Here is a portion from John Wilson’s review of Randy Balmer’s THY KINGDOM COME: HOW THE RELIGIOUS RIGHT DISTORTS THE FAITH AND THREATENS AMERICA–AN EVANGELICAL’S LAMENT (go here). Balmer follows the familiar pattern of someone who started out going to conservative Christian schools, did well, went on to high-profile secular schools, retained the vestiges of his faith but takes as his greatest pleasure in life knowing that he is so sophisticated that none of his secular colleagues will ever call him to account for the offense of the Gospel. By the way, if you are curious about my sartorial habits, you can look at the debate here. The Dembski-Silver debate was discussed on this blog here.

What really disappointed me about Balmer’s book was the absence of the depth, the nuance, the texture, the alertness to human complexity that made his portrait of the aging Jimmy Swaggart so powerful. Consider, for example, the chapter in Thy Kingdom Come entitled “Creationism by Design,” which includes Balmer’s account of a debate between William Dembski, one of the leading figures in the Intelligent Design movement, and the distinguished molecular biologist Lee Silver. Here is how Balmer introduces Dembski:

• Wearing a dark suit slightly too large for his lanky frame, Dembski had the mien of an assistant vice president at a local bank or of someone who has just been dispatched to notify the next of kin. The moderator introduced him as having an unspecified affiliation with Baylor University, but that was somewhat misleading, and Dembski made no effort to correct the impression that he was a member of the faculty at Baylor.

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Also from www.thebrites.org: The Panda’s Thumb Destroys Jonathan Wells Intelligent design creationist Jonathan Wells, who poses as a biologist and scholar with Ph.D.s from Berkeley and Yale, has just published a dangerous book attacking modern science – and indeed, the whole of Western civilization. With The BRITES’s enthusiastic support, The NCSE and Panda’s Thumb have dedicated themselves to destroying the dangerous Jonathan Wells. The only good practitioner of ID is a destroyed practitioner of ID.

From www.thebrites.org: The caption reads: “The BRITES is working through legal channels to have statues of Darwin installed in United States court houses to replace the recently outlawed ten commandments. This is a photo of a statue given to the citizens of Dover, PA from The BRITES and is currently on display in the lobby of the the Dover courthouse. (Head sculpter Species Aldacruz, © TheBRITES.org)”

Congratulations all on another record month in all the metrics! We continue to reach a larger and larger audience. Thanks to our tireless authors for all the great articles and a special thanks to our members for all the great commentary! July was down because the blog was shut down for a few days but we got right back on track in August. September, although you can’t see it here, is shaping up to be yet another record month.

I cannot believe I am hearing this nonsense again! The debate over the teaching of purposeless evolution in the school system retails more urban legends than a group of high school girls smoking in the women’s can.

In the Correspondence section of Nature, we can read, from U Kutschera , Institute of Biology, University of Kassel, Heinrich-Plett-Strasse 40, D-34109 Kassel, Germany (Nature 443, 26(7 September 2006) | doi:10.1038/443026b), yet another defence of Theodosius Dobzhansky, as a Darwinist poster boy for theistic or even Christian faith, sort of:

Dogma, not faith, is the barrier to scientific enquiry

[ … ]

He collaborated for many years with Ernst Mayr, who, when asked about his religious views, replied: “I am an atheist. There is nothing that supports the idea of a personal God. On the other hand, famous evolutionists such as Dobzhansky were firm believers in a personal God. He would work as a scientist all week and then on Sunday get down on his knees and pray to God” (Skeptic 8, 76-82; 2000.

In about 1950, Dobzhansky and Mayr founded our modern ‘atheistic’ evolutionary theory. Their work showed that Christians and atheists can cooperate to develop scientific theories, as long as religious dogma is not mixed up with facts and experimental data. Unfortunately, this is exactly what young-Earth creationists and intelligent-design theorists are doing. They should read the 1973 essay in which Dobzhansky – an open-minded, non-dogmatic theist – thoroughly refuted their irrational claims.

Dobzhansky was, of course, free to believe whatever he wanted, but in what sense was he a Christian or a theist?

