In his recent response to Stephen Meyer’s Signature in the Cell, Francisco Ayala claimed that repetitive portions of our DNA called “Alu” sequences are “nonsensical.” Ayala wrote: “Would a function ever be found for these one million nearly identical Alu sequences? It seems most unlikely.” In his response to Ayala, Meyer showed that Ayala is factually wrong about this. According to recent technical papers in genomics, Alu sequences perform multiple functions.
In a rejoinder to Meyer, Darrel Falk defended Ayala and claimed although “a number of functional regions have been discovered within Alu sequences,” there “is no question that many Alu sequences really have no function.”
In my last blog, I showed that the vast majority of the genome is transcribed, either into protein-coding genes or into regulatory RNAs. The technical literature—some of which I cited in that blog—reports that the genome is an RNA-coding machine. Clearly, most DNA really does have function.
In this and subsequent posts, I will provide other sorts of evidence that so-called “junk DNA” is not junk at all, but functional.
A Response to Questions from a Biology Teacher: How Do We Test Intelligent Design?
Casey Luskin
A biology educator recently wrote me asking how we test intelligent design using the scientific method, how ID is falsifiable, and how ID explains patterns we observe in nature. These are very common questions that we receive all the time from teachers, students, and interested members of the public, and they're usually legitimate, sincere, and thoughtful questions. In this case, they certainly appeared to be such, and below I post a slightly modified version of my response to the teacher, withholding any information about the teacher to protect his/her identity:
Dear [Snip],
Greetings and thanks for your e-mail. ID is most definitely testable and falsifiable. It uses the scientific method and explains many patterns we observe in nature.
Let's start with how ID uses the scientific method. The scientific method is commonly described as a four-step process involving observations, hypothesis, experiments, and conclusion. ID begins with the observation that intelligent agents produce complex and specified information (CSI). Design theorists hypothesize that if a natural object was designed, it will contain high levels of CSI. Scientists then perform experimental tests upon natural objects to determine if they contain complex and specified information. One easily testable form of CSI is irreducible complexity, which can be discovered by experimentally reverse-engineering biological structures to see if they require all of their parts to function. When ID researchers find irreducible complexity in biology, they conclude that such structures were designed.
I have long questioned the assumption that most genomic DNA sequences are “nonsensical” or “junk.” And given the data that have emerged over the past seven or so years, a functionalist view of genome has robust empirical support. It is for this reason that I think many of the arguments presented by the Biologos Foundation are “wrong on many counts,” to borrow a phrase from Darrel Falk.
Here is an example. While reading the ”critique” of Steve Meyer’s book, Signature in the Cell, by Francisco Ayala, a number struck me that I know to be incorrect. The integer that I am referring to is “25,000” and it is claimed to be the known tally of genes in our chromosomes:
The human genome includes about twenty-five thousand genes and lots of other (mostly short) switch sequences…
Now, the problem with such a statement is this: While there are ~25,000 protein-coding genes in our DNA, the number of RNA-coding genes is predicted to be much higher, >450,000.1 Some of the latter range in length from being quite short—only 20 or so genetic letters—to being millions of letters long. Since 2004 we have learned that over 90% of our DNA is transcribed into RNA sequences at some developmental stage, in different cell and tissue types.2,3,4 (Our brain cells are unusually rich in these non-translated RNAs.) These RNAs are then processed into regulatory and structural sequences of all sizes.2,3,4
Is Weather Forecasting A Counterexample To Complex Specified Information?: Jeff Shallit on Signature in the Cell (part 1)
Paul Nelson
For over a decade, mathematician Jeffrey Shallit has been an outspoken critic of intelligent design. Recently, in a series of blog posts, he has attacked Stephen Meyer’s book Signature in the Cell (SITC) for what he sees as a variety of shortcomings. Some of Shallit’s criticisms merit careful attention, which we’ll present here in weeks to come.
Other criticisms, however, are fluffy confections, failing to achieve even the slightness of what Hume called “mere cavils and sophisms.” Let’s look at one such bonbon of sophistry, Shallit’s claim that weather forecasting represents a devastating counterexample to SITC's argument that complex specified information is, universally in human experience, produced by a mind or intelligence.
Falk’s Rejoinder to Meyer’s Response to Ayala’s “Essay” on Meyer’s Book
Jay Richards
I’ve followed the back and forth between Francisco Ayala and Steve Meyer with interest. I happened to have just read Meyer’s book Signature in the Cell when I first saw Ayala’s commentary/review on it at the Biologos Foundation website. My initial response was that Ayala obviously hadn’t read the book, and, as a result, made some embarrassing mistakes that any reader of the book would recognize.
Darrell Falk at the Biologos Foundation was apparently responsible for inviting Ayala to comment on Meyer’s book, and has been drawn into the debate.
He published the first part of Meyer’s response to Ayala, but not without first offering his “background comments” about the debate. (I think David Klinghoffer has said what needs to be said about that.) The Biologos Foundation is committed to the “science-and-religion dialogue.” In my opinion, however, they have a peculiar way of fostering dialogue.
Stephen Meyer’s Full Response to Francisco Ayala Now Available
Anika Smith
Earlier this week, the Biologos Foundation posted part of Stephen Meyer’s response to a review of his book Signature in the Cell by evolutionary biologist Francisco Ayala. Because Biologos decided to introduce its partial posting of Meyer’s response with a misleading and inaccurate preface, and because Biologos further decided to rebut part 1 of Meyer’s response before readers had a chance to read his entire response, we have decided to make the rest of Dr. Meyer’s response available on his website immediately. Just as readers were allowed to read Dr. Ayala’s critique in its entirety before reading Dr. Meyer’s response, we think it only fair that readers should have the opportunity to read Meyer’s entire response (which was written in one piece) before reading further rejoinders by Biologos.
As a former book review editor (at National Review), I take a professional interest in book reviews and all the things that can go right or wrong with them. I confess, though, I’ve never seen anything quite like the treatment of Stephen Meyer’s book, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design, on BioLogos, the curious website funded by the Templeton Foundation and specializing in Christian apologetics for Darwin. The site published what was clearly, unambiguously written to look like a review by biologist Francisco Ayala that, as Steve Meyer pointed out already, actually gave every evidence that Ayala had not read the book. (My colleague Dr. Meyer thinks Ayala did read the Table of Contents, but on this I must disagree.)
On what did Ayala base his views about Signature? This is a bit of a mystery. BioLogos president Dr. Darrel Falk is unstinting with fulsome praise for Ayala (“one of Biology’s living legends”). Falk claims he actually asked Ayala to respond to Falk’s review of Signature. Falk purports that in publishing Ayala’s review, he mistakenly failed to introduce it with the disclaimer that Ayala was reviewing Falk’s review, not Meyer’s book per se. Yeah, sure. Falk’s review did not provide Ayala with his absurd misrepresentation of Meyer’s argument. Instead Ayala gives every impression of having derived that from his own assessment of the book itself. As Ayala claims,
The keystone argument of Signature of the Cell [sic] is that chance, by itself, cannot account for the genetic information found in the genomes of organisms. I agree. And so does every evolutionary scientist, I presume. Why, then, spend chapter after chapter and hundreds of pages of elegant prose to argue the point?
Yet that is certainly not the keystone argument of Signature, and Meyer in fact spends only 66 pages (out of 613) on it. But that is not really the point here.
What’s notable is that Falk in his own review, whatever its other faults or merits, never claimed that Signature is all about proving that “chance by itself, cannot, account for the genetic information found in genomes.” Falk doesn’t mention the word “chance.” So where did Ayala get his mistaken notion? All one can say is, not from the book, which he patently didn’t read, and not from Falk. Indeed, Ayala in his essay does not mention Falk or Falk’s review. Clearly, Ayala wanted readers to think he was reviewing Signature in the Cell—or Signature of the Cell as he repeatedly calls it. Thus, for example, he commends Meyer for his “elegant prose.” The idea that Ayala was merely acting in good faith on Falk’s assignment of responding to Falk’s review is hardly believable.
New York Times Repeats NCSE’s False Account of Selman v. Cobb County Case
Casey Luskin
Last week’s New York Times article on academic freedom legislation makes a false assertion that the Selman v. Cobb County Board of Education claimed it was illegal to single out evolution in a curricular policy. The NY Times article wrongly states:
The legal incentive to pair global warming with evolution in curriculum battles stems in part from a 2005 ruling by a United States District Court judge in Atlanta that the Cobb County Board of Education, which had placed stickers on certain textbooks encouraging students to view evolution as only a theory, had violated First Amendment strictures on the separation of church and state.
Although the sticker was not overtly religious, the judge said, its use was unconstitutional because evolution alone was the target, which indicated that it was a religious issue.
The problem with the NY Times’ claim is that the Selman case did NOT rule that the sticker was unconstitutional due to the fact that “evolution alone was the target.” In fact, in the Selman v. Cobb County ruling, Judge Cooper held that the Cobb County sticker had a valid secular purpose and that it was permissible to single out evolution. In the words of Judge Cooper’s lower court ruling in Selman, “The School Board's singling out of evolution is understandable in this context” because “evolution is the only theory of origin being taught in Cobb County classrooms,” and “evolution was the only topic in the curriculum, scientific or otherwise, that was creating controversy.”
Stephen Meyer Responds to Evolutionary Biologist Francisco Ayala on Signature in the Cell
John West
Earlier this year, evolutionary biologist Francisco Ayala critiqued Stephen Meyer’s book, Signature in the Cell, in an invited essay for the Biologos Foundation website. Dr. Meyer has now responded with the first part of a two-part response, “On Not Reading The Signature in the Cell.” In this first part, Meyer argues that Ayala unfortunately does not appear to have read Signature in the Cell, and so his effort to refute the book falls flat. Indeed, Ayala’s “review misrepresents the thesis and topic of the book and even misstates its title.” Read more here.
Thank Goodness the NCSE Is Wrong: Fitness Costs Are Important to Evolutionary Microbiology
Casey Luskin
The evolution of antibiotic resistance is typically the result of small changes allowing for survival in a microbe or other organism under special circumstances where the organism faces extremely strong selection pressure due to the presence of some antibiotic drug. In other cases, it is the result of the transfer of pre-existing antibiotic resistance genes from one microbe to another, and the selection of such microbes in an environment containing antibiotics. Even in the first example, evolution does not produce a truly new function. In fact the change produced often makes the microbe less fit when the antibiotic is removed—it reproduces slower than it did before it was changed. This effect is widely recognized, and is called the fitness cost of antibiotic resistance. It is the existence of these costs and other examples of the limits of evolution that call into question the neo-Darwinian story of macroevolution.
Fitness costs are real, and biological realities like fitness cost and other limits to evolution play a vital role in shaping strategies used to combat antibiotic resistance, antiviral resistance, and pesticide resistance. In fact, were it not for the existence of fitness cost, in many cases antibiotic resistant bacteria would proliferate and resistant strains would soon replace non-resistant strains. Because of fitness costs, resistant strains are outcompeted by non-resistant bacteria once selection pressure is relaxed, allowing doctors to combat antibiotic resistance through various drug usage strategies.
Proliferation of Academic Freedom Bills Is Darwin Lobby's Worst Nightmare
Casey Luskin
The recent front page New York Times article on academic freedom legislation offers a stark reminder that the intelligentsia is very worried about the prospect of teachers gaining academic freedom, as a bill presently in the Kentucky legislature would allow, “to help students understand, analyze, critique, and review scientific theories in an objective manner, including but not limited to the study of evolution, the origins of life, global warming, and human cloning.”
From 2008-2009, 12 academic freedom bills were submitted into state legislatures, including Florida, Alabama (2), South Carolina (2), Missouri (2), Michigan, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Iowa, and New Mexico. Now in 2010, there are 3 bills already, including bills in Kentucky, Missouri, and Mississippi.
The Kentucky bill contains an excellent example of language refuting assertions from critics that these bills allow the teaching of religion: “This section shall not be construed to promote any religious doctrine, promote discrimination for or against a particular set of religious beliefs, or promote discrimination for or against religion or nonreligion.” The operative language of the academic freedom bills is entirely beneficial:
What Do Darwinism and "Climate Change" Have in Common?
Anika Smith
It's the question raised by yesterday's New York Times article on the push for balance in classroom discussions of global warming, though, as Jay Richards aptly notes over at The American, the real point of Leslie Kaufman's story is "to connect the teaching of evolution to the climate change debate."
Now when I read anything on the environment in the New York Times, I try to keep a couple of deconstructionist qualifiers running in the back of my head: “This is what the New York Times wants me to believe about the issue” and “What are they trying to accomplish with this piece?” I know it’s cynical, but when it comes to environmental stories, I just don’t trust New York Times reporters to keep it straight.
Some things they want to accomplish with this piece:
(1) Divide and conquer skeptics of global warming orthodoxy and Darwinism, by painting the latter as ignorant religious zealots, in hopes of starting a fight among conservatives. No doubt they’re hoping that, say, Richard Lindzen will have to explain why he agrees with those nefarious creationists on the global warming issue, and that he’ll have to spend his time issuing statements of agreement with evolution.
(2) Make it harder for official bodies to encourage critical thinking on global warming, since attempts to do the same with regard to evolution have, in recent years, met with fierce resistance and only modest success.
This is the media analysis required with today's journalism, though I would call it prudent rather than cynical.
Richards goes on to consider how the debate over evolution and the debate over climate change are alike — and how they differ:
New York Times Front Page Highlights Movement for Academic Freedom on Evolution, Global Warming and Other Science Issues
John West
The nationwide effort to protect the freedom of teachers to hold balanced classroom discussions of evolution, global warming, and other scientific issues is highlighted on the front page of today’s New York Times. The article, “Darwin Foes Add Warming to Targets,” contains the usual errors and mischaracterizations one expects from the establishment media. But mischaracterizations or not, the article gets one thing right: It reveals how both the public and policymakers are increasingly dissatisfied with the scientific establishment’s attempt to misuse science to support various ideological agendas, whether it be Richard Dawkins’ scientific atheism or some global warming alarmists’ efforts to push us back to the Stone Age. People want genuine education about scientific topics, and that includes being able to study all of the evidence, not just a few data points cherry-picked for their propaganda value.
Of course, the Times’ article parrots the standard refrain that there are no legitimate scientific criticisms of things like Darwinian evolution or man-made global warming. Tell that to the more than 800 doctoral scientists who have signed the Dissent from Darwin statement, or to anyone who has read the “Climate Gate” emails. It’s a measure of the obtuseness of the Times that an article that discusses concerns about one-sided teaching on global warming doesn’t even deign to mention the cascading avalanche of revelations of misconduct by scientists among global warming alarmists. The Times’ motto, “All the news that’s fit to print,” has taken on a new meaning: Hide from the public any “inconvenient truths” that may upset the establishment’s ideological apple cart. Fortunately, the Times and the rest of the establishment media are no longer the gatekeepers for what most people learn about the world.
Testing the Orchard Model and the NCSE’s Claims of “Nested Patterns” Supporting a “Tree of Life”
Casey Luskin
In my previous post responding to the National Center for Science Education's (NCSE) attacks on Explore Evolution's treatment of biogeography, I explained that there are many examples where there is inconsistency between evolutionary expectations of biogeography and plate tectonics. The NCSE is thus wrong to have claimed that “The consistency of these sorts of nested patterns cannot be explained without reference to common descent. The creationist ‘orchard’ is scientifically meaningless, since it makes no predictions.” * The classical "universal common descent" view is contrasted with the orchard model at below:
Will Tomorrow's Academic Freedom Story in The New York Times Accurately Reflect Discovery's Science Education Policy on Teaching Evolution?
Robert Crowther
UPDATE: A sentence in the original post has been corrected to read: I stopped her right there and explained that we do not favor mandating the teaching of intelligent design — as is so often misreported — but rather that we think when evolution is taught teachers should present both the evidence the supports Darwinian evolution as well as some of the evidence that challenges it.
http://www.academicfreedompetition.comTomorrow The New York Times will publish an article about academic freedom bills being considered in a few states. We've obviously had some involvement: in 2008 we created the Academic Freedom Petition, which has sample language that legislators could adapt for use in their own states. That led to a very good piece of legislation, the Louisiana Science Education Act, that was finally signed into law last year.
Months ago NYT reporter Leslie Kaufman interviewed CSC associate director John West about academic freedom bills, our views on science education policy, and whether or not we were turning our focus to the global warming issue. As usual, West explained our longstanding science education policy position, which is: "As a matter of public policy, Discovery Institute opposes any effort require the teaching of intelligent design by school districts or state boards of education. Attempts to mandate teaching about intelligent design only politicize the theory and will hinder fair and open discussion of the merits of the theory among scholars and within the scientific community." Bills that don't follow this approach are not ones we're likely to support. When they do, we're glad to lend our seal of approval, for what it's worth.
I greatly appreciate that Leslie had the integrity to call us today and verify the quote she wanted to use from West and to make sure it still reflected our general position. I spoke with her briefly and she told me she also planned to describe Discovery Institute as leading the movement to get intelligent design taught in science classes. I stopped her right there and explained that we do not favor mandating the teaching of intelligent design — as is so often misreported — but rather that we think when evolution is taught teachers should present both the evidence the supports Darwinian evolution as well as some of the evidence that challenges it. She said that was too long to fit in her story (in the New York Times, remember, where they promise to report "All the News That's Fit to Print"; maybe letting people speak for themselves isn't fit to print, we shall see). So I was encouraged when she read back to me a sentence that describes the Institute as endorsing the teaching of critiques of modern evolution. I agreed to that. Upon reflection I probably should have insisted on finding out how she plans to define both "critiques" and "evolution." Again, we shall see what sort of meanings are implied and what perceptions readers are likely to take away from the story. I hope her context is as accurate as the sentence she read back.
She might just as well call it what it is, the teach the controversy approach. As I've explained it previously:
One of the reasons CSC has advocated for the teach the controversy approach is because it is a good way to teach critical thinking to students who all too often are not learning to analyze things and think critically about the arguments for and against.
Darwinian evolution is mostly taught as if it were a done deal, as if there were no unsolved problems, as if the theory had been proven. Such is not the case. Telling students about the debate amongst scientists over certain evidences for Darwin’s theory is not only necessary for good science, it is a pedagogically sound way of teaching a controversial subject.
See here for some other good reasons this is a good approach.
the NCSE was not quite accurate when claiming that “By comparing macroevolutionary patterns between different groups, we find that the same patterns repeat. This strongly suggests that the same forces drove the diversification of those different groups.” The truth is that whenever oceanic “sweepstakes” dispersal is required, we find an exception to expected neo-Darwinian rules of biogeography. And as will be seen in my next post, there are so many exceptions that one might reasonably question whether the inviolable neo-Darwinian rule of universal common ancestry is supported by biogeography.
When proponents of neo-Darwinism “speculate” about the “luck” and “chance” needed to explain this “amazing” phenomenon and “challenging” biegeographical data, it’s clear that they are lacking reasonable explanations. Yet rafting or other means of “oceanic dispersal” have been suggested to solve a number of other biogeographical conundrums that challenge neo-Darwinism, including:
In its response to the chapter on biogeography in the supplementary textbook Explore Evolution: The Arguments For and Against Neo-Darwinism (EE), the National Center for Science Education (NCSE) asserts that EE “mangles the tiny fraction of biogeography covered.”* My response to the NCSE’s arguments, "The NCSE's Biogeographic Conundrums: A Defense of Explore Evolution's Treatment of Biogeography," notes that “[t]he NCSE’s approach is to cherrypick examples to support their arguments for universal common descent, but a large number of ‘biogeographic conundrums’ that challenge neo-Darwinism could be discussed.”
For example, in its response regarding marsupials, the NCSE admits, “If the [North American] opossum truly had roots in Australia, it would indeed be a biogeographic conundrum.” Since North American opossums are not descended from Australian “possums,” their high morphological similarity dictates to neo-Darwinian evolutionists that this must be another case of extreme convergent evolution that challenges the methodology by which neo-Darwinism infers homology and common descent.
The NCSE’s Citation Bluffs Reveal Little About the Evolutionary Origin of Information
Casey Luskin
I explained previously the lack of details in the citations given by the NCSE (and Ken Miller, and Judge Jones) to purportedly explain the evolutionary origin of information. Their bluffs were taken from a paper by Long et al. published in Nature Reviews Genetics in 2003. More examples from that paper could be given, but the point is clear enough already: a careful analysis of Long et al. exposes the utterly insufficient explanations offered by neo-Darwinists to account for the origin of new genetic information.
In not a single case did the above papers cited by Long et al. actually explain how new functional information arose. In no case was there an analysis of how natural selection could have favored mutational changes that were shown to be likely along each step of an alleged evolutionary pathway; never was any detailed step-by-step mutational pathway even given. At best, these studies offered vague and ad hoc appeals to duplication, rearrangement, and natural selection — often in a sudden, extreme, and abrupt manner — to form the gene in question. In many cases, natural selection was invoked to allegedly account for changes in the gene, even though the investigators didn’t even know the function of the gene and thereby could not identify the advantage provided by the gene’s function. In no case were calculations performed to assess whether sufficient probabilistic resources existed to produce the asserted mutational events on a reasonable timescale. In some cases, the original genetic material for the genes was unknown, or the studies asserted spontaneous “de novo” origin of genes from previously non-coding DNA. While they readily admitted that “de novo” gene emergence is rare, no attempt was made to assess whether such an unguided mechanism is even remotely plausible on mathematical probabilistic grounds. These papers play the Gene Evolution Game, but never ask the right questions to explain how neo-Darwinian mechanisms create new genetic information.
Assessing the NCSE’s Citation Bluffs on the Evolution of New Genetic Information
Casey Luskin
During the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial, Judge Jones followed Ken Miller and the NCSE by citing a review paper co-authored by Manyuan Long.42 Jones claimed the paper shows “peer-reviewed scientific publications showing the origin of new genetic information by evolutionary processes.”43 In fact, what Long et al. actually demonstrates is that neo-Darwinists do not want to ask the right questions — the hard questions — about the sufficiency of their theory to explain gene evolution. They accept superficial just-so stories in place of detailed, plausibly demonstrated explanations.
Just as in the Gene Evolution Game, the studies cited in the review by Long et al. repeatedly invoke gene duplication, natural selection, and genetic rearrangements. But many offer little more than vague just-so stories that commit the mistakes Lynch warns of — mistaking story-telling for explanation.
To show how heavily the NCSE relies on Long et al. in its response to Explore Evolution, let’s look at how the NCSE reproduces a lengthy table (Table 2) from Long et al. The table lists a number of genes whose evolutionary origin has supposedly been explained.44 Many of the examples from this Table 2 are mere story-telling exercises based upon assumptions which do not explain or answer deeper questions about how neo-Darwinian evolution generates new functional genetic information:
Fodor on Darwinism: "One sees, even without God, how this Darwinian story could turn out to be radically wrong."
Robert Crowther
Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini aren't making many friends among evolutionists with their new book What Darwin Got Wrong. Salon magazine published an interview with Fodor today in which he has some interesting things to say about the attacks he's received online, about whether he is providing aid and succor to the ID community, and what he thinks is wrong with modern evolutionary theory.
As you explain in the book, one of the problems with Darwinism is that Darwin is inventing explanations for something that happened long ago, over a long period of time. Isn’t that similar to creationism?
Creationism isn't the only doctrine that’s heavily into post-hoc explanation. Darwinism is too. If a creature develops the capacity to spin a web, you could tell a story of why spinning a web was good in the context of evolution. That is why you should be as suspicious of Darwinism as of creationism. They have spurious consequence in common. And that should be enough to make you worry about either account.
The Gene Evolution Game is a very simple game to play. In three examples, we’ll develop three rules that can help you explain the origin of any new gene. That’s right—any gene! Let’s start with a simple example:
Rule 1: The Magic Wand of Gene Duplication
Where do new genes come from? Gene duplication is typically how we explain where a new gene comes from. Here’s how it works:
But there were also a number of excellent resources from authors and groups not affiliated with Discovery Institute. Coming in at second place is Illustra Media’s new documentary, Darwin’s Dilemma: The Mystery of the Cambrian Fossil Record. Another good resource that makes it very high on ARN’s list (#3) is Bradley Monton’s book, Seeking God in Science: An Atheist Defends Intelligent Design. You read that right—Monton is an atheist who finds many ID arguments highly persuasive. Another recommended resource from a new author in the ID-evolution debate is doctor and author James Le Fanu’s book Why Us? How Science Rediscovered the Mystery of Ourselves. We released podcasts with Drs. Monton and Le Fanu last year about their respective books—check out ID the Future to hear the interviews.
Finally, I was quite pleased that two resources I wrote made ARN’s top 10 list. Coming in at number 9 is a law review article published in Hamline University Law Review last year--an attempted exhaustive survey of evolution case law and titled, "Does Challenging Darwin Create Constitutional Jeopardy? A Comprehensive Survey of Case Law Regarding the Teaching of Biological Origins." We've been recounting many of the cases surveyed in that article here on ENV over the past couple months. At number 10 is a lesser-known resource that I’ve nonetheless been getting some positive feedback on -- The College Student’s Back to School Guide to Intelligent Design, a concise FAQ rebutting many common objections that college (or high school) students are likely to hear from their uninformed professors about intelligent design.
Be sure to check out ARN’s Top 10 page to read the lists in full and get links to all of their recommended resources.
Despite the fact that proponents of neo-Darwinian evolution claim to understand the origin of new genetic information, they obscure the fact that they lack explanations for such by making vague appeals to mechanisms such as “gene duplication,” “rearrangement,” and “natural selection.” Such mechanisms are generally inferred from circumstantial evidence, i.e. similarities and differences between gene sequences, where a neo-Darwinian evolutionary history is assumed. More importantly, accounts that invoke such mechanisms almost never attempt to assess the likelihood of mutations producing the genetic changes in question. In this regard, important notes of caution must be observed when assessing evolutionary accounts of the origin of a gene.
A 2007 article by evolutionary biologist Michael Lynch in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA goes to the heart of some of the assumptions inherent in many claims of neo-Darwinian evolution. Lynch provides a list of myths promoted by biologists, and he calls it a “myth” to believe that “Characterization of interspecific differences at the molecular and/or cellular levels is tantamount to identifying the mechanisms of evolution.”18
Of course, one of the typical “mechanisms of evolution” cited is natural selection, commonly invoked to account for how a gene duplicate acquires a new function. But what kind of evidence is sufficient to demonstrate that positive selection, or natural selection acting to preserve adaptive mutations, has occurred? Biologist Austin Hughes warns that most inferences of positive selection are based upon questionable statistical analyses of genes:
The Evolution-Lobby’s Misguided Definition of “New”
Casey Luskin
When Judge Jones claimed that Ken Miller showed “the origin of new genetic information by evolutionary processes,” Ken Miller and his friends at the NCSE didn’t just equivocate on the definition of “information,” they also misused the term “new.” In fact, they would likely accept something as “new” if it were merely a copy or a duplicate some pre-existing stretch of DNA, even if the new copy doesn’t actually do anything new, or perhaps even when the new DNA doesn’t do anything at all. In contrast, proponents of intelligent design would define “new” genetic information as a new stretch of DNA which actually performs some different, useful, and new function. For example, consider the following string:
DUPLICATINGTHISSTRINGDOESNOTGENERATENEWCSI
This 42-character string has ~197 bits of Shannon information. Now consider the following string longer:
This procedure just added 42 “new” characters, but no new function has been produced. Assuming there was no way to predict beforehand that the first string would be duplicated just as it was, the amount of Shannon information has doubled, but the amount of CSI has not increased one bit (literally).
The Evolution-Lobby’s Useless Definition of Biological Information
Casey Luskin
For the NCSE/Ken Miller/Judge Jones to claim that there is an explanation or “the origin of new genetic information by evolutionary processes,” they must equivocate on the definitions of both the words “information” and “new.” Following the NCSE, Judge Jones probably would define information as “Shannon information,” which means mere complexity. Under this definition, a functionless stretch of randomly garbled junk DNA might have the same amount of “information” as a fully functional gene of the same sequence-length. For example, under Shannon information, which the NCSE would claim is “the sense used by information theorists,” the following two strings contain identical amounts of information:
Both String A and String B are composed of exactly 54 characters, and each string has exactly the same amount of Shannon information—about 254 bits. 9 Yet clearly String A conveys much more functional information than String B, which was generated using a random character generator.10 For obvious reasons, Shannon complexity has a long history of being criticized as an unhelpful metric of functional biological information. After all, biological information is finely-tuned to perform a specific biological function, whereas random strings are not. A useful measure of biological information must account for the function of the information, and Shannon information does not take function into account.
Some leading theorists recognize this point. In 2003, Nobel Prize winning origin of life researcher Jack Szostak wrote in a review article in Nature lamenting that the problem with “classical information theory” is that it “does not consider the meaning of a message” and instead defines information “as simply that required to specify, store or transmit the string.”11 According to Szostak, “a new measure of information – functional information – is required” in order to take account of the ability of a given protein sequence to perform a given function. Likewise, a paper in the journal Theoretical Biology and Medical Modelling observes:
Cornelia Dean Doesn't Trust You -- But Then Again, She Doesn't Trust Herself, Either
Anika Smith
There’s a disturbing trend for the role of media in a democracy: journalists who don’t trust their profession, the public, or themselves. These days more reporters, editors, and journalism advocates are urging their colleagues to jettison objectivity in reporting and replace it with something they can trust: their blind allegiance to authority.
You read that correctly. Here’s a journalist who sees objectivity as a problem. To wit:
In striving to be “objective” journalists try to tell all sides of the story. But it is not always easy for us to tell when a science story really has more than one side — or to know who must be heeded and who can safely be ignored. When we cast too wide a net in search of balance, we can end up painting situations as more complicated or confusing than they really are. (pp. 47-48, emphasis added)
And here I thought that journalists were supposed to investigate the story and search for nuance, layers, complexity… the things that make for a compelling narrative. I guess that Dean gave that up a while ago when she decided to simplify things. And what better way to simplify than to edit out dissenting voices?
Judge Jones’s Misguided NCSE-Scripted Kitzmiller Ruling and the Origin of New Functional Genetic Information
Casey Luskin
Not long before the beginning of the 2005 Kitzmiller v. Dover trial, then-National Center for Science Education staff member Nicholas Matzke told a reporter, “The origin of genetic information is thoroughly understood.” 1 During the Dover trial, plaintiffs’ expert witness, biologist Kenneth Miller, testified that he presented Judge John E. Jones with “more than three dozen scientific studies showing the origin of new genetic information by these evolutionary processes.” 2 The plaintiffs’ attorneys, working with the NCSE, successfully convinced Judge Jones to parrot Miller by stating in the Kitzmiller v. Dover ruling that Miller had “pointed to more than three dozen peer-reviewed scientific publications showing the origin of new genetic information by evolutionary processes.” 3
Virtually all of those “publications” mentioned by Judge Jones came from one single paper Miller discussed at trial, a review article, co-authored by Manyuan Long of the University of Chicago.4 The article does not even contain the word “information,” much less the phrase “new genetic information.” 5
Want to Make a Difference for ID? Enroll in Discovery Institute's Summer Seminars
Anika Smith
Academic freedom week is about more than quoting Darwin and maybe watching an appropriate film for the occasion. (No, not that one. That one’s boring. This one.) It’s about the scientists, scholars, journalists, teachers and students who are affected when fear of inquiry rears its ugly head in the debate over evolution. When you hear the stories of ordinary men and women who have been targeted in this battle over an idea, the importance and impact of the debate becomes clear.
So you’re informed about the issues — you read the blog, listen to the podcast, get the newsletter, and stay involved in the debate as it continues. What else can you do?
If you’re a college or graduate student, you can learn even more about intelligent design. In fact, you can get equipped and be inspired to join the movement.
Another Once-Favored Alternative to ID Reduced to an Epitaph
Anika Smith
Over at Biologic Institute, Director Douglas Axe highlights a new paper that brings clarity to the origin of life debate.
The paper’s title is a diplomatic statement of its main conclusion: Lack of evolvability in self-sustaining autocatalytic networks constrains metabolism-first scenarios for the origin of life. It becomes clear on reading the paper that the word constrains is here being used euphemistically
Dr. Axe explains what this means for Darwinian explanations of the origin of life.
