A radio debate featuring Michael Behe and Keith Fox, discussing issues relating to the scientific substance, and theological implications, of ID was made available today on the Premier Christian Radio website. The audio can be found here. The introductory comments on the website read as follows: Michael Behe is professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University, Pennsylvania and the founder of the modern Intelligent Design movement.  His book “Darwin’s Black Box” ignited the controversy 14 years ago when it claimed that certain molecular machines and biological processes are “irreducibly complex” and cannot be explained by Darwinian evolution. His new book “The Edge of Evolution” takes his conclusions further, arguing that the Darwinian processes of random mutation and natural selection are incapable of producing the variation Read More ›

Jack Krebs at Panda’s Thumb claims that I have “come clean” as a young earth creationist. There are a couple of problems with his announcement: (1) It’s not true, and (2) there’s nothing in my words that he quoted to justify his claim. Krebs seems to think that my recent statements clarifying my views represent either a compromise or a “retraction” of my earlier views. But that is false. It’s a matter of public record that I am an evangelical Christian. I have publicly defended the complete trustworthiness and inerrancy of Scripture; but my comments in The End of Christianity led some to believe otherwise. The purpose of my recent statement was to make it clear that I believe in Read More ›

In an earlier post, I wrote that my faith in Intelligent Design was falsifiable, and I listed two criteria by which it might be falsified:

1. An empirical or mathematical demonstration that the probability of the emergence of life on Earth during the past four billion years as a result of purely natural processes, without any intelligent guidance and starting from a random assortment of organic chemicals, is greater than 10^(-120). [Note: when I wrote “life,” I meant “cellular life.”]

2. An empirical or mathematical demonstration that the probability of the emergence of any of the irreducibly complex structures listed on this page, as a result of non-foresighted processes (“random mutations plus natural selection”) is greater than 10^(-120).

I could have added:

3. An empirical or mathematical demonstration that the probability of the emergence of eukaryotes from prokaryotes, or of the 30+ phyla of animals from a single-celled ancestor, or of the different classes of vertebrates from a common ancestor, as a result of non-foresighted processes (“random mutations plus natural selection”) is greater than 10^(-120). Indeed, I might have added “orders” and “families.”

In my post, I deliberately set the bar very, very low, in terms of probabilities – in fact, quite a bit lower than I need have done. I wanted to be as generous as possible to skeptics who might argue that a lot might happen in a large cosmos, over a long enough time.

Astonishingly, no-one in the “skeptic” camp took up the challenge. I was genuinely surprised, because I wasn’t asking for much.
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Japanese maple leaves. Over at Why Evolution is True, Professor Jerry Coyne has been busy at work. He has not only outlined a scenario that would convince him of God’s existence, but he has written an article entitled On P. Z. Myers on evidence for a god with a point-by-point rebuttal of P. Z. Myers’ assertion (backed up by eight supporting arguments) that there was no amount of evidence that could convince him of the existence of any kind of God. I believe in giving credit where credit is due, so I would like to congratulate Professor Coyne. Let me hasten to add that Professor Coyne is still a convinced atheist. As he writes: “To me, the proper stance is, Read More ›

Proponents of intelligent design (ID) have long predicted that many of the features of living systems which are said to exhibit “sub-optimal” design will, in time, turn out to have a rationally engineered purpose. This is one of several areas where ID actively encourages a fruitful research agenda, in a manner in which neo-Darwinian evolution does not. One such area, and a field for which I have long held an inquisitive fascination for, is the subject of so-called “junk DNA,” and the non-coding stetches of RNA which are transcribed from them. Skepticism of the “junk DNA” paradigm is not a phenomenon which is limited to proponents of ID. This popular view of the genome — while still resonating as the Read More ›

Oceanic bacteria can swap genes remarkably fast, new findings reveal. Such horizontal gene transfer is facilitated, in this case, by tiny gene-transfer agents, or GTAs:  Read more

…the “machines” of the cell will still be what they are: complex, sophisticated molecular systems, essential for the living state. Like the proteasome on the right, a sub-cellular machine that degrades proteins, among its other functions.

Oops, there I went and did it — used the “machinery” language that Massimo Pigliucci (CUNY) and Maarten Boudry (Univ. of Ghent) argue not only plays into the hands of ID advocates, but also misleads scientists themselves:

…if we want to keep Intelligent Design out of the classroom, not only do we have to exclude the ‘theory’ from the biology curriculum, but we also have to be weary [sic] of using scientific metaphors that bolster design-like misconceptions about living systems. We argue that the machine-information metaphor in biology not only misleads students and the public at large, but cannot but direct even the thinking of the scientists involved, and therefore the sort of questions they decide to pursue and how they approach them.

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The thesis expressed in the title of this “opening bat” post is plainly controversial, and doubtless will be hotly contested and/or pointedly ignored. However, when all is said and done, it will be quite evident that it has the merit that it just happens to be both true and well-warranted. So, let us begin. Noted Harvard evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin inadvertently lets the cat out of the bag in his well-known January 1997 New York Review of Books article, “Billions and Billions of Demons”: . . . to put a correct view of the universe into people’s heads we must first get an incorrect view out . . .   the problem is to get them to reject irrational and supernatural Read More ›

At a fundraiser in Boston President Obama said: Part of the reason that our politics seems so tough right now and facts and science and argument does not seem to be winning the day all the time is because we’re hardwired not to always think clearly when we’re scared, and the country’s scared. In my experience “hardwired” is Evolution-speak for “evolutionary adaptation that influences behavior.” Fascinating. If you don’t like Obama’s policies and plan to vote Republican, it is because you are scared and that fear drives you away from decisions based on facts, science and logic and toward irrational behavior. The sheer arrogance of this statement beggars belief.

Leigh Van Valen — an evolutionary biologist for whom the word “polymath” is entirely appropriate — died this past weekend, after a long illness. Leigh was a student of both Theodosius Dobzhansky and G.G. Simpson at Columbia University, and spent most of the rest of his career at the University of Chicago, where he served on the faculties of the Department of Ecology and Evolution, and the Committees on Genetics, Evolutionary Biology, and the Conceptual Foundations of Science. Like I said: a true polymath. As any of his students or colleagues will tell you, one’s first meeting with Leigh was unforgettable. Slight of stature and soft-spoken, with a long white beard and hair, Leigh had an incomparable knowledge of the Read More ›

Over at HuffPo, Professor Matt Rossano, Head of the Department of Psychology at Southeastern Louisiana University, has posted a thought-provoking article entitled, “Thomas Aquinas: Saint of Evolutionary Psychologists?”

Let me say at the outset that Professor Rossano is a very fair-minded scientist, who has made a genuinely sympathetic attempt to answer the question, “How did religion come to be?” from a secular perspective. In his recent book, Supernatural Selection (see here for a brief synopsis and here for a look inside the book), he acknowledges that “religion is vitally important to morality” and that “religion does make us more moral,” although he strongly disagrees with the notion that without religion there can be no morality (and he argues that Aquinas did, too). Provocatively, Rossano even goes so far as to say that “Religion made us human.” Statements like these clearly put him at odds with the New Atheism of Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion.

In his latest article, Professor Rossano discusses the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas, and argues that in many ways, Aquinas anticipates the principles used by evