It’s hard for a religious believer not to appreciate, at least in part, the spirit in which Robert Wright presents his new book The Evolution of God. On one hand, he regards the history of religion as the history of an illusion. On the other hand, he argues that the evolution of that illusion represents humanity’s groping toward a truth about the universe that may include the existence of a force operating in human lives, a force that it may even be fair to call God.

He writes admittedly as a materialist — for whom the most basic postulate holds that reality can be explained in purely material terms. He sees an “evolution” in the Bible where relatively primitive, even polytheistic concepts are gradually replaced by more enlightened ones. His case for religion, such as it is, is about as compelling as you can expect, given the postulation of materialism.

I like the person I see in Wright’s writing. Other materialists, on the basis of their own faith in such an arbitrarily constricted picture of the world, leap to demand the dismantling of religion, the mockery of religion’s defenders, and their exclusion from public office. We have the example of bestselling atheist author Sam Harris attacking poor old Francis Collins, Obama’s pick for the National Institutes of Health, on the New York Times op-ed page. Why? Because Collins is an Evangelical Christian. And we have Jerry Coyne in the New Republic attacking Wright himself as peddling “creationism for liberals.” Wright must find such insults unsurprising.

In his Afterword, he notes that following the Islam-inspired attacks of 9/11, faith as a whole acquired a foul odor. Many who previously would have been content to keep quiet about their atheism chose to go on the offensive. Today voicing even the mildly religion-friendly view that Wright does would invite mockery at, “say, an Ivy League faculty gathering unless you want people to look at you as if you’d just started speaking in tongues.”

Luckily, Wright is not a professional academic but a scholarly journalist. He has also taught at Penn and Princeton, so he knows that terrain. What I like about him, apart from the fact that he writes wonderfully readable yet learned prose, is his generosity to people of faith. I’m not being ironic. He writes that he finds it “nice” (and I think there he is being ironic) that some people can lead morally exemplary lives without God. Yet he also finds this surprising: “the natural human condition is to ground your moral life in the existence of other beings, and the more ubiquitous the beings, the firmer the ground.” It’s for that reason that he wants to find, again given his materialist premise, the most compelling case for faith that he can.

That case takes the form of a wryly told history of religion beginning with its presumed primitive origins, and has as its centerpiece the first century Jewish theologian Philo. I heartily endorse rediscovering neglected theologians of the past, dusting them off, and positioning them as vital prophets for our time. David Goldman at First Things, another writer I admire, has been doing this with Franz Rosenzweig. I’ve been trying to do the same thing with Samson Raphael Hirsch.

Philo makes an interesting choice. He was long held at arm’s length in the Jewish world (NB: Wright is not Jewish), on the grounds that his theology inspired much of early Christian thinking about God and His Logos. Yet there’s been a move lately in some Orthodox circles to reclaim him as an authentically Jewish thinker.

Wright focuses on two points about Philo. First, his rereading of a verse in Exodus,
“You shall not revile God,” in pluralist terms: You should refrain from reviling even the gods of others. (The Hebrew word, elokim, is ambiguous.) For the Torah “muzzles and restrains its own disciples, not permitting them to revile these [gods] with a loose tongue, for it believes that well-spoken praise is better.”

Wright feels that Philo is setting an example for us not only of tolerance but of how the meaning of the Scriptural text evolves and, with it, God: “when prevailing interpretations of a god change, the very character of the god changes.” Rethinking the Bible in light of the need he perceived to encourage friendly relationships with his Alexandrian Greek-speaking neighbors, Philo exemplifies and justifies a trend in religious thinking to a certain generous, open-spirited wisdom. That wisdom amounts to a greater appreciation that our own interests are best served by seeing human interactions as a non-zero sum game, where your gain is also an opportunity for my own advancement, to be celebrated rather than resented.

The second point about Philo is related. In the directionality of history toward “non-zero-sumness” (the phrase is awkward, but Wright can’t think of a better one and I can’t either), Wright wants to see the possibility of an “initial design” in the world “that would lead human beings toward wisdom.” Of course he feels compelled to disavow any dangerous association of such an “initial design” with an “intelligent design.” Instead Wright links it with Philo’s teaching about a divine Logos, identifiable with God’s wisdom, that unfolds in history and educates human beings.

I’m not doing justice to a long, subtle, and ambivalent book. A frustrating one, too. You keep wanting to shake Wright out of his assumption that materialist science has things all sewn up. In fact, the more science reveals — about the genome or the brain, for example — the clearer it becomes that the ultimate reality is spiritual, not material. Wright’s job lately has been as editor-in-chief of Bloggingheads.tv, where brainy journalists and academics get to debate erudite issues at luxurious length in split-screen format on the Web. How I would love to see Robert Wright discuss the scientific merits of materialism for an hour with Stephen Meyer or James Le Fanu. Perhaps he’ll read this and consider the idea.

At the same time, for all that The Evolution of God will not satisfy a traditional believer, it’s startling to see how much in the way of traditional belief Wright was able to arrive at without accepting the authority of any faith.

He assumes that there is something radical and modern in Philo’s reading Scripture in light of concerns that were contemporary in his time. But Jews have been doing that for millennia. In Deuteronomy, Moses emphasized that God made the covenant with every generation — partly, on that generation’s own terms. A medieval midrash, Yalkut Shimoni, envisions God as appearing to the people as “a picture which is visible from all angles. A thousand people may gaze on it and it gazes on all of them…When [God] spoke, every individual Israelite maintained: To me the word spoke!’”

A modern scholar, Nehama Leibowitz, showed how “Each generation must view the Torah as personally addressed to it and directly applicable to the contemporary situation.” While Torah laws remain the same, insights gained from the text unfold — one might say, evolve — as the situation changes. She gives examples of how rabbinic interpreters found such new meanings in the context of historical situations like the Inquisition and the challenge of secular Enlightenment.

The directionality of history, guided by God’s wisdom in a process whereby human beings are led through stages of increasing illumination, is an idea as old as the Bible. The prophet Zechariah describes the culmination point: “Then the Lord shall be King over all the earth; on that day the Lord shall be One and His name One.”

The Logos is only Philo’s Hellenized formulation of another Biblical idea. The idea originated in the book of Proverbs, where according to traditional understanding, divine wisdom is equated with the Torah — not the five books of Moses per se but the stream of teaching and illumination crystallized with special intensity in those books.

Wright’s evolutionary story is one of rediscovery — rediscovering ancient truths and reformulating them in secular terms. In his view, people grow and, thereby, so does God. The other possibility is that God was always there, the same and unchanging, represented enigmatically in the Bible, waiting always to be rediscovered by each generation and each person.

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

Posted by David Klinghoffer at 8:48 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Dear President Obama,

I note with dismay your appointment of Dr. John Holdren as Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, Assistant to the President for Science and Technology, and Co-Chair of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. Although Dr. Holdren’s experience in academia and administration may be adequate, his publicly expressed views regarding population control disqualify him from holding office.

I will set aside objections to Dr. Holdren’s scientific competence. Despite his strong scientific credentials, he advanced theories in the 1970’s and 1980’s that have become the paradigm of ideologically motivated junk science. He and his collaborators (such as co-author Paul Ehrlich) predicted world-wide famine as a consequence of over-population by the late 20th century, and they advocated radical coercive public policies to avert catastrophe. These predictions were explicit, public, and were published under professional imprimatur. Obviously, the predictions were wrong. Dr.Holdren’s predictions are an exemplar of scientific incompetence.

But it is the spectre of Dr. Holdren’s competence, not his incompetence, that concerns me. In 1977 Dr. Holdren and his colleagues Paul and Anne Ehrlich published the book Ecoscience. In it, Holdren and his co-authors endorse the serious consideration of radical measures to reduce the human population, particularly third world populations, such as India, China and Africa. The measures include:

• People who “contribute to social deterioration” (i.e. undesirables) “can be required by law to exercise reproductive responsibility” — in other words, be compelled to have abortions or be sterilized.

• Women — particularly women of insufficient means due to poverty, nationality, marital status, or youth — could be forced to abort their children and undergo sterilization.

• Implementation of a system of "involuntary birth control," in which girls at puberty would be implanted with an infertility device and only could have it removed temporarily if they received permission from the government to have a baby.

• Undesirable populations could be sterilized by infertility drugs intentionally put into drinking water or in food.

• Single mothers and teen mothers who managed to have their children despite measures to prevent fertility should have their babies seized from them and given away to others to raise.

• A transnational “Planetary Regime” and a transnational police force should be assembled to enforce population control.

Although Dr. Holdren recently has asserted that he does not support coercive measures to reduce population, he has continued to champion population control ‘science’ and he includes his book “Ecoscience” prominently on his CV, without disclaimer.

In other words, Dr. Holdren dissembles. He insists, despite the record, that he no longer believes what he 'didn’t believe' then. Evidently you accept his denial. As you are, Mr. President, a man of good will, inclined to see the best in people, you may have misunderstood Dr. Holdren’s ideology. It has a history that runs from early 20th century eugenics to the German T4 program to the modern population control movement and eco-fundamentalism. It is a view of man as pestilence. No one who holds that view, or has held that view, or who has publicly endorsed serious consideration of that view, should be in a position of influence in our government.

There is a deep and disturbing irony in your appointment of Dr. Holdren as Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. The irony, sir, is this: Dr. Holdren endorsed the serious consideration of radical measures — including involuntary sterilization and abortion — to cull mankind. And he was not an equal-opportunity culler. He betrayed a particular animus to children conceived of third world parentage to young mothers of limited means. He asserted that they were a burden that we dare not bear — for the sake of humanity and for the sake of the Earth. He implored us to ensure that these children were never given life.

He meant you.

Sincerely,

Michael Egnor, M.D.

Posted by Michael Egnor at 9:39 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

Some evolutionary-development researchers must be taking cues from the PR team that overhyped “Ida.” A recent article on ScienceDaily was titled, “How Evolution Can Allow For Large Developmental Leaps,” but the article documents nothing of the kind. It begins by discussing a long-recognized problem in evolution: “when it comes to traits like the number of wings on an insect, or limbs on a primate, there is no middle ground. How are these sorts of large evolutionary leaps made?” I appreciate the author’s acknowledgment that functional intermediate forms can be a problem for Darwinian evolution. I then expected the article to discuss how “large evolutionary leaps” might occur, but instead, it went on to discuss research that showed trivial biological changes in bacteria.

When the going gets tough, many bacteria will hunker down and produce spores that can house and protect a bacterium’s genetic material until the environment returns to a favorable state. The ScienceDaily article reported that certain bacterial mutations may cause bacteria to produce one spore, two spores, or just die, with those traits appearing in differing proportions in bacterial populations depending on the particular mutation. Biologists were already well aware that many bacteria produce multiple spores, and at best the research shows how bacteria might produce more of something they already produce.

So what about evolving different numbers of insect legs or primate limbs? Somehow the researchers forgot to address that topic. If you’re looking for “large evolutionary leaps,” you won’t find any here — just bacteria that can make one spore, two spores, or die. But as Jonathan Wells showed in Icons of Evolution, it overtaxes Darwinian processes simply to produce an extra set of non-functional useless wings on fruit flies, to say nothing of producing an extra set of wings that are functional. And how about the evolutionary origin of wings or legs in the first place? It would seem that for now, the Darwinian solution to these kinds of problems exists only in the over-exaggerated titles of press releases.

Posted by Casey Luskin at 8:39 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Tonight Stephen Meyer will be on Coast to Coast with George Noory. Dr. Meyer will be on from 11:00 pm to 2:00 am PT, and as an extra incentive for our readers who aren't night owls, the show promises to "discuss recent discoveries in cell biology which support intelligent design and reveal that digital computers and living cells are operating on the same principles."

To find an affiliate station in your area and tune in, click here.

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

Recently Focus on the Family aired part one of a two-part series on evolution. Reaching back into the archives, they played selections from a 1994 debate between intelligent design advocate Phillip Johnson (U.C. Berkeley) and Darwin-defender William Provine (Cornell).

One thing in particular struck me: ID advocates are often accused of wanting to push ID into the public high school classroom. Yet even in this early debate, Phillip Johnson clearly notes that ID advocates would be happy just to see Darwinism taught fairly with both its strengths and weaknesses made clear. And, more importantly, ID advocates would like to see the academy open up to discussion of intelligent design — not primarily the high school classroom.

You can listen to part one and part two of Dr. Dobson's show by following these links.

Lastly, for more resources on documentaries and readings, go here. Not only is the debate available for purchase, but there is also a great clip from Expelled with Ben Stein interviewing Richard Dawkins.

Posted by Logan Gage at 9:15 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Eugenie Scott plays many roles in the evolution debate. Now, in a recent enlightening interview in Science News, she offers her wisdom as a media coach for scientists talking publicly about evolution. Her most important piece of advice? Never use terminology that could imply any real weakness in evolutionary biology. Dr. Scott counsels:

To put it mildly, it doesn’t help when evolutionary biologists say things like, “This completely revolutionizes our view of X.” Because hardly anything we come up with is going to completely revolutionize our view of the core ideas of science.... An insight into the early ape-men of East and South Africa is not going to completely change our understanding of Neandertals, for example. So the statement is just wrong. Worse, it’s miseducating the public as to the soundness of our understanding of evolution.

So what happens when we do make a discovery that refutes or challenges some evolutionary hypothesis? Are scientists supposed to just spin it positively and never acknowledge they were wrong? Essentially, Dr. Scott says yes, because, in her own words: “You can say that this fossil or this new bit of data ‘sheds new light on this part of evolution.’” Funny, because I always thought that scientific progress is made when we reject false hypotheses, and scientific literacy would require disclosing those sorts of things to the public.

Later in the interview, Scott makes an even more startling comment, saying: “Ultimately the solution to this problem is not going to come from pouring more science on it.”

When scientists in a field are instructed to avoid publicly admiting when they’re wrong, and are advised that improving the public’s perception of science is not best served by doing better science, then you know that field is steeped in intolerance towards dissent, and political pressure to give assent to orthodoxy. These are not the signs of a healthy science.

Posted by Casey Luskin at 6:45 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Over at Ligonier Ministries there is a very thoughtful review of Signature in the Cell.

Those who are committed to an atheistic and materialist philosophy will be all over this book, but I am slightly optimistic that it may actually change the nature of the debate among scientists who are interested in going where the evidence leads. In fact, one of the most helpful sections of this book deals with the very definition of "science," an issue that has hindered helpful discussions and debates.

Although I enthusiastically recommend Meyer's book to any who are interested in the scientific study of the origin of life, I do want to raise one important point. Advocates of intelligent design are directing most of their efforts toward addressing scientific questions and objections. They are not addressing the questions theologians might have about the implications of their work.

