July 2010

In River out of Eden : A Darwinian View of Life Richard Dawkins wrote:

The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. As that unhappy poet A.E. Housman put it: ‘For Nature, heartless, witless Nature Will neither care nor know.’ DNA neither cares nor knows. DNA just is. And we dance to its music.

In a 2007 New Scientist/Greenpeace Science debate, Dawkins said:

Far from being the most selfish, exploitative species, Homo sapiens is the only species that has at least the possibility of rebelling against the otherwise universally selfish Darwinian impulse . . . If any species in the history of life has the possibility of breaking away from short term selfishness and of long term planning for the distant future, it’s our species. We are earth’s last best hope even if we are simultaneously, the species most capable of destroying life on the planet. But when it comes to taking the long view, we are literally unique. Because the long view is not a view that has ever been taken before in whole history of life. If we don’t plan for the future, no other species will . . .

Dawkins’ does not seem to understand that he cannot have his cake and eat it too, and that leads the world’s most prominent atheist/evolutionary biologist to make mutually exclusive truth claims that I would expect the average high school freshman to avoid. Let us examine a couple:

1. DNA is all there is, and we dance to its music. Yet it is possible for Homo sapiens to rebel against DNA. But how can DNA rebel against itself? I cannot rise above myself. I cannot reach down, grab my bootstraps, and pull myself off the floor.

2. There is no good and no evil. Yet Homo sapiens has the capability of planning for the future (presumably to avoid an undesired outcome or achieve a desired outcome). But if there is no good and no evil, on what grounds should we desire any particular outcome and plan for it?

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The stench of non-science coming out of ScienceBlogs.com has gotten so bad that it has drawn the attention of the New York Times! See: Unnatural Science. It would appear that the opponents of ID must resort to means other than science to challenge the hypothesis of Intelligent Design. Rather than appeals to evidence, the foes of ID resort, in the words of NY Times, to “class warfare”.

Over at Pharyngula — which often ranks in the Top 100 blogs on the Internet— PZ Myers revels in sub-“South Park” blasphemy, presenting (in one recent stunt) his sketch of the Prophet Muhammad as a cow-pig hybrid excited about “raping a 9-year-old girl.”
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Though Myers and other science bloggers boast that they can be jerky in the service of anti-charlatanism, that’s not what’s bothersome about them. What’s bothersome is that the site is misleading. It’s not science by scientists, not even remotely; it’s science blogging by science bloggers. And science blogging, apparently, is a form of redundant and effortfully incendiary rhetoric that draws bad-faith moral authority from the word “science” and from occasional invocations of “peer-reviewed” thises and thats.
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There is an interesting news story in the Guardian about the tadpole shrimp Triops cancriformis that has managed to exist unchanged since the Triassic. Its life cycle involves a short breeding season with eggs laid in the mud. These eggs can survive for long periods as the mud dries out periodically. Guardian – World’s most ancient creatures found in Scottish field – 29 July 2010

Over the years, samples of amber recovered from numerous sites around the world have been found to contain petrified insects, plants and a variety of other exotic inclusions. Invariably, we get an insight into a past world where the flora and fauna look very modern. A recent discovery has identified mammalian hair in amber, whose original owner was a contemporary of dinosaurs. The dimensions and topography of the two fossilised hairs were analysed carefully, because the find provides the first opportunity to look at Mesozoic mammal hairs preserved in 3D. The result: “With such features, the cuticular surface of the Archingeay-Les Nouillers hairs shows a modern aspect, implying that the morphology of hair cuticula has remained unchanged throughout most of Read More ›

I was discussing the second law argument with a scientist friend the other day, and mentioned that the second law is sometimes called the “common sense law of physics”. This morning he wrote: Yesterday I spoke with my wife about these questions. She immediately grasped that chaos results on the long term when she would stop caring for her home. I replied: Tell your wife she has made a perfectly valid application of the second law of thermodynamics. In fact, let’s take her application a bit further. Suppose you and your wife go for vacation, leaving a dog, cat and a parakeet loose in the house (I put the animals there to cause the entropy to increase more rapidly, otherwise Read More ›