At the time, my work was focusing on the profound differences between the simple catalysis caused by small molecules and the elaborately orchestrated and stunningly efficient catalysis achieved by enzymes—the catalysts of life. Kauffman was equating complexity with the sheer numbers of chemical species and reactions, whereas my concern was with the mode of reaction. Since Kauffman’s model employed reactions that were fundamentally simple, with no discernible prospect of rising above this, I saw no satisfactory connection between his model and life.
But the difficulty of explaining life’s origin makes even hints of progress a big deal, and many saw in Kauffman’s simple model the potential for something bigger. The reason for their optimism, I think, was expressed by Daniel Dennett around the time of Kauffman’s writing: “Evolution will occur whenever and wherever three conditions are met: replication, variation (mutation), and differential fitness (competition).” The hope was that if autocatalytic networks can deliver those three things, then whatever they lack in comparison to modern life they can acquire through progressive evolution.
I think it’s fair to say that the optimism has faded as the years have passed without anything like a convincing demonstration—at least nothing that could be called “autocatalytic metabolism.” Now it seems things may be drawing to a close with a new paper by Vasas, Szathmáry, and Santos. Their work calls this whole notion of life starting with raw metabolism into question by seriously undermining the biological relevance both of Kauffman’s conjecture and of Dennett’s dictum.
Q. You express some doubt that even under “the right conditions, the influx of stellar energy into a planet could cause atoms to rearrange themselves into nuclear power plants and spaceships and computers.” This, you say, ought to be “considered an open question” at least by scientists and the public alike. Why isn’t it?
A. A typical college physics text I read contains the statement “One of the most remarkable simplifications in physics is that only four distinct forces account for all known phenomena.” Most people just haven’t ever thought about things in this way, that if you don’t believe in intelligent design, you must believe this claim, that the four unintelligent forces of physics caused atoms on Earth to rearrange themselves into nuclear power plants, spaceships and computers. When they do think about it, they may start to see things a little differently. This is part of the “broader view” that is often missed by biologists, but noticed by mathematicians and physicists.
Also, a heads up for those of you in Seattle. Dr. Sewell will be presenting his book at Discovery Institute on February 23rd. And for everyone else, next week ID The Future will podcast two interviews with Dr. Sewell about his views on intelligent design, origin of life theories, and why he thinks Darwin's theory about the struggle for life "easily the dumbest idea ever taken seriously by science."
What Darwin Got Wrong: Intelligent Design Proponents Welcome Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini to the Growing Ranks of Darwin's Critics
Robert Crowther
Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini are arrving late to the Darwin doubting party, but are welcome attendees none the less. Below are some welcoming remarks from leading scientific voices in the intelligent design community.
We just received a review copy of "What Darwin Got Wrong", the new book attacking Darwinian evolution by Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini, two thorougly materalistic scientists. Why does that matter? Because typically materialists have been the most ardent defenders of Darwin's theory of natural selection. With the publication of this book, that is likely to change.
For those of you wondering what this is all about let me back up to 2007 when Fodor published his first piece of heresy in the London Review of Books, "Why Pigs Don't Have Wings". That article led to Stanley Salthe, another materialist scientist who doubts Darwrinian evolution (and has signed the Dissent From Darwin statement to boot), to convene an e-mail discussion group that became what is now known as the Altenberg 16.
Science writer Susan Mazur reported on that meeting, and later wrote an entire book about the 16 scientists who were basically affirming what we'd been saying here at ENV for years -- Darwinian evolution is dead. She wrote:
What it amounts to is a gathering of 16 biologists and philosophers of rock star stature – let's call them "the Altenberg 16" – who recognize that the theory of evolution which most practicing biologists accept and which is taught in classrooms today, is inadequate in explaining our existence. It's pre the discovery of DNA, lacks a theory for body form and does not accommodate "other" new phenomena.
She also reported what Fodor had experienced after going public with his initial doubts about Darwin.
When I called Fodor to discuss his article, he joked that he was now in the Witness Protection Program because he'd been so besieged following the LRB piece. ... Fodor also told me that "you can't put this stuff in the press because it's an attack on the theory of natural selection" and besides "99.99% of the population have no idea what the theory of natural selection is".
To his credit, he has stuck with his position, and has taken it to the next level by publishing What Darwin Got Wrong.
Since these doubts aren't anything new to many scientists who've been saying this for years, I thought I'd ask them what their initial thoughts about this book are. Here are a few responses.
On his website David Berlinski, author of The Deniable Darwinwrites in part:
What is encouraging about Jerry Fodor's and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini's arguments in What Darwin Got Wrong is just that Fodor and Piattelli- Palmarini had the nerve to make them. What is discouraging about their arguments is just that it has taken them so long to acquire their nerve. Where have you been fellahs?
Every argument that they advance others have advanced before them. Who in particular? Me, for sure. I have called attention to the striking analogy between Skinner and Darwin for more than fifteen years now.
Darwinian propagandists would like the public to believe that there is no scientific debate about the adequacy of evolutionary theory--though scientists have actually been debating it ever since The Origin of Species was published in 1859. Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini's book, What Darwin Got Wrong, is the latest contribution to this long-standing scientific controversy.
Darwin considered natural selection--survival of the fittest--to be the "most important" mechanism of evolution, but Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini (like many scientist before them) argue that it is not. Although they accept Darwin's idea that living things are descended from a common ancestor, Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini cite abundant evidence against natural selection.
They call much of the "vast literature" on this subject "distressingly uncritical" and write "it is high time that Darwinists take this evidence seriously."
So the scientific debate continues--the debate that Darwinian propagandists say doesn't exist.
The smoke from Darwin’s 200 birthday candles had barely dissipated when Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini announce “What Darwin Got Wrong” — evolution’s mechanism. Natural selection just can’t cut the mustard, they explain. But since the proposal of a natural mechanism for evolution is the very reason for Darwin’s scientific and cultural importance, his achievement apparently has been way overblown by pretty much the entire biological community. Now, I wonder who else has been saying that for the last few decades?
Fodor correctly understands that natural selection, Darwin's designer substitute mechanism, lacks the creative power that has long been attributed to it. Natural selection by definition only "selects" or favors functional advantage. What we have learned in biology over the last 50 years shows that at every level in the biological hierarchy -- whether we are talking about novel genes, proteins, molecular machines, signal transduction circuits, organs, or body plans -- functional advantage depends upon the occurrence of a series of vastly improbable and tightly coordinated mutational events. Careful quantitative analysis has shown that these events that are so improbable as to put thresholds of selectable function well beyond the reach of chance. The selection and mutation mechanism does not work because the mechanism of natural selection depends on too many improbable things going right before there is anything to select at all.
A popular Darwinian meme is that humans and chimp genomes are ninety-something percent identical. It varies a bit, but usually hovers close to 99%. The meme hides all sorts of assumptions, of course, but the take home lesson for the headline reader is plain enough: we’re almost exactly the same as chimps.
Though the 99% number has received some qualifiers, and has even been referred to as a “myth” in Science, the basic idea remains firmly entrenched in the media collective consciousness.
But evidence seems to be piling up that the similarities are not nearly what has been advertised. Geneticist Richard Buggs has reflected on this, and has even predicted “that when we have a reliable, complete chimpanzee genome, the overall similarity of the human genome will prove to be close to 70% (and very far from 99%).”
It will be interesting to see how Buggs' prediction holds up over time. If he’s right, this will be one more switch from “meme” to “myth” in the Darwinian ledger.
Seeing Ghosts in the Bushes (Part 2): How Is Common Descent Tested?
Paul Nelson
If that dictum looks like a bumper sticker, I apologize — but it’s true all the same. Most of the philosophy of science can be captured by a handful of bumper stickers. Anyway, keep the dictum in mind. In this second installment of the “Seeing Ghosts in the Bushes” blog series — part 1 is here — we’ll ask how the theory of common descent could be tested by fossils. The principle of “what evidence cannot question, evidence cannot support” will be our main guide.
Signature in the Cell Tampa Bay Event Streaming Live Tonight
Robert Crowther
You can watch the live "Signature in the Cell" intelligent design one-night event featuring some of the leading voices challenging Darwinian evolution including Stephen Meyer, Michael Medved, David Berlinski and Tom Woodward.
The event will be broadcast LIVE tonight from 7:05-9:00pm, on the internet You can stream it live from either of these radio websites: AM 570 and 910 or AM 860 WGUL.
To listen to the event in its entirety, click here.
Discovery Institute senior fellow and national radio personality Michael Medved will lead a two-hour discussion about the evidence for intelligent design and the challenges it proposes to modern evolutionary theory. Joining him will be Signature in the Cell author, Stephen C. Meyer, leading Darwin skeptic and author of The Deniable Darwin, David Berlinski, and scientist, scholar and writer, Thomas Woodward, author of Darwin Strikes Back.
Stephen Meyer's Signature in the Cell is stirring up a thoughtful debate over at Biologos' blog, Science and the Sacred, where Darrel Falk and Francisco Ayala both reviewed Meyer's book. Today, Meyer's response to Falk is posted:
In 1985, I attended a conference that brought a fascinating problem in origin-of-life biology to my attention—the problem of explaining how the information necessary to produce the first living cell arose. At the time, I was working as a geophysicist doing digital signal processing, a form of information analysis and technology. A year later, I enrolled in graduate school at the University of Cambridge, where I eventually completed a Ph.D. in the philosophy of science after doing interdisciplinary research on the scientific and methodological issues in origin-of-life biology. In the ensuing years, I continued to study the problem of the origin of life and have authored peer-reviewed and peer-edited scientific articles on the topic of biological origins, as well as co-authoring a peer-reviewed biology textbook. Last year, after having researched the subject for more than two decades, I published Signature in the Cell, which provides an extensive evaluation of the principal competing theories of the origin of biological information and the related question of the origin of life. Since its completion, the book has been endorsed by prominent scientists including Philip Skell, a member of the National Academy of Sciences; Scott Turner, an evolutionary biologist at the State University of New York; and Professor Norman Nevin, one of Britain’s leading geneticists.
Nevertheless, in his recent review on the Biologos website, Prof. Darrel Falk characterizes me as merely a well-meaning, but ultimately unqualified, philosopher and religious believer who lacks the scientific expertise to evaluate origin-of-life research and who, in any case, has overlooked the promise of recent pre-biotic simulation experiments. On the basis of two such experiments, Falk suggests I have jumped prematurely to the conclusion that pre-biotic chemistry cannot account for the origin of life. Yet neither of the scientific experiments he cites provides evidence that refutes the argument of my book or solves the central mystery that it addresses. Indeed, both experiments actually reinforce—if inadvertently—the main argument of Signature in the Cell.
The central argument of my book is that intelligent design—the activity of a conscious and rational deliberative agent—best explains the origin of the information necessary to produce the first living cell. I argue this because of two things that we know from our uniform and repeated experience, which following Charles Darwin I take to be the basis of all scientific reasoning about the past. First, intelligent agents have demonstrated the capacity to produce large amounts of functionally specified information (especially in a digital form). Second, no undirected chemical process has demonstrated this power. Hence, intelligent design provides the best—most causally adequate—explanation for the origin of the information necessary to produce the first life from simpler non-living chemicals. In other words, intelligent design is the only explanation that cites a cause known to have the capacity to produce the key effect in question.
Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed is now available on DVD in the United Kingdom in a newly expanded edition with 44 minutes of never-before-seen interviews.
Interest in intelligent design is growing in Britain. Earlier this month, Stephen Meyer, who appears in Expelled, defended both the film and ID in a debate with atheist Peter Atkins, which you can listen to here.
The "Bad Boy UK Version" promises to be a hit in a market that has been dominated by the likes of Richard Dawkins, whose appearance in the film and startling admission that intelligent design exists — coming from aliens, of course — might raise a few eyebrows in his native land.
What's the old saying about prophets and honor in their homeland?
A Mathematician Looks at Darwin’s Theory and Discovers It Doesn’t Add Up
Anika Smith
SEATTLE – "Darwin’s attempt to explain the origins of all the magnificent species in the living world in terms of the struggle for survival is easily the dumbest idea ever taken seriously by science," writes Dr. Granville Sewell in his new book In the Beginning and Other Essays on Intelligent Design published by Discovery Institute Press.
What do you get when you add together the big bang, the fine-tuning of the laws of physics and the evolution of life? Definitely not a materialistic theory of origins, answers Sewell, a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Texas El Paso.
In this wide-ranging collection of essays, Sewell concludes that while there is much in the history of life that seems to suggest natural causes, there is little evidence to support Charles Darwin’s idea that natural selection of random variations can explain major evolutionary advances.
Getting ID Right: More Response to the Beliefnet Review of Signature in the Cell
Jay Richards
The second, third, and fourth installments of the review of Steve Meyer’s book Signature in the Cell are up over at Beliefnet. (I responded to the first installment here.)
Although this series appears on Scot McKnight’s Jesus Creed blog, they’re written by anonymous blogger “RJS.” I’m guessing that RJS is a scientist, or is in a sensitive academic position, and doesn’t want to risk banishment for saying reasonable things about an ID argument. If so, that tells us something of the social pressures against writing publicly about this issue.
Another area where Ken Miller misrepresents irreducible complexity is the blood clotting cascade. With the flagellum, Miller took a shortcut by arguing that if a few parts can do something else, irreducible complexity is refuted. With the blood clotting cascade, Miller claims that if blood clotting works without parts that Behe doesn’t claim in Darwin’s Black Box are part of the irreducibly complex core of the system, then blood clotting isn’t irreducibly complex. Not only is Miller’s objection fallacious, it blatantly misrepresents Michael Behe’s arguments.
Roughly speaking, there are three “prongs” to the blood clotting cascade: two pathways which initiate the cascade (the extrinsic and intrinsic pathways) and the cascade itself, which forms the clot. These prongs are illustrated in the diagram below:
Discovery Institute Announces 2nd Annual Academic Freedom Day on Charles Darwin’s Birthday
Anika Smith
Fresh on the heels of Darwin Year, Discovery Institute announces the launch of the 2nd Annual Academic Freedom Day in honor of Charles Darwin’s birthday, February 12, 2010.
Yes, it's that time of year again, and Discovery Institute is gearing up for the celebration by supporting what Darwin supported: academic freedom.
I admit to a fond wish to impute significance to coincidences. Cynics such as Matthew Cobb writing at Jerry Coyne's blog, Why Evolution Is True, explain away such things, like they do absolutely everything, as a function of survival value tucked into our genome from ancient days. In some recent posts, Cobb was full of mockery for people like me:
In the Darwinist community there’s a general acceptance, however uneasy, of the necessity of speaking in design-related metaphors to describe features of organisms. Such language may be regrettable since it attracts the attention of the bogeyman, “creationism,” but really it’s kind of unavoidable. In Darwin and Design, Michael Ruse sought to offer solace to fellow Darwinians. He asked,
We still talk in terms appropriate to conscious intention….In biology, we still use forward-looking language of a kind that would not be deemed appropriate in physics or chemistry. Why is this?
His answer:
Organisms, produced by natural selection, have adaptations, and these give the appearance of being designed.…If organisms did not seem to be designed, they would not work and hence would not survive and reproduce. But organisms do work, they do seem to be designed, and hence the design metaphor, with all the values and forward-looking, causal perspective it entails, seems appropriate.
So it’s precisely because organisms are not really designed, but rather built up by natural selection, that they seem designed. Well, comfort must be taken where it’s available.
Unfortunately for the Darwin faithful, the discomfort level keeps getting kicked up notch by notch as the design metaphor proves itself increasingly useful to bioengineers -- as a model to be instantiated in very practical, not merely literary, ways. If you were to imagine that life really does reflect an intelligent purpose, then that purpose would probably be reflected somehow in the genetic material, coded in DNA. So it’s of interest that a couple of new projects seek to be in relationship to DNA what your local auto parts store or catalogue is to the cars we drive. Keep in mind that cars and their parts are designed products. The Scientist has an item noting the launch of a “DNA factory.”
Snap, Crackle ... Chirp? Or, Looking for Life in All the Wrong Places
Robert Crowther
The silence is only eerie if you try to listen too hard. Efforts to confirm that there is intelligence elsewhere in the universe have, to put it mildly, fizzled. Each new theory about why we can’t find intelligent life anywhere else in the universe ends up like a damp firecracker: there’s a bunch of crackling in the blogosphere, but there’s never any bang.