Posted by Robert Crowther at 8:21 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

In a recent post, I explained how James Carville’s new book, 40 More Years: How the Democrats will Rule the Next Generation, badly misrepresents intelligent design (ID) as merely a negative argument against evolution. Carville somehow failed to notice that the passage he quoted from our Briefing Packet for Educators made an entirely positive argument for design. But Carville, a longtime Democratic strategist, has a game plan and he’s not going to let the facts get in his way.

The point of Carville’s chapter on evolution is to turn the debate into a club that he can wield in his war against Republicans. Not one to shy away from a rhetorical flourish, Carville writes: “the so-called debate over evolution boils down to the Republicans invisible-angel theory of gravity against the Democrats’ 150 years of science and the U.S. Constitution position.” (pg. 93) Of course there’s plenty of credible scientific dissent from neo-Darwinian evolution. More interestingly, Carville’s book completely fails to recognize how members of his own party feel about the evolution debate. Polls show that self-described “liberals” and Democrats support academic freedom in evolution-education just as much as (and in some cases more than) self-described “conservatives” and Republicans!

For example, Mr. Carville would probably be horrified to learn that a 2006 poll found that 65 percent of Democrats feel that intelligent design should be taught alongside evolution.

Mr. Carville might want to sit down for this next one. A poll taken in January 2009 found that over 80 percent of self-identified “liberals” and Democrats agreed that “teachers and students should have the academic freedom to discuss both the strengths and weaknesses of evolution as a scientific theory” -- a higher percentage than the 72 percent of Republicans who felt the same. The figure below shows the poll data:

Carville certainly isn’t the first pundit to wrongly frame this debate as a wedge issue, splitting Democrats from Republicans. However, based upon his book, there’s little doubt that he would ardently reject academic freedom in evolution education. He opens the book’s chapter on evolution by stating there is no room for dissent on the topic:

“If there’s ever been a time to use the word ‘incontrovertible,’ it’s when we’re talking about evolution. Arguing about evolution is like arguing about gravity.” (pg. 88)

“[E]volution is a fact and if these people are disturbed by being the descendants of monkeys and fishes, they’ve got a mental problem. We can’t afford the psychiatric bill for them. That ends the story as far as I’m concerned.” (pg. 93)

Carville says in his book that the evolution debate is “res judicata” (meaning a settled matter), but right now I’d rather say res ipsa loquitur, which in this instance means that Carville’s unashamed intolerance speaks for itself. Whether he likes it or not, by treating evolution as a dogma that should not be criticized or questioned, he’s actually grossly out-of-step with the vast majority of Americans, including, it turns out, members of his own party.

Posted by Casey Luskin at 6:02 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Recently, I discussed how in his book Only a Theory, Kenneth Miller badly misrepresented intelligent design (ID) as it relates to common descent. Another egregious error in the book comes in Dr. Miller's section titled "Just Not Good Enough" (pgs. 70-74). Anyone familiar with the Dover trial knows exactly what Miller's error is and where this is going.

Dr. Miller claims that when the plaintiffs' attorneys at the Dover trial did a literature-dump bluff on Michael Behe during cross-examination -- placing before him over 50 papers and nearly a dozen books purportedly explaining the evolution of the immune system -- Behe said, in Judge Jones's report of the exchange, that they were "not 'good enough.’" Miller even goes so far as to characterize Behe's response as follows: "Even when presented with every opportunity to make their case, the defenders of design resorted to little more than saying 'It's not good enough or me' in the face of overwhelming evidence for evolution." (pg. 74)

And now, the rest of the story.

If by "evolution," Miller means common descent, then Behe fully conceded that the articles in the literature-dump bluff reflected evidence for common descent. The vast majority of the papers entailed mere comparisons of DNA sequence in the genes that build our immune system to genes in other organisms, claiming that genetic similarities demonstrated their common origin. But as Behe has reminded us in both of his books:

Darwin's Black Box: "Although useful for determining lines of descent ...comparing sequences cannot show how a complex biochemical system achieved its function -- the question that most concerns us in this book. By way of analogy, the instruction manuals for two different models of computer put out by the same company might have many identical words, sentences, and even paragraphs, suggesting a common ancestry (perhaps the same author wrote both manuals), but comparing the sequences of letters in the instruction manuals will never tell us if a computer can be produced step-by-step starting from a typewriter....Like the sequence analysts, I believe the evidence strongly supports common descent. But the root question remains unanswered: What has caused complex systems to form?" (Darwin's Black Box, pgs. 175-176)

The Edge of Evolution: "[M]odern Darwinists point to evidence of common descent and erroneously assume it to be evidence of the power of random mutation." (Edge of Evolution, pg. 95)

"In many of [the papers] they're not actually discussing mutation. They're discussing similarities and sequences between parts of the immune system in vertebrates and some elements of transposons."

A. No, they certainly do not. My answer, or my argument is that the literature has no detailed rigorous explanations for how complex biochemical systems could arise by a random mutation and natural selection and these articles do not address that.

Q. So these are not good enough?

A. They're wonderful articles. They're very interesting. They simply just don't address the question that I pose."

Q. Is that your position today that these articles aren't good enough, you need to see a step-by-step description?

A. These articles are excellent articles I assume. However, they do not address the question that I am posing. So it's not that they aren't good enough. It's simply that they are addressed to a different subject.

A. Most of them have evolution or related words in the title, so I can confirm that, but what I strongly doubt is that any of these address the question in a rigorous detailed fashion of how the immune system or irreducibly complex components of it could have arisen by random mutation and natural selection.

"These articles are excellent articles I assume. However, they do not address the question that I am posing. So it's not that they aren't good enough. It's simply that they are addressed to a different subject." (emphasis added)

Table 1. Evidence for Descent with Modification of the Mischaracterization of Michael Behe's views on the Evolution of the Immune System.

Perhaps in this rare case alone, the evidence for evolution actually is "overwhelming."

This was not the only instance in Miller's book where he misrepresents Behe's arguments regarding irreducible complexity. So, sometime soon, I'll explain how in Only a Theory Miller also badly misrepresents Michael Behe on the irreducible complexity of the blood clotting system.

Posted by Casey Luskin at 5:36 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

CSC director, and author of the Signature in the Cell, Stephen C. Meyer spoke to a full house at the Seattle Art Museum’s Plestscheef Auditorium last night presenting compelling evidence for intelligence behind the origin of life.

On a beautiful summer evening in downtown Seattle, an eager crowd of over 200 relaxed inside the museum’s state-of-the-art theater to hear Dr. Meyer explain the problem of “The DNA Enigma” – that is, where does the highly specified and complex information inside the cell come from?

Read the full report here and see some pictures from the event.

Posted by Staff at 4:39 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

In his new book, 40 More Years: How the Democrats Will Rule the Next Generation, Democratic strategist James Carville badly misrepresents intelligent design (ID) as a wholly negative argument against evolution. What’s most incredible is that Carville makes this inaccurate characterization directly after quoting passages from ID proponents making wholly positive arguments for design.

One such passage he quotes is from our Intelligent Design Briefing Packet for Educators, as follows:

Intelligent design “begins with the observation that intelligent agents produce complex and specified information (CSI).…One easily testable form of CSI is irreducible complexity, which can be discovered by experimentally reverse-engineering biological structures to see if they require all of their parts to function. When [intelligent design] researchers find irreducible complexity in biology, they conclude such structures were designed.”

The same Briefing Packet notes that observation-based experience teaches that intelligent agency is the cause of high CSI systems, such as irreducibly complex machines. This yields a positive argument for design. As Michael Behe explained during the Dover trial, “This argument for design is an entirely positive argument. This is how we recognize design by the purposeful arrangement of parts.” (Michael Behe, October 17 AM Testimony, Page 110)

In the 2006 edition of Darwin’s Black Box, Behe further explains why irreducibly complex features provide positive evidence for design:

“[I]rreducibly complex systems such as mousetraps and flagella serve both as negative arguments against gradualistic explanations like Darwin’s and as positive arguments for design. The negative argument is that such interactive systems resist explanation by the tiny steps that a Darwinian path would be expected to take. The positive argument is that their parts appear arranged to serve a purpose, which is exactly how we detect design.”
(Michael Behe, Darwin’s Black Box, Afterward, pgs. 263-264 (Free Press), emphasis added.)

"In all irreducibly complex systems in which the cause of the system is known by experience or observation, intelligent design or engineering played a role [in] the origin of the system.…Although some may argue this is a merely an argument from ignorance, we regard it as an inference to the best explanation…given what we know about the powers of intelligence as opposed to strictly natural or material causes."
(Scott A. Minnich & Stephen C. Meyer, “Genetic Analysis of Coordinate Flagellar and Type III Regulatory Circuits in Pathogenic Bacteria”)

It seems clear that Carville has little or no idea of what ID actually is. Moreover, Carville’s book really doesn't offer any serious treatment of this topic. In fact, he has a clear agenda in misrepresenting ID: his purpose to miscast the whole matter as a Democrat vs. Republican issue.

Carville’s chapter on evolution really boils down to a rhetorically outlandish defense of intellectual intolerance a la Richard Dawkins’s infamous line, “It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid, or insane (or wicked, but I’d rather not consider that).” My guess is that Carville would be horrified to learn just how many Democrats disagree with him, and support academic freedom in evolution education.

Posted by Casey Luskin at 5:54 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

In elevating the economic value of Charles Darwin over Adam Smith in the New York Times, Robert Franks misrepresents Smith. Franks claims that Darwin, better than Smith, accounted for conflicts between individual and collective interest. But Smith knew of such conflict. His invisible hand reliably guides private self-interest to socially beneficial outcomes only under a stable rule of law. For markets to work, rule of law must fetter private actors—prevent them from killing, defrauding, and stealing from each other. So Smith’s market “competition” is neither anarchy nor Darwinian nature, red in tooth and claw.

Franks offers examples that he claims favor Darwin’s account. From illegal steroid use to mortgages that misrepresent the underlying risk of a loan, however, we have a violation of rule of law, not a breakdown in the invisible hand. The “Darwinian” nuance adds nothing to Smith’s account, so I doubt, contra Franks, that economists will be praising Darwin in 2109.

Posted by Jay Richards at 7:44 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

In medical ethics, there is a growing conflict between two important principles: autonomy and dignity. In an important way, autonomy and dignity are virtues derived from different worldviews. Autonomy owes much to the secular/materialist view of man, whose very existence is the product of an autonomous struggle for existence. Dignity owes much to the Judeo-Christian understanding of man, who is created in the image of God. Certainly there is overlap; advocates of autonomy obviously have some respect for dignity, and advocates for dignity have some respect for autonomy. But the differences in approaches to ethics are real, and are of great consequence.

The differences are particularly clear and important in the issue of physician-assisted suicide. Oregon has passed a law allowing physician-assisted suicide, and a similar statute was recently passed in Washington State. Physician-assisted suicide is even more common in Europe, with some nations such as Switzerland attracting ”suicide tourists”. Bioethicist Jacob Appel has even endorsed physician-assisted suicide for some healthy people who request it.

Proponents of physician-assisted suicide generally invoke autonomy as the primary justification for medical cooperation in suicide. Of course, the reality is that our autonomy is always constrained, given our nature. We are naturally constrained by many things, and autonomy must be understood in light of those constraints. There are really two kinds of patient autonomy in medical ethics: negative and positive.

Negative autonomy is the right to be left alone. The right to negative autonomy is radical, and is accepted by all bioethicists. The right of a competent adult to refuse medical care is universally acknowledged.

Positive autonomy—the right to obtain a specific medical treatment-- is another matter entirely. All ethicists implicitly acknowledge that the right to positive autonomy is severely limited. A patient in my office with a brain tumor has a right to a very limited range of treatments. The options only include treatments accepted by the medical profession as appropriate to brain tumors. My patient has a right to brain surgery, or to radiation therapy, or to chemotherapy. He does not have a right to countless other medical treatments, such as amputation, antibiotic therapy, liposuction, a heart transplant, etc. Positive autonomy is profoundly constrained. It is limited by the judgment of the medical profession as to what treatments are effective and appropriate.

How does the medical profession decide what’s effective and appropriate? Clearly there are important implicit assumptions (life is good, health is good, pain should be ameliorated, benefits should outweigh risks, the dignity of the patient should be respected, etc). But notice what is not a part of the medical profession’s decision about effectiveness and appropriateness—autonomy. Respect for autonomy plays no role in the judgment of the medical profession as to the effectiveness and appropriateness of a medical treatment.

Ultimately, negative autonomy—the right of the patient to refuse treatment—is always to be respected, but positive autonomy is always a merely an assertion of choice among several treatments deemed appropriate by the medical profession. Positive autonomy is always really an exercise of negative autonomy on a limited list of options.

Patients have a right only to negative autonomy—a right to accept or refuse medical treatments appropriate to their illness. The medical profession decides what acts constitute appropriate medical treatment. Thus the assertion that physician-assisted suicide is a matter of patient autonomy is mistaken and even misleading. The issue of physician-assisted suicide has nothing to do with issues of autonomy; all patients have a right to choose among appropriate medical treatments—about this there is no debate.

The issue of physician-assisted suicide hinges on whether or not killing is medical treatment. If killing is medical treatment, then patients who have a disease for which the medical profession has decided that killing is an effective and appropriate remedy have a right choose it. If killing is not a medical treatment, then patients do not have a right to choose it, at least as a part of their medical treatment.

The assertion that autonomy is an important factor in physician-assisted suicide is a phantom. “Autonomy’ conjures specters of freedom from compulsion, yet patients always retain the right to refuse medical treatment. And they never have the right to acts by physicians that are not medical treatment. In the debate over physician-assisted suicide, it is the status of killing as a medical treatment that is the issue.

Here’s my view: the intentional taking of innocent human life – one’s own or that of another— is never medical treatment, and is never ethical. There is no such thing as physician-assisted suicide. There is merely suicide, at times assisted. The profession of the accomplice is accidental to the act.

Suicide can be carried out quite effectively without medical assistance. We need not add pentobarbital to ropes, bullets, and bridges, none of which are medical instruments, either. Suicide isn’t a medical act, and assisted suicide has nothing to do with autonomy as understood in medical ethics. Autonomy is the right to refuse medical treatment, not the right to a non-medical act performed by a physician.

Advocates of physician-assisted suicide use ‘autonomy’ as a diversion from the real ethical issue—an issue that, if understood clearly by the public and by the medical profession—would end the cause of physician-assisted suicide:

Should we grant a medical imprimatur to killing?