Australian biologist Stephen E. Jones, who keeps up with these things better than anyone I know, has the goods on Dobzhansky’s real state of faith. He writes me,

Dobzhansky really was an orthodox believer. That is, if you don’t count “fundamental beliefs of traditional religion, such as the existence of a personal God and of life beyond physical death”!:

and quotes :

Dobzhansky was a religious man, although he apparently rejected fundamental beliefs of traditional religion, such as the existence of a personal God and of life beyond physical death. His religiosity was grounded on the conviction that there is meaning in the universe. He saw that meaning in the fact that evolution has produced the stupendous diversity of the living world and has progressed from primitive forms of life to mankind. Dobzhansky held that, in man, biological evolution has transcended itself into the realm of self-awareness and culture. He believed that somehow mankind would eventually evolve into higher levels of harmony and creativity. He was a metaphysical optimist.” (Ayala, F.J. & Fitch, W.M., Genetics and the origin of species: An introduction,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, Vol. 94, July 1997, pp.7691-7697, p.7693.

Now, I have to admit, I smile when I think of the middle Americans who go away from a meeting with the Darwinist spokesfolks, vastly relieved to hear that Dobzhansky was a “religious man,” and then they can go back to sanctified materialism with a good conscience. They certainly do not want to know that Dobzhansky’s views would hardly qualify him to be considered a Christian, let alone Orthodox, because the basic statements of the Creed stand in fundamental opposition to them.

Steve Jones offers some more information that might help: Read More ›

In Illusion of Knowledge I, I discussed dark matter and dark energy.  Even though neither has ever been observed (i.e., confirmed by experience), the Standard Model of cosmology posits that 21% of the universe is comprised of the former and a whopping 75% of the universe is comprised of the latter.  I quoted skeptical cosmologist Mike Disney:  “The greatest obstacle to progress in science is the illusion of knowledge, the illusion that we know what’s going on when we really don’t.” 

Some people took the point of my post to be a criticism of big bang cosmology.  That was not my purpose.  As I said before, I have absolutely no qualifications to judge the merits of the Standard Model.  But I do know a thing or two about epistemology – the branch of philosophy that deals with the nature of knowledge and knowing.    Read More ›

In the response to a recent post a commenter asks what “homologous” means and whether similarity is the same as homology.  In this post I will give a brief (and hopefully plain language) overview of “homology” and the related concept of “homoplasy.”

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Nick Matzke at Panda’s Thumb, what evidence is there that the type III secretion system appeared in nature before the flagellum? If the flagellum coopted the ttss then the ttss must predate the flagellum. The ttss mediates elaborate interactions with plant and animal hosts of the bacteria. The flagellum on the other hand is for locomotion, not parasitic or pathogenic relationships with more complex cells. The flagellum is useful absent more complex organisms in the environment while the ttss is not. It seems to me quite likely that the flagellum appeared in nature before the ttss. Probably billions of years before as the following supports: J Mol Microbiol Biotechnol. 2000 Apr;2(2):125-44. Phylogenetic analyses of the constituents of Type III protein Read More ›

Denyse just alerted me to this latest gem of wisdom in the evolutionary psychology arena, concerning the origin of musical ability and appreciation: http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2006/09/03/survival_of_the_harmonious The one thing that always amazes me is that Darwinists concentrate on the survival value of a certain trait (why natural selection would select that trait), while assuming that the trait can be had on the cheap and for the asking. Do any of them ever ask, What random mutations would it take to genetically rewire a non-musical brain so that it could appreciate and create music, and what are the probabilities that these mutations could have arisen by chance and been fixed in the population in the time available, with the number of generations available Read More ›

Furious evolution debate hits famed Kenyan museum
Lillian Omariba
AFP
September 5, 2006

NAIROBI — The global debate between scientists and conservative Christians over evolution has hit Kenya, where an exhibit of one of the world’s finest collections of early hominid fossils is under threat.

As the famed National Museum of Kenya (NMK) prepares to re-open next year after massive EU-funded renovations, evangelicals are demanding that the display be removed or at least shunted to a less prominent location. Read More ›

[From a colleague:] Here’s an Italian article with a few things to say about ID, though Cardinal Schoenborn gets most of the coverage. To continue to maintain that the debate around ID is an exclusively “American” phenomenon, one would need to be deaf and blind in Europe. ARTICLE: https://uncommondescent.com/documentation/ID_in_Italy.pdf.

The “Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution” Myth: An Empirical Study and Evaluation Jerry Bergman, Ph.D. Abstract It is commonly claimed that Darwinism is the cornerstone of the life sciences and that “nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.” To evaluate this claim I reviewed both textbooks used to teach life science class at the college where I teach and those I used in my university course work. I concluded from my survey that Darwinism was rarely mentioned. I also reviewed my course work and that of another researcher and came to the same conclusion. From this survey I concluded that the claim “nothing in biology makes sense except in the Read More ›

Below is the abstract of an article in the latest edition of PLOS Biology. The scientists developed a method by which they could compare ‘evolved’ strains from the pure strains with which they’re been crossed. Under duress–that is, deprived of a glucose environment, and forced to live on galactose–they found that when four different strains of yeast were distressed in this way, all four strains developed the SAME type of adaptation in the SAME gene (GAL80), a gene which, in normal environments, suppresses the ‘galactose utilization pathway’.

Think about it: ALL four ‘evolved’ strains basically hit on the same mechanism. We certainly have change (mutation), but is it ‘random’ if each of the four strains reacts in the same way? How probable is it for a mutation to occur in the same place in all four strains while causing the same changed metabolic pathway to be set in motion? Random mutation? I think not.

High-Resolution Mutation Mapping Reveals Parallel Experimental Evolution in Yeast
Ayellet V. Segrè1, Andrew W. Murray1, Jun-Yi Leu1*¤

1 Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States of America

Understanding the genetic basis of evolutionary adaptation is limited by our ability to efficiently identify the genomic locations of adaptive mutations. Here we describe a method that can quickly and precisely map the genetic basis of naturally and experimentally evolved complex traits using linkage analysis. A yeast strain that expresses the evolved trait is crossed to a distinct strain background and DNA from a large pool of progeny that express the trait of interest is hybridized to oligonucleotide microarrays that detect thousands of polymorphisms between the two strains. Adaptive mutations are detected by linkage to the polymorphisms from the evolved parent. We successfully tested our method by mapping five known genes to a precision of 0.2–24 kb (0.1–10 cM), and developed computer simulations to test the effect of different factors on mapping precision. We then applied this method to four yeast strains that had independently adapted to a fluctuating glucose–galactose environment. All four strains had acquired one or more missense mutations in GAL80, the repressor of the galactose utilization pathway. When transferred into the ancestral strain, the gal80 mutations conferred the fitness advantage that the evolved strains show in the transition from glucose to galactose. Our results show an example of parallel adaptation caused by mutations in the same gene.

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I just watched a fascinating show on the National Geographic Channel about dark matter and dark energy. 

Here is a quick synopsis:  The standard theory of gravity predicts that the further an object is away from a massive object, the smaller the gravitational effect the massive object will have on the object.  In the solar system this means that the distant planets will orbit the sun much more slowly then the closer planets, and sure enough empirical observations confirm the theory.

Problem 1:  In the 1970’s it was observed that the theory does not work at the level of galaxies.  The stars and gas at the outer edge of galaxies orbit at the same rate as the ones closer in. 

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Engineering Life: Building a Fab for Biology  Principles and practices learned from engineering successes can help transform biotechnology from a specialized craft into a mature industry  By The Bio FAB Group Although the term “genetic engineering” has been in use for at least three decades, and recombinant DNA methods are now mainstays of modern research, most biotechnologists’ work with living things has little in common with engineering. One reason is that the tools available for building with biological “parts” have yet to reach a level of standardization and utility equal to that in other engineering fields. Another has to do with methods and mind-sets in biology, although these, too, can be powerfully influenced by technology. Electronic engineering, for example, was Read More ›