

The much maligned Don McLeroy has a column in today's Bryan-College Station Eagle. Recall that McLeroy has been accused of a host of nefarious deeds, including recklessly disregarding the advice of education experts, causing the Texas State Board of Education to be “extremely dysfunctional,” fueling endless culture wars, and putting ideology and partisanship ahead of the schoolchildren of Texas. So what does McLeroy have to say for himself?

Well he starts right off with the ludicrous idea of teaching only science in science class. I can now see why everyone was so upset. McLeroy writes that there is no place for any ideology, religious or otherwise in science class. He obviously is up to no good. He also argues that students should be able to challenge untestable ideologies being taught as dogma. This of course will undermine the authority of the teacher and textbook.

We all agree with the need for, so-called, critical thinking. But McLeroy takes this to a dangerous extreme, essentially bringing anarchy to the classroom. Students need to be taught theories that everyone already knows are true. It profits no one for students to question the truth. Students may ask questions about theories, but not question the theories themselves. McLeroy fundamentally misunderstands what critical thinking is all about.

McLeroy's ulterior motives become all too obvious when he addresses the theory of evolution (which is really a fact). He thinks, of all things, that students should study evidence for common ancestry, such as in the fossil record. McLeroy would then allow these young, impressionable, students to question evolution.

It is hard to believe that we are even debating how to teach science. Students obviously need to be taught, and tested on, the truth. Questioning the truth will get them nowhere.

Posted by Cornelius Hunter at 6:01 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Editor's Note: This is crossposted at Professor Scot McKnight's Beliefnet blog, Jesus Creed. The first post in this series is found here, and the second here.

The Origin of Beauty

Benjamin Wiker and Jonathan Witt’s masterful book A Meaningful World: How the Arts and Sciences Reveal the Genius of Nature gives the following illustration of how modern scientific reductionists treat nature and the arts:

Imagine hearing the following account of one of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s symphonies: ‘We have been able to prove that this particular symphony is actually reducible to a series of notes that happen to be played both at the same time in chords and one after another, creating a string of disturbances in the air caused by different frequencies. We realize, of course, that these disturbances cause further disturbances in the audience, due in part to the presence of Earth’s particular atmosphere and in part to the effect such disturbances have on the apparatus of the ear as transmitted by neurons to the brain—so disturbing, in fact, that some break into voluntary tears, remarking that they seemed to be hearing the very harmonies of heaven. Happily, we now know that there is nothing more to Mozart’s work in particular and to music in general than mere notes, themselves reducible to waves disturbing air.’

Continue Wiker and Witt:

Such reductionism displays the kind of bluntness of soul we found in Sigmund Freud, which could reduce the glory of Hamlet to the irrational gurglings of sexual desire. It is the precise bluntness of soul that led Charles Darwin to reduce the origin of music to mating calls and, hence, to the sexual desire that drives sexual selection.

As University of Chicago biologist Jerry Coyne writes, “any injection of teleology into evolutionary biology violates precisely the great advance of Darwin’s theory: to explain the appearance of design by a purely materialistic process—no deity required.”

In chapter six of The Origin, Darwin further destroys the beauty of beauty, demoting it to an illusion which, once again, enhances reproductive fitness. Darwin there writes that if his theory is true, nothing in nature was created for the beauty of man. Nor is beauty of any real substance, but completely arbitrary.

The Darwinian, at least in his philosophical commitments, is tone deaf. As A.N. Wilson (the great biographer of C.S. Lewis) recently wrote of philosophical materialists in explanation of his re-conversion to Christianity, “they seem to me like people who have no ear for music, or who have never been in love. It is not that (as they believe) they have rumbled the tremendous fraud of religion—prophets do that in every generation. Rather, these unbelievers are simply missing out on something that is not difficult to grasp. Perhaps it is too obvious to understand; obvious, as lovers feel it was obvious that they should have come together, or obvious as the final resolution of a fugue.”

Nature’s design is just like this. Too obvious to grasp. (As Lewis said, fish don’t feel wet.) But this is why we need the artist. For the artist senses the transcendent and eternal in the mundane and temporal. She makes plain what should be plain; stirs in us what is simmering unconsciously. Conveys the immaterial through the material.

So why have so many of the best artists of our generation, even rather secular ones—the Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.s, the Tom Wolfes, etc.—been unable to shake their skepticism of Darwinian fairytales? Because Darwin’s view strikes at the heart of the artist’s soul, reducing all purposes, all agency actually, to survival. The Darwinian world is no longer a shadowland, for it is without Sun. To the artist, however, such reductionism will ever echo falsely in the quiet hour, when another world whispers.

Posted by Logan Gage at 8:43 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Editor's Note: This is crossposted at Professor Scot McKnight's Beliefnet blog, Jesus Creed. The first post in this series is found here.

Intelligent Design and the Deity

In the predominant narrative, Charles Darwin was a humble scientist who proposed a strictly scientific theory. Upon publication of The Origin of Species in 1859, religious folks like Bishop Wilberforce voiced theological objections to it; and thus began the most salient episode in the ‘war between science and religion.’ Many Christians adopt a similar narrative, but suggest this was all a misunderstanding; Darwin’s theory simply has nothing to do with religious or philosophical questions.