So. It seems that Paul Davies has published the equivalent of a benign stick of TNT reiterating all the failed attempts, and then coming up with a few new zany ideas. Instead, he might consider reading in Signature in the Cell about the evidence for intelligent design that booms out of DNA right here on this planet.
Seeing Ghosts in the Bushes -- Or How to Keep the Theory of Evolution from Breaking Your Heart and Driving You Crazy
Paul Nelson
What would be evidence against evolution, and very strong evidence at that, would be the discovery of even a single fossil in the wrong geological stratum….But not a single solitary fossil has ever been found before it could have evolved.
Listen in as Stephen Meyer Debates Peter Atkins on the U.K.’s Premier Radio
Anika Smith
UPDATED: Today, Premier Radio UK is airing a debate recorded earlier this week between Signature in the Cell author Stephen Meyer and noted Oxford University chemist and “new atheist” Peter Atkins. The debate is part of the kick off of promotion for Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, which arrives in the UK on DVD this month.
Both Atkins and Meyer are accomplished scholars with very different viewpoints. The at times testy back and forth between them is as entertaining as it is enlightening.
California Senate Minority Leader Launches Probe into California Science Center's Alleged Violations of First Amendment Rights
John West
SACRAMENTO--California Senate Minority Leader Dennis Hollingsworth has sent a letter to the California Science Center (CSC) requesting documents related to the Center’s cancellation of a screening last October of the pro-intelligent design documentary “Darwin’s Dilemma.” The screening was sponsored by the American Freedom Alliance (AFA), a private group that had rented the Center’s IMAX theater.
Senator Hollingsworth’s letter follows twolawsuits filed against the state government-operated Science Center charging that it violated both the First Amendment and California’s open records law in its effort to stop the screening and then cover up the real story behind the cancellation.
“The constitutional implications of [the Science Center’s] actions are concerning” wrote Senator Hollingsworth in the letter, citing various court decisions protecting private parties against viewpoint discrimination. “It is fundamental that when a governmental entity or sub-unit (such as CSC) opens its facilities as a public forum, it is not constitutionally permissible to censor speech based on viewpoint or content.”
“The California Science Center’s assault on free speech should alarm everyone,” said Casey Luskin, Program Officer in Public Policy and Legal Affairs for the Discovery Institute. “If the government can ban a private group from renting a public auditorium to show a film favoring intelligent design, it can ban private groups from showing films in support of Darwin’s theory. Where does it stop?”
“Senator Hollingsworth is to be commended for launching this inquiry,” added Dr. John West, Vice President for Public Policy and Legal affairs at the Institute. “Free speech is the foundation of a free society. Government agencies have no right to discriminate against citizens because of their legally-protected viewpoints.”
Hollingsworth’s letter is directed to Dr. Joel Strom, Chair of the California Science Center Board of Directors, requesting that he instruct the museum’s management to provide copies of documents pertaining to the cancellation of the event, including e-mail communications from Science Center staff, employees, and board members which discuss the event and the topic of intelligent design versus Darwinism.
Darwin's Legacy Rebroadcast: Stream Talks by Michael Medved, Steve Fuller, and Tom Woodward
Anika Smith
If you're wondering what a major one-night event with some of the leading voices challenging Darwinian evolution sounds like, here's your chance to find out. If you're interested in attending this year's conference, featuring Michael Medved again, along with Dr. Stephen Meyer and Dr. David Berlinski, be warned: Last year's conference sold out, and over 200 were turned away. Click here to secure your place with a ticket in advance.
Last year's conference, "Darwin's Legacy: The Hidden Story," was held by the C. S. Lewis Society at the University of South Florida and featured Michael Medved and Professor Steve Fuller of the University of Warwick, along with CSLS director Tom Woodward. Highlights of this event will be rebroadcast several times in the coming weeks.
Program Schedule for the rebroadcast of last year's program, "Darwin's Legacy: The Hidden Story"
Intelligent Design, Front-Loading, and Theistic Evolution
Jay Richards
Over at Scott McKnight's blog at Beliefnet, an anonymous blogger has started a review thread on Steve Meyer's book. Signature in the Cell. While the blogger ("RJS") says he ultimately disagrees with Meyer's argument, it's clear that he takes Meyer's argument seriously and is trying to do his best to present the argument accurately. This is much more than can be said for the many hysterical and misinformed "critiques" of Meyer's argument that are now floating around the Internet. Anyone who's actually read the book will know that most of these critiques are cliches that Meyer addresses in detail in the book, suggesting that the critics don't even know the argument they are criticizing.
A civil review like this is welcomed, and I look forward to reading the installments.
In his first installment, RJS suggests that there's a promising "third way" that Meyer doesn't address in the book:
Does "Lifeless" Prion Evolution Demonstrate Anything Significant?
Casey Luskin
I was recently asked by an e-mailer to comment on a new study about evolution of prions based via a process like Darwinian selection.
Prions are misfolded proteins (or misfolded protein complexes). They aren’t alive. They can’t replicate on their own. They require their host’s cellular machinery for producing new proteins they can "misfold" in order to propagate.
Gould’s Fatal Flaw: The Thirtieth Anniversary of Wallace's Encounter with Darwinian Newspeak
Michael Flannery
Precisely thirty years ago this month the late Stephen Jay Gould published an article in volume 89 of Natural History purporting to demonstrate Alfred Russel Wallace’s “fatal flaw.” Wallace, who co-discovered natural selection in his now-famous Ternate Letter of 1858, first startled Charles Darwin and then prompted him after years of ponderous delay to finally complete his Origin of Species and rush it to press. By November of the following year his magnum opus was in the hands of the English public. But Wallace would break with Darwin over the source of the human intellect. While Darwin thought man and animal different in degree not kind, Wallace felt that the special attributes of the human mind, its facility for abstract reasoning, mathematics, music, even wit and humor was inexplicable by Darwin’s own principle of utility, namely, the idea that no attribute in any species would arise and be maintained unless it afforded it a functional advantage in its struggle for survival. Admitting that none of these most human of traits promoted survival, Wallace instead suggested that these qualities were explicable only through some “Overruling Intelligence.” Darwin and his disciples have been horrified ever since. Pointing to Wallace’s insistence that natural selection can only “fashion a feature for immediate use,” Gould issued his indictment: Wallace’s so-called “fatal flaw” was his “hyperselectionism.” But does this charge hold up?
Meyer, Medved and Berlinski Coming to Tampa Florida for Design vs. Darwin Event
Robert Crowther
The debate between Darwin and design is coming to Tampa, Florida with a major one-night event featuring some of the leading voices challenging Darwinian evolution.
Discovery Institute senior fellow and national radio personality Michael Medved will lead a two-hour discussion about the evidence for intelligent design and the challenges it proposes to modern evolutionary theory. Joining him will be Signature in the Cell author, Stephen C. Meyer, leading Darwin skeptic and author of The Deniable DarwinDavid Berlinski, and scientist, scholar and writer, Thomas Woodward author of Darwin Strikes Back.
The event will take place at The A La Carte Pavilion, Tampa, FL, Thursday, January 28th at 7pm and is hosted by the C. S. Lewis Society. Discovery Institute is one of the co-sponsors.
The cost of admission is $6 for Students and $12 for Adults. For more information and advanced ticket sales, call (727) 376-6911 x 336. Or you can simply purchase tickets to the event online.
Convergent Evolution of Introns Challenges Common Descent and Random Mutation
Casey Luskin
A recent article in ScienceDaily titled “ Introns Nonsense DNA May Be More Important to Evolution of Genomes Than Thought,” actually demonstrates nothing like Darwinian evolution. Introns are stretches of DNA within genes in Eukaryotes that do not code for proteins. But they aren’t functionless and can play important roles in splicing together proteins. According to the ScienceDaily article:
For many years, Jerry Fodor has been an outspoken critic of Darwinian reasoning in cognitive science and the philosophy of mind / language. As a graduate student, I saw him present a colloquium on these topics, in front of a semi-hostile audience, and admired his bravado in refusing to kneel before the Altar of Darwin. Sorry if that language seems over the top, but after the end of the Darwin Year, the steady worshipful attitude towards old Charles has finally got to me.
Dr. Josef Mengele, Angel of Death and "Devotee of Darwin"
David Klinghoffer
Try to imagine being operated on without anesthesia. A kidney is removed and then, while you are still fully awake, the surgeon displays it to you for your consideration in his hand. Sounds like a very bad nightmare but this is the kind of thing Dr. Josef Mengele did routinely with patients at Auschwitz. What would inspire a human being to such devilry? What influence, perhaps early in life, might have nudged him off the course of what could have otherwise been a conventional medical career?
California Science Center Engaged in Illegal Cover-Up to Hide the Truth About Its Censorship of Pro-Intelligent Design Film
John West
There are two big stories arising from the California Science Center’s censorship last October of the pro-intelligent design film Darwin’s Dilemma. The first big story, which was the primary focus of a Los Angeles Timesarticle last week, is the act of censorship itself. As an agency of state government in California, the Science Center is required to abide by the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech. The Science Center didn’t have to rent its facilities to the public, but once it did so, as a government agency, it was legally obliged by the First Amendment to treat all citizens equally.
But there is another big story tied to the Science Center that hasn’t received sufficient attention yet: The Center’s illegal cover-up.
The California Science Center has flagrantly violated California’s open records law in an apparent effort to hide the real story behind its censorship of Darwin’s Dilemma. The Center’s evasion of the law is the reason for the open records lawsuit recently brought by Discovery Institute against the Center. In October, the Institute filed a comprehensive open records request demanding that the Science Center turn over all documents relating to its abrupt decision to cancel the privately-sponsored screening of Darwin’s Dilemma. In early November, the Science Center released 44-pages of documents in response to the records request. At that time, the Center assured Discovery Institute that it had turned over "all documents" and that "no documents have been withheld," apart from a few e-mail addresses that were redacted. The Science Center did not tell the truth. Discovery Institute independently obtained incriminating emails involving Center officials that should have been turned over by the Center but weren’t.
Most importantly, the Institute obtained a smoking-gun e-mail confirming that the censorship of Darwin’s Dilemma was connected to the Science Center’s relationship with the Smithsonian Institution. In an Oct. 6 email to the American Freedom Alliance, Science Center Vice President Christine Sion specifically cited alleged damage to the Center’s “relationship with the Smithsonian” as the reason for canceling the Darwin’s Dilemma screening. In its open records request, Discovery Institute had asked for all documents relating to the screening cancellation that referenced the Smithsonian. The Christine Sion e-mail was clearly covered by that request and therefore should have been produced. It wasn’t. Another email from a Smithsonian official to the Science Center complaining about the screening was likewise suppressed.
These missing emails may be the tip of the proverbial iceberg. There is a huge unexplained gap in the documents produced by the Center thus far, raising suspicions that the Center may have suppressed many more incriminating documents. Notably, the Science Center failed to disclose even a single email or document relating to the Darwin’s Dilemma screening written by any decisionmaker at the Center who actually made the determination to cancel the screening. In other words, the Science Center would have the public believe that although there was lively email traffic about the screening by others at the Center, no one involved in making the cancellation decision composed even one email or other document mentioning the screening.
It is certainly beginning to look like someone at the Science Center scrubbed the record in order to hide any incriminating documents from the public in violation of the law. And that’s outrageous.
Even those who don’t care one whit about the debate over Darwinism and intelligent design ought to be concerned when a state agency flagrantly violates an open records law and then lies about it. Let’s hope that the judicial system in California is prepared to defend the public interest and to force the Science Center to comply with the law.
Why the California Science Center's Censorship of Pro-Intelligent Design Film is a Big Deal
John West
It’s amazing to me how many Darwinists are willing to embrace government censorship in order to prop up their favored theory. It’s equally amazing to me how few Darwinists understand the key difference between what private groups can do (they can sometimes discriminate based on viewpoint) and what government agencies are allowed to do (they must treat all citizens equally, regardless of viewpoint). These issues are coming out with full force in discussions spurred by the Los Angeles Timesstory this week highlighting the California Science Center’s censorship last October of a privately-sponsored screening of the pro-intelligent design film Darwin’s Dilemma: The Mystery of the Cambrian Fossil Record.
On a radio show this week, someone defended the Science Center’s censorship of Darwin’s Dilemma by equating intelligent design to Holocaust denial and arguing that the Science Center’s censorship was no different from the Simon Wiesenthal Center (a private group) denying someone permission to screen a Holocaust-denial film at its Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles.
The fact that some Darwinists can’t resist comparing intelligent design to Holocaust denial tells one more about their own insecurity and incivility than it does about the legitimacy of intelligent design. The debate over whether nature is the product of intelligence or a blind process is one of the great debates of Western Civilization, and significant numbers of philosophers, scientists, and other scholars have espoused some form of intelligent design over the past century, including the co-discoverer of the theory of evolution by natural selection, Alfred Wallace! Comparing support for intelligent design to Holocaust denial is a shameful effort to suppress open debate by smear tactics. This tactic is especially appalling given the clear historical connection between Darwinism and the development of Nazi ideology itself. Given the role played by Darwinism in the ideology of the Holocaust, one would think that modern Darwinists would be a little squeamish in equating their critics to Holocaust deniers.
Darwinist smear tactics notwithstanding, the comparison between what the California Science Center did and the hypothetical case of the Simon Wiesenthal Center completely misses the point. The Simon Wiesenthal Center is a private entity, and so it certainly has the legal right to limit the rental of its facilities to those who support its mission.
But the California Science Center is a government agency, not a private organization. As a part of California state government, the Science Center is required to abide by the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech. Unlike private groups or individuals, a government agency is obliged to treat all citizens equally regardless of their religious or political viewpoints. In this case, once the California Science Center decided to rent its auditorium to the public, it couldn’t discriminate against groups whose viewpoints it might not favor. The Science Center didn’t have to rent its facilities to the public, but once it did so, as a government agency, it was required by the First Amendment to treat all citizens equally. Allowing the Science Center to deny citizens equal access to its facilities would be a clear violation of the Constitution.
Those who think that the Science Center (again, a government agency) did nothing wrong in banning the privately-sponsored screening of an intelligent design film might want to consider how far they are willing to apply their support for government censorship. Would they also approve a town council deciding that a public park can be rented for a demonstration to denounce Obama administration policies, but not for a counter-demonstration supporting the Obama administration? If not, why not? There is no in principle difference between a government agency denying equal access to the rental of park facilities for demonstrations and a government agency denying equal access to the rental of a government auditorium.
If you are a proponent of Darwin’s theory, I’d urge you to think long and hard about how far you are willing to go down the path of trashing the Constitution. Are you really willing to jettison the First Amendment in your obsession to shield Darwinian theory from scrutiny? Are you that insecure? Do you think that the evidence for your theory is so weak that you need to resort to government censorship to prevent anyone from even hearing another point of view?
Los Angeles Times Reporting on Lawsuit Against California Science Center for Cancelling Intelligent Design Film
Robert Crowther
Finally, it seems that the filing of two separate lawsuits against the California Science Center for its blatant viewpoint discrimination when it censored Darwin's Dilemma has caught the attention of the mainstream media. The Los Angeles Times is now reporting on the story.
Strangely, the California Science Center (CSC) claims to have cancelled a contract with the American Freedom Alliance not because of something the AFA did, but rather because they didn't like the press release put out by Discovery Institute. It might come as a shock to the CSC, but free speech is still protected in this country. The Institute can, and will, say whatever it wants to about the public activities of its scientists and researchers. The CSC has no right to limit our speech, and they have no leverage to bring to bear against the AFA and punish them for something they also have no control over. That is just a ploy to avoid the real issue, theviewpoint discrimination engaged in by a department of the state government.
We've covered this story since the beginning , especially the part played by the Smithsonian, which The Los Angeles Times is also focusing on. I asked in a blog post on Oct. 10 whether the Smithsonian bullied the CSC into cancelling the film. It sure looked like it then.
Earlier this week, Discovery Institute issued its own press release (independent of AFA) announcing that the AFA would be hosting a screening of the film, followed by a discussion with Discovery scientists at a Smithsonian affiliated museum. That is apparently when the screening became a problem. The LA Daily News reports that Smithsonian spokesman Randall Kremer said "he saw the press release a few days ago and was concerned by its reference to the Smithsonian." It certainly seems that the Science Center didn't have a problem until the Smithsonian had a problem.
