Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

The Unsolved Murder

In a private forum a question was recently posed: At what point the police should stop investigating an unsolved murder and close the case, declaring that God must have simply wanted the victim dead? It is the same point at which it is appropriate to tell scientists to stop looking for explanations and simply conclude “God did it”. My reply Dear XXXX, Well, in practice they stop investigating when the evidence goes cold (the trail of evidence stops in an inconclusive state). In the investigation into the origin and diversification of life the trail of evidence hasn’t gone cold. The trail begins with ancient scientist/philosophers looking at macroscopic features of life like the camera eye and saying it looks like Read More ›

Why the recent article in Nature calling for Wallace recognition is right AND wrong

George W. Beccaloni and Vincent S. Smith of The Natural History Museum (London) recently drew attention to the nearly forgotten figure of Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913) in Nature vol. 451.28 (February 2008): 1050.  Bemoaning “how Wallace’s achievements have been overshadowed by Darwin’s . . ., a process certainly not helped by the Darwin ‘industry’ of recent decades,” the authors call for a revision of “the current darwinocentric view of the history of biology.”  Few among this blog could dissent from such a bold proposal.  Beccaloni and Smith would like the focus to be upon the reading of Darwin and Wallace’s seminal papers to the Linnean Society on July 1, 1858, with due recognition accorded Wallace for his joint discovery of natural selection.  Published one month later, this most surely was a major turning point in the history of the biological sciences and in that regard one can hardly find fault with the simple but instructive point that for all the Darwin Day hype, natural selection was indeed a joint discovery.

Yet this in itself fails to do justice to Wallace.  The theory Wallace developed from years of field experience in the Mayla Archipelago did not end with that 1858 reading; in fact, it was just the beginning of an intellectual odyssey that would find fullest expression in what might arguably be regarded as his magnum opus, The World of Life: a Manifestation of Creative Power, Directive Mind and Ultimate Purpose, published just three years before his death in 1913.  That book more than any other expressed Wallace’s fullest and most complete views on the subject of evolution.  While Beccaloni and Smith want us to remember Wallace’s discovery, I suggest a fuller reflection upon what that discovery meant to Wallace and to the biological sciences will uncover a wholly different kind of evolutionary scenario than that fashioned by Darwin, Huxley and their X-Club fellow travelers.  In short, I call for not a recognition of Wallace within this much-touted Darwinian context but rather upon Wallace as the originator of an independent design-centered view best expressed as Wallaceism.  What precisely that means requires some explanation.

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Does neo-Darwinian Theory Include the Origin of Life?

Quite often when confronted with the problematic nature of explaining the arrival of the first life capable of supporting descent with modification an evolutionary theorist will say the theory has no bearing on how the first life came into existence – the theory only explains what happened after that. Is this true? Well, yes and no. Evolutionary theory doesn’t explain exactly how the first life was created and doesn’t demand any particular modus operandi. However, that’s not to say it doesn’t make any assumptions at all. It assumes that the first life was a simple cell and the mechanism(s) described by the theory made a simple common ancestor (or perhaps a few simple common ancestors) into the complex and diverse Read More ›

Haeckel’s Embryos Are Alive

Sounds like the title of a bad horror movie, but it’s true. Run. All right, you can walk. The link above takes you to a pdf of page 110 of Donald Prothero’s new book, Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). Prothero argues that “all vertebrate embryos start out with a long tail, well-developed gill slits, and many other fish-like features” (p. 108). Thus, he continues, “to the limited extent that von Baer had shown 40 years earlier,” Haeckel’s biogenetic law — ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny — “is true.” Except sometimes it’s not: But embryos also have many unique features (yolk sac, allantois, amniotic membranes, umbilical cords) that have nothing to do with Read More ›

New revelations on gene expression

Research led by Prof Frank Gannon has uncovered new revelations on possible ways to switch genes on and off and how cells interpret their DNA. Only some genes are expressed in any given tissue. Proteins active in nerve cells are not expressed in the liver. How this is controlled is complex. One fundamental factor is whether the DNA is tagged or modified (methylated) in the region of a gene. This is important in gene expression and balancing the level proteins in different cell lines. Although gene methylation (when a gene is turned on or turned off) was thought to be stable and unchangeable, this is not the case. Things are even more complicated than previously thought. Transient, cyclical and dynamic Read More ›