If I may be so bold, I’d like to suggest that both narratives are wrong.

(For a good, short critique of the “conflict thesis” of science and religion, see God’s Undertaker by Oxford’s John Lennox.) If one reads The Origin, the fact that Darwin is presupposing certain views of God and creation fashionable in Victorian England is striking. This theory involved more than strictly scientific questions from the beginning.

One such theological conception common in this debate (touched upon by RJS in a recent post) involves whether God is a “tinkerer.” Kenneth Miller, Catholic Darwinist of Brown University, sums up this view well. He thinks that neo-Darwinism’s view of God is better than ID’s:

The God of the intelligent design movement is way too small…. In their view, he designed everything in the world and yet he repeatedly intervenes and violates the laws of his own creation. Their God is like a kid who is not a very good mechanic and has to keep lifting the hood and tinkering with the engine.

First, if ID is only the proposition that an intelligent cause explains some features of nature better than mere material causes, then the ID advocate is not necessarily committed to intervention in the process of creation. God could (intelligently) set up nature to unfold a certain way. He need not intervene in “gaps.” All ID requires is that intelligent design was involved and that the effects of this design are empirically discernable.

Michael Behe, for example, thinks there were probably not any interventions by God in creation. Other ID theorists think otherwise.

Second, and more to our point, as post-modern philosophers of science often point out, even the questions we ask are from a certain frame of reference. Miller seems to ask, ‘Why would God create a world which he has to tinker with?’ But wouldn’t it be equally valid to ask, ‘Why would God design a process in which he isn't going to be involved?’

Is “tinkering” really the only way to look at it? Tinkering is a rather loaded term. Did Monet “tinker” or did he add detail, richness, and complexity? Would Monet have been a better artist if instead of tinkering with paintings he created a machine which relied upon a random number generator to manufacture them without his involvement? It might have saved him some work, but it wouldn’t have let him be an artist. (And one supposes God isn’t too concerned with saving work.)

St. Thomas often relied upon the principle that effects cannot be greater than their causes. In this regard, wouldn’t it be odd if the creator of artists should not also be an artist?

Posted by Logan Gage at 1:04 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Sometimes after explaining how the now-defunct junk-DNA mindset was encouraged and fostered by neo-Darwinian evolution, evolutionists respond by asserting that nonetheless some individuals from their camp explored function for junk-DNA. This, they claim, absolves their neo-Darwinian camp from any charges of science-stopping, and shows that the neo-Darwinian paradigm did not hinder research into junk-DNA. But if a 2003 article in Science is any indication, then it seems that the neo-Darwinian paradigm did indeed impose a taboo on research into function for junk-DNA. As the article stated:

Although catchy, the term ‘junk DNA’ for many years repelled mainstream researchers from studying noncoding DNA. Who, except a small number of genomic clochards, would like to dig through genomic garbage? However, in science as in normal life, there are some clochards who, at the risk of being ridiculed, explore unpopular territories. Because of them, the view of junk DNA, especially repetitive elements, began to change in the early 1990s. Now, more and more biologists regard repetitive elements as a genomic treasure."

(Wojciech Makalowski, "Not Junk After All," Science, Vol. 300(5623):1246-1247 (May 23, 2003).)

In fact, even some of the evolutionary biologists who risked "ridicule" to seek function for junk-DNA have lamented how their paradigm has stifled research into junk-DNA. Also in 2003, John Mattick, an evolutionist biologist who is a standout because of his research seeking function for junk-DNA, stated in Scientific American the following striking comment:

“I think this will come to be a classic story of orthodoxy derailing objective analysis of the facts, in this case for a quarter of a century,” Mattick says. “The failure to recognize the full implications of this—particularly the possibility that the intervening noncoding sequences may be transmitting parallel information in the form of RNA molecules—may well go down as one of the biggest mistakes in the history of molecular biology.”

(John S. Mattick quoted in W. Wayt Gibbs, “The Unseen Genome, Gems Among the Junk,” Scientific American (November, 2003).)

A Prediction about Future Junk Hypotheses
The central dogma, as it’s commonly called, of molecular biology entails the fact that the information in DNA is transcribed into RNA, which is then translated to create proteins. In March I recounted how once function was suggested, partly through the discovery of large-scale transcription, for non-coding DNA, evolutionists "pushed the 'junk' back to RNA." As I noted, evolutionists have "effectively argued, 'Sure, we know that most of the genome is being transcribed into RNA, but that doesn't mean that the RNAs have function. Much of the transcriptome might in fact be junk.'" Because evolutionists love the "junk" argument, I predict that now that there is evidence of function for RNA, we're going to see evolutionists push the "junk" back another level and postulate much of the proteome is junk: "junk proteins."