"The only reason I spoke with anyone at the California Science Center is I was concerned by the inference (in the press release that) there was a showing of the film at a Smithsonian branch, which is how the California Science Center was portrayed in the news release," Kremer said. "Of course, that is not the case. They are independent and any decisions they make on this are on their own."
Really? The Science Center had already made the decision to allow the screening. Canceling it only happened after the Smithsonian saw the press release and at least one Smithsonian official called the Science Center in concern.
And it looks even more so now that the Times is revealing that yet another person at the Smithsonian was complaining to the CSC, though he claims to have stopped short of ordering them to cancel the film.
On Oct. 5, the science center, one of 165 national affiliates of the Smithsonian that enjoy special access to loans from its massive collection, received an alert -- and a complaint -- from Harold Closter, director of the Smithsonian's affiliates program. Closter gave the science center the head's-up about a news release that had been issued not by the AFA but by the Discovery Institute, a Seattle-based think tank that promotes intelligent design and whose researchers are featured in "Darwin's Dilemma." In an e-mail that's an exhibit in the lawsuit, he wrote that the news release wrongly implied that the California Science Center is "a West Coast branch of the Smithsonian, and that the film showing is a Smithsonian event." Closter asked science center officials to correct the error but did not mention canceling the screening.
And of course there was the little fact of a VP at the CSC admitting that just scheduling Darwin's Dilemma to be screened at the science center damaged its reputation and its relationship with the Smithsonian.
As 2009 comes to an end, so does the delirium of “Darwin Year.” From “Darwin Day” on February 12 (Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday) to November 24 (the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Origin of Species), Darwin’s disciples spared no expense (using mostly taxpayers’ money) in their exuberant celebrations, even though most of Darwin’s ideas were mistaken and his contributions to science were insignificant compared to those of hundreds of others—including (to name just a few) Isaac Newton, James Clerk Maxwell, and Albert Einstein in physics; Robert Boyle, Antoine Lavoisier and Willard Gibbs in chemistry; and Carolus Linnaeus, Georges Cuvier and Gregor Mendel in biology.
What Darwin promoted was not empirical science but materialistic philosophy. As historian Neal C. Gillespie wrote in 1979, “It is sometimes said that Darwin converted the scientific world to evolution by showing them the process by which it had occurred,” but “it was more Darwin's insistence on totally natural explanations than on natural selection that won their adherence.” (Charles Darwin and the Problem of Creation, p.147) The Darwinian revolution was primarily philosophical, and Darwin's philosophy limited science to “the discovery of laws which reflected the operation of purely natural or ‘secondary’ causes.” Furthermore, “there could be no out-of-bounds signs... When sufficient natural or physical causes were not known they must nonetheless be assumed to exist to the exclusion of other causes.”
The U. S. “Public” Broadcasting System (PBS) has a long history of promoting materialistic philosophy disguised as empirical science. In 1980, PBS brought us Carl Sagan’s thirteen-part Cosmos series, which featured Sagan—in the name of Science—assuring us that “The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be.”
In 2001, PBS broadcasted the seven-part series Evolution. The first episode featured atheist philosopher Daniel Dennett praising “Darwin’s dangerous idea,” which according to Dennett “eats through just about every traditional concept”—including the concept of God. (Darwin's Dangerous Idea, p. 63) At the time, the Discovery Institute published a scene-by-scene viewer’s guide that documented the flawed science and anti-religious bias of the series, yet PBS’s Evolution is still being used to indoctrinate students in U. S. public schools. My son’s high school biology teacher used it; her favorite episode was the fifth, “Why Sex?”, in which an evolutionary psychologist confidently claimed that artistic achievements such as Handel’s Messiah are produced by “our sexual instincts for impressing the opposite sex.”
Now PBS is about to jump on the departing Darwin Year bandwagon with another special, “What Darwin Never Knew,” scheduled to air on December 29.
Go ahead, David, say it: "Darwin taught Hitler (and Stalin and Mao and Pol Pot) how to kill millions of people."
That is of course a ridiculous parody of what I've written on Darwinism and its historical consequences, and I've never written a word about Darwin-Mao, but...now that you mention it, Paul, I just so happen to have before me on my desk China and Charles Darwin, by China scholar James Reeve Pusey of Bucknell University, published in 1983 by Harvard University Press. Pusey is a son of the illustrious late Harvard president Nathan Pusey. (They don't give people names like that anymore, do they? Too bad.) Let's just look up his conclusion, shall we? Hm, what's this? He writes:
Mao Tse-tung finally claimed that Marxism-Leninism could all be boiled down to one sentence, tsao fan yu li -- "To rebel is justified" -- but that standard translation obscures the force of the li (reason or principle) that rebellion was now said to have. That Neo-Confucian word in [its] new context really meant that rebellion was a natural law, and that lesson had been taught to Mao Tse-tung not by Marx but by Sun Yat-sen and Liang Ch'i-ch'ao, who had learned it, rightly or wrongly, from Darwin. For the li of revolution, they had said, lay in evolution.
Darwin justified revolution and thereby helped the cultural revolutions of Liang Ch'i-ch'ao, Hu Shih, and Mao Tse-tung (and, of course, so many others), and the political revolutions of Sun Yat-sen, Chiang K'ai-shek, and Mao Tse-tung. As things turned out, therefore, he seemd to help Mao Tse-tung the most, and indeed he did. He helped make the Marxists the fittest.
Darwin created the ideological vacuum [by undermining traditional ideas] that cried out for something like Marxism, and he established criteria for what that something should be. The new fit and fittening ideology had to be based on the Western science of evolutionary progress. It had to identify inevitable, natural stages of human social development. It had to promise historical inevitability and yet at the same time recognize the vital importance of human action. It had to be based on struggle and yet stress mutual aid among members of the ch'un. It had to provide a non-racial enemy to explain China's inner and outer troubles without damning the Chinese -- and it had to give the underdog a chance.
That last stipulation was not Darwin's by any stretch of the imagination, but every Chinese Darwinist we have seen forced Darwin to give the underdog a chance....
Bah Humbug! British Librarian Tries to Ban Explore Evolution in the Name of Darwin
Casey Luskin
It's the holiday season, which means that cheer and values like charity, academic freedom, tolerance, and diversity are abounding--but apparently not among Darwin's defenders in the United Kingdom. A recent angry editorial by the "Atheist Examiner" titled "Creationists try to sneak Intelligent Design into school libraries" tells the story -- except that it's not the actual story.
The correct story is that "Truth in Science," a British organization allied with a number of credible British scientists and academics, is offering Explore Evolution to school libraries. Contra the "Atheist Examiner" article, the textbook Explore Evolution does not argue for intelligent design, but rather presents students with the scientific evidence both for and against neo-Darwinian evolution. Intelligent design is not advocated in the book. What the book does contain are numerous references to mainstream scientific publications raising serious questions about core aspects of neo-Darwinian evolution. The textbook's authors include university faculty and Ph.D. scientists from top institutions. The real story here is that because the textbook challenges Darwinism, British evolutionists want it banned from public school libraries.
In that regard, the "Atheist Examiner" quotes a letter from a librarian in Wales who boasted about his efforts to ban Explore Evolution from his library and protect his students from its arguments. As the librarian writes in New Humanist:
2009 is almost over, but the hangover from the Darwin parties has already begun. Jonathan Wells has the story at American Spectator:
The Darwin Year delirium reached such an extreme that even evolutionists grew weary of it.
Cambridge University paleontologist Simon Conway Morris wrote in Current Biology, "More than one of my colleagues has cast her eye around the packed conference room and then murmured sotte voce that, well, she was suffering a little from Darwin fatigue." Conway Morris wondered whether the "obsession" with Darwin and the "endless cycle" of centennial celebrations reflected "a loss of way, an eclipse of confidence," and he criticized those who "caper around the Darwinian totem" while ignoring the contributions of others.
University of Florida biologist Vassiliki Betty Smocovitis wrote in Science, "Just when it looked like the 'ultra-Darwinists' were winning the 'year of Darwin' with their interminable love-fests, triumphalist narratives, and self-serving revisionist histories; when we were starting to think that Darwin was the only evolutionist to have lived in the past 150 years; and when we might conclude that nearly the entire evolutionary community had drunk the Kool-Aid of antiquarian Darwinism," David Prindle published a book on Stephen Jay Gould that "would likely challenge much of the ultra-orthodoxy passing as reflective history and science written expressly for the year of Darwin." Smocovitis concluded: "Darwin is dead. Long live evolution."
"One Could Not Ask for More" Than Signature in the Cell
Anika Smith
Those who follow the debate over evolution will remember 2009 as the year Stephen Meyer's Signature in the Cell convincingly made a new scientific case for intelligent design. In fact, according to Doug Groothuis, "Its publication may prove to be a decisive moment for the Intelligent Design movement.
One could not ask for more in a philosophy of science treatise than what we find in The Signature in the Cell. The book is no less than magisterial, an adjective that curmudgeons such as myself seldom use. At every level--philosophical, scientific, historical and literary--it is a superb treatise.
Reading every word of its 508 pages of text (not counting end notes)--as I did--repays the reader greatly. Meyer thoroughly examines a most significant topic--how life came about--and does so in an engaging, warm, and philosophically rigorous fashion. (Few books ever do such a thing.) In fact, I have never read a book that goes so deep while remaining so welcoming to the reader. It does do by using a minimal narrative structure--there is no obtrusive autobiography here--to guide us through the issues and arguments pertaining to the nature and origin life at the genetic level. The reader is lead step-by-step into the question of the origin of biological information, and so receives a hearty education in the history of science in general and the scientific question to understand life itself. (emphasis added)
Of course, it's difficult to be objective when it seems everyone has a stake in the debate over the origin of life itself. As another reviewer observes:
Certainly in our own day such inquiries are made with apostolic fervor, both by those who adhere to science and by those who follow faith – and by that segment of every population, quieter than the first two and by far more numerous, who believe it’s possible to live in both mindsets simultaneously. These are the great and rancorous ‘God Debates’ of our beleaguered modern moment, with battle-ready contestants on both sides, writers like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Michael Behe, and Kenneth Miller squaring off on TV screen and town hall stage to wrestle with eschatological questions as old as Abraham. The fool sayeth in his heart ‘there is no God’ – the wise man, apparently, sayeth it on Larry King Live.
Into this supercharged atmosphere Cambridge-educated chemist and scientific historian Stephen Meyer puts forth his own case in his new book Signature in the Cell. In its calmly-reasoned 400 pages (with an extra 100 tightly-packed endnotes), Meyer constructs the strongest argument yet made for the theory of Intelligent Design, and he does it without once advocating any living God.
This reviewer, Ignazio de Vega of Open Letters Monthly, notes how Meyer takes on arch-atheist Richard Dawkins ("his serial dismantling of Dawkins throughout the book is conducted with a very satisfying mandarin delicacy") and concludes by noting that "The author is concerned only with scientific fact – and the limits of some of those facts."
New Peer-Reviewed Paper Demolishes Fallacious Objection: “Aren’t There Vast Eons of Time for Evolution?”
Casey Luskin
When debating intelligent design (ID), there are countless times I’ve heard the old objection, “But aren’t there millions of years for Darwinian evolution?” Perhaps there are, but that doesn’t mean the Darwinian mechanism has sufficient opportunities to produce the observed complexity found in life. Darwin put forward a falsifiable theory, stating that his mechanism must work by “numerous successive slight modifications.” Michael Behe took Darwin at his word, and argued in Darwin’s Black Box that irreducible complexity refuted Darwinian evolution because there exist complex structures that cannot be built in such a stepwise manner. Darwin’s latter day defenders responded to Behe by effectively putting Darwinism into an unfalsifiable position: they put forth wildly speculative and unlikely appeals to indirect evolution. Largely based upon “exaptation,” these scenarios required that complex biological systems be built by spontaneously “co-opting” or borrowing multiple parts within the cell to suddenly to perform wholly different functions in an entirely new system. The only evidence for such speculative scenarios is typically “protein homology,” or sequence similarity between one part and another. The mere remote possibility of such a story is said to salvage evolution from falsification by Behe’s arguments.
But is “mere possibility” sufficient justification to assert “scientific plausibility”? A new peer-reviewed article in Theoretical Biology and Medical Modelling asks just this question. The abstract states:
What Climategate Tells Us About "Consensus Science"
Anika Smith
The parallels between the CRU email scandal (aka "Climategate") and the abuse of science perpetrated by those who want to keep Darwin-skeptics out of their universities, journals, and way, are clear to those closely involved in the debate over evolution. Today Stephen Meyer explains in an article at Human Events how familiar it is to have "scientists from various academic institutions hard at work suppressing dissent from other scientists who have doubts on global warming, massaging research data to fit preconceived ideas, and seeking to manipulate the gold standard 'peer review' process to keep skeptical views from being heard."
Does this sound familiar at all? To me, as a prominent skeptic of modern Darwinian theory, it sure does. For years, Darwin-doubting scientists have complained of precisely such abuses, committed by Darwin zealots in academia.
There have been parallels cases where e-mail traffic was released showing Darwinian scientists displaying the same contempt for fair play and academic openness as we see now in the climate emails. One instance involved a distinguished astrophysicist at Iowa State University, Guillermo Gonzalez, who broke ranks with colleagues in his department over the issue of intelligent design in cosmology. Released under the Iowa Open Records Act, e-mails from his fellow scientists at ISU showed how his department conspired against him, denying Dr. Gonzales tenure as retribution for his views.
To me, the most poignant correspondence emerging from CRU e-mails involves discussion about punishing a particular editor at a peer-reviewed journal who was defying the orthodox establishment by publishing skeptical research.
Confronted with problems in life, it’s useful to think in terms of trends. Whether I am a consumer strapped with paying off credit card debit or a Darwinian biologist strapped with trying to explain the origin and development of life, is a given problem’s power to bedevil me getting, on the whole, bigger or smaller? If smaller, then that’s a cause for relief. Evolutionists talk grandly, seeking to give the impression that their problem is increasingly in hand, or in the bag, or under control, whichever metaphor you prefer. But this is mostly bluff, as a report in Nature Structural and Molecular Biology reminds us.
If the evolutionary origin of DNA coding remains an enigma, try adding to that the origin of histone coding that’s associated with it. A group of researchers from Emory University School of Medicine have revealed ways that histones receive modifications in such a way as to convey information that in turn allows the information in DNA to be properly read.
When things like cells and the proteins that make them go were understood to be simple blob- or crystal-like entities, then explaining how their structure could be accounted for in terms of natural selection seemed a task that was not far out of reach. On the contrary, it appeared to be intuitively easy to imagine how a full and satisfying account could be detailed.
Histones are proteins that form the nucleosome spools on which DNA is coiled tightly to fit the stuff into the minute confines of the cell. Steve Meyer observes in Signature in the Cell, “[I]t is the specific shape of the histone proteins that enables them to do their job….Thanks in part to nucleosome spooling, the information storage density of DNA is many times that of our most advanced silicon chips.”
Darwinists' Continued Yelping About Signature In The Cell Reveals Their Desperation
Robert Crowther
The continued success of Signature In The Cell has driven Darwinists crazy. They’re desperately making louder and ever more ridiculous denunciations of the book and anyone who might have the temerity to suggest people read it for themselves.
An interesting and informative back and forth has been taking place on the pages of the Times Literary Supplement, where last month noted atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel recommended SITC as one of the best books of the year. Not surprisingly, he was attacked (he responded, and he was attacked again) by a Darwinist who told people forgo reading SITC and instead just read Wikipedia. Is this what passes for civil discourse on important topics now? Just ignore the arguments you don't like? A pretty pathetic state of affairs if true.
Nagel wasn't just attacked in the TLS, but also by Darwin activist Brian Leiter, who as far as I can tell is grossly ignorant or a liar when it comes to the issue of intelligent design. (He writes as if he knows something about what we do at Discovery Institute, attributing to us things which we in fact do not do, so he is either ignorant or a liar.)