Posted by Michael Egnor at 11:27 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

It’s the question that Darwin never even began to address: How did the very first life begin? Dr. Stephen Meyer, author of the new book Signature in the Cell (HarperOne, June 2009), investigates how new scientific discoveries are pointing to intelligent design as the best explanation for the complexity of life and the universe.

“It’s only in the past decade that the information age has finally come to biology. We now know that biology at its root is digital code information,” states Dr. Meyer. “In the cell, information is carried by DNA, which functions like a software program. The signature in the cell is that of the master programmer of life.”

On Tuesday, July 21, Dr. Meyer will present his arguments for intelligent design at a free event, hosted by Discovery Institute and held at Plestcheeff Auditorium at the Seattle Art Museum.

Join us for the event that will herald a new scientific revolution!

Register for the Signature in the Cell Book party on Tuesday, July 21st at 7:00pm. This free event will be held in the Plestcheef Auditorium within the Seattle Art Museum (entrance at 1st Avenue and University).

Register now and get your book for only $20.

By registering now you have the opportunity to save time and money by also pre-ordering a copy of Signature in the Cell for just $20 (including tax - 37% off the cover price!)

Books will be available at the event for $25 (20% off the cover price) while supplies last.

Walk-ups are okay, but seating is not guaranteed without pre-registration.

For more information, visit www.signatureinthecell.com.

Posted by Anika Smith at 3:09 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

In the world of peppered moths, gray is the new black. The “peppered moth” became famous after textbooks started using it as an iconic example of evolution. It’s still employed in some current textbooks: Douglas Futuyma’s 2005 edition of Evolution states, “By the 1930s, however, examples of very strong selection came to light. One of the first examples was Industrial Melanism in the peppered moth (Biston betularia). … There is considerable evidence, obtained by several independent researchers, that birds attack a greater proportion of gray than black moths where tree trunks, due to air pollution, lack the pale lichens that would otherwise cover them.” (p. 393) While Futuyma is right to further note that “other factors also appear to affect the allele frequencies,” debates have raged over whether moths really do rest on tree trunks where they are predated on by birds, whether birds are the main cause of changes in the relative proportion of dark and light moths in populations, and how much the colors really changed.

All that aside, a recent article in the London Daily Telegraph now reports a new chapter in this story, as moth populations are now reverting from black back to gray / white:

The Peppered moth, which changed its colour from white to black in areas of Britain with heavy pollution, is now reverting to its original appearance. ... Now in post-industrial Britain, 200 years after Darwin's birth, the moth is changing back to its original white colour.

"We have seen these moths making a big swing back to their original colour," said Richard Fox, project manager of Moths Count. "It has been happening for decades as air pollution is cleaned up and with the demise of heavy industry in the big cities.[”]

(Moth turns from black to white as Britain's polluted skies change colour, London Daily Telegraph, June 19, 2009.)

So what does this mean for the debate over evolution?

If you’re an evolutionist, this is now becoming at best a case of oscillating selection, much like what has been observed in the oscillating sizes of beaks of the Galapagos finches, which grow slightly larger during a drought but revert back to their original size when the drought is over. Regarding those finches, Jonathan Wells observes in Icons of Evolution that evolutionists overstate their case when "evidence for oscillating natural selection in finch beaks is claimed as evidence for the origin of finches in the first place." (p. 174)

Are such extrapolations warranted? Phillip Johnson comments:

To make the story look better, the National Academy of Sciences removed some facts in its 1998 booklet on Teaching About Evolution and the Nature of Science. This version omits the flood year return-to-normal and encourages teachers to speculate that a "new species of finch" might arise in 200 years if the initial trend towards increased beak size continued indefinitely. When our leading scientists have to resort to the sort of distortion that would land a stock promoter in jail, you know they are in trouble.

(Phillip Johnson, “The Church of Darwin,” Wall Street Journal August 16, 1999.)

What will happen now that the peppered moth is turning out to be a case of oscillating selection, “producing no long-term evolutionary change”? Will textbooks tell the whole story or will they continue to perpetuate the peppered myth?

Posted by Casey Luskin at 8:12 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Responses from the Darwin faithful to anything touching upon intelligent design are often so thoughtless it takes your breath away. I guess this is how they manage to stay impervious to the evidentiary challenge to their religion -- they just don’t think it through, or even read it. A single article in a newspaper or journal taxes their ability simply to read what a person says and respond to that, rather than to what they imagine he would say. Consider the cases of Ewen Callaway and Jerry Coyne.

When Stephen C. Meyer wrote an op-ed in the Boston Globe on Thomas Jefferson as a proto-ID supporter, outraged science journalist Callaway at the New Scientist couldn’t even mount an argument. He calls linking Jefferson and ID a “ridiculous assertion.” But he doesn’t tell us why it’s ridiculous. He writes:

Public schools didn't exist in their current form in America during Jefferson's time, but Dr. Meyer never pauses to consider whether Jefferson would have supported the teaching of ID -- a religious philosophy -- in government-funded schools.

Callaway then concludes in oracular fashion: “He wouldn't have” -- Jefferson would not have supported acknowledging Darwinism’s scientific shortcomings in a public school setting. This isn’t an argument. It’s an assertion. Actually, it’s necromancy. Callaway believes that he can speak with authority for the dead Jefferson.

He goes on to airily dismiss the massive scientific evidence in Meyer’s Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design as if it were a kind of temper tantrum:

Meyer cannot accept that the genetic code evolved naturally. Never mind the fact that the building blocks of DNA and its cousin molecule RNA existed on early Earth and even in space.

But let’s lay off Ewen Callaway. He’s just a science writer. More startling is the laziness of University of Chicago biologist Jerry Coyne, author of Why Evolution is True.

For most people, believing in Darwinian evolution is about trust. They trust the prestige media and academia. But how can anyone trust a guy who writes so sloppily? On his blog, Coyne lashes out at “young-earth creationist” Stephen Meyer. Of course, Steve Meyer is nothing of the sort, as he writes clearly in Signature in the Cell (e.g., see p. 17) and elsewhere, and has even testified under oath. Meyer believes the information in DNA goes back around 3.85 billion years.

It’s like a kind of Alzheimer’s with these guys. I have a Darwinist email correspondent who simply can’t grasp that I’m not a young-earther. He’s has queried me on this more than once, and each time I respond that I am not. He then goes ahead and forgets that he asked me once before: “Do you really believe that the earth (and the universe) is roughly 6,000 years old?”

In 2005, Coyne wrote a dismissive piece in The New Republic citing Meyer’s controversial essay in the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington. That’s the one that resulted in the punishment of its editor, Smithsonian evolutionary biologist Richard Sternberg, by his supervisors and colleagues at the Smithsonian. Let’s assume that Coyne, as a serious scientist, wouldn’t cite a published article in a peer-reviewed technical journal without reading it. In the article, Meyer makes clear his view that life is very old. The article is about the Cambrian explosion, for goodness sake, that happened 530 millions years ago.

Yet now Coyne has forgotten all about that and asks incredulously of Meyer: “Is a 6,000-year-old Earth also an ‘inference from geological data’?” In an appended correction and apology, Dr. Coyne explains that he became confused and thought Steve Meyer was someone else -- someone totally different with a different name and different beliefs. I know, it’s so painful when that happens.

In a more general way, Coyne becomes confused about what Meyer was even saying in a brief, simple, and clearly written op-ed. He calls it an “argument from authority,” as if Steve were trying to somehow bolster the scientific case for modern ID from the authority of Jefferson. That would indeed be absurd, but the real point was a historical and philosophical one. Jefferson believed that nature is designed. He believed this based on reason and observation, not Scripture. He was not a Christian. In fact, he didn’t care for Christianity much at all. Yet he did believe in “Nature’s God,” that this God, accessible to all through the evidence of nature, endowed us with “certain unalienable rights.”

So whether Jefferson was right or wrong in his science, we can trace our own liberty back to his ideas, which are branches from an intellectual tree that is today called “intelligent design,” but that goes back much further than that phrase does. You could trace it to Plato and Aristotle, as you could trace Darwinism to Epicurus. Meyer’s message was: If you like the Declaration of Independence, thank intelligent design. Under the influence of Darwinism, such a noble document could not be written. Other kinds of meritorious writing could be produced -- say, the short stories of H.P. Lovecraft -- but not the Declaration of Independence.

Coyne goes on to characterize Stephen Meyer’s argument as “God-of-the-gaps.” Steve’s book, of course, its argument briefly touched on in the article, is nothing like a God-of-the-gaps argument. But people like Ewen Callaway and Jerry Coyne have their fixed conceptions, to which they are fiercely faithful. Any argument for ID has to be “God-of-the-gaps.” Don’t even bother opening the book. It has to be!

It’s like being a dreamer who, no matter how far he roams in waking life, finds that the house he returns to in his dreams is always the dearly beloved one he lived in when he was five years old. Can Coyne even shake himself awake long enough to read a new and serious book like Meyer’s and consider its argument and evidence afresh? Probably not, right Dr. Coyne?

One idea in Coyne’s blog post has merit. He comments parenthetically about Meyer’s necessarily brief citations from Jefferson, “I’d love to see that quote in context.”

Your wish, Dr. Coyne, is my command. We present to you the fuller quote from Jefferson’s letter to Adams, where his support for intelligent design is even clearer:

I hold (without appeal to revelation) that when we take a view of the Universe, in it's parts general or particular, it is impossible for the human mind not to perceive and feel a conviction of design, consummate skill, and indefinite power in every atom of it's composition. The movements of the heavenly bodies, so exactly held in their course by the balance of centrifugal and centripetal forces, the structure of our earth itself, with it's distribution of lands, waters and atmosphere, animal and vegetable bodies, examined in all their minutest particles, insects mere atoms of life, yet as perfectly organised as man or mammoth, the mineral substances, their generation and uses, it is impossible, I say, for the human mind not to believe that there is, in all this, design, cause and effect, up to an ultimate cause, a fabricator of all things from matter and motion, their preserver and regulator while permitted to exist in their present forms, and their regenerator into new and other forms. We see, too, evident proofs of the necessity of a superintending power to maintain the Universe in it's course and order. Stars, well known, have disappeared, new ones have come into view, comets, in their incalculable courses, may run foul of suns and planets and require renovation under other laws; certain races of animals are become extinct; and, were there no restoring power, all existences might extinguish successively, one by one, until all should be reduced to a shapeless chaos. So irresistible are these evidences of an intelligent and powerful Agent that, of the infinite numbers of men who have existed thro' all time, they have believed, in the proportion of a million at least to Unit, in the hypothesis of an eternal pre-existence of a creator, rather than in that of a self-existent Universe. Surely this unanimous sentiment renders this more probable than that of the few in the other hypothesis.

Posted by David Klinghoffer at 12:00 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

A friend recently wrote me an e-mail asking if I had any critiques of Ken Miller's 2009 book Only a Theory. Writing back to him, I observed that the book has many problems, but that I would offer a few quick responses to two or three of its most egregious errors. This serious of three posts (or three topics, really) will look at three errors and mischaracterizations of intelligent design (ID) in Only a Theory, starting with Miller's mischaracterization of ID and common descent.

On page 51, Miller states:

What does design theory tell us about the details of the horse family over the past 55 million years? First, it would not consider it a family at all. From the ID perspective, the relationships detailed in figure 3.1 aren't real, because descent with modification, which is another name for evolution, never actually took place. Those ancestor-descendant relationships so apparent to paleontologists are just an illusion. In fact, the evolutionary tree leading to modern horses isn't a tree at all, but just a collection of individual species, directly created by the designer, each without any relationship to the other.

Intelligent design does not require organisms to emerge suddenly or to be specially created from scratch by the intervention of a designing intelligence. To be sure, intelligent design is compatible with the creationist idea of organisms being suddenly created from scratch. But it is also perfectly compatible with the evolutionist idea of new organisms arising from old by gradual accrual of change. What separates intelligent design from naturalistic evolution is not whether organisms evolved or the extent to which they evolved, but what was responsible for their evolution.

(William A. Dembski, The Design Revolution, pg. 178 (InterVarsity Press, 2004).)

I personally am a common descent skeptic (for scientific reasons), although I recognize that ID is very much compatible with common descent. (I co-wrote with Logan Gage in Intelligent Design 101, "Intelligent design is not necessarily incompatible with common ancestry. Even if all organisms on earth share a common ancestor, it does not follow that the primary mechanisms causing the differences between the species must be blind, unguided processes such as natural selection." [pg. 217])

Even so, I have always thought that the proposed evolutionary horse series looks like a string of highly similar and related forms probably belonging to the same taxon. It always looked like microevolution to me. Thus, even us ID-proponents who are common descent skeptics don't fit Ken Miller's straw man characterization that according to ID, life is composed of "individual species, directly created by the designer, each without any relationship to the other." That's so NOT ID!

Posted by Casey Luskin at 7:01 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Stephen Meyer has an interesting op-ed in today's Boston Globe about founding father Thomas Jefferson's view of intelligent design. A view which Meyer argues comes from the scientific evidence, not from religious authority, and which is foundational to our nation's adherence to inalienable rights for all:

Contemplating everything from the heavenly bodies down to the creaturely bodies of men and animals, he argued: “It is impossible, I say, for the human mind not to believe that there is, in all this, design, cause and effect, up to an ultimate cause, a fabricator of all things from matter and motion.’’

The “ultimate cause’’ and “fabricator of all things’’ that Jefferson invoked was also responsible for the “design’’ of life’s endlessly diverse forms as well as the manifestly special endowments of human beings. Moreover, because the evidence of “Nature’s God’’ was publicly accessible to all and did not depend upon a special appeal to religious authority, Jefferson believed that it provided a basis in reason for the protection of individual liberty. Thus, the Declaration of Independence asserted that humans are “endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.’’

Of course, many people assume that Jefferson’s views, having been written before Darwin’s “Origin of Species,’’ are now scientifically obsolete. But Jefferson has been vindicated by modern scientific discoveries that Darwin could not have anticipated.

Posted by Robert Crowther at 8:17 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

In the previous post I described the debate among evolutionary biologists over the so-called adaptive hypothesis. Some biologists believe that natural selection has the power to drive evolution in adaptive directions, and that most changes that we observe in organisms are there because they confer some adaptive benefit. Other biologists believe that most of the changes we see in organisms over time are due to neutral, non-adaptive processes.