In fact, when I came up with this idea I suspected that perhaps I wasn't the first person to think of it. So I searched for "junk protein" and immediately found that yes, some evolutionists have already proposed this concept. Here's an abstract from one such paper:

It has recently been shown that many proteins are unfolded in their functional state. In addition, a large number of stretches of protein sequences are predicted to be unfolded. It has been argued that the high frequency of occurrence of these predicted unfolded sequences indicates that the majority of these sequences must also be functional. These sequences tend to be of low complexity. It is well established that certain types of low-complexity sequences are genetically unstable, and are prone to expand in the genome. It is possible, therefore, that in addition to these well-characterised functional unfolded proteins, there are a large number of unfolded proteins that are non-functional. Analogous to ‘junk DNA’ these protein sequences may arise due to physical characteristics of DNA. Their high frequency may reflect, therefore, the high probability of expansion in the genome. Such ‘junk proteins’ would not be advantageous, and may be mildly deleterious to the cell.

(Simon C Lovell, "Are non-functional, unfolded proteins (‘junk proteins’) common in the genome?," FEBS Letters, Vol. 554(3):237-239 (November 20, 2003).)

Discovery Institute fellow Cornelius G. Hunter has also noted the Darwinian love-affair with “junk” and how this will lead to hypotheses about “junk proteins.” At his new blog, Darwin’s God (Darwins-God.blogspot.com), Hunter recently wrote a post titled "Now It’s Junk Protein," where he writes that the assumption of junk "pervades evolutionary thinking, and shows up again and again to be wrong. This week, instead of the usual junk-DNA-turned-marvel, it is junk protein."

So I'll make a little prediction: Based upon current trends, the hypothesis that many proteins are in general always junk is going to go the same way as junk-DNA and junk-RNA: into the junk-pile.

An Interlude: A Quick Rebuttal to the YouTube “challenge’s” Response to me
A recent YouTube response to my response to the YouTube “challenge” video makes false charges that I misquoted Francis Collins. To set the record straight, I'd like to show what Dr. Collins wrote, what I said he said, and how there was no misrepresentation whatsoever of Dr. Collins on my part. I include this here because it involves a relevant discussion of "junk" DNA and how the data is continually refuting that viewpoint.

In his book The Language of God, Francis Collins wrote:

"This evidence alone, of course, does not prove a common ancestor; from a creationist perspective, such similarities could simply demonstrate that God used successful design principles over and over again." (The Language of God, pg. 134)

Collins writes in The Language of God that genetic similarity "alone does not, of course, prove a common ancestor" because a designer could have "used successful design principles over and over again."

I also stated: "the presence of shared functionally similar sequences between different organisms does not make a good test of discriminating between design and descent. Even leading evolutionists like Francis Collins recognize this point." (emphasis added) The key word there is "functionally similar" — I'm talking about Collins' view with respect shared functional sequences here, not his views regarding shared non-functional or "junk" DNA. And Collins plainly stated that such shared functional similarity (i.e. "successful design principles" that are "used over and over again") does not refute common design in favor of common descent. That’s pretty much all I said about Collins in my post.

So let’s again make clear the very limited point on which I was citing Collins: I was only citing him to back my argument that shared functional biological similarity is not evidence of common descent instead of common design. This contravened a claim made in the YouTube challenge video. That’s all I was citing Collins to say. In particular, I never claimed Collins argued the genome was intelligently designed, and as you can see, I even noted that Collins is an "evolutionist," and thus it should have been pretty clear that he rejects biological design.

So what's the problem? The video response to my blog post gets quite upset because Collins also says in that same paragraph I quoted above: "The study of genomes leads inexorably to the conclusion that we humans share a common ancestor with other living things," and "As we shall see, however, and as was foreshadowed by the discussion of 'silent' mutations in protein-coding gene regions, the detailed study of genomes has rendered that interpretation virtually untenable--not only about other living things, but also about ourselves." The video implies that because Collins clearly believes the genome was not intelligently designed, I somehow misrepresented his views.

Did I misquote or misrepresent Collins? Again, I never said that Collins didn’t believe in common descent, and as I said, I noted that he’s an “evolutionist,” so it should have been pretty clear he rejects biological design. Moreover, in the quote from Collins above on page 134, he clearly thinks that shared functional similarity (i.e. "successful design principles" that are “used … over and over again”) does not necessarily demonstrate common descent over common design. Since that's all I said about Collins, again I fail to see how there was any misrepresentation of his views.