In a recent PNAS paper John Avise argued that evolution emancipates “religion from the shackles of theodicy” by getting any god off the hook as the source of seemingly cruel design defects in the human genome. Giving a god credit for the good designs, so the story goes, makes that god responsible for the bad designs too. Defending his opinion in this week’s PNAS letters Avise restates that a “God directly responsible for the many malfunctions that characterize the human genome, would seem to be quite malevolent as well as bumbling”. Believing as he does that “IDers promulgate the notion of an omnipotent and benevolent deity who directly crafts life ex nihilo” and “vehemently oppose any suggestion that God has Read More ›

Click here to listen. On this episode of ID the Future, Anika Smith interviews mathematician and philosopher William Dembski on a break from teaching at Discovery Institute’s Summer Seminars on Intelligent Design. Listen in as Dr. Dembski shares his advice for young scientists interested in ID and the hope he has for the future of intelligent design.

And would be the worst, whether one is an ID proponent or not. Many UD readers know the Australian molecular biologist John Mattick as a leader in thinking about functional roles for so-called ‘junk DNA.’ Mattick has earned the implacable ire of ID critics such as Larry Moran and T. Ryan Gregory, although not because Mattick is an ID proponent. He’s not — see the opening sections of this interview, which is also available as a video. (Scroll to the Supplementary Material at the end; SIZE WARNING: 46M.] It’s a fascinating exchange, although I think Mattick greatly underestimates the significance of clade- or taxon-specific novel proteins in eukaryotes. If nothing else, however, empirical discovery itself stands entirely on Mattick’s side. Read More ›

Imagine if you called a car salesman, explained the type of car you wanted to buy, and he exclaimed he has exactly what you are looking for. Furthermore, the car is almost new, has only a few miles, and yet is priced at a mere ten thousand dollars! You and a friend hurry over to the car lot and with a big smile the salesman shows you a junker. You recognize the make as being at least thirty years old, and the car looks like it has at least 200,000 miles. The tires are worn bare, the body is rusted away, the seats are so worn down there are holes in the fabric, the paint is so faded that you Read More ›

Biology textbook authors George Johnson and Jonathan Losos are leaders in the life sciences. They are accomplished researchers and professors from leading universities—they are also blind guides. In their otherwise well written and highly produced textbook The Living World ((Fifth Edition, McGraw Hill, 2008), Johnson and Losos badly misrepresent science and make fallacious arguments when they present evolution to the student. It is yet another example of smart people spreading lies and foolishness.  Read more

In my previous post I gave a typical example of evolutionary thinking and asked readers to identify the usual metaphysics that is interwoven. Here is the example:  Read more

Marilynne Robinson, one of College Crunch’s 20 most brilliant Christian professors, has a new book in which she takes on Darwinism: Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self. This book is based on Robinson’s Terry Lectures at Yale (see here). David Bentley Hart’ review of her book (see here) begins as follows: The chief purpose of Absence of Mind — the published version of Marilynne Robinson’s splendid Terry Lectures, delivered at Yale in 2009 — is to raise a protest against all those modern, reductively materialist accounts of human consciousness that systematically exclude the testimony of subjectivity, of inner experience, from their understanding of the sources and impulses of the mind. Its targets Read More ›

Evolutionists claim evolution is a fact as much as gravity is a fact. As with gravity, we may not yet understand the details of evolution, but evolution in one way or another is an undeniable fact. Well is it? One evolutionist is certain and wrote this to me:  Read more

Bioethicist Gregory Kaebnick, Ph.D., has an interesting take on the recently announced synthetic cell created by a team of researchers led by J. Craig Venter at the J. Craig Venter Instititute (JVCI). In a recent article in The Scientist entitled Is the “Synthetic Cell” about Life?, Kaebnick writes:

…the technical accomplishment is not quite what the JCVI press release claimed. It’s hard to see this as a synthetic species, or a synthetic organism, or a synthetic cell; it’s a synthetic genome of Mycoplasma mycoides, which is familiar enough. David Baltimore was closer to the truth when he told the New York Times that the researchers had not created life so much as mimicked it. It might be still more accurate to say that the researchers mimicked one part and borrowed the rest.

The explanation from the Venter camp is that the genome took over the cell, and since the genome is synthetic, therefore the cell is synthetic. But this assumes a strictly top-down control structure that some biologists now question. Why not say instead that the genome and the cell managed to work out their differences and collaborate, or even that the cell adopted the genome (and its identity)? Do we know enough to say which metaphor is most accurate?

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