You don’t need to take my word for the existence of this debate. Michael Lynch, an eminent evolutionary biologist, lays out the case against the power of natural selection in a paper called “The Frailty of the Adaptive Hypothesis,” ¹ published a few years ago for an evolutionary symposium. In it he argues that natural selection is neither a necessary or sufficient explanation for organismal complexity. Rather, he contends that many of the genomic complexities of multicellular organisms are the result of the passive non-adaptive forces that I outlined in my previous post.

For example, mobile genetic elements tend to proliferate, inserting themselves more or less at random into new chromosomal positions, leading to what Lynch calls genomic bloat. In bacterial species with large populations and rapid generation time, this excess baggage is rapidly purified by natural selection. In contrast, among multicellular organisms, with their small effective population sizes and longer generation times, natural selection is usually not strong enough to prevent the accumulation of neutral or weakly harmful insertional mutations.

However, when it comes to answering how organisms deal with the continual genetic disruption such insertional mutagenesis would produce, Lynch has no answers. He offers no explanation of how non-adaptive forces can produce the functional genomic and organismal complexity we observe in modern species.

Lynch believes that evolution is the result of the four forces he lists, mutation, recombination, drift, and natural selection, with the first three non-adaptive forces having a major shaping role. He must accept that natural selection is enough to generate coordinated functional complexity, even in the face of these non-adaptive processes, because after all, what else is there?

Yet it’s clear that other evolutionary biologists are beginning to recognize that the problem is larger than Lynch realizes.² They understand they are up against some hard limits — everything from how many mutations can be required before a new selectable function is achieved ³⁴, to how much time is available to produce the highly divergent body plans of the Cambrian explosion ⁵⁶. They continue to come forward with new proposals for how to generate innovation by purely naturalistic means ⁷. But all these new ideas suffer from the same flaw — they are undirected, stochastic processes themselves, and likely to suffer from the same failings as the four forces of Michael Lynch.

The problem is clear when we consider the limit mentioned above — how many independent mutations are within reach of an evolutionary search. Recent papers have suggested that anything beyond two mutations may be impossible unless special scenarios are introduced ³⁴. Yet a single enzymatic innovation can require many changes and still result in a very poorly functioning enzyme ⁸. So how do we account for the huge diversity of proteins existing in nature — over a thousand distinct protein folds that can be subdivided into more than 3400 distinct families of similar proteins, according to the most recent count ⁹?

The problem just keeps growing exponentially the higher up the scale of biological complexity you go. Consider the information in a single cell. Even the simplest minimal cell needs to be able to reproduce itself, use and store energy, and make new cellular components not available in its environment, all of which require the complex cellular systems of replication, transcription, translation and metabolism. To organize and control such systems requires an enormous amount of information.

The only source that is able to generate this level of specified, complex information ¹⁰ is intelligence. We know from our own experience that intelligent agents can develop systems to store information and recall it when needed. Intelligent agents can reconfigure non-living things (and to a limited extent, living things) in purposeful ways, to modify or produce new functions as desired and to coordinate those functions into a working whole.

Obviously, biologists recognize the information storing and processing capacity of cells. What they are now realizing is how much information is needed to produce living systems. This is knowledge Darwin didn’t have. We need to begin to take account of it in any theory of life’s origin and change over time.

References
¹ Lynch M (2007). The frailty of adaptive hypotheses for the origins of organismal complexity. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 104:8597-8604.
² http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0803/S00051.htm
³ Durrett R and D Schmidt (2008). Waiting for two mutations: with applications to regulatory sequence evolution and the limits of Darwinian evolution. Genetics 180:1501-1509.
⁴ http://www.biology-direct.com/content/3/1/18
⁵ Morris SC (2006). Darwin’s dilemma. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 361:1069-1083.
⁶ Meyer S (2004). The origin of biological information and the higher taxonomic categories. Proc Biol Soc Washington 117:213-239.
⁷ Koonin EV (2007). The cosmological model of eternal inflation and the transition from chance to biological evolution in the history of life. Biology Direct 2:15. doi:10.1186/1745-6150-2-15.
⁸ Graber R et al. (1999) Conversion of aspartate aminotransferase into an L-aspartate β-decarboxylase by a triple active-site mutation. J Biol Chem 274: 31203-31208.
⁹ http://scop.berkeley.edu/
¹⁰ Dembski W (1998) The Design Inference: Eliminating Chance through Small Probabilities. Cambridge University Press, ed. B Skyrms.

Posted by Ann Gauger at 7:49 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Stephen Meyer's new book, Signature in the Cell, continues to get lots of coverage.

Dr. Meyer was recently interviewed for CNS and you can watch a video of the entire interview on the SITC website here.

Also, over at Uncommon Descent Robert Deyes is reviewing the book chapter by chapter.

When the 19th century chemist Friedrich Wohler synthesized urea in the lab using simple chemistry, he set in motion the ball that would ultimately knock down the then-pervasive ‘Vitalistic’ view of biology. Life’s chemistry, rather than being bound by immaterial ‘vital forces’ could indeed by artificially made. While Charles Darwin offered little insight on how life originated, several key scientists would later jump on Wohler’s ‘Eureka’-style discovery through public proclamations of their own ‘origin of life’ theories. The ensuing materialist view was espoused by the likes of Ernst Haeckel and Rudolf Virchow who built their own theoretical suppositions on Wohler’s triumph. Meyer summed up the logic of the day:

“If organic matter could be formed in the laboratory by combining two inorganic chemical compounds then perhaps organic matter could have formed the same way in nature in the distant past” (p.40)

Darwin’s theory generated the much-needed fodder to ‘extend’ evolution backward’ to the origin of life. It was believed that “chemicals could “morph” into cells, just as one species could “morph” into another “ (p.43). Appealing to the apparent simplicity of the cell, late 19th century biologists assured the scientific establishment that they had a firm grasp of the ‘facts’- cells were, in their eyes, nothing more than balls of protoplasmic soup.

Posted by Robert Crowther at 2:21 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Editor's Note: Ann Gauger is a senior research scientist at Biologic Institute. Her work uses molecular genetics and genomic engineering to study the origin, organization and operation of metabolic pathways. She received a BS in biology from MIT, and a PhD in developmental biology from the University of Washington, where she studied cell adhesion molecules involved in Drosophila embryogenesis. As a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology at Harvard, she cloned and characterized the Drosophila kinesin light chain. Her research has been published in Nature, Development, and the Journal of Biological Chemistry. Her awards include a National Science Foundation pre-doctoral fellowship and an American Cancer Society post-doctoral fellowship.

A long-standing controversy exists among evolutionary biologists that is little known outside of professional journals. This controversy is significant because it deals directly with the question of how evolutionary processes produce functional changes in organisms —- whether or not the changes we observe are due to adaptive processes guided by natural selection.

Why such a controversy? In his landmark book On the Origin of Species, Darwin proposed natural selection as a force sufficient to account for the organismal complexity and diversity we see around us today. But Darwin knew nothing about genetics or molecular biology. He knew nothing about how variation among organisms was produced or inherited, or what the limits of variation might be. He knew nothing about population dynamics or how difficult it might be for a slightly advantageous trait to spread throughout a population.

In the many years since Darwin wrote his book, scientists have learned much about these topics, and as a result, they have identified four forces driving evolution, not just the one known to Darwin. The four forces are natural selection, mutation, recombination, and genetic drift, and when taken together they affect evolving populations of organisms in sometimes surprising ways. This has led to the controversy I outlined above concerning the efficacy of natural selection to drive evolution in adaptive directions.

Let me explain what the four forces are, and then I will describe the problem they pose.

Natural selection is the evolutionary force with which most people are familiar, and can be simply stated as follows: organisms better adapted to their environment tend to survive and have more offspring than other less fit counterparts, all other things being equal. Mutation and recombination act as the engine of organismal variation: mutations change an organism’s DNA (by substitution, insertion or deletion of particular bases, or modification of the DNA), while recombination shuffles the DNA into new combinations, thus producing further variation. This means that each individual has a unique genome. Differences in each individual’s DNA can produce differences in how well the organism functions in its environment. Finally, genetic drift causes particular variations to be lost from small populations at random, simply because individuals may die or fail to reproduce for reasons unrelated to their fitness for their environment.

It is important to note that three of these four evolutionary forces are non-adaptive and stochastic. An evolutionary force is considered non-adaptive when the change it produces is independent of whether it confers a benefit. It is stochastic when its occurrence is randomly distributed, and cannot be precisely predicted. We can say something about how frequently a stochastic event is likely to occur, but we cannot say what specific changes will occur.

With regard to the above evolutionary forces, this means that mutations occur at random, independent of whether they help or harm, and recombination occurs at random, whether or not it produces helpful or harmful new combinations of genes.¹ Similarly, genetic drift increases the likelihood that a potentially beneficial mutation will be lost before it becomes widespread in the population. This is particularly true for organisms with small effective population sizes, such as vertebrates. The net effect of genetic drift in such populations is “to encourage the fixation of mildly deleterious mutations and discourage the promotion of beneficial mutations,”, in the words of one evolutionary biologist.² Only natural selection is adaptive, that is to say, working to ensure that beneficial changes are preserved in the population, and harmful changes are eliminated.

This may seem counter-intuitive, so let me reiterate this point. Because of the accidental effects of genetic drift in small populations, natural selection is not strong enough to guarantee that beneficial mutations will eventually become fixed (universal) in a population or that weakly harmful mutations will be eliminated. Thus, in organisms with small effective population size (e.g. all vertebrates, which includes us humans), the stochastic and non-adaptive forces of mutation, recombination, and drift will tend to drive evolution in non-adaptive directions.

We see the powerlessness of natural selection to eliminate harmful mutations quite clearly, with the variety of hereditary diseases that exist in human populations today. Extremely harmful dominant mutations that cause death immediately, or prevent reproduction, do not spread in the population. However, less immediately harmful dominant mutations, such as those that cause Huntington’s Chorea, permit survival into and past the reproductive years and so are not eliminated. Recessive mutations, like those causing sickle cell anemia or cystic fibrosis, can be present at substantial levels in the population, because having one mutated gene copy has little or no effect on an individual. Only when someone inherits a bad copy from both mother and father do they develop the disease.

And new mutations happen all the time, most of which are either neutral (having no effect), or harmful (causing varying amounts of damage or disease).

What about the rare beneficial mutations? Once again, unless the benefit is very strong, and confers a very large advantage to the individual carrying the mutation, it may never spread through the population. An example here might be the ability of Northern Europeans to digest milk as adults. This ability arose when a mutation allowed an enzyme that digests milk to be produced in adults, and not just in infants. This is a simple advantageous mutation for milk drinkers, but it is not universal among humans, as any one with lactose intolerance can tell you. And it may never be universal, because the selective advantage of being able to eat dairy products is not large unless your diet depends exclusively on milk products for most of the year.

This picture of evolution is strikingly in contrast to the stories told by biologists who believe in the adaptive power of natural selection to generate whole new cellular systems, behaviors, and body plans (see for example Endless Forms Most Beautiful by Sean Carroll ³ or most evolutionary psychology arguments ⁴). If three out of the four forces driving evolution are non-adaptive, then perhaps most evolutionary change is also non-adaptive, and not due to the power of natural selection. Hence the controversy.

In the next post I will consider some of the implications of this controversy for intelligent design theory.

References
¹ This is the standard story. Some scientists are now proposing that mechanisms exist to promote targeted mutations when organisms are stressed [see for example Rosenberg SM (2001) Evolving responsively: adaptive mutation. Nat Rev Genet 2:504-15]. This idea remains highly controversial. If true, the resulting mutations would occur at a higher frequency in the targeted gene(s), but should still be stochastic in nature, and without regard to adaptive benefit.
² Lynch, Michael (2007) The frailty of adaptive hypotheses for the origins of organismal complexity. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 104:8597-8604.
³ Sean Carroll (2005) Endless Forms Most Beautiful. WW Norton and Company, New York.
⁴ See for example: http://www.epjournal.net

Posted by Ann Gauger at 9:43 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

Picture a majestic T. rex receiving the tablets of the Ten Commandments in its undersized forelimbs, or an elegant octopus crucified on an old rugged cross with four crossbars instead of one.

Such images are what Kenneth Miller presumably has in mind with his comforting Darwinist thought that intelligent creatures were guaranteed to pop up even in the course of an evolutionary process of purely unguided, purposeless churning. You see, he tells us, evolution was bound to "converge" (as theorized by Simon Conway Morris) not necessarily on a human being but on -- well, as Miller has said, it could have been "a big-brained dinosaur, or... a mollusk with exceptional mental capabilities." Just for fun, let's grant the scientific merit of "convergence" -- though many Darwinists, in fact, do not. My argument here is not with Miller's science but with his imagination.

A Roman Catholic and a Brown University biologist, Ken Miller is one of those theistic evolutionists who want other religious believers to feel there's nothing in Darwin to offend religious sensibilities. He and others (such as Obama's favorite geneticist, Francis Collins) invite us to imagine God being delighted with such creatures, noble and impressive in their way, as the culmination of the evolutionary process that He chose not to guide. But what if the intelligent creature that resulted from all the purposeless churning, and that was intended to reflect God's own image, had been something really horrible.

That's the scenario that an author I enjoy, a committed Darwinist and atheist -- H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) -- allows us to contemplate. In his terrifically imaginative horror stories, most set in a spooky, antiquated New England, the great theme is that humanity is but a tiny, unimportant speck in an unimaginably vast universe that has cast up innumerable varieties of extraterrestrial beings, some of which have colonized our planet. Darwinists love him. If you follow PZ Myers's blog, you'll know PZ linked the other day to an "Unholy Bible" -- Holy Scriptures tweaked along Lovecraftian lines (Genesis 1:1: "In the beginning Cthulhu created R'lyeh and the earth").

Many of Lovecraft's creatures are so repellent that when a human being encounters them, he's as likely as not to die right there on the spot from the sheer terror. Here's a description of one, depicted in the form of a little statue at the beginning of "The Call of Cthulhu":

It seemed to be a sort of monster, or symbol representing a monster, of a form which only a diseased fancy could conceive. If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing. A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings; but it was the general outline of the whole which made it most shockingly frightful. Behind the figure was a vague suggestion of a Cyclopean architectural background.

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

From Elliot, Lovecraft absorbed "the denial of teleology," of cosmic progress toward any particular goal, and "the denial of any form of existence other than those envisaged by physics and chemistry." Darwin was important for having refuted the "argument for design," thereby guaranteeing man's "comic insignificance."

Play the videotape of evolutionary history back again and Ken Miller imagines you get a charming brainy creature for God to play with -- something lovable and admirable. Lovecraft would have seen that as sentimental nonsense.