So why does Collins think the genome was not designed? It’s not because of shared functional similarity, but rather he argues against design based upon what he thinks is shared functionless similarity, or functionally unnecessary similarity, particularly shared junk-DNA. Thus if you read on past page 134 in Collins’ book, he makes it clear that he thinks the purported shared junk-DNA — i.e. shared functionless genetic sequences are what demonstrate common ancestry over common design. He calls such junk DNA sequences "genetic flotsam and jetsam" (p. 136) and holds that it’s only when we are dealing with shared sequences that are non-functional (i.e. junk) that we uncover a strong argument for common descent:

Even more compelling evidence for a common ancestor comes from the study of what are known as ancient repetitive elements (AREs). ... Mammalian genomes are littered with such AREs, with roughly 45 percent of the human genome made up of such genetic flotsam and jetsam. ... There are AREs throughout the human and mouse genomes that were truncated when they landed, removing any possibility of their functioning. ... Unless one is willing to take the position that God has placed these decapitated AREs in these precise positions to confuse and mislead us, the conclusion of a common ancestor for humans and mice is virtually inescapable. (The Language of God, pp. 135, 136-137)

Of course, some might argue that these are actually functional elements placed there by a Creator for a good reason, and our discounting them as 'junk DNA' just betrays our current level of ignorance. (The Language of God, p. 136)

In sum, I never said Collins felt the genome was intelligently designed. All I said was that that he admits that shared functional similarity does not refute design. The original YouTube “challenge” video feels different than Collins because it argued that shared functional similarity does refute design and implies common descent instead of design. Thus, the video claimed that a gene is only designed when it has no known homologues (i.e. it is completely unique). According to the “challenge” video, if two functional proteins are similar, they were not designed, and when we find homology for a functional protein, that somehow refutes intelligent design. I correctly quoted Collins as part of my argument that the video was simply incorrect on this point.

The context of our dialogue over the YouTube video was regarding shared functional similarity (the video discussed protein homology), and not shared functionless similarity. Collins rejects design of the genome for reasons that are different from what we were talking about in the dialogue over the YouTube video, for he rejects design not due to shared functional similarity, but due to shared functionless similarity.

The other video is unwittingly misquoting Collins by implying that the Collins quote that I provided above on page 134 is regarding shared junk-DNA, when it isn’t; it’s about shared functional DNA. Indeed, I agree with Collins that shared functional similarity is not evidence for descent over design, and that shared functionless similarity can point to common descent over common design. I suggested Collins believed otherwise in my piece.

Regardless of the YouTube video’s misguided accusations, there is one major thing wrong with Collins’ argument: As discussed below, while Collins is right that shared non-functional "junk"-DNA can indicate common ancestry, he’s wrong to presume this repetitive DNA is necessarily non-functional "junk."

A Reality Check for Francis Collins’ Argument: Discovery of Function for Repetitive DNA
We have now seen how the eminent evolutionist biologist Francis Collins relies heavily upon the alleged lack of function of repetitive DNA as an argument for common descent. Yet papers are coming out all the time that report function for so-called “junk” repetitive DNA. In "A Reply to Francis Collins’s Darwinian Arguments for Common Ancestry of Apes and Humans," Logan Gage and I recount the finding of a variety of functions for repetitive DNA. Below is a summary of two articles from the past few weeks reporting studies that found function or so-called “junk” repetitive DNA:

We are often told that the evidence for evolution is “overwhelming.” If “evolution” is defined as “change over time” or “minor changes within existing species,” this is a truism. But what if “evolution” means Charles Darwin’s theory? According to Darwin, all living things are descendants of a common ancestor that have been modified by unguided processes such as random variation and natural selection.

Despite the hype from Darwin’s followers, the evidence for his theory is underwhelming, at best. Natural selection—like artificial selection—can produce minor changes within existing species. But in the 150 years since the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, no one has ever observed the origin of a new species by natural selection—much less the origin of new organs and body plans. As a result, the only evidence that all living things are biologically descended from a common ancestor comes from comparisons of the similarities and differences among fossil and living species. When making such comparisons, however, Darwinists start by assuming common ancestry. Then they try to fit similarities and differences into the branching-tree pattern that would result from it, and they ignore the glaring inconsistencies that often remain.

So the evidence for anything more than minor changes within existing species is surprisingly flimsy. In most other scientific fields, a theory with so little empirical support would probably have been discarded by now. To make matters worse for Darwinism’s defenders, their theory now faces a new challenge: intelligent design (ID). According to ID, evidence from nature shows that some features of living things are explained better by an intelligent cause than by unguided natural processes.¹

Junk DNA to the Rescue?
Darwin was mistaken about the origin and hereditary transmission of variations, and it wasn’t until his followers embraced Mendel’s competing theory of genetics in the 1930s that evolutionary theory began to rise to the prominence it enjoys today. According to modern neo-Darwinism, genes that are passed from generation to generation carry a program that directs embryo development; mutations occasionally alter the genetic program to produce new variations; and natural selection then sorts those mutations—the raw materials of evolution—to produce organisms better adapted to their environment.