Today, Leiter was taken to task for challenging someone obviously his superior when it comes to philosophical arguments. Over at the Libertarian-leaning Lewrockwell.com, David Gordon has a very good essay on the whole frakas where he explains:
Nagel's remarks on Intelligent Design are of great philosophical significance. He is an atheist and does not accept the view that a designing mind directed the evolutionary process. But he opposes what he deems a contemporary prejudice in favor of reductionist naturalism. He doubts that Darwinism can adequately explain the existence of objective value ...
Gordon goes to call Leiter's temper tantrums unedifying and points out that Nagel is "one of the foremost philosophers of the past half-century".
He concludes by defending civil debate and discourse and denouncing the attempts to suppress such debate as deplorable.
I have gone on at some length about this, because the attempt by Leiter and others to block inquiry that challenges naturalism seems to me altogether deplorable. To some people, evidently, the first line of the False Priestess in In Memoriam is Holy Writ, not to be questioned: "The stars, she whispers, blindly run." But even if these avid naturalists are correct in their metaphysics, debate needs to be encouraged rather than suppressed. Perhaps Leiter should reread On Liberty. Pending that happy event, one can only say of his abuse that the barking of Bill Sikes's dog just tells us that Bill Sikes is in the neighborhood.
Quick question: What upcoming holiday would have priests in white vestments admonishing you to turn off your TV and take comfort in hearing an old story?
If you're tired of watching It's a Wonderful Life or A Christmas Carol yet again, perhaps Darwin can occupy your cold winter nights. As a holiday treat, Origins would like to point out that this summer's Darwin Festival in Cambridge, U.K., has compiled videos of many of its sessions, which typically start with a reading from Darwin's correspondence.
"If you're tired of watching It's a Wonderful Life yet again"?!
Because of my sore knee, it follows that there this is no God.
You think I'm kidding but this line of reasoning is commonly heard from devotees of evangelizing atheism like Richard Dawkins. It's the argument from seemingly poor, botched, or suboptimal design. Yet the Hebrew Bible alerts us early on that creation is afflicted with a "lack" or "deficiency" (chesron), as Jewish philosophy terms it. The Maharal, whom we talked about recently on my Beliefnet blog, discussed this theme in his book on Chanukah, Ner Mitzvah, which is why I mention it now. We're in the midst of Chanukah now, concluding Saturday.
The human knee appears to be ill-suited to its task, hence the prevalence of knee pain, similar to that of back pain, and so on. I've had trouble from this recurrent minor soreness, brought on by running. So here's a website devoted to cataloguing instances of apparently faulty designs like my knee that, so goes the argument, a creator would not allow in his creatures.
That is a theological argument, not a scientific one, based on the premise that Dawkins & Co. know what a God would or wouldn't do if that God existed which he does not. As Dawkins writes in The Greatest Show on Earth, regarding the extravagantly lengthy and circuitous recurrent laryngeal nerve of the giraffe, "Any intelligent designer would have hived off the laryngeal nerve on its way down, replacing a journey of many meters by one of a few centimeters." Atheists think they've discovered a devastating "Ah hah! Gotcha!" sort of a response to religious believers who, it's assumed, never realized that nature has a certain painful lack of perfection built into it.
Why Are Darwinists Scared to Read Signature in the Cell?
David Klinghoffer
It’s somehow cheering to know that while the pompous know-nothingism of Darwinian atheists in the U.S. is matched by those in England, so too not only in our country but in theirs the screechy ignorance receives its appropriate reply from people with good sense and an open mind. Some of the latter include atheists who, however, arrived at their unbelief through honest reflection rather than through the mind-numbing route of fealty to Darwinist orthodoxy. Such a person is Thomas Nagel, the distinguished NYU philosopher. He praised Stephen Meyer’s Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design in the Times Literary Supplement as a “book of the year,” concluding with this enviable endorsement:
[A] detailed account of the problem of how life came into existence from lifeless matter -- something that had to happen before the process of biological evolution could begin….Meyer is a Christian, but atheists, and theists who believe God never intervenes in the natural world, will be instructed by his careful presentation of this fiendishly difficult problem.
Nagel’s review elicited howls from Darwinists who made no effort to pretend they had even weighed the 611-page volume in their hand, much less read a page of it. On his blog, Why Evolution Is True, University of Chicago biologist Jerry Coyne complained that they hadn’t ought to let such an opinion even appear in the august columns of the TLS:
“Detailed account”?? How about “religious speculation”?
Nagel is a respected philosopher who’s made big contributions to several areas of philosophy, and this is inexplicable, at least to me. I have already called this to the attention of the TLS, just so they know.
No doubt the editors appreciated his letting them know they had erred by printing a view not in line with the official catechism. Coyne then appealed for help. Not having read the book himself, while nevertheless feeling comfortable dismissing it as “religious speculation,” he pleaded:
Do any of you know of critiques of Meyer’s book written by scientists? I haven’t been able to find any on the internet, and would appreciate links.
Coyne was later relieved when a British chemist, Stephen Fletcher, published a critical letter to the editor in the TLS associating Meyer’s argument with a belief in “gods, devils, pixies, fairies” and recommending that readers learn about chemical evolution by, instead, reading up on it elsewhere from an unimpeachable source of scientific knowledge:
If you find similarities between Ben Stein's account of the ID movement and the ClimateGate news of scientists blackballed from science journals and treated like traitors, well, welcome to reality.
Signature in the Cell, "A Landmark Assault on Scientific Naturalism"
Anika Smith
Want to know more about the Amazon.com bestselling book that made the Times Literary Supplement's Top Books of 2009? Robert Deyes has a review of Stephen Meyer's Signature in the Cell below:
New Intelligent Design Book A Landmark Assault On Scientific Naturalism
In his recent book Signature In The Cell, Meyer presents a fresh outlook on one of the most compelling facets of the Intelligent Design case — that of biological information in DNA. Meyer provides a lucid and personal account of his own experiences as a scientist and philosopher revealing to the reader the watershed events that led to his move towards the intelligent design alternative.
Meyer's historical overview of the key events that shaped origin-of-life biology is extremely readable and well illustrated. Both the style and the content of his discourse keep the reader focused on the ID thread of reasoning that he gradually develops throughout his book.
Meyer does a marvelous job in conveying the personal tensions that so characterized the DNA story. His extensive coverage of 'turning point' historical moments reveals an in-depth knowledge of the subject matter. Like few other scientific discoveries, that of the structure of DNA brought fundamental changes to our understanding of the chemistry of life since life itself could no longer be considered to be a mere product of matter and energy. As Meyer elaborates, information in the form of a DNA code had emerged as the critical player in defining the hereditary makeup of nature.
That's the question Jay Richards puts to NRO's John Derbyshire today at The American, where he aptly notes:
Derbyshire appeals to a scientific magisterium: “Science contains a core magisterium, which we can and do trust.” This should give anyone who has followed the climate change debate the creeps—a reaction Derbyshire anticipates in the column. But he seems blind to why talk of a scientific magisterium is creepy; so let me spell it out.
Other than listing the things Derbyshire thinks are settled and “without serious competitors,” he doesn’t really even identify what the magisterium is. This gives the impression that the magisterium is the subjectively determined list of things that people with power claim are settled. And that impression encourages the postmodern doubters of truth that Derbyshire hopes to keep back from the gates.
Todd's Blog Bungles Wiker's New Book, The Darwin Myth
Michael Flannery
A confused and wholly erroneous review of Ben Wiker's Darwin Myth by Todd Wood appeared recently on Todd's Blog. Wood's review suffers from three major errors (and likely many more if I took the necessary time to delineate them all), but in the interest of calling them out without wasting too much time on such an obviously muddled missive, permit me to note the following:
This fall Meyer came out with a full account of what science has learned in recent decades: Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design (Harper One, 2009) shows that the cell is incredibly complex and the code that directs its functions wonderfully designed. His argument undercuts macroevolution, the theory that one kind of animal over time evolves into a very different kind. Meyer thus garners media scorn for raining on this year's huge celebration of the birth of Charles Darwin 200 years ago and the publication of On the Origin of Species 150 years ago.
The cover story is what should become the essential profile of Meyer, following what World's Marvin Olasky describes as "the four-stage pattern that is common among intellectual Daniels: Questioning, discernment, courage, and perseverance."
Meyer says, "You ask how someone gets the moxie to take something like this on. Part of the answer is that I didn't know any better when I was young. I was just so seized with this idea and these questions: 'Was it possible to develop a scientific case? Were we looking at evidence that could revive and resuscitate the classical argument from design, which had been understood from the time of Hume and certainly the time of Darwin to be defunct?' If that was the case, that's a major scientific revolution."
Courage becomes a determinant once we count the cost and see that it's great. Meyer's first inkling came when "talking about my ideas to people at Cambridge High Table settings, and getting that sudden social pall." But the cost was and is more than conversational ease: San Francisco State University in 1992 expelled a professor, Dean Kenyon, who espoused ID, and other job losses have come since. Meyer and other ID proponents saw "that this would be very controversial. One of the things that emboldened all of us who were in the early days of this movement was meeting each other. In 1993 we had a little private conference [with] 10 or 12 very sharp, mostly younger scientists going through top-of-the-world programs in their respective fields who were all skeptical. I think the congealing of this group gave everyone the sense that this was going to be an exciting adventure: Let's rumble."
The article, as the title indicates, is a profile in courage worth reading, particularly this bit:
Many who enter the courage stage at first think that the war in which they find themselves will end in a few years. There comes a time in many lives, though, when a hard realization sinks in: It will not be over in my lifetime. That's when some give in while others proceed to the perseverance stage. That's where Meyer is: Signature in the Cell ends with a long list of testable predictions concerning the direction of science over the next several decades. Meyer predicts that further study will reveal the importance of "junk DNA" and the reasons for what seem to be "poorly designed" structures: They will reveal either a hidden functional logic or evidence of decay from originally good designs.
Avi Davis Responds to Donald Prothero on Beverly Hills Debate
Anika Smith
After the Darwinists lost the debate in Beverly Hills, Donald Prothero — the man who cites imaginary eighteen-winged dragonflies as evidence for evolution — tried to salvage his reputation by attacking debate moderator Avi Davis for setting up an unfair encounter. As always, thoughtful readers might want to consider listening to the debate and judging themselves who won and just how fair the battle was. Courtesy of the American Freedom Alliance website, you can listen to the entire debate here.
As the moderator of the debate, AFA's Avi Davis responded to Dr. Prothero's slurs in an email, which he gave us permission to post here at ENV:
Dear Professor Prothero:
Your posting BELOW on Panda's Thumb has been forwarded to me and frankly I am a little disappointed by it.
I wouldn't think this worthy of a man of your academic distinction and accomplishments.
So now lets get some things straight.
I had no association with Michael Shermer before I contacted him with regard to his willingness to debate the subject of evolution.
After he agreed to appear, I asked him for a reference of someone who could partner him in the debate. He mentioned your name. I readily agreed to the recommendation. I then suggested that I call you to extend the invitation personally. Michael assured me that he would call you and take care of all details. I spoke to Michael numerous times before the debate and he repeatedly assured me that he would be the interlocutor with me for all matters regarding your side of the debate.
With regard to the other side, I was only in touch with Stephen Meyer and had no contact with his debate partner, Richard Sternberg, either by phone or by email before his arrival in Los Angeles.
I do think, then, that I had very good reason to believe that Michael Shermer had informed you of the debate topic which was agreed between the principals to be "Has Evolutionary Theory Adequately Explained the Origins of Life?" This was established eight weeks prior to the debate and was negotiated in back and forth emails between myself and Michael Shermer and myself and Stephen Meyer respectively.
It was advertised as such in all our printed literature and in all our advertising and in our radio ads. The only place the debate topic did not appear was on the AFA website where the topic was deemed by our webmaster to be " not catchy enough "and so was reduced to the more accessible 'Origins of Life Debate.'"
Notwithstanding this, at 8:00 am on the day of the debate, nearly twelve hours before it. according to your own words, you were finally "informed" of the debate topic. That email contained the rules for the debate and a definition of terms, designed to avoid a conflict over semantics. Strangely though, you wrote back to me immediately that everything was "fine" — only that you wished you had received my notice earlier. You did not protest the debate topic, nor did you mention that you had prepared a completely different presentation.
Yet notwithstanding our own tardiness, I can't fathom how it would have made a whit of difference to your presentation. After all, you were tasked by Michael with presenting a case for evolution, demonstrating how first life could have transformed over history into present organic life through natural selection via random mutation.
And that is the presentation I believe you made — something completely in keeping with the terms of the debate. It was Michael Shermer who assumed the task of attacking the efficacy of intelligent design, contrary to the agreed debate topic. He did this, to my great surprise, despite the fact that he had confirmed the original topic with me on the phone only a few days before and knew how it was being advertised on our website.
Even with all this known, it is astonishing to me that you would be so completely flummoxed and aggrieved by the perceived change of topic.
As an evolutionary advocate of such long standing, how difficult for you could it have been to switch gears slightly and offer a defense of a theory you are absolutely certain represents the only acceptable explanation for the origins of life? How much difference would it have made to your actual presentation?
In short, if you now have complaints that you were misinformed of the debate topic, you have simply chosen the wrong address to deliver them.
As for the timing on this debate, you should know that I accepted Michael Shermer's offer to be a time keeper and it was he who offered me views of his stop watch to determine the passage of time for each presentation.
Regarding debating procedure, I will state that it is quite normal during rebuttal for the moderator to relax the rules and allow the two sides to engage in a bit of exchange back and forth since that excites interest for the audience and often gets to the core of the differences between the two sides. You had equal time for rebuttal and were given ample opportunity to make your case and debunk the arguments of your opponents. which, according to your own assessment, you did successfully.
Your characterization of a lobby " full of creationists, religious tract pushers and Holocaust deniers" smacks of prejudice and bigotry and is completely devoid of truth. The audience was a healthy mix of both your own defenders and your critics.
As for Dr. Meyer's and Dr. Sternberg's presentations, you showed them very little courtesy or deference, snickering at their remarks while making a number of condescending statements. It fell to your debate partner to correct your rudeness.
Unlike you, your debate partner was not quite so aggrieved that he had been mistreated or that we had been in anyway dishonest.
Here, in fact, are his words to me following the debate:
Hi Avi,
Good job tonight. I thought you were the perfect moderator. Things got a little testy there for awhile, but smoothed out in the long run. The audience seems pleased with the debate from the comments I heard on both sides after.
Thanks again. Someone told me there were 350 people there tonight, so that's much better than you thought might show up, right?
Michael
Michael Shermer
Altadena, CA
The American Freedom Alliance, which is a non-partisan and non-political organization and does not belong to either the right or left wing, arranged this series of debates in good faith and at every step of the way was careful to make sure that each side had an equal opportunity to present its case.
During these five weeks we presented some individuals of real class who displayed some genuine humility and respect for their opponents and for the organization hosting them.
News Coverage of the California Science Center Lawsuits
Anika Smith
WorldNetDaily has been covering the lawsuits filed against the California Science Center by the AFA and Discovery Institute over the cancellation of the pro-intelligent design film Darwin's Dilemma and the suppression of public documents concerning the Center's decision:
The newest action comes from the Discovery Institute, which is accusing the California Science Center of unlawfully refusing to disclose public documents sought under the California Public Records Act.
Discovery officials filed the request for the documentation about the center's decision-making process when it rejected the video "Darwin's Dilemma" Oct. 9. The center canceled a contract with the American Freedom Alliance to show the film Oct. 26.
The center released 44 pages of documentation Nov. 2 and claimed "no documents have been withheld."
However, the Discovery Institute, in a statement about the controversy, accused the center of withholding information.
Among some of the documents obtained, one e-mail sent by University of Southern California professor Hilary Schor on Oct. 6 states, "I'm less troubled by the freedom of speech issues [i.e., the suppression of freedom of speech] than why my tax dollars which support the California Science Center are being spent on hosting religious propaganda!"
Another document shows Ken Phillips, a curator at the CSC, stating, "I personally have a real problem with anything that elevates the concept of intelligent design to a level that makes it appear as though it should be considered equally alongside Darwinian theory as a possible alternative to natural selection. In other words, I see us getting royally played by the Center for Science and Culture resulting in long term damage to our credibility and judgment for a very long time. … No institute supporting an essentially religious philosophy of creation is required to assure that appropriate critique comes to bear on the Darwinian theory."