In a universe unguided by the intelligent purpose of a just, loving God, there's no reason to imagine that the intelligent creature or creatures that resulted from the endless churning would be nice, cute, or noble. The probability seems reasonably high -- why not? -- that they would be grotesque, obnoxious, loathsome, abhorrent, ghastly. Those are all, by the way, favorite adjectives with Lovecraft. He was big on adjectives, deploying them extravagantly. His fiction, over and over, asks us to consider the possibility that the university is filled with such horrors: "terrifying vistas of reality."

Here is his description of a shoggoth, another monster in his Cthulhu mythos (from "At the Mountains of Madness"):

It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train - a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and un-forming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter.

In his Introduction to The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories (Penguin Classics), S.T. Joshi reminds us that Lovecraft has to be appreciated "in the context of the philosophical thought that he evolved over a lifetime of study and observation. The core of that thought...is mechanistic materialism." Lovecraft dealt not with the supernatural but with the "supernormal," as Joshi puts it -- the unrealized side of material reality. The terrible possibilities he raises follow from that philosophy.

Sure, they're just stories -- and often kind of silly ones at that, though wickedly entertaining. Yet after reading him, you can't comfortably go back to the naïve Ken Miller way of thinking that Darwinian evolutionary was somehow certain to provide God with children over whom He would approve with the Biblical formulation, "And behold it was very good."

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

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Advocates of Intelligent Design and others who practice skepticism toward the pomposities of much of modern Darwinism can be forgiven a little amusement when they see their detractors engaged in an internal squabble that highlights the philosophical absurdities of the scientistic rationalism that pervades much of modern Darwinism.

Ever since the publication of Jerry Coyne's New Republic article, "Seeing and Believing," the Darwinists have been engaged in a three-way tug of war over the issue of "accommodationism." The gnawing and snarling has pitted three camps against each other in a contest over the right way to wage the PR war against the Intelligent Design movement for the hearts and minds of the scientifically naive.

The Three Non-Amigos
There are, first, those who, scornful of any public dissembling, declare outright their unapologetic commitment to metaphysical naturalism. Generally speaking, these are the New Atheists, whose online champion for several years has been P. Z. Myers, a professor of biology at the University of Minnesota who is perhaps most famous for his public desecration of the Eucharistic Host, a one-time publicity stunt that only temporarily overshadowed his more regular and customary nastiness toward those who consider his narrow scientific reductionism ... well, narrow. Coyne, a University of Chicago scientist, has recently joined Myers at the head of the pack.

On one hand this group has called on scientific organizations like the NCSE to take a neutral position in regard to whether Darwinism is reconcilable. On the other hand, they favor a wider war on religion as the only ultimately victorious Darwinist strategy. These are the crazy uncles of the movement — those who the mainstream Darwinists would rather not let the neighbors see.

Second, there are those who adhere to metaphysical naturalism, but think it's bad for their public image, not to mention for their courtroom strategy, which has been premised on the assumption that Darwinism is only methodologically, but not philosophically naturalist. These are the more presentable people who set up shop at the National Center for Science Education, and who have enjoyed much of the media spotlight in the debate over Intelligent Design. Their message to the New Atheists has been, generally speaking, to keep their yaps shut so the public will not become alarmed over the atheism that lies behind much of Darwinist belief. They prefer singing the soft song of accommodation to the herd in order that there not be a full-scale stampede toward creationism.

And finally there are the theistic evolutionists, whose concern is to maintain the intellectual plausibility of their position, which is of course threatened if their views on the subject were to house two irreconcilable positions: that of an active theism and that of a metaphysical naturalism that can permit, at most, only a rudimentary, emasculated Deism. That is why many members of this group, such as Ken Miller, a professor of biology at Brown University, tend to downplay the basic miracles of Christianity — the Resurrection and the Virgin Birth — that are at the heart of the issue between theists and the New Atheists, rather than offering any kind of intellectual defense of them. In once sense, they might be considered the accommodationists of the theistic movement.

Tied up in the debate is not only the public relations strategy of the anti-ID movement, but the questions of where methodological naturalism ends and metaphysical naturalism begins; whether science can claim exclusive right to being rational; whether the scientific method is the only avenue to truth; and ultimately whether science and religion are intellectually reconcilable at all.

Coyne's Confusion over Metaphysical Naturalism
The issue of methodological naturalism and its role in science has pervaded the whole discussion, and one of the charges made against Jerry Coyne is that he is confused about the distinction. One person making this charge is journalist Chris Mooney. Coyne's defenders (including himself and Jason Rosenhouse) have responded to Mooney's charge by pointing to statements Coyne has made in which he explicitly states the distinction. But if you say that someone contradicts himself — which Coyne clearly does on this issue — it is hardly an adequate defense to simply repeat one side of the contradiction.

In his original article in the New Republic, Coyne indeed articulates the principle of methodological naturalism:

Scientists do indeed rely on materialistic explanations of nature, but it is important to understand that this is not an a priori philosophical commitment. It is, rather, the best research strategy that has evolved from our long-standing experience with nature.

Why reject the story of creation and Noah's Ark because we know that animals evolved, but nevertheless accept the reality of the virgin birth and resurrection of Christ, which are equally at odds with science? After all, biological research suggests the impossibility of human females reproducing asexually, or of anyone reawakening three days after death.

It would appear, then, that one cannot be coherently religious and scientific at the same time. That alleged synthesis requires that with one part of your brain you accept only those things that are tested and supported by agreed-upon evidence, logic, and reason, while with the other part of your brain you accept things that are unsupportable or even falsified. In other words, the price of philosophical harmony is cognitive dissonance. Accepting both science and conventional faith leaves you with a double standard: rational on the origin of blood clotting, irrational on the Resurrection; rational on dinosaurs, irrational on virgin births.

Natural Law and the Miraculous
The Christian claim is that Christ miraculously brought Himself back from the dead, and that He was born without a human father. These claims are miracle claims. A miracle is, by definition, a violation of the normal course of nature. In other words, a belief in a miracle not only does not imply that there is no normal natural behavior, it clearly involves the belief that there is: otherwise, there would be nothing amazing about a miracle. For someone to say "I believe the normal course of natural events was suspended on these occasions" does not imply that they don't believe in the normal course of natural events; in fact, it implies — very explicitly — exactly the opposite.

So if those who believe in miracles already believe in the normal course of natural events, then why does Coyne consider it a blow to the belief in the miraculous to point to the normal course of natural events? If believers in miraculous events believe in the normal workings of nature, what exactly is it that makes them unscientific thinkers? Obviously Coyne does not think that a theistic scientist cannot competently perform an experiment in the laboratory or identify a new species of plant or work an equation properly just because he thinks that a man who claimed to be God was born of a virgin and rose from the dead over 2000 years ago.

So what's his problem?

His problem is that, despite protestations that he believes science does not necessarily involve an a priori materialistic commitment, he really thinks it does, and clearly says so — in the same article in which he says he doesn't. And in fact much of what he says about his rejection of miracles makes no sense without taking into account his metaphysical naturalism.

This penchant for saying one thing and then arguing as if you believed the exact opposite is characteristic of New Atheist scientists. Sean Carroll, physicist at the California Institute of Technology, who comes to Coyne's defense, joins in the spirit of Coyne's confusion:

Science never proves anything. Science doesn’t prove that spacetime is curved, or that species evolved according to natural selection, or that the observable universe is billions of years old. That’s simply not how science works.

The reason why science and religion are actually incompatible is that, in the real world, they reach incompatible conclusions ... Different religions make very different claims, but they typically end up saying things like “God made the universe in six days” or “Jesus died and was resurrected” or “Moses parted the red sea” or “dead souls are reincarnated in accordance with their karmic burden.” And science says: none of that is true. So there you go, incompatibility.

Lurking behind the comments of Coyne's and his allies is the idea of inviolable natural law. As Carroll seems to admit (before he takes it back), we cannot prove that the laws of nature always apply, for the simple reason that we haven't been there to observe the laws at every instant of their application. We employ inductive reasoning, and conclude, based on an infinitesimally small sampling of events that have ever happened in the world, that things seem to follow certain patterns.

But if someone produces evidence of an irregularity, it is no argument against it to say that nature is uniformly regular, since nature is uniformly regular only if there are no irregularities. If there are, then the claim that it is uniformly regular is shot to pieces.

Can Science Say Anything about the Christian Miracles?
Coyne claims that science is set up to handle such possibilities (which he doesn't really admit as possibilities):

Despite [Stephen Jay] Gould's claims to the contrary, supernatural phenomena are not completely beyond the realm of science. All scientists can think of certain observations that would convince them of the existence of God or supernatural forces ... if a nine-hundred-foot-tall Jesus appeared to the residents of New York City, as he supposedly did to the evangelist Oral Roberts in Oklahoma, and this apparition were convincingly documented, most scientists would fall on their knees with hosannas.

Of course it's hard to conceive of how Coyne can adjudicate historical miracle claims which, practically speaking, are the only kind of miracle claims there ever really are. It certainly doesn't cover Christianity's miracle claims. And so, ironically, Coyne's position in opposition to miracles commits the cardinal scientific sin: it is unfalsifiable.

When someone in history claims to have witnessed an exception to the law, particularly one performed by someone who was purported to have previously performed a number of them in public; and which was witnessed by hundreds of people; and which was supported by myriad documentary evidence — and when even the contemporary detractors, of whom there were many, never even appeared to contest it; one wonders then what "science" can profitably say about it.

Scientists, qua scientists, can't say anything about whether these events were exceptions to natural laws precisely because they weren't there to observe them. One could say that makes them "unfalsifiable" and therefore "unscientific," to which the answer is, "So what?" The only person to whom such a statement would any force anyway was someone who thought that science was the only methodology that yielded truth. But, with the apparent exception of a few scientists cloistered in their academic departments, no one really believes that anyway.

And since when did anyone consider history "scientific" in the normal sense? Historical events are unrepeatable, they can't be studied in a laboratory, and they can't be quantified. The rules of historical research bear little resemblance to what is done in biology or chemistry or physics. Coyne can't say history is "scientific" in his sense any more than he say religion is scientific.

There are only two things anyone can say about any miracle. The first is that it can't happen, and the second is that it didn't happen — and neither one of these is a scientific statement. The first is a philosophical statement, and the second is a historical statement. The first statement is a statement of metaphysical naturalism, which Coyne himself says (right before he unsays it) is not inherent in science itself. It is a philosophical assumption masquerading as science. The second is a statement if historical skepticism. Coyne can only be saying one or the other, and in fact does both, but without offering any philosophical or historical argument for his conclusions (the only two things he can legitimately do). He instead does the one thing he has no justification for doing: he waves his hand and declares them unscientific.

The question of the miraculous is a philosophical and historical question. It is not a scientific question.

The scientific manner of dealing with miracles is really quite impressive as a rhetorical phenomenon: it gets the scientific rationalist out of having to do any intellectual heavy lifting. It involves making metaphysical and historical assertions without actually making any metaphysical or historical arguments. G. K. Chesterton spotted the method behind it a hundred years ago:

The philosophical case against miracles is somewhat easily dealt with. There is no philosophical case against miracles. There are such things as the laws of Nature rationally speaking. What everybody knows is this only. That there is repetition in nature.

... The historic case against miracles is also rather simple. It consists of calling miracles impossible, then saying that no one but a fool believes impossibilities: then declaring that there is no wise evidence on behalf of the miraculous. The whole trick is done by means of leaning alternately on the philosophical and historical objection. If we say miracles are theoretically possible, they say, "Yes, but there is no evidence for them." When we take all the records of the human race and say, "Here is your evidence," they say, "But these people were superstitious, they believed in impossible things."

Remember that the next time you are told how rational modern scientists are.

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CSC Director Stephen C. Meyer recently appeared on Jan Mickelson's talk show to discuss his new book, Signature in the Cell. Now you can download audio and listen in as Meyer discusses Francis Collins, Carl Sagan, the information embedded in DNA, and how arch-atheist Richard Dawkins anticipated the title of Dr. Meyer’s new book.

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In May, pro-Darwin-only education advocates issued a press release lamenting that “25 percent of biology teachers do not know it is unconstitutional to teach creationism.” Then last month the National Center for Science Education (NCSE) publicized its new “Creationism and the Law” web page, which states that “Since 1968…, U.S. courts have consistently held that ‘creationism’ is a particular religious viewpoint and that teaching it in public schools would violate the First Amendment of the Constitution.” While these statements are legally correct, they leave out a crucial point of law that the NCSE may not wish to publicize: “scientific critiques of prevailing scientific theories [may] be taught provided that such curricula are enacted with the clear secular intent of enhancing the effectiveness of science instruction.” That latter quote comes from the abstract of a new law review article, “Does Challenging Darwin Create Constitutional Jeopardy? A Comprehensive Survey of Case Law Regarding the Teaching of Biological Origins,” that I recently published in the Hamline Law Review (Vol. 32(1):1-64 (Winter, 2009)).

Who Is This Article For?
I wrote this recent Hamline University Law Review article as a primer for anyone -- but especially for an attorney or legal scholar -- who seeks a quick yet comprehensive Matrix-style brain-upload of the case law related to the evolution debate. My hope is also that the article will prove useful in its attempt to survey all of the major court cases dealing with education on biological origins, and most of the minor cases as well. The article surveys 21 cases (the full list is given below), and with each, there is an objective review of the facts followed by some commentary giving my view of the important legal implications of that decision.

Readers will find that the article distinguishes itself from advocacy pieces put out by the Darwin lobby. It's a serious review of current law, dealing frankly with the actual case law that supports evolution, such as the extensive case law supporting the constitutionality of teaching evolution and the numerous cases that expound upon the unconstitutionality of teaching creationism. It also delves into something that the NCSE and the rest of Darwin’s public defenders are probably hesitant to admit: not one court case finds that it is illegal to engage in scientific critique of evolution in public schools, and significant authority (including a number of long-standing educational policies requiring critical analysis of evolution that the Darwin lobby has lacked the stomach to challenge) supports the constitutionality of such.

Why Does the Darwin Lobby Basically Ignore the Law on Hot Educational Policy Questions?
Despite what you may read in the media, the big debate in public schools today isn’t about teaching creationism, and it isn’t even about teaching intelligent design (which is of course different from creationism). The real question that most commonly faces schools is whether to strictly indoctrinate students in Darwinian evolution, or whether instead to inform them about the scientific evidence both for and against modern Darwinism.

Given the actual nature of most policy debates, why does the evolution lobby spend so much time talking about how courts have banned the teaching of creationism? It's simple: They want you to think that anything that challenges evolution entails teaching creationism, which in turn would imply that teaching anything but the pro-evolutionary viewpoint is unconstitutional. I submit that not only is this a wholly inaccurate representation of the law, but it entails an abuse of the First Amendment.