In the 1950s, molecular biologists discovered that sequences of nucleotide subunits in an organism’s DNA encode proteins, and they equated “gene” with “protein-coding sequence.” When genetic mutations were traced to molecular accidents in the DNA, neo-Darwinian theory seemed complete. In 1970, molecular biologist Jacques Monod announced that with its “physical theory of heredity” and “the understanding of the random physical basis of mutation that molecular biology has also provided, the mechanism of Darwinism is at last securely founded. And man has to understand that he is a mere accident.”²

With design seemingly eliminated, Oxford professor Richard Dawkins wrote in 1976 that the only “purpose” of DNA is to ensure its own survival. Dawkins considered the predominant quality of successful genes to be “ruthless selfishness.” It follows that “we, and all other animals, are machines created by our genes. Like successful Chicago gangsters, our genes have survived, in some cases for millions of years, in a highly competitive world.” A body is simply “the genes’ way of preserving the genes unaltered.” Thus natural selection favors genes “which are good at building survival machines, genes which are skilled in the art of controlling embryonic development.” And genes control embryonic development by encoding proteins that build the body.³

By the 1970s, however, it was clear that most of the DNA in humans and many other animals does not code for proteins. In 1972, Susumu Ohno remarked that there is “so much ‘junk’ DNA in our genome.” ⁴ Dawkins was aware of this, but he argued that such junk was consistent with the logic of neo-Darwinism. “The amount of DNA in organisms,” he wrote, “is more than is strictly necessary for building them: a large fraction of the DNA is never translated into protein. From the point of view of the individual organism this seems paradoxical. If the ‘purpose’ of DNA is to supervise the building of bodies, it is surprising to find a large quantity of DNA which does no such thing. Biologists are racking their brains trying to think what useful task this apparently surplus DNA is doing. But from the point of view of the selfish genes themselves, there is no paradox. The true ‘purpose’ of DNA is to survive, no more and no less. The simplest way to explain the surplus DNA is to suppose that it is a parasite, or at best a harmless but useless passenger, hitching a ride in the survival machines created by the other DNA.”⁵

In 1980, Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel argued in Nature that “much DNA in higher organisms is little better than junk.” The spread of junk DNA in the course of evolution “can be compared to the spread of a not-too-harmful parasite within its host.” Since it is unlikely that such DNA has a function, “it would be folly in such cases to hunt obsessively for one.” In a companion article, W. Ford Doolittle and Carmen Sapienza similarly argued that many organisms contain “DNAs whose only ‘function’ is survival within genomes,” and that “the search for other explanations may prove, if not intellectually sterile, ultimately futile.”⁶

Some biologists wrote to Nature expressing their disagreement. Thomas Cavalier-Smith considered it “premature” to dismiss non-protein-coding DNA as junk, and Gabriel Dover wrote that “we should not abandon all hope of arriving at an understanding of the manner in which some sequences might affect the biology of organisms in completely novel and somewhat unconventional ways.” Orgel, Crick and Sapienza replied that “most people will agree” that higher organisms contain “parasitic” DNA or “dead” DNA. “Where people differ,” they wrote, “is in their estimates of the relative amounts. We feel that this can only be decided by experiment.”⁷

In 1980, the techniques for DNA sequencing were tedious and slow, but they improved rapidly. In 1990, the U.S. Department of Energy and National Institutes of Health established the Human Genome Project (HGP), with the goal of sequencing the entire human genome by 2005.⁸

Throughout the 1990s, however, many biologists continued to regard much of human DNA as non-functional “junk.” For example, according to the 1995 edition of Voet & Voet's Biochemistry “a possibility that must be seriously entertained is that much repetitive DNA serves no useful purpose whatever for its host. Rather, it is selfish or junk DNA, a molecular parasite.” Indeed, it may be that “a significant fraction, if not the great majority, of each eukaryotic genome is selfish DNA.”⁹

In the coming days I'll address the junk-DNA hypothesis in more detail.

Notes:
¹ “What Is the Theory of Intelligent Design?” Center for Science & Culture, Discovery Institute. Available online (2009) here.
² Monod is quoted in Horace Freeland Judson, The Eighth Day of Creation: The Makers of the Revolution in Biology. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979, p. 217.
³ Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (New York: Oxford, 1976), pp. 2, 24-25.
⁴ Susumu Ohno, “So much ‘junk’ DNA in our genome,” Brookhaven Symposia in Biology 23 (1972): 366-70.
⁵ Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, p. 47.
⁶ Leslie E. Orgel & Francis H.C. Crick, “Selfish DNA: the ultimate parasite,” Nature 284 (1980): 604-607.
W. Ford Doolittle & Carmen Sapienza, “Selfish genes, the phenotype paradigm and genome evolution,” Nature 284 (1980): 601-603.
⁷ Gabriel Dover, “Ignorant DNA?” Nature 285 (1980): 618-620.
Thomas Cavalier-Smith, “How selfish is DNA?” Nature 285 (1980): 617-618.
Leslie E. Orgel, Francis H.C. Crick & Carmen Sapienza, “Selfish DNA,” Nature 288 (1980): 645-646.
⁸ Edmund Pillsbury, “A History of Genome Sequencing,” Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, Yale University (1997). Available online (2009) here.
⁹ Donald Voet & Judith Voet, Biochemistry, Second Edition (New York: Wiley, 1995), p. 1138.

Posted by Jonathan Wells at 8:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

When talking with friendly journalists, theistic evolution proponent Francis Collins typically insists that he wants to initiate a “dialogue” about faith and evolution.

But Collins and his colleagues at the Biologos Foundation seem curiously averse to engaging in real dialogue.