Court Papers in Discovery Institute Lawsuit Against California Science Center
Anika Smith
This morning Discovery Institute announced their lawsuit against the California Science Center for unlawfully refusing to disclose public documents requested by Discovery Institute under the California Public Records Act.
The petition, filed December 1, 2009, is available for viewing here.
Ouch. Intelligent Design Guys Put the Sleeperhold on Darwin's Defenders
Robert Crowther
The great debate over the adequacy of evolution continues. Sort of. The latest head to head meeting had Dr. Stephen Meyer and Dr. Richard Sternberg debating Dr. Michael Shermer and Dr. Donald Prothero. Heading into the debate I was quite excited; these aren't lightweights, after all. The defenders of evolution are well known in science circles and to followers of the overall debate. Indeed, we've blogged a fair amount on Dr. Prothero who has, shall we say, a colorful and cavalier way with the facts. He is known more for polemical bromides and spurious personal attacks than for any serious science.
Waiting for the event to start, I was wondering if Prothero would be better behaved in person than he is hiding behind a keyboard. His partner was Skeptic magazine's head honcho, Michael Shermer, who has debated Stephen Meyer before, and is known for making more theological arguments against ID, as opposed to bringing any serious scientific criticisms bear. I expected he would be the good cop to Prothero's keystone cop. What I didn't know was that Prothero would be Ed McMahon to his Johnny Carson.
On the other side, the contenders are just as well credentialed — maybe more so — with one holding a philosophy of science degree from Cambridge (Meyer) being the less qualified, since Sternberg holds two degrees in evolutionary and theoretical biology. Not to mention that Meyer's new book, Signature in the Cell, is by far the most prominent book of any of the participants, having just been named a bestseller by Amazon.com, and last week honored in the Times Literary Supplement of the London Times as one of the best books of the year.
It was all shaping up to be a serious heavyweight bout. And then Meyer and Sternberg simply KO'd the competition in the opening round. If I were being generous I might say that Prothero tripped over his own arrogance and impaled himself on his condescension, but let's be honest; he was completely knocked out by Sternberg. I think Sternberg earned a third degree tonight, one in evolutionary bulldozing.
The debate video will be made available at some point by American Freedom Alliance, the sponsors of the debate, along with Center for Inquiry, The Skeptics Society and Discovery Institute.
Shermer opened by denouncing intelligent design as not science and not to be confused with science, which is what he and Prothero apparently assumed to be the topic of the debate. (It wasn't, sadly.) Then he turned it over to Prothero, who — after repeatedly repeating that science cannot resort to the supernatural — proceeded to race through a litany of complaints against intelligent design and assertions about the creation of amino acids and proteins, most of which was non-controversial and also not evidence for Darwinian evolution. Prothero made a number of claims about RNA chains, about how the evidence of the fossil record is "ironclad" or would be if people treated it fairly, and about how the Miller-Urey experiment was right, "and even if they weren't it still works" (quit laughing, he was serious!). His Darwinian motivational rant went on about how the Cambrian explosion was really a "slow fuse," not an explosion. Amazingly, he claimed that almost all the major phyla had ancestors 50 million years before the Cambrian. Alas, he was so far wrong that it wasn't all that much effort to point it out, completely discredit him, and then let him hang himself with his twisted rope of unearned arrogance and condescension. If you're going to be arrogant, you'd better be able to back it up with something better than, "I climbed some rocks in Russia and read an article in The New Scientist."
To call the debate a massacre would be a discredit to Sitting Bull. The only thing I can say is that Shermer needs to add a point to his booklet on how to debate "creationists" — namely, leave Donald Prothero at home in his van by the river.
This guy is to be taken seriously? I had to remind myself not to laugh every so often during his presentation — it was so pathetic and ill-informed. Basically, Shermer and Prothero blathered on about supernaturalism, and Meyer ceded his time to Sternberg, who made an interesting presentation about whale evolution. Then he proceeded to point out the topic of the debate to Shermer and Prothero: Has Evolutionary Theory Adequately Explained the Origins of Life?, something which they never addressed because they were so busy falling all over themselves to denounce intelligent design.
Some of the best points came later in the debate, when Sternberg slammed Prothero with factual put down after factual put down, citing the current literature time and again. His command of the subject matter — from population genetics to junk DNA — was so far and above beyond Shermer and Prothero's knowledge, so far above their pay grade, that it was almost painful to watch him school them point after point. As I said before, shortly you'll be able to watch the debate for yourself. But be warned, it isn't pretty.
Unbelievers at the Holidays: Two Different Takes on Why There Are Still Doubts About Darwin
Anika Smith
It's the question that bothers many Darwinists: why doesn't everyone believe us? This is compounded of course by the fact that most of the people Darwinists interact with in the mainstream media believe everything anyone in the scientific establishment tells them (see: ClimateGate) as if it were gospel truth, causing them to wonder why a solid year of attention paid to Charles Darwin and his 150-year-old book isn't convincing anyone.
As John West explains at ID the Future podcast, people have good reasons for rejecting Darwinian evolution, based on both the scientific evidence and the way it purports to overthrow long-cherished ideas about human dignity, morality, and God.
This is a hard pill for many Darwinists to swallow, particularly those who themselves uphold traditional morality and belief in God, but since they have no problem seeing no problems with the mounting scientific evidence against Darwin's theory, it's not too difficult for them to turn a blind eye to the social implications of Darwinian evolution.
Discrimination Against Intelligent Design Film Cited in California Science Center Lawsuit
Casey Luskin
More details are now coming out from the lawsuit filed against the California Science Center by the American Freedom Alliance (AFA), filed in the Superior Court for the State of California for the County of Los Angeles (Central District). AFA's lawsuit contends that the California Science Center engaged in viewpoint discrimination when cancelling AFA's contract to screen the pro-intelligent design (ID) documentary Darwin’s Dilemma at the Center’s IMAX Theatre on October 25th. As discussed below, AFA's complaint contains e-mails from California Science Center staff revealing that the Center cared more about how it would be perceived by ID-critics in the scientific community for renting its facilities to screen a pro-ID video than it did about AFA’s constitutional rights.
The abrupt cancellation of AFA’s event was first reported by the Los Angeles Daily News, and has previously been covered by Discovery Institute here, here, here, and here.
Meyer Has CNN Op-ed for Anniversary of Darwin's Origin: Pro-Darwin consensus doesn't rule out intelligent design
Robert Crowther
As part of the recognition of this being the 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin's On The Origin of Species, CNN.com today published this piece by CSC Director Stephen C. Meyer.
Pro-Darwin consensus doesn't rule out intelligent design STORY HIGHLIGHTS
Stephen Meyer says there are scientific reasons to doubt consensus about Darwin's theory
Meyer: Fossil record challenges idea that organisms evolved from a single ancestor
Meyer: There is compelling scientific evidence of actual intelligent design
While we officially celebrate the 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin's "On the Origin of Species" on November 24, celebrations of Darwin's legacy have actually been building in intensity for several years. Darwin is not just an important 19th century scientific thinker. Increasingly, he is a cultural icon.
Darwin is the subject of adulation that teeters on the edge of hero worship, expressed in everything from scholarly seminars and lecture series to best-selling new atheist tracts like those by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. The atheists claim that Darwin disproved once and for all the argument for intelligent design from nature.
And that of course is why he remains hugely controversial. A Zogby poll commissioned by the Discovery Institute this year found that 52 percent of Americans agree "the development of life was guided by intelligent design." Those who are not scientists may wonder if they have a right to entertain skepticism about Darwinian theory.
We are told that a consensus of scientists supporting the theory means that Darwinian evolution is no longer subject to debate. But does it ever happen that a seemingly broad consensus of scientific expertise turns out to be wrong, generated by an ideologically motivated stampeding of opinion?
According to a recent online report from Wired Science, “On one of the Galápagos islands whose finches shaped the theories of a young Charles Darwin, biologists have witnessed that elusive moment when a single species splits in two.”
If it were true, this would be very important news. Evolutionary biologists have long recognized that Charles Darwin (despite the title of his most famous book) failed to solve what he called “the mystery of mysteries,” — the origin of species. Darwin argued that it happens by natural selection acting on small variations, but no one has ever observed the origin of a new species (“speciation”) by this process. Evolutionary biologist Keith Stewart Thomson wrote in 1997 that “a matter of unfinished business for biologists is the identification of evolution's smoking gun,” and “the smoking gun of evolution is speciation, not local adaptation and differentiation of populations.” Before Darwin, the consensus was that species can vary only within certain limits; indeed, centuries of artificial selection had seemingly demonstrated such limits experimentally. “Darwin had to show that the limits could be broken,” wrote Thomson, “so do we.” 1
According to Wired Science, the mystery is now solved. “Evolution’s smoking gun” has been found.
Or has it? Darwin called The Origin of Species “one long argument.”2 Some of Darwin’s modern followers have claimed to observe speciation by natural selection, but the evidence doesn’t support their claim. In The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design 3 I called it “one long bluff,” and the report in Wired Science is part of the bluff.
The Debate Over Darwin Continues: Stephen Meyer vs. Michael Shermer in Beverly Hills
Anika Smith
In less than two weeks we will witness the rematch of the decade as Stephen Meyer and Michael Shermer face off on the question of intelligent design versus evolution.
These two men have met several times before, most recently at Freedomfest in Las Vegas in 2008 (click here for video). They also sparred in 2005 at Westminster College and appeared together on Lee Strobel's Faith Under Fire program (video here). It will be interesting to see the new insights into the questions at hand as this debate has matured and developed.
The debate is hosted by the American Freedom Alliance and will take place at the prestigious Saban Theater in Beverly Hills on Monday, November 30, at 7:30pm. Dr. Meyer and Dr. Shermer will be joined by Dr. Richard Sternberg and Dr. Donald Prothero, respectively.
For more information and to buy tickets, click here.
Origins of Life Debate Commemorates 150th Anniversary of Darwin's Origin of Species
Robert Crowther
With the anniversary of Darwin's opus nearly upon us, a question that keeps coming up is whether the scientific community is any closer to figuring out the origins of life now than when Darwin published his theory 150 years ago?
To mark the 150th anniversary of the publication of Origin of Species, advocates for intelligent design and Darwinian evolution will be squaring off at the end of the month to debate the origins of life, the challenges to Darwin’s theory of evolution and the alternative theory of intelligent design. The American Freedom Alliance is sponsoring this debate as a part of their series of events celebrating the 150th anniversary of the publication of the Origins this month.
• Dr. Michael Shermer, the Founding Publisher of Skeptic magazine and editor of Skeptic.com, a monthly columnist for Scientific American, and an Adjunct Professor at Claremont Graduate University.
• Dr. Richard Sternberg, evolutionary biologist and Research Scientist at the Biologic Institute and a Research Collaborator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History.
• Dr. Donald R. Prothero, Professor of Geology at Occidental College in Los Angeles, Lecturer in Geobiology at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, and member of the editorial board of Skeptic magazine.
WHEN: Monday, November 30th at 7:30pm
WHERE: Saban Theater, 8440 Wilshire Blvd. Beverly Hills, CA
Tickets are available for $20.00; students: $10.00 and can only be purchased either at www.americanfreedomalliance.org or at the door on day of event. Co-sponsoring the event are The Skeptics Society, Center for Inquiry, the Saban Theater, and the Temple for the Arts.
Reflections on the University of Chicago Darwin 2009 Fest
Paul Nelson
Thanks to variouslive-bloggers, you can read summaries of all of the University of Chicago Darwin 2009 conference presentations. The conference organizers have also promised to make video podcasts available of all the lectures shortly. By contrast, what follows below is -- as they say in sports television -- color commentary. This will be a longer post, because much was said that calls for comment.
Bottom line: this was an outstanding conference, where any ID theorist would have enjoyed himself, and learned a lot, if he didn’t mind a bit of mocking laughter along the way.
Lewontin and Numbers: Day One of Darwin 2009 at the University of Chicago
Paul Nelson
“Go to hell!” said Ron Numbers cheerfully to me, as we greeted each other at the front of Rockefeller Chapel last night. “Hey, did I say that loud enough?” he asked, looking around at the various evolutionary biology and history and philosophy of science worthies – Lewontin, Kitcher, Sober, Ruse, Dennett, Richards, and so on – milling about. Ron’s smiling insult was a mocking attempt to redress the widespread criticism that he had let me off easy in our notorious Bloggingheads conversation. A spirit of raillery was in the air, given a vigorous kick at the beginning of the evening by Harvard geneticist Richard Lewontin. Little of the secular sanctimony of the 1959 Darwin centennial (see below) was in evidence.
To the talks:
Richard Lewontin
Rockefeller Chapel, the venue for the plenary sessions, is a Gothic cathedral, although an oddly Baptist one, almost entirely void of religious symbols. (I’m sure there’s a small cross somewhere in the building, but you’d have to look hard to find it.) Lewontin, who has turned down every invitation this year to speak at Darwin celebratory events, accepted the University of Chicago invitation, he said, “because Jerry Coyne [Lewontin’s former doctoral student at Harvard] is the best arm-twister around. But I didn’t know I’d be speaking in a church,” Lewontin continued, “and we should recognize the religiosity of this occasion. There is a certain worship of a great saint, Darwin, and his apostles, who provide the texts for the day.” He then cited contrasting chapter and verse from Sir Ronald Fisher and Sewall Wright, and explained that battles between their respective positions – the primacy of natural selection, versus the primacy of random events – had occupied evolutionary theory for decades. “I really wish I could have spoken from there,” Lewontin ended his introduction, wistfully pointing to the spectacular high pulpit on the opposite side of the chancel.
International Poll on Evolution Confuses British Darwinists
Anika Smith
This just gets better. Remember the International poll we highlighted earlier this week? British Darwinists, confused by the results (You mean our constant barrage of DARWIN RULZ msgs aren’t convincing anyone?), has taken to that old defense mechanism every psychologist knows too well: projection.
That’s it! They must be confused about Darwin’s theory. After all, “scientific wording” like "intelligent design" tricks people into thinking what they couldn’t possibly think after all the money we’ve spent on advertising Darwin’s awesomeness.
Surprisingly, this percentage [of support for teaching alternative theories] was higher than in the US – a comparative bastion of religious fundamentalism – and Egypt, where only a third as many people dissented from the scientific consensus.
Actually, the percentage was the same in the US, if we’re going by total respondents (60% in the UK and the US want other perspectives taught). For those who have heard of Darwin, they’re right, Britain has more support for alternative theories (66% to the US’s 64%), but who can blame them? They have to put up with Richard Dawkins year-round. We only have to suffer through his stodgy book tour every three years or so.
As for Egypt’s lack of “dissent from the scientific consensus” (what a lovely phrase!), maybe that’s because 62% of respondents had never heard of Darwin and had no idea what they were being asked. Most people in Egypt didn’t know what to say in response to the question, “How should evolutionary theory be taught in science lessons at schools?” though the few who had heard of Darwin preferred alternatives there, too, 45% to 22%.
Perhaps if certain British Darwinists (we’re looking at you, Ekklesia) channeled the time and energy they spend on condescending to America, religion, dissent from Darwin, and oh yes, their own audience, into something more productive, like reading poll numbers accurately, they might be more effective.
Darwinists Launch Cyber Attack Against Intelligent Design Website
Anika Smith
A Colorado group is the target of malicious computer hackers in what appears to be a coordinated attempt to suppress information about an upcoming conference on Darwin and intelligent design in Colorado.
Earlier this month the Shepherd Project Ministries website was breached using a “brute force attack” to break the password. The hackers then deleted webpages containing information about an upcoming conference featuring Discovery Institute speakers Stephen Meyer, Michael Behe, David Berlinski, and John West.
“No question whatsoever about they were targeting,” said Shepherd Project Executive Director Craig Smith. “That was brazen. We were a little stunned, to be perfectly honest. We had seen some hostile language about the conference, but honestly we just assumed it was cyber-flaming. We didn’t really expect or anticipate any kind of actual attack.”
The pages were quickly re-posted and security protocols fixed to prevent further mischief being done, but since then a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack crippled and even crashed the Shepherd Project website, preventing many from registering for the intelligent design conference. These attacks involve multiple people coordinated in an attempt to make a website unavailable, shutting down access to information in a form of modern-day book-burning.
These attacks reveal how even having a discussion about intelligent design is threatening to those who can't countenance free speech on evolution.