The First Amendment was intended to protect both freedom of speech and freedom of religion. The latter means, in part, that the government cannot adopt policies whose primary effect advances religion. That is why courts have rightly banned the advocacy of creationism in public schools. But the Darwin lobby tries to relabel anything that challenges evolution as “creationism,” thereby twisting the First Amendment, reversing its meaning, as if it had been intended as a tool for censorship. While creationism should not be advocated in public schools, there is nothing illegal about teaching students about legitimate scientific challenges to modern evolutionary biology, a pedagogical approach that is quite different from teaching creationism, has clear secular educational benefits, and that should be supported by anyone who truly upholds freedom of scientific inquiry.

The abstract of the article is below, followed by a list of the cases I survey.

Abstract: The teaching of biological origins in public schools remains a contentious scientific, cultural, and legal debate. With the increase of public interest in this topic, it is essential for attorneys, legal scholars, and educational authorities to have an awareness of the full breadth of case law on this issue. Yet at present, a comprehensive collation and summary of the relevant cases is absent from the literature. Moreover, few have bothered to engage in a careful review of the case law to determine if evolution actually is beyond scrutiny in public schools. This article attempts to exhaustively survey the case law relevant to the teaching of biological origins, dividing the cases into three major categories: (1) Cases upholding the right to teach about evolution; (2) Cases rejecting the teaching of alternatives to evolution; and (3) Cases rejecting disclaimers regarding the teaching of evolution. The range of constitutionally permissible policies for teaching evolution can also be understood by studying policies that have not engendered lawsuits. Twenty-one cases will be reviewed, as well as various policies that have not faced legal challenges, revealing that while courts have firmly upheld the rights of educators to teach evolution and have rejected attempts to teach creationism, none of these cases stands for the proposition that a curriculum that teaches scientific critiques of evolution would necessarily place a school board in constitutional jeopardy. Indeed, case law and the public policy history of this issue suggest precisely the opposite: curricular policies in public schools need not unilaterally support evolution. Rather, as the U.S. Supreme Court has stated, “scientific critiques of prevailing scientific theories [may] be taught” provided that such curricula are enacted with the “clear secular intent of enhancing the effectiveness of science instruction.” Educators that choose to improve science education by teaching both the scientific evidence supporting modern Darwinian theory, as well as the scientific evidence that challenges this view, can rest assured that they are on firm legal ground and that Darwin himself may even be smiling approvingly from whichever realm of the afterlife he resides today.

Cases surveyed:
1. Scopes v. State
2. Epperson v. Arkansas
3. Wright v. Houston Independent School District
4. Moore v. Gaston County Board of Education
5. Crowley v. Smithsonian Institution
6. Segraves v. California
7. Peloza v. Capistrano Independent Unified School District
8. Moeller v. Shrenko
9. LeVake v. Independent School District
10. Hendren v. Campbell
11. McLean v. Arkansas Board of Education
12. Edwards v. Aguillard
13. Webster v. New Lennox School District
14. Bishop v. Aronov
15. Helland v. South Bend Community School Corporation
16. Kitzmiller v. Dover
17. Hurst v. Newman
18. Daniel v. Waters
19. Steele v. Waters
20. Freiler v. Tangipahoa Parish Board of Education
21. Selman v. Cobb County Board of Education

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Stephen Barr at First Things has responded to the three questions I posed to him in our online dialogue about evolution, God, Christianity, and intelligent design. Parts of Barr’s response are helpful in clarifying the points in contention; other parts continue to leave me perplexed.

For those who have not been following our exchange, it began after Barr took issue with this article I wrote for The Washington Post criticizing proponents of theistic evolution such as Kenneth Miller and Francis Collins (who was just nominated by the Obama administration to be the head of the National Institutes of Health, and who was one of the notable supporters of President Obama's repeal of the ban on federal funding of embryonic stem-cell research earlier this year.) Other installments in my exchange with Barr can be read here, here, and here.

Barr’s latest response comes in two parts: The first part appeared as a comment posted on June 26 to one of his earlier blog posts; it’s a thoughtful answer that advances the discussion by clarifying our disagreements. The second part appeared as a new post on the First Things blog. Unfortunately, this latter rejoinder adopts an exasperated and condescending tone that isn’t especially conducive to civil discussion.

My three questions to Barr focused on his peculiar definition of Darwinism, his public silence on the mainstream theistic evolutionists who promote undirected evolution, and the ways in which Barr thinks design can be detected in biology.

The Humpty Dumpty Approach to Defining Darwinism

In my first question, I asked Barr why he insisted on conflating his teleological view of evolution with the term “Darwinism.” Doesn’t that simply promote confusion rather than clarity?

As I demonstrated previously, the vast majority of evolutionary biologists don’t just believe that Darwinian evolution appears undirected; they hold that it really is undirected. Barr even seems to have conceded this fact. However, he rejects the idea that evolution truly is undirected. To him, evolution only looks undirected and any claims to the contrary are merely “philosophical offshoots” of the real biological theory of evolution. Whatever can be said about Barr’s view of evolution, it is not “Darwinism.” The definition of Darwinian evolution as an undirected process goes back to Darwin himself; it’s a core part of the theory. Barr’s response? He insists there isn’t any other term that can be used: “At present, there is no such agreed-upon substitute word [for Darwinism], or even any proposal or discussion of finding one. So we HAVE to use the word Darwinism to describe the mere biological theory—there is simply no other word available.”

Well, if there is simply no other word currently available, why doesn’t Barr invent one? Surely he can come up with his own more precise term to describe his unique view of evolution, one that isn’t already being used by others to mean something else. But instead of coining a new term for his own view, Barr suggests that we come up with a new label for undirected evolution: “atheistic hyper-darwinism.” The problem with this suggestion is that what Barr calls “atheistic hyper-darwinism” is merely mainstream Darwinian theory as accepted by the vast majority of evolutionary biologists. Indeed, if we were to adopt Barr’s suggestion, we would have to classify Charles Darwin himself—the author of the theory—as a “hyper-Darwinist.” The “hyper-Darwinist label” is thus seriously misleading. It attempts to portray garden variety Darwinism as a fringe view, when it is Barr’s attempted redefinition of Darwinism that is the fringe view among evolutionary biologists.

This discussion over terminology begins to make one feel rather like Alice in Wonderland:

“I don't know what you mean by ‘glory,’” Alice said.

Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. “Of course you don't—till I tell you. I meant “there's a nice knock-down argument for you!’”

“But ‘glory’ doesn't mean ‘a nice knock-down argument,’” Alice objected.

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that's all.”

Perhaps I’m old-fashioned, but I believe Darwinism should be defined as Darwin and most of his followers have defined the term—as a blind, undirected process of natural selection acting on random variations. Barr insists that he should be able to redefine the term to mean that evolution only appears to be unguided, and that mainstream Darwinian theory be relabeled “hyper-Darwinism.” Readers will have to decide for themselves which approach leads to greater clarity in public discussions. In my view, one can have a theory of evolution that is harmonious with Christianity, but Darwinism isn’t it, and using the term “Darwinism” to refer to such a metaphysically-neutral theory of evolution is not helpful at all. As I pointed out in my previous post, I think the main consequence of trying to redefine Darwinism to mean something other than what most Darwinian biologists think is to lull theists into believing that mainstream Darwinism is metaphysically neutral—when it’s not. Mainstream Darwinism will continue to mean what it has always meant, and mainstream Darwinists will continue to use the theory to promote their metaphysical agenda, Barr's efforts to redefine the term notwithstanding.

The Hear-No-Evil, See-No-Evil Approach to Undirected Theistic Evolution

My second question to Barr asked why he and Francis Collins have not repudiated the theory of undirected theistic evolution propagated by scientists like Kenneth Miller and former Vatican astronomer George Coyne. Here Barr pleads ignorance, saying that he really hasn’t studied the views of Kenneth Miller. Barr indicates that if Miller really espouses the views I cite, then of course those views wouldn’t be acceptable, but Barr doesn’t want to hazard an opinion as to whether Miller actually holds the views I cite. (He doesn’t mention George Coyne.) This plea of ignorance is puzzling. Kenneth Miller, George Coyne, and Georgetown theologian John Haught are prominent figures in the evolution debate, and their view of unguided theistic evolution is hardly a secret. Yet Barr seems more concerned about finding fault with intelligent design proponents than with countering the denial of God’s omniscience and sovereignty by fellow proponents of theistic evolution who are trying to square theism with undirected Darwinism. This seems to be a strange set of priorities. After all, which is more serious: Disagreement about where and how one can detect design in nature? Or disagreement about whether nature really was designed in any traditional sense? I would encourage Dr. Barr to become acquainted with what mainstream theistic evolutionists like Miller, Coyne, and Haught are arguing. Otherwise while he is busy skirmishing with intelligent design proponents over where and how to detect design, he may miss a far more fundamental intellectual battle going on all around him.

Francis Collins, I might add, can’t plead the excuse of ignorance. Unlike Barr, Collins has praised Kenneth Miller’s writings and has drawn extensively on Miller for his own critique of intelligent design. As I noted in two previous posts, Collins also delivered the keynote at a conference on “open theism” and science. Open theists, of course, explicitly deny that God knows the future exhaustively. So Collins surely is not ignorant of the views of theistic evolutionists who deny that the specific outcomes of evolution are known and directed by God. Why, then, has Collins stayed silent about the views of these mainstream theistic evolutionists? Again, this seems to be a strange set of priorities. Collins assails intelligent design, shrilly claiming that “ID is not only bad science but is potentially threatening in other deeper ways to America’s future.” (emphasis added) Yet Collins raises no similar criticisms of his fellow theistic evolutionists who insist that God neither knows nor directs the specific outcomes of evolution. Why not?

Evolution Appears Undirected (Except When It Appears Directed)

My third question to Barr asked about where he sees evidence of design in biology. This question arose after Barr seemed to endorse Francis Collins’ position that evolution only looks “undirected.” Barr then seemed to agree with intelligent design proponents that biology does display evidence of design even though he disagreed with specific arguments for the detection of intelligent design in biology. (“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….”)

Responding to my question, Barr says that there appears to be “a great deal of directedness in biological evolution,” echoing Simon Conway Morris’s view that evolution converges on the same solutions time and again. Barr goes on to claim that man’s “spiritual powers of intellect and will” provide evidence of “design and purpose very directly.” According to Barr, “no kind of biological theory can account for man himself. We have spiritual souls. These cannot be accounted for by any biological process, whether Darwinian or otherwise. The soul is infused directly by God.”

Barr’s answer makes me even more mystified about why he insists on calling his own view “Darwinism.” After all, Morris’s view of “channeled” evolution is far from canonical Darwinism. Indeed, although Morris has been publicly critical of intelligent design, his early statements about convergent evolution explicitly drew a connection between the anthropic principle in cosmology and what he was finding in biology. Barr’s view of human development, meanwhile, is completely contrary to the Darwinian view. There is simply no principled basis from within Darwinism to exempt any part of human beings from the evolutionary process, and no orthodox Darwinist would ever accept the idea that Darwinian evolution does not fully explain man’s capacities, including his mental and moral faculties. In fact, Darwin himself wrote an entire book—The Descent of Man—to demonstrate that all of man’s intellectual, moral, and even spiritual faculties were produced by the same blind and mechanistic process that produced his bodily appendages. When fellow scientists such as Alfred Wallace and St. George Jackson Mivart dared to disagree with Darwin about whether natural selection could explain such human faculties, Darwin became upset; in his view, their views were heretical.

I must admit that I am perplexed about how to reconcile Barr’s latest statements with his earlier defense of the position of Francis Collins. Remember that our original exchange began when Barr took offense because I criticized Collins for insisting that evolution looks to human beings as if it is “undirected.” Lydia McGrew insightfully analyzes how Barr seems to discount the detectability of design throughout nature, not just in biology. Yet Barr is now saying that we can discern “a great deal of directedness in biological evolution.” Well, which is it? Does evolution look “undirected,” as Collins says, or does evolution appear to have “a great deal of directedness”? Interestingly, after his latest response to me, Barr posted the following comment:

We are in the presence of mystery. God does not always show his hand. He is the “deus absconditus”, the God who hides. The splendor of creation indeed proclaims the greatness and power of God. But I certainly don’t know how God does everything He does, and neither do the ID people.

Setting aside the jibe that “ID people” pretend to know how God does everything (in fact, they merely propose that science can detect certain features of design in nature), let us focus on the confusion that seems to inhere in this passage. Barr first asserts that God is “the God who hides” (implying that His activity may be undetectable in nature); but then Barr turns around and asserts that “creation indeed proclaims the greatness and power of God” (implying that God’s activity is detectable after all). It seems to me that Barr is trying to have it both ways when it comes to Darwinian evolution. When someone critiques Collins’ view that the evolutionary process only looks “undirected,” Barr responds with “the God who hides.” When it is pointed out that this claim flies in the face of historic Christian theology, Barr turns around and says, well, of course, I believe that evolution shows evidence of direction and design! No doubt he will accuse me of misunderstanding his position (again), but it seems to me that Barr’s actual position is rather difficult to pin down. According to Barr, Darwinian evolution appears to be undirected—except, of course, when it appears to be directed.

Does Barr’s Position Diminish the Role of Design in the Christian Tradition?

Thus far I have responded to Barr’s answers to my three questions, which he posted as a comment to one of his blogs. Later, Barr posted an entirely new blog post titled “There He Goes Again: Another Response to John West.” Barr begins that post with: “To quote the Gipper, ‘There he goes again’ Every time John G. West attempts to argue against my views, he misrepresents them.” Barr goes on to say that he has “deep differences with the ID movement, but I think they deserve far better than this kind of advocacy.” He ends with the claim: “West thinks he can read the evidences of God’s activity and purpose in nature much better than I or Francis Collins can. His claims in this regard would be much more convincing if he were to demonstrate some ability to understand human purpose let alone divine, and in particular the meaning and purpose of very clear passages of human prose.”

I’m not sure why Barr thinks that honest questions and disagreements should be met with a tone of condescension and exasperation, not to mention intimations that I am either mendacious or dim. Perhaps Barr is learning bad habits from some other theistic evolutionists. He seems to think that I am questioning his honesty or sincerity in disagreeing with him. For the record, let me assure him that I have not intended to do so. I’m sure Barr genuinely believes that his position is correct. Just because I disagree with him does not mean I am trying to impugn his integrity. I earlier praised Barr as a serious and thoughtful man and commended him for being willing to engage in a genuine dialogue about serious issues.