A case in point is a cranky blog entry posted this week by theistic evolutionist Karl Giberson, Francis Collins’ colleague at Biologos. Giberson, whom I debated at Biola University a few months ago, denounces Discovery Institute’s new Faith and Evolution website as “slick, well-resourced, rhetorically clever, profoundly misleading, and almost completely devoid of any real science.” Whew! Giberson’s own post might be charitably described as “almost completely devoid of any real substance.” Giberson goes on to claim:

At BioLogos, we present solid evidence in favor of evolution… We do not simply offer anti-design arguments and assume that we win by default. At Faith+Evolution, they produce no evidence for their position, nor do they even describe the “design model” they supposedly all embrace; all they present are arguments against evolution, with the supposed inference that “design” wins if evolution is defeated. In the final analysis, the site is little more than a exercise in rhetoric—how can we frame what looks like a compelling argument for a position that we can’t even articulate to ourselves.

I wonder how much of the Faith and Evolution site Giberson actually read. Our website certainly presents the scientific challenges to modern Darwinian theory—the sort of information you won’t find on Giberson’s Biologos site. But, contrary to Giberson, the Faith and Evolution site also presents the positive evidence for intelligent design. If you doubt this, go to the site’s topic page about intelligent design. There you can read this summary of the scientific evidence supporting design, along with links to additional articles that provide a more detailed discussion (links to some of these articles can also be found here). As for a thoughtful presentation of the overall evidence and logic of the theory of intelligent design, philosopher of science Stephen Meyer’s 33-page scholarly article is a great place to start. Unlike the completely one-sided Biologos site, Faith and Evolution also highlights articles by those with different views: just look at the Debates section.

Giberson’s broadside against Faith and Evolution is a remarkable example of projection. Giberson attacks a website with which he disagrees as “profoundly misleading, and almost completely devoid of any real science,” when it’s his own article that makes patently false claims with no evidence to back them up. Giberson’s basic approach is to insinuate that intelligent design proponents are insincere or disingenuous (hence our “slick” and “profoundly misleading” website). But Giberson never bothers to respond to the actual arguments offered throughout our website. To borrow a metaphor from our critics, this is intellectual exchange “in a cheap tuxedo.” It has the appearance of debate without its substance.

All in all, this is a strange way to do “dialogue”: Smear the integrity of the other party, rather than respond to his or her arguments. For myself, I don’t doubt that Giberson sincerely believes that the evidence supports Darwinian theory, or that he sincerely thinks that intelligent design is wrong. But it would be nice if he would return the favor and treat intelligent design proponents as sincere. In a good dialogue, both parties typically at least assume the good faith of each other and try to respond with arguments based on evidence, not specious attacks on motives.

Maybe Giberson and his colleagues hope that intelligent design proponents will disappear so they don’t have to engage them. But that’s not going to happen. The debate over design in nature has been one of the great debates in Western civilization reaching back as far as Plato, and it’s not about to go away. The accumulated evidence for intelligent design supplied by discoveries in physics, cosmology, astronomy, chemistry, biology, mathematics and related fields is simply too great.

Interestingly, the folks at Biologos essentially acknowledge the evidence for design in physics and astronomy. They just want to build a wall between those disciplines and biology: Outside of biology, reasonable people are allowed to discuss the evidence for design; inside biology, it’s verboten. The Biologos position might be called “designer lite.” But there is no good reason why evidence for design cannot be considered in whatever area it is found. When one discovers the same fine-tuning inside the cell that one finds in the universe as a whole, why shouldn’t one be able to draw the same inference? More to the point, why shouldn’t reasonable people be able to discuss the evidence for design in biology without having their motives questioned? Are the proponents of theistic evolution at Biologos so insecure that they don’t want to allow an open discussion that includes anyone who disagrees with them?

Posted by John West at 6:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Editor's Note: This is crossposted at David Klinghoffer's Beliefnet blog, Kingdom of Priests.

I'm a big fan of Rod Dreher. His Crunchy Con blog rarely fails to enlighten me, so I've been looking forward to his reflections on faith and science, generated by his current visit to Cambridge University as a Cambridge-Templeton fellow. Rod blogged today in response to a lecture and discussion in which evolution came up. He writes that "Darwinism wasn't initially opposed by Christians" and credits William Jennings Bryan with rallying the faithful against evolution. This is worth some further elaboration. How soon did opposition to Darwinism develop? Among whom, and why?

The question matters because if anti-Darwin sentiment only developed 60 years after the Origin of Species appeared, that might suggest it came from historical causes rather than reflecting fatal flaws in the evolutionary idea itself. With the passing of those historical circumstances, opposing Darwin today might then seem hopelessly outdated.

Darwinism means belief in the mechanism of unguided natural selection as fully capable of producing life's countless forms, thus supplanting any meaningful notion of design in biology. The idea was controversial from the start, scientifically and morally. In fact, early critics of all stripes, Christians and others, clearly perceived the worldview to which Darwin gave scientific-seeming confirmation. And they trembled.