Reviews, reviews of The Design of Life: Pats and pans, ink and angst

The reviewers start to look at The Design of Life, a design-friendly biology textbook. Excerpt: “In this atmosphere, The Design of Life was bound to be controversial. It actually shouldn’t be. It’s a good book and well written, but the fact that it is even remotely controversial shows just how committed the science establishment is to ideas about evolution that do not conform to the current available evidence.” Also, today at The Mindful Hack Researchers ask, What does it mean to be an animal? How the Catholic Church built up science Kind words from a fellow blogger How much does the hole in your wallet improve the taste of wine? Chronic pain reduced by meditation, not medication How far has Read More ›

Jack Cashill Reviews “Expelled”

Ben Stein Smart Bombs Darwinian Bunker A rousing SRO preview on Tuesday of the new Ben Stein documentary, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, brought a Kansas City audience to its feet. And with good cause. Stein’s often funny, always engaging frontal assault on the oppressive neo-Darwinist establishment is arguably the smartest and most sophisticated documentary ever produced on the right side of the cultural divide, on any subject, ever. As such, Expelled represents still another blow to the progressive orthodoxy of government-issued science in its winter of discontent. The winter started early when in November two separate labs, one in Wisconsin, one in Japan, announced the breakthrough discovery that adult skin cells can be reprogrammed to mimic embryonic stem cells. Just Read More ›

Professional atheists combine with SUNY-Buffalo to offer a masters of education

Paul Kurtz’s Center for Inquiry is partnering with SUNY-Buffalo (the State University of New York) to offer an Ed.M. in “scientific literacy” (which will include a whopping dose of Darwinism and an assault on ID). For a description of the degree, go to their website. Below is a description of the program from an email I just received. In reading it, ask youself what would happen if Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, which is far less sectarian than the Center for Inquiry, were to partner with a state university to offer a program in “scientific literacy.” It’s okay for the Center for Inquiry to promote atheism in the name of science but anything that even gets close to Read More ›

Maximo Sandin

As every child in our public school system knows, all critics of neo-Darwinism are religious fanatics. Except those who aren’t, such as University of Madrid biologist Maximo Sandin, whose dislike for Darwinism seem to be as much based on its association with capitalism (here) as with its inconsistency with the fossil record and other evidence. The theories which have been proposed to replace neo-Darwinism tell us something about the respect that many biologists have for the official version. Sandin’s alternative theory involves viruses and bacterias (he refers more or less approvingly to Alfred Hoyle’s “Evolution from Space”). The following is excerpted from one of his essays , an English translation is here . Viral and bacterial response capacity to environmental Read More ›

Dawkins admits that life could be designed — Is ID therefore scientific?

Joseph Farah at World Net Daily is one of the select few who has seen an advance screening of Ben Stein’s EXPELLED. I’ve been to three advance screenings, giving a little talk on ID at the one on Times Square in New York a few weeks ago. To me the most amazing part of the film is where Dawkins gives away the store by taking seriously a scenario in which a designer might have brought about life on Earth. Farah agrees: go here for his review of the film. I expect that Dover was not the end of litigation involving ID. In the next court case, it will be interesting to depose the people on the other side who appear Read More ›

The scientist delusion

David Goldston (extensively edited) “Scientists tend to underestimate the public receptivity to science, and the battles ahead. Intelligent-design advocates try to sell their wares as science rather than religion partly as a legal gambit, but also because science and scientists are held in high esteem. Scientists do not face a public inherently hostile to science even among fundamentalists, and should address the public with respect rather than contempt. Although a remarkably high percentage of Americans do not believe that humans evolved from earlier life forms, it’s not clear whether this is just a casual way of saying they viscerally reject the notion of a random Universe. Evolution is largely a symbolic issue to the public, and may be a poor measure of how religious Read More ›

The Altenberg Sixteen

HT to Larry Moran’s Sandwalk for the link to this fascinating long piece by journalist Suzan Mazur about an upcoming (July 2008) evolution meeting at the Konrad Lorenz Institute in Altenberg, Austria. “The Altenberg 16” is Mazur’s playful term for the sixteeen biologists and theoreticians invited by organizer Massimo Pigliucci. Most are on record as being, to greater and lesser degrees, dissatisfied with the current textbook theory of evolution. Surveying the group, I note that I’ve interacted with several of the people over the years, as have other ID theorists and assorted Bad Guys. This should be an exciting meeting, with the papers to be published in 2009 by MIT Press. Mazur’s article is worth your attention. Evolutionary theory is Read More ›