In today's ID the Future podcast interview, Craig Smith said, "It’s stunning to me how threatened they seem to be about the conversation that is taking place. It’s not a matter of, 'I disagree with the content' or 'I disagree with the conclusion,' it’s 'I disagree that the conversation should be allowed.'"
The Legacy of Darwin Intelligent Design Conference targeted by these hackers takes place this weekend at Douglas County Event Center in Castle Rock, Colorado.
The More They Know Darwin, The Less They Want Darwin-Only Indoctrination
Anika Smith
According to an international poll released by the British Council, the majority of Americans — 60% — support teaching alternatives to evolution in the science classroom. The percentage is the same for Britons, despite the fact that both countries have been inundated with pro-Darwin media coverage in this super-mega Darwin Year.
Of course, the Britishmediareportingthis are chagrined. Britain is the birthplace of Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution, and the official-sounding British Council, the UK group behind the “Darwin Now” campaign that commissioned the Ipsos MORI poll, have spent precious resources educating the world about Darwin. Now some believe the poll shows that efforts by Darwinist organizations aren't working.
Head of the British Council’s Darwin Now program Fern Elsdon-Baker said, “Overall these results may reflect the need for a more sophisticated approach to teaching and communicating how science works as a process.”
While Darwin’s apologists might try to explain the poll numbers as an example of ignorance influencing people’s beliefs, the numbers themselves suggest a different picture.
Across the board, most respondents from the ten countries polled thought that “other perspectives on the origins of species” “such as intelligent design and creationism” should be taught in science class*. When the poll is weighted to include only those respondents who have heard of Charles Darwin and know something about his theory of evolution, the percentage supporting alternate theories increases, from 60% to 66% in Britain and 60% to 64% in the U.S.
Piddling Pebbles and Empty Promises: Response to Carl Zimmer and Joseph Thornton
Michael Behe
The science writer Carl Zimmer posted an invited reply on his blog from Joseph Thornton of the University of Oregon to my recent comments about Thornton’s work. This is the first of several posts addressing it. References will appear in the last post.
I must say, it never ceases to amaze me how otherwise-very-smart folks like Zimmer and Thornton fail to grasp pretty simple points when it comes to problems for Darwinian mechanisms. Let me start slowly with a petty complaint in Carl Zimmer’s intro to the post. Zimmer is annoyed that I think Thornton’s latest work is “great,” yet I thought his previous work published a few years ago was “piddling.” “Why the change of heart?” wonders Zimmer.
The Demise of Another Evolutionary Link: Archaeopteryx Falls From Its Perch
Casey Luskin
A few days ago we saw Ida fall from her overhyped status as an ancestor of humans. Now some scientists are claiming that Archaeopteryx should lose its status as an ancestor of modern birds. Calling Archaeopteryx an “icon of evolution,” the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) borrows a term from Jonathan Wells while reporting that “[t]he feathered creature called archaeopteryx, easily the world's most famous fossil remains, had been considered the first bird since Charles Darwin's day. When researchers put its celebrity bones under the microscope recently, though, they discovered that this icon of evolution might not have been a bird at all.”
Experimental Data Force Researchers to Admit There’s “No Such Thing As Junk RNA”
Casey Luskin
Originally, proponents of neo-Darwinian evolution lauded “junk” DNA as functionless genetic garbage that showed life is the result of blind and random mutational events. Then “junk” DNA was disproved by the discovery that the vast majority of DNA is being transcribed into RNA. Did the failure of this Darwinian assumption cause evolutionists to terminate their love affair with biological “junk”? Of course not. They just shifted their argument back, claiming that the cell is full of “junk RNA”—DNA that is being transcribed into RNA but still does nothing in the cell. Earlier this year we reported on a Nature paper suggesting function for “junk” RNA. Now a Science Daily NewsArticle is confirming that finding. Aptly titled “No Such Thing As 'Junk RNA,' Say Researchers,” the article reports that very small strands of RNA termed “usRNAs” (unusually small RNAs) perform important functions related to gene regulation.
Ken Miller Confuses Weak Assertions of Common Ancestry With Darwinian Evolution of Blood Clotting Cascade
Casey Luskin
In his book Only a Theory, one of Dr. Kenneth Miller’s main response to Michael Behe’s arguments for the irreducible complexity of the blood clotting cascade is that sequence similarities between various blood clotting factors demonstrates that they share a common ancestry. Indeed, in his response to me on the irreducible complexity of the blood clotting cascade, Miller again conflates evidence for common ancestry with evidence for Darwinian evolution. At best, Miller's only evidence shows evidence of common ancestry--not Darwinian evolution--but on closer inspection it seems that even Miller's arguments for common ancestry may be weak.
As a first example of such a fallacious argument, Miller confuses evidence for common ancestry with evidence for Darwinian evolution in his book Only a Theory:
Breaking News at ID the Future: Free Speech Under Threat by California Science Center
Anika Smith
A new podcast out today at ID the Future features breaking news that could affect your freedom to present views that dissent from Darwin in a public place. CSC Associate Director John West explains in an interview here.
Richard Dawkins’ The Greatest Show on Earth Shies Away from Intelligent Design but Unwittingly Vindicates Michael Behe
Casey Luskin
Richard Dawkins’ new book, The Greatest Show on Earth, is being touted as a scathing rebuttal to intelligent design (ID), yet an actual response to mainstream ID thinking can hardly be found in the book. Though the book makes passing mention of “irreducible complexity” in a couple places, there are zero mentions of leading ID proponents like Michael Behe, William Dembski, Jonathan Wells, Phillip Johnson, Stephen Meyer, or any other well-known ID proponent. Instead, Dawkins refers extensively to “creationists,” repeatedly attacking young earth creationism, while also making heavy use of fallacious (and dubious) “poor design” examples that rebut no argument made by a leading advocate of design since perhaps the 19th century. It seems that Dawkins didn’t have the stomach to tackle the actual modern theory of intelligent design in his new book.
Today on the Michael Medved show, arch-Darwinist Richard Dawkins, author of The Greatest Show on Earth, was asked point-blank by Discovery Institute President Bruce Chapman why he wouldn't debate Stephen Meyer, author of Signature in the Cell. His response? Weak sauce:
I have never come across any kind of creationism, whether you call it intelligent design or not, which has a serious scientific case to put.
The objection to having debates with people like that is that it gives them a kind of respectability. If a real scientist goes onto a debating platform with a creationist, it gives them a respectability, which I do not think your people have earned.
No matter — Professor Dawkins made his position clear enough: address young earth creationism, then tell your audience that you've destroyed intelligent design... which of course, even Richard Dawkins admits, is not the same thing as young earth creationism.
Read the transcript of the entire exchange below — and note Bruce Chapman's great line about Expelled:
How The Junk DNA Hypothesis Has Changed Since 1980
Richard Sternberg
As someone who has studied the concept of “junk DNA” for over twenty years, I am dismayed by two statements that appear repeatedly on various blog sites discussing evolution. No, I am not referring to arguments of the form “the onion has six times more DNA than do mammals; therefore, there is no deity,” that are invariably followed by terms of disparagement hurled at anyone who even marginally departs from the Darwinian perspective. Rather, my consternation stems from a half-truth and a false fact that are recycled ad nauseum by those who apparently believe that, despite all the genomic and transcriptomic data that have been obtained only in this decade—data that have overturned a number of trenchant assumptions—a certain hypothesis published in 1980 is outside the purview of serious questioning.
The half-truth is the oft-read comment that goes something like this: “No one ever asserted that junk DNA is without function…it was long suspected that these sequences have important roles in the cells,” Now, to be fair, it is correct to say that models for, say, repetitive DNA-based operations in metazoan development, have been proposed since the 1960s.1 It is also true that the evolutionary process of exaptation—the accidental acquisition of a function—has been used to explain how the odd transposon here or there along a chromosome can regulate a locus. Nonspecific effects of “extra” DNA on the cell have also been suggested for around three decades, if not longer. That said, the junk DNA hypothesis that one commonly reads as being an unassailable observation, as an incontrovertible empirical conclusion, presents as a clear prediction that the vast majority of non-gene sequences are devoid of any precise specificational role in ontogeny. Allow me to explain.
No Joke: Richard Dawkins Still Peddling Haeckel’s Fraudulent Embryo Diagrams!
John West
I thought Richard Dawkins’ science was outdated, but I didn’t realize just how badly outdated until I watched this amazing You Tube clip from “The Genius of Charles Darwin,” a science documentary Dawkins hosted last year. If you watch until 7 minutes and 30 seconds into the clip, you will see Ernst Haeckel’s bogus embryo diagrams magically appear onscreen right before your very eyes:
That’s right, Richard Dawkins circa 2008 was still peddling fraudulent "evidence" for evolution that no self-respecting embryologist would defend, and that most biology textbooks dropped years ago due in large part to biologist Jonathan Wells’ masterful book Icons of Evolution, which shamed Darwinists into cleaning up their act. Randy Olson, call home. Armed with retro science like this, no wonder Dawkins is afraid to debate Stephen Meyer.
Leading Darwinist Richard Dawkins Dodges Debates, Refuses to Defend Evolution as The Greatest Show On Earth
Anika Smith
Seattle – Richard Dawkins, the world’s leading public spokesman for Darwinian evolution and an advocate of the “new atheism,” has refused to debate Dr. Stephen C. Meyer, a prominent advocate of intelligent design and the author of the acclaimed Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design.
“Richard Dawkins claims that the appearance of design in biology is an illusion and claims to have refuted the case for intelligent design,” says Dr. Meyer who received his Ph.D. in the philosophy of science from the University of Cambridge in England.
“But Dawkins assiduously avoids addressing the key evidence for intelligent design and won’t debate its leading proponents,” adds Dr. Meyer. “Dawkins says that there is no evidence for intelligent design in life, and yet he also acknowledges that neither he nor anyone else has an evolutionary explanation for the origin of the first living cell. We know now even the simplest forms of life are chock-full of digital code, complex information processing systems and other exquisite forms of nanotechnology.”
Barbara Forrest Exposes Her Intolerance, Misrepresents Darwin-Doubting Scientist
Casey Luskin
Barbara Forrest has issued a press release protesting good rules adopted in September, 2009 by the Louisiana State Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) for implementing Louisiana’s Science Education Act (LSEA). The LSEA is an academic freedom bill passed into law in Louisiana last year. Dr. Forrest seems to think that by frequently inserting the word “creationist” into her press release and falsely labeling people like Darwin-doubting biologist Dr. Don Ewert as “creationists,” she can logically argue that the rules are “pro-creationist.” The reality is that BESE’s new rules are fair and pro-academic freedom, not "pro-creationist." But as will be seen, fairness and academic freedom are exactly what evolution lobbyists like Dr. Forrest fear the most.
Artificially Reconstructed “Ardi” Overturns Prevailing Evolutionary Hypotheses of Human Evolution
Casey Luskin
The missing link presently being touted in the media, Ardipithecus ramidus, has had more reconstructive surgery than Michael Jackson. Assuming that their "extensive digital reconstruction" of its "badly crushed and distorted bones" is accurate, what does A. ramidus (or “Ardi” as the fawning media is affectionately calling it) really show us that we didn’t already know? We already knew of upright walking / tree-climbing, small-brained hominids—that’s what Lucy, an australopithecine, was. We already knew that there were australopithecine fossils dating back to before 4 million years, and this fossil is only a little bit older. So what does this fossil teach us? Assuming all the reconstructions of Ardi's crushed bones are objective and accurate, this fossil teaches us at least one very important thing: prevailing evolutionary explanations about how upright walking supposedly evolved in humans, confidently taught in countless college-level anthropology classes, were basically wrong.
Bones of “Ardi,” New Human Evolution Fossil, “Crushed Nearly to Smithereens”
Casey Luskin
Another new alleged missing link has been found, if you consider something discovered in the early 1990’s new. This fossil seems to have spent almost as much time under the microscope at Berkeley as it did in the ground in Ethiopia, when it was first buried about 4.4 million years ago.
Why did it take over 15 years for the reports on this fossil to finally be published, besides the fact that it allowed more time for planning the now-customary PR campaign? A 2002 article in Science explains exactly why: the bones were so brittle, “squished,” “chalky” and “erod[ed]” when cleaned such that many of the bone fragments had to be “reconstruct[ed]”—and that took a long time. Here’s the story from more than seven years ago:
Nature has published an interesting paper recently which places severe limits on Darwinian evolution. This is the first of several posts discussing it.
The manuscript, from the laboratory of Joseph Thornton at the University of Oregon, is titled “An epistatic ratchet constrains the direction of glucocorticoid receptor evolution.” The work is interpreted by its authors within a standard Darwinian framework. Nonetheless, like the important work over the years of Michigan State’s Richard Lenski on laboratory evolution of E. coli, which has shown trillions of bacteria evolving under selection for tens of thousands of generations yielding just broken genes and minor changes, the new work demonstrates the looming brick wall which confronts unguided evolution in at least one system. And it points strongly to the conclusion that such walls are common throughout all of biology.
In the paper Bridgham et al (2009) continue their earlier work on steroid hormone receptor evolution. Previously they had constructed in the laboratory a protein which they inferred to be the ancestral sequence of two modern hormone receptors abbreviated GR and MR (Bridgham et al 2006). They then showed that if they changed two amino acid residues in the inferred ancestral receptor protein into ones which occur in GR, they could change its binding specificity somewhat in the direction of modern GR’s specificity. (All the work was done on molecules in the laboratory. No measurements were made of the selective value of the changes in real organisms in nature. Thus any relevance to actual biology is speculative.) They surmised that a gene duplication plus sequence diversification could have given rise to MR and GR. As I wrote in a comment at the time, that was interesting work, and the conclusion was reasonable, but the result was exceedingly modest and well within the boundaries that an intelligent design proponent like myself would ascribe to Darwinian processes. After all, the starting point was a protein which binds several steroid hormones, and the ending point was a slightly different protein that binds the same steroid hormones with slightly different strengths. How hard could that be?
Well, the news out of Oklahoma about Stephen Meyer's intelligent design presentation at the University last night is quite encouraging. Over three hundred people reportedly turned out for the lecture and discussion following. For all the potty-mouthed bluster that local Darwin activists offered up ahead of time, almost everyone in attendance, whether for or against ID, was civil and respectful during the presentation and discussion last night.
The local daily paper, The Norman Transcript, has two stories today, one about the event last night and one about the screening of Darwin's Dilemma this evening.
Intelligent design is the most likely explanation of the origin of life, an author and speaker at the University of Oklahoma said Monday night.
The Greatest Show on Earth — Another Circus Comes to Town
Bruce Chapman
The New Scientist may sound like a scholarly science publication, but in covering news it often revels in uninformed and unprofessional attacks on critics of Darwinian evolution. So it is somewhat of a surprise to see the publication produce a not-so-veiled pan of The Greatest Show on Earth, Richard Dawkins' new book. If the evident disappointment expressed by science filmmaker Randy Olson is at all valid, Dawkins' resemblance to the creator of the original "Greatest Show on Earth," 19th Century circus entrepreneur P.T. Barnum, is confirmed.
In a new segment, Bloggingheads chief Robert Wright and Bloggingheads correspondent George Johnson go on for 75 minutes about the trauma of a pair of heretics (me and Paul Nelson, on separate segments) appearing on their site. I would urge everyone who doesn’t have pressing matters to attend to, such as the need to wash your hair, to tune in for the full time. It’s really fascinating in its way to see two grown men in such a hand-wringing lather. It’s also fascinating to see that neither of them in 75 minutes offers a reason for the correctness of their own views, or the wrongness of ours. The closest they come is when George Johnson invokes the hoary “methodological naturalism.”
An interesting and informative back and forth has been taking place on the pages of the Times Literary Supplement, where last month noted atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel 
On Showtime 2
12/16/09 at 11:15 AM
This fall Meyer came out with a full account of what science has learned in recent decades: Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design (Harper One, 2009) shows that the cell is incredibly complex and the code that directs its functions wonderfully designed. His argument undercuts macroevolution, the theory that one kind of animal over time evolves into a very different kind. Meyer thus garners media scorn for raining on this year's huge celebration of the birth of Charles Darwin 200 years ago and the publication of On the Origin of Species 150 years ago.