On the new Faith and Evolution site, Benjamin Wiker reminds us that purely scientific resistance to natural selection arose quickly, including from some of Darwin's closet scientific allies -- even Alfred Russell Wallace, the co-discover of evolution:

Immediately upon publishing, [Darwin] threw himself into an enormous international effort to have his theory affirmed, pulling every string available. Four men were particularly influential as his helpmates in this endeavor: Charles Lyell, Asa Gray, Thomas Huxley, and Joseph Hooker. Along with...Alfred Wallace, they strove to make Darwinism respectable.

Ironically, three of these men -- Lyell, Gray, and Wallace -- affirmed evolution [in the sense of an old earth and common descent] but thought that natural selection alone was radically insufficient to account for man's moral and intellectual nature. Evolution needed God. Their "defection" so peeved Darwin that he wrote another book, The Descent of Man (1871), in which he made his case that our moral, intellectual, and "spiritual" aspects are all derived from natural and sexual selection. Evolution did not need God, thank you.

As the 19th century progressed, religious and other social thinkers saw what the future held. These included figures who have long been derided by elite, "sophisticated" opinion. For example, Bishop Samuel Wilberforce pointed out that Darwin's theory undermined traditional ideas of responsibility and free will. He cited as prophetic the 17th-century English philosopher Henry More's forecast that "vile epicurism and sensuality will make the soul of man so degenerate and blind, that he will not only be content to slide into brutish immorality, but please himself in this very opinion that he is a real brute already, an ape, satyr, or baboon." In this view, the embrace of Darwin was not only a potential cause of cultural degeneration but also a symptom of it.

The German pastor Rudolf Schmid wrote of Darwinism in 1876 that, as many critics perceived it, this "unproven hypothesis...threatens to become a torch, which could reduce the most noble and highest culture achievements of the past century to a heap of ashes." Darwinism could tempt men into seeing the "struggle for existence" as the logical paradigm for human interaction: "Of him who learns to look upon himself only as a product of nature, though highly ennobled, we cannot expect any other principle than that of following his nature....Where this leads to, everybody knows who knows human nature."

A German rabbi who inspired modern Orthodox Judaism, and whose name readers of this blog will recognize by now -- Samson Raphael Hirsch -- in 1878 used the Biblical image of the pagan idol Baal Peor, adored in worship by mixing defecation with sexual intercourse, to illustrate "the kind of Darwinism that revels in the conception of man sinking to the level of beast and stripping itself of its divine nobility, learns to consider itself just a 'higher' class of animal."

Though Darwin himself was unable to anticipate the savage use to which his theory would be put by various 20th-century political movements, even he appreciated a moral danger inherent in it. His writing calls into question not only the belief in God but in any abiding, objective, non-relative code of morality. In a notebook, he observed that "the general delusion about free will [is] obvious," thus "one deserves no credit for anything...nor ought one to blame others." He recognized it would be harmful, to say the least, to society if the "delusion" of moral responsibility were dispelled among the general population. But luckily the masses would never be "fully convinced of its truth." He was an optimist.

It's arguable, however, that Darwin's bitterest critics on religious and moral grounds were not clergymen at all but his fellow scientists. On the Harvard campus, Asa Gray's promotion of evolution was met by the fierce opposition of zoologist Louis Agassiz, who gave a series of addresses on Darwinism in 1862 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music: "The Structure of Animal Life, being six lectures on the Power, Wisdom, and Goodness of God, as manifested in his works." When questioned, Agassiz's answer to the mystery of how species originated was blunt: it was by "a thought of God."

Darwin and his ideas functioned as a Rorschach test. Those who felt religious tradition to be a burden tended to see evolution as a source of liberation. The English biologist and eugenics advocate Karl Pearson remembered, as a young man, "the joy we...felt when we saw that wretched date BC 4004 [previously assumed to be the year of the world's creation], replaced by a long vista of millions of years of development." Pearson would go on to teach that Darwinian theory obliged advanced Europeans to make "war" on "inferior races."

Among Darwin's friends and foes, many could agree that, as Darwin's own wife Emma put it, the theory of natural selection "put God further off." However, one could see that as a good or a bad thing. The specter of atheism has today lost its power to shock. We know what a secularized culture is like. Darwin's contemporaries, of course, did not know, which heightened their fear that perhaps civilization itself could not survive the subtraction of the divine from human experience.

In his long poem "City of Dreadful Night," written between 1870 and 1873, the Scotsman James Thomson crystallized the underlying dread that many felt. He paints a nightmare vision of London transformed in the wake of the death of God: "O melancholy Brothers, dark, dark, dark!/ O battling in black floods without an ark!/ O spectral wanderers of unholy Night!" If you imagine a Victorian Gothic version of an apocalyptic Stephen King novel, you'll have the atmosphere of Thomson's poem about right.

Many accepted the scientific truth of Darwinism even as they feared its consequences. Friedrich Nietzsche, for one, has been claimed as a Darwinist (by H.L. Mencken, for one, who applauded him for it) and defended from the charge (by biographer Walter Kauffman). Both views are partly right.