Barr takes particular umbrage at my writing that he “tries to diminish the role of design in the Christian theological tradition,” which he says misrepresents his position. On further reflection, however, I think my statement was fair. I did not claim that Barr denies the role of design in the Christian theological tradition, only that he was trying to diminish it. Now why did I say that?

To understand the context of what I wrote, one needs to go back (again) to the very beginning of our exchange. Barr criticized an article I wrote for the Washington Post that criticized Francis Collins for suggesting that the outcomes of evolution could have been known and specified by God even though God (according to Collins) made the evolutionary process look “random and undirected.” Barr insisted that Collins’ “understanding of divine providence, omnipotence, and omniscience are thoroughly in accord with the insights and explanations to be found in St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, and the mainstream of Christian tradition.”

As part of my response, I cited Romans 1:20, Psalm 19, and the teachings of the early church fathers to make one very simple point: The idea that God hid his activity in creating biological life (making His actions appear “random and undirected” in Collins’ words) is difficult to square with the universal teaching of the church that God’s creativity activity can be discerned through the things he has made. Contra Frank Beckwith, my point in citing Romans was not to insist on a particular way of detecting design in nature—be it Bill Dembski’s explanatory filter, Michael Behe’s irreducible complexity, or Stephen Meyer’s inference to the best explanation. I certainly have opinions on how design can be detected in biology and elsewhere, but that was not what I was getting at. My original point was that Collins’ specific claim in The Language of God that the development of life through evolution looks “undirected” is in tension with the historic Christian teaching that God can be known through His works. I think this criticism of Collins still stands.

Now in response to this criticism of Collins’ position, what did Barr say? Well, one thing he did not say was that he disagreed with Collins. Instead, he launched the following defense: “It is a huge leap of logic to jump over all these crucial distinctions and say that because someone defends the basic validity of Darwinian evolution and thinks the arguments of the ID movement are shaky and inadequate he must therefore be denying that God’s activity in the world is knowable through the things he has created.”

But Barr misstated my argument and missed my central point: I did not argue that because someone “thinks the arguments of the ID movement are shaky and inadequate” that “he must therefore be denying that God’s activity in the world is knowable through the things he has created.” Rather, I objected to Collins’ claim that God made the evolutionary process look like it was “random and undirected” (again, this is Collins’ phrase, not mine). It seemed to me then—it still seems to me now—that Collins’ assertion is hard to square with the general principle enunciated by Paul that we can discern God’s character through the things he created in nature. Collins’ claim that God made evolution look “undirected” to human beings isn’t just a denial of one particular way of discerning design in the history of life; it is a general denial that we can discern design in the particular outcomes of the evolutionary process.

After critiquing an argument I did not make, Barr went on to argue that the passage I cited from the Apostle Paul in Romans 1:20 contained “a clear allusion to a passage from the Book of Wisdom,” which he then reprinted at length. Since I had not mentioned the Book of Wisdom, what was the reason for Barr’s lengthy quotation from it? According to his own explanation at the time, he wanted to make the following point: “It is noteworthy that this passage does not point at all to biological phenomena, let alone biological complexity.” Now why was this point “noteworthy,” unless Barr somehow thought that it countered my interpretation of Romans 1:20 to which he was responding? Read in context, Barr’s statement certainly does seem intended to diminish the prominence of biological arguments for design in the Christian theological tradition. Barr’s subsequent paragraph reinforces this interpretation. I reproduce that paragraph in full:

To 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. Everything is part of the divine plan, but the divine plan is not always and everywhere evident on the surface of things. There are valid design arguments, but that does not mean that all design arguments are valid. Darwinism has indeed made certain kinds of design argument more difficult to make; but, happily, science has made other kinds of design argument easier to make. 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. In my view, it is more effective at present to use design arguments of another sort.

Again, it is necessary to correct Barr on what he imagines ID proponents propose. They do not hold that “every single thing one sees in the world, taken by itself, standing alone, constitutes persuasive evidence of… design.” This is a straw man argument. As for the rest of the passage, Barr does not deny that there are any valid design arguments (nor did I claim that he did), but it’s clear that the overall thrust of his argument is to diminish the importance of biological arguments for design. Barr argues that “Darwinism has… made certain kinds of design arguments more difficult to make” (i.e., biological arguments for design), and although he goes on to say that “good biological design arguments can be made,” he warns that “it is a challenging task to formulate them in a way that will be persuasive to knowledgeable people today.” Barr’s conclusion? “In my view, it is more effective at present to use design arguments of another sort.”

Note that Barr indicates here that even “good biological design arguments” are hard to make persuasively, and therefore he prefers “design arguments of another sort.” How is this not diminishing the importance of arguments for biological design—even those Barr considers “good biological design arguments”?! When I wrote that Barr was trying to diminish the role of design, the context was clearly a discussion of his view of biological design. I never claimed that he was hostile to all design arguments. In fact, I have noted that both he and Francis Collins are open to design in physics and cosmology. The point under discussion, however, was whether or not the evolutionary process that led to the development of complex life displayed evidence of design.

An additional point. Barr takes me to task for stating that his “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.”

Barr thinks I was impugning his integrity by this passage. In fact, I was trying to criticize his approach, not his integrity. To reiterate: I do not question that Barr is a serious Christian who sincerely believes that his position is correct. In retrospect, I think I could have eliminated the phrase “at all costs” in my criticism. Regardless, by his own self-explanation, Barr is very concerned about getting Christians to make peace with Darwinism. Indeed, he even invokes the metaphor of warfare in expressing his concerns that Christians stop attacking Darwin. He writes:

It is both futile and very harmful to Christianity for Christians to keep waging war against evolution and “Darwinism”. This will not have any effect whatsoever on the field of biology. Contrary to what many people naively imagine, there is zero chance that the idea of evolution will be overthrown in biology. There is zero chance that Darwin’s idea of natural selection will be completely overthrown. It is likely to be modified and refined by new discoveries and insights, but not overthrown. Darwin’s ideas are important pillars of modern biology and will always remain so. So attacking Darwin will do no damage to Darwin. It does, however, do enormous damage to religion.

Based upon comments such as these, I think it’s entirely fair to point out that Barr is concerned about the need for Christians to make their peace with Darwinism. I think it’s just as fair to point out—again, based on his own comments—that Barr’s concern about Christians making their peace with Darwinism is more pronounced than his concern about whether theistic evolutionists such as Ken Miller and George Coyne are promoting heterodox ideas about God. After all, while Barr seems uninterested in finding out about the beliefs of Miller and Coyne, he goes out of his way to condemn fellow Christians who have the temerity to push back against Darwinism. That is the point I was trying to make.

Is Disagreeing with Stephen Barr and Francis Collins Beyond the Pale?

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of Barr’s latest response is the seeming effort to brand honest disagreements with his views (and with the views of Francis Collins) as somehow beyond the pale. Barr writes:

I cannot sympathize at all with those ID people (fortunately, a small minority) who target anyone, no matter how traditional his theological stance, who isn’t willing to join their anti-Darwin movement. Why West feels he has to call my integrity into question by talking about “peace at any price” I cannot imagine. But what disturbs me much more is the targeting of Francis Collins. Collins is, without any question, the most effective voice coming from the ranks of scientists in favor of traditional Christian belief that we have seen in a very long time.

Barr complains that some ID proponents (presumably meaning me) “target anyone, no matter how traditional his theological stance, who isn’t willing to join their anti-Darwin movement.” The whole tenor of this passage is along the lines of “How dare they! How dare they question my arguments or the arguments of Francis Collins!” Barr’s very terminology of “target” and “targeting” communicates that he thinks something illegitimate is afoot.

This complaint must be examined closely.

Francis Collins is a public figure who regularly makes public arguments denouncing intelligent design. He asserts that intelligent design is bad science, bad theology, and is even “potentially threatening in other deeper ways to America’s future.” Stephen Barr also has made public criticisms of intelligent design, and he accuses those who disagree with Darwinism of doing “enormous damage to religion.” Barr presumably thinks that both he and Collins have every right to “target” those they disagree with in this way. But when someone responds with a different view, Barr seems to view those challenges as personal affronts or otherwise illegitimate. Does he similarly think it is illegitimate for someone who supports a pro-life position to critique Collins' support for embryonic stem-cell research or his ambiguous views on abortion?

In fact, what would be illegitimate is a one-sided exchange where party A gets to criticize party B all he wants, but when party B responds he is suddenly accused of having done something inappropriate.

Although I disagree with both Collins and Barr, I have not questioned their right to express their views. Nor have I complained that they “target anyone, no matter how traditional his theology, who isn’t willing to join their pro-Darwin movement.” In a free society, it is perfectly proper for people to express their disagreements with one another, especially about issues of consequence. Barr and Collins have every right to criticize proponents of intelligent design. But they should not take it as a personal affront if those they criticize respond with questions and counter-arguments.

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Discovery Institute senior fellow David Klinghoffer has written an insightful column in The Jerusalem Post on the evidence for design in DNA -- and what it means for materialism:

DNA are three letters full of paradox. What they represent remains little understood by the public, yet they are on everyone's tongue. Amid the chatter of popular culture, the truth gets lost that DNA is one of the most powerful clues we have of the existence of a spiritual reality, maybe to the existence of God.

An acronym for deoxyribonucleic acid, DNA refers to the form taken by the biological information that directs the production of proteins and other cell components. In 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick famously described its double-helix shape. The information thus encoded, the genome, influences how a living organism's body gets constructed, though how far this goes, and how it works, are questions that remain obscure.

. . .

But all this is trivial compared to the largely unheralded insight gained from the Human Genome Project, completed in 2003. The insight is disturbing. It is that while DNA codes for the cell's building blocks, the information needed to build the rest of the creature is seemingly, in large measure, absent.

CONSIDER THE HOX "master" genes that supposedly determine the spatial configuration of the front and back ends of creatures as diverse as frogs, mice and humans. As British physician James Le Fanu writes in a fascinating new book, Why Us? How Science Rediscovered the Mystery of Ourselves (Pantheon), Swiss biologist Walter Gehring showed that "the same 'master' genes mastermind the three-dimensional structures of all living things... The same master genes that cause a fly to have the form of a fly cause a mouse to have the form of a mouse." The physically encoded information to form that mouse, as opposed to that fly, isn't there. Instead, "It is as if the 'idea' of the fly (or any other organism) must somehow permeate the genome that gives rise to it."

Explanations depending on unguided material processes alone usually founder on a chicken-or-the-egg paradox: notably, that "specified information in DNA codes for proteins, but specific proteins are necessary to transcribe and translate the information on the DNA molecule."

DNA acts like a computer code, or like a language consisting of letters and words, arranged in specific sequences to accomplish a specific task or convey a specific meaning. As Dr. Meyer observes, the only kind of source we know of that can produce a "functionally integrated information-processing system" like that in the cell is an intelligent source.

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In case you missed your chance to listen live last week, you can now listen to Dr. Stephen C. Meyer's interview on the nationally syndicated Michael Medved Show here. Meyer and Medved discuss the information revolution and the challenge it presents for Darwinism, as well as the argument for intelligent design from information.

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In a recent ENV post, Stephen Meyer critiqued a May 2009 Nature paper co-authored by John D. Sutherland titled, "Synthesis of activated pyrimidine ribonucleotides in prebiotically plausible conditions." The paper claimed to have produced RNA nucleobases under prebiotic conditions, but Meyer observed that it utterly failed to address the most crucial question in the origin of life (OOL): the origin of information, a topic Meyer addresses extensively in his new book Signature in the Cell.

Other scientists agree with Meyer. Organic chemist Dr. Charles Garner recently noted in private correspondence that "while this work helps one imagine how RNA might form, it does nothing to address the information content of RNA. So, yes, there was a lot of guidance by an intelligent chemist."

Sutherland's research produced only 2 of the 4 RNA nucleobases, and Dr. Garner also explained why, as is often the case, the basic chemistry itself also required the hand of an intelligent chemist:

As far as being relevant to OOL, the chemistry has all of the usual problems. The starting materials are "plausibly" obtainable by abiotic means, but need to be kept isolated from one another until the right step, as Sutherland admits. One of the starting materials is a single mirror image for which there is no plausible way to get it that way abiotically. Then Sutherland ran these reactions as any organic chemist would, with pure materials under carefully controlled conditions. In general, he purified the desired products after each step, and adjusted the conditions (pH, temperature, etc.) to maximum advantage along the way. Not at all what one would expect from a lagoon of organic soup. He recognized that making of a lot of biologically problematic side products was inevitable, but found that UV light applied at the right time and for the right duration could destroy much (?) of the junk without too much damage to the desired material. Meaning, of course, that without great care little of the desired chemistry would plausibly occur. But it is more than enough for true believers in OOL to rejoice over, and, predictably, to way overstate in the press.

Another anonymous pro-ID Ph.D. chemist privately wrote me similar criticisms of Sutherland's paper:

They used pH manipulation, phosphate buffers and irradiation all at the correct times and amounts to achieve their goal, which was to produce “activated pyrimidine ribonucleotides.” Indeed, they could have shortened their title by chopping off the last four words and sent the paper to the Journal of Organic Synthesis and had a good chance of getting it accepted as a novel synthetic route with full credit to themselves for their clever manipulations. Certainly the fingerprints of several intelligent chemists are all over this pathway if not their rather ham fisted signatures.

Other control they exercised includes careful selection of the precursors, control of competing reactions by pH selection and the phenomenal phosphate concentration they used. Life in the modern ocean is phosphate limited as phosphate is generally about 0.5 micro-molar at the sea surface and only 2-4 micro-molar at depth. But what is a six order of magnitude enrichment among friends if it helps the cause!? Now they could argue that one gets that kind of enrichment in a tide pool but even that is a stretch.

Incidentally, now comes the hard parts: first, selectively hydrolyzing the cyclic 2’, 3’ phosphates to 3’- only, then getting them to polymerize ONLY at the 5’ position. And second, once you have a supply of various RNA molecules, spontaneously developing the required biochemical structure to convert the coded sequences into proteins. Of course, we have to hope that we get lucky and we guess the correct code on the first try. And all of this has to happen in the same tide-pool otherwise, well, you get the picture. It’s a bit of a stretch.

It is no wonder that whenever I see the word “plausible” in the title of an article, that I am reminded of the quote attributed to P.T. Barnum, “there is a sucker born every minute.”