In "On the Use and Abuse of History for Life" (1873), Nietzsche anguished at the consequences he foresaw:

If the doctrines of sovereign Becoming, of the liquidity of all...species, of the lack of any cardinal distinction between man and animal -- doctrines which I consider true but deadly -- are foisted on people for another generation with the frenzied instruction which is now customary, then it should take no one by surprise if people destroy themselves in egotistical trifles and misery, ossifying themselves in their self-absorption, initially falling apart and ceasing to be a people. Then, in place of this condition, perhaps systems of individual egotism, alliances for the systematic larcenous exploitation of those non-members of the alliance and similar creations of utilitarian nastiness will step forward onto the future scene.

A young friend of Darwin, the biologist George Romanes, came increasingly to question his mentor's theory and lament its impact, passing through a period of agnosticism and partly regaining his Christian faith before dying at the untimely age of 46. He wrote:

Never in the history of man has so terrific a calamity befallen the race as that which all who look may now behold advancing as a deluge, black with destruction, resistless in might, uprooting our most cherished hopes, engulfing our most precious creed, and burying our highest life in mindless desolation. . . . The flood-gates of infidelity are open, and Atheism overwhelming is upon us.

Posted by David Klinghoffer at 12:43 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

CSC senior fellow John West has an article up at Washington Post's "On Faith" blog highlighting the importance of an open and broad debate on faith and evolution — one that includes intelligent design proponents.

Dawkins and Collins are often put forward as the two alternatives in discussions over faith and evolution, but since they both embrace Darwin's theory, they represent only a thin slice of the overall debate. Largely shut out from current media coverage are the growing number of scientists, as well as the vast majority of Americans, who view Darwin's theory with skepticism.

In an effort to broaden the conversation, Discovery Institute has launched www.faithandevolution.org, a website featuring scientists and scholars who aren't afraid to ask tough questions about both the science and implications of modern Darwinian theory. The website includes a "Debates" section highlighting competing views on such topics as evolution's impact on religion, the claims of intelligent design, and the relationship between Darwin's theory and "Social Darwinism."

The website also seeks to clear-up confusion about why Darwin's theory poses such a challenge to faith in the first place. Contrary to what many people suppose, it's not because evolution proposes that living things change over millions of years, or even because it suggests that animals are descended from a common ancestor.

The real sticking point is Darwin's claim that all of life--human beings included--developed through a blind and undirected process of natural selection acting on random variations. In the words of late Harvard paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson, "Man is the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind."

There are ways to try to reconcile Darwinism's undirected process with theism, but they involve throwing overboard some long-cherished beliefs about God.

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

I believe it was Philip Johnson who once said that if you replaced the word "evolution" in biology textbooks with the word "design," almost nothing of substance would change. I think he was right.

We wonder at nature, not because we are so ignorant, as some people think, but rather because it is so amazing. As Benjamin Wiker and Jonathan Witt explained in A Meaningful World, nature displays true genius. And it is this plain fact that drives design-deniers to deify, or at least personify, Evolution.

Take as just one example this extremely fascinating article, "To Be a Baby," (a play on Thomas Nagel's question of what it is like to "be a bat") from Seed Magazine. The article is an interview with Berkeley psychologist Alison Gopnik, author of The Philosophical Baby: What Children's Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life.

Gopnik notes that the helplessness of young children seems to be an evolutionary disadvantage and thus would never have developed via the Darwinian mechanism (recall that in humans this period of helplessness is longer than in many other species). Yet her fascinating research led her to see that babies have such a richer mental life (especially rich in imagination) than we typically give them credit for. And this period where they are helpless actually affords them a lengthy period to develop thoughts about the world.

Thus Gopnik concludes:

The way that evolution seems to have solved this problem is by giving us this period of childhood where we don’t have to do anything, where we are completely useless. We’re free to explore the physical world, as well as possible worlds through imaginative play. And when we’re adults, we can use that information to actually change the world.

Yet she would have lost nothing except the superfluous personification had she just opened her eyes to design.

Posted by Logan Gage at 7:23 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The scientists at Biologic Institute have noticed something sure to challenge and trouble Darwinian biologists: physicists are recognizing perfection as a principle in biology.

When we think of simple, elegant, unifying principles in science, we think of physics. It’s not surprising then that physicists who examine living systems are looking for principles of this kind.

And it seems they have found one. Simply stated, it is that biological processes tend to be optimal in cases where this can be tested. Life’s complexity can make it hard to pinpoint what “optimal” means, but sometimes physical limits provide a crisp definition. Because these limits cannot possibly be exceeded, they serve as an objective standard of perfection. Interestingly, in cases where it is clearly beneficial to edge right up to this standard, that’s exactly what life seems to do.

For decades enzymologists have recognized that certain enzymes are catalytically perfect—meaning that they process reactant molecules as rapidly as these molecules can reach them by diffusion. That hinted at a principle of physical perfection in biology, but no one anticipated its breadth until recently.

Posted by Anika Smith at 11:36 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)