"Plausible" is in the Eye of the Beholder
There are thus many instances in this research where the conditions they used were anything but, as the paper's title claims, "prebiotically plausible conditions." One such instance may have been the careful addition of the 'just right' quantity of UV light, where even the original Nature paper admits: "Although the issue of temporally separated supplies of glycolaldehyde and glyceraldehyde remains a problem, a number of situations could have arisen that would result in the conditions of heating and progressive dehydration followed by cooling, rehydration and ultraviolet irradiation."

It's no groundbreaking news story that there are potential sources of heat on the early earth. These "number of situations" referred to typically include proposals of heating and drying in intertidal pools or volcanic ridges where repeated cycles of heating and drying can take place. But mundane sources of heat are only a small part of the problem, which largely comes down to the fact that the proper amount of heat has to be carefully applied so as to not wipeout the desired molecular products. It's quite easy to over-cook (or under-cook) the organic molecules, which tend to break down rapidly (i.e. cook) in the presence of heat. This would have to be a fine balancing act that would also require just the right input of organic material, heat, and UV light, so as to avoid destroying the molecules. In other words, it's a finely tuned system, the kind in which a successful scenario is very difficult to imagine without the input of intelligence. And of course, intelligently directed chemistry is exactly what provided the glycolaldehyde and glyceraldehydes in this recent research.

The Nature paper claims that the starting molecules are all "plausible prebiotic feedstock molecules," but as Garner suggests, that claim turns on what we mean by "plausible." In this case, the mechanisms of producing glycolaldehyde and glyceraldehyde are about as "plausible" as saying that if you have a pile of flour, baking powder, salt, butter, and eggs, you can produce a cake, given "the conditions of heating." Any baker knows that the ingredients must be applied in the right quantities and the right order, and that "the conditions of heating" have to be applied at just the right level or you produce nothing worth eating. In the world of creating even the mere precursor molecules to ribonucleotides, it's not just heating that's necessary but also the proper amount and sequence of "the conditions of heating and progressive dehydration followed by cooling, rehydration and ultraviolet irradiation."

As a third chemist put it to me, "The work was very carefully done. The problem is that it was very carefully done." No kidding.

Of course, even some origin of life theorists recognize that this research is not relevant to plausible conditions on the early earth. A news article on the website of the Royal Chemistry Society stated:

However, Robert Shapiro, professor emeritus of chemistry at New York University disagrees. 'Although as an exercise in chemistry this represents some very elegant work, this has nothing to do with the origin of life on Earth whatsoever,' he says. According to Shapiro, it is hard to imagine RNA forming in a prebiotic world along the lines of Sutherland's synthesis.

'The chances that blind, undirected, inanimate chemistry would go out of its way in multiple steps and use of reagents in just the right sequence to form RNA is highly unlikely,' argues Shapiro. Instead, he advocates the metabolism-first argument: that early self-sustaining autocatalytic chemosynthetic systems associated with amino acids predated RNA.

(Robert Shapiro quoted in James Urquhart, Insight into RNA origins, Royal Society of Chemistry (May 13, 2009).)

'Of course, it is referring to an event of the past and therefore conclusions will never achieve a level of certainty as in other scientific fields,' says renowned synthetic organic chemist Albert Eschenmoser. 'But Sutherland's work is a fundamental study referring to the problem of the origin of life. It is an exemplary piece of how to do synthetic organic chemistry research under very serious constraints of prebiotic chemistry,' Eschenmoser adds.

(Albert Eschenmoser quoted in James Urquhart, Insight into RNA origins, Royal Society of Chemistry (May 13, 2009).)

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Update: An earlier version of this release mistakenly attributed a quote from lecturer James Williams to the Daily Telegraph to Archbishop Rowan Williams, also cited in the article as critical of intelligent design.

SEATTLE—Earlier this week, The Daily Telegraph reported attacks on the inclusion of intelligent design in a British science exam, provoking a sharp response from the intelligent design research community, led by Stephen C. Meyer, a Cambridge University-trained philosopher of science whose just-released book Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design (HarperOne) is already drawing praise from leading U.K. scientists.

Lecturer James Williams of Sussex University complained to The Telegraph, “This gives an unwarranted high profile to creationism and intelligent design as ideas of equal status with tested scientific theories.”

“Mr. Williams apparently knows very little about the scientific case for intelligent design," said Dr. Meyer, who also directs the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture in the United States. "The exam board should be commended, not attacked, for exposing students to competing ideas about the origin and development of life."

Williams made his remarks in the context of a controversy in Britain around a science test given last month to thousands of teenagers in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland. One question asked students to compare Darwinian evolutionary theories with Lamarckian evolutionary theory, the theory of intelligent design and Biblical creationism.

"Unlike creationism, intelligent design is an inference from scientific evidence, not a deduction from religious authority," countered Meyer. "Intelligent design proposes that certain features of the universe and life are best explained by an intelligent cause rather than an undirected process such as natural selection."

Meyer argues in his new book that compelling scientific evidence for intelligent design exists in the digital code stored in the DNA molecule.

"DNA functions like a software program," he explains. "We know from experience that software comes from programmers. Information--whether inscribed in hieroglyphics, written in a book or encoded in a radio signal--always arises from an intelligent source. So the discovery of digital code in DNA provides evidence that the information in DNA also had an intelligent source."

Scientists who have endorsed Meyer's book include one of the U.K's top geneticists, Dr. Norman C. Nevin, O.B.E., Emeritus Professor in Medical Genetics, Queen's University, Belfast, who has praised Signature in the Cell as "a landmark in the intelligent design debate."

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[Note: For a more comprehensive rebuttal to "Expelled Exposed," please see: NCSE Exposed at NCSEExposed.org]

We're often told that the evidence for neo-Darwinian evolution -- where unguided natural selection acting on random mutations is the driving force generating the complexity and diversity of life -- is "overwhelming." But hints of dissent from this position can be found throughout the mainstream scientific literature. One article in Trends in Ecology and Evolution last year acknowledged that there exists a "healthy debate concerning the sufficiency of neo-Darwinian theory to explain macroevolution".[1] Likewise, Günter Theißen of the Department of Genetics at Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, Germany recently wrote earlier this year in the journal Theory in Biosciences:

while we already have a quite good understanding of how organisms adapt to the environment, much less is known about the mechanisms behind the origin of evolutionary novelties, a process that is arguably different from adaptation (Wagner 2000). Despite Darwin’s undeniable merits, explaining how the enormous complexity and diversity of living beings on our planet originated remains one of the greatest challenges of biology.[2]

Explaining exactly how the great complexity and diversity of life on earth originated is still an enormous scientific challenge. ... There is the widespread attitude in the scientific community that, despite some problems in detail, textbook accounts on evolution have essentially solved the problem already. In my view, this is not quite correct.[3]

What is most interesting is how these hints of dissent are often accompanied by statements disclaiming any support for intelligent design (ID), seemingly intended to help deflect attacks upon the dissenter. Theißen's 2009 article is quick to protest that "'anti-Darwinians' should not be confused with people, such as creationists, that see Darwin as their opponent,"[2] and his 2006 paper expressly disclaims any support for ID (where Theißen again inappropriately lumps with "creationism"):

There is the opposite view gaining ground mainly outside of scientific circles that living organisms are so complex that they must have been created by an external intelligence – a novel version of creationism known as "Intelligent Design" (ID). A philosophical analysis of whether ID is a scientific hypothesis at all is beyond the scope of this review. In any case, its ability to develop fruitful research programs has remained negligible so far (Raff, 2005). With few exceptions (e.g., see Lönnig, 2004, and references cited therein) biologists do not consider ID helpful in our endeavour to explain life’s complexity and diversity. This does not mean, however, that we already have a complete and satisfactory theory which explains how the complexity and diversity of life originated. Thus the rejection of ID or other varieties of creationism is not based on the comprehensive explanatory power of any existing evolutionary theory, but has to be considered as an epistemological presupposition and heuristic basis of biology as a natural science.[3]

Theißen apparently feels it necessary to announce his rejection of ID and his commitment to material explanations in order for his "anti-Darwinian" ideas to have any hope of gaining traction. Yet his 2006 paper contains a stark lamentation admitting the opposition faced by even materialists who dissent from neo-Darwinism:

It is dangerous to raise attention to the fact that there is no satisfying explanation for macroevolution. One easily becomes a target of orthodox evolutionary biology and a false friend of proponents of non-scientific concepts. According to the former we already know all the relevant principles that explain the complexity and diversity of life on earth; for the latter science and research will never be able to provide a conclusive explanation, simply because complex life does not have a natural origin.[3]

This is by no means the only evidence dissent from neo-Darwinism is tolerated (and as Theißen indicates, just barely) only if one pledges allegiance to materialism. Last year, Nature published an article covering the Altenberg 16 conference where critics gathered to debate the sufficiency of the modern synthesis of evolution. Scott Gilbert was quoted in the Nature article stating that “[t]he modern synthesis is good at modelling the survival of the fittest, but not the arrival of the fittest.”[5] Stewart Newman stated in the same article, "You can't deny the force of selection in genetic evolution ... but in my view this is stabilizing and fine-tuning forms that originate due to other processes."[5] Evolutionary paleobiologist Graham Budd was similarly open in the article about deficiencies in explanations of key evolutionary transitions:

These problems include some of the key turning points in evolution: the patterns and changes seen in the fossil record as new branches spring from the tree of life and new anatomies — skeletons, limbs, brains — come into being. "When the public thinks about evolution, they think about the origin of wings and the invasion of the land," says Graham Budd, a palaeobiologist at the University of Uppsala, Sweden. "But these are things that evolutionary theory has told us little about."[5]

[T]here was no sense at Altenberg of a desire to attack evolutionary theory from the left. Quite the reverse — the dominant political concern was a fear of attack from fundamentalists. As Gould discovered, creationists seize on any hint of splits in evolutionary theory or dissatisfaction with Darwinism. In the past couple of decades, everyone has become keenly aware of this, regardless of their satisfaction or otherwise with the modern synthesis. "You always feel like you're trying to cover your rear," says Love. "If you criticize, it's like handing ammunition to these folks." So don't criticize in a grandstanding way, says Coyne: "People shouldn't suppress their differences to placate creationists, but to suggest that neo-Darwinism has reached some kind of crisis point plays into creationists' hands," he says.

Implications for the Pretensions of "Expelled Exposed"
So here we are, the apparently unwelcome proponents of intelligent design, quoting these scientists who are skeptics of the neo-Darwinian synthesis of evolution. Now of course I've made it clear that everyone quoted in this article disagrees with intelligent design and feels that materialist explanations of evolution will be forthcoming. But that's the point, isn't it? One can express scientific dissent from neo-Darwinism--albeit rarely, sheepishly, and full of disclaimers and political pledges to materialism--so long as that dissent is does not support intelligent design. At the very least, that much is quite clear from the articles quoted above.

This would seem to contravene the claims of the "Expelled Exposed" website, where the National Center for Science Education (NCSE) claimed that anyone can dissent from neo-Darwinism without facing persecution. Providing a short list of prominent scientists who successfully promoted ideas that dissented from standard neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory, they conclude:

The scientific enterprise is open to new ideas, however much they initially may be challenged. Here are some examples of people who have challenged the scientific status quo and, far from being “expelled” from science, were lauded as visionaries – once they had successfully proven their ideas. ... So the scientific consensus can be and is challenged regularly. There is no unchallengeable orthodoxy, which is what Expelled would have you believe. ... Scientists are constantly questioning, refining, and expanding theories, including evolution – and natural selection theory. As Michael Shermer writes, “Anyone who thinks that scientists do not question Darwinism has never been to an evolutionary conference.” There is no reason why intelligent design proponents cannot follow in the footsteps of these distinguished scientists who overcame sometimes considerable opposition, sometimes for a very long time, before their scientific views prevailed.

(Expelled Exposed)

[Note: For a more comprehensive rebuttal to "Expelled Exposed," please see: NCSE Exposed at NCSEExposed.org]

References Cited
[1]. Michael A. Bell, "Gould’s most cherished concept, review of Punctuated Equilibrium by Stephen Jay Gould. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007," Trends in Ecology and Evolution, Vol. 23(3):121-122 (2008) (emphasis added).

[2]. Günter Theißen, "Saltational evolution: hopeful monsters are here to stay," Theory in Biosciences, Vol. 128:43–51 (2009).

[3]. Günter Theißen, "The proper place of hopeful monsters in evolutionary biology," Theory in Biosciences, Vol. 124:349–369 (2006).

[4]. Scott C. Todd, "A view from Kansas on that evolution debate," Nature, Vol. 401:423 (Sept. 30, 1999).

[5]. John Whitfield, "Biological Theory: Postmodern evolution?," Nature, Vol. 455:281-284 (2008).

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ID the Future podcast has a special edition worth checking out today:

Founding Father Thomas Jefferson on Intelligent Design

Click here to listen.

Critics of intelligent design sometimes claim they are defending the principles of American Founding Father Thomas Jefferson in trying to ban discussions of intelligent design. In the words of one writer, “Thomas Jefferson makes it quite clear that there was not a consensus of support among the authors of the Constitution... to support theological doctrines such as intelligent design.” But would Thomas Jefferson himself agree? In this special July 4th edition of ID the Future, Discovery Institute Senior Fellow John West explores the real views of Jefferson on intelligent design.

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Those textbook diagrams showing the supposed evolution of vision reveal a real blind spot. There are at least three big problems with this evolutionary narrative. First, the biochemistry, even in primitive eyes is numbingly complex. The notion that it evolved is nowhere motivated by the scientific evidence.

Second, if a new vision capability did just happen magically to arise, it would be worthless since there would be no interpretation of the new signals in the brain. And third, speaking of signals, the signal processing that goes on between the initial signal transduction and the brain is profound. The signal transduction, as phenomenally complex as that is, is only the beginning.

The incoming light is converted into an electrical signal (action potential) and then undergoes massive processing before making its impact on the brain. And new research is revealing new levels of complexity in this processing. If you stare at a horizontal line first then a circle appears stretched out, like an ellipse. This simple fact was ingeniously used in an experiment to study how the processing deals with the incoming signals that must be changing too fast.

Our eyes move several times per second. If we were aware of what our eyes were seeing we'd have difficulty making sense of such rapid movements. As it is we don't sense such movements, and one theory held that the signal processing in our vision system deleted certain scenes to keep the image steady in our brains. But when subjects were shown a horizontal line too quickly to be sensed, they nonetheless then saw a circle as an ellipse.

In other words, even those scenes of which we are not aware have an effect on the scenes that we do see. Our vision system is even more complex than we thought, and the evolutionary narrative, that a few mutations created and modified a few genes from which arose fancy new vision capabilities, has become that much more absurd.

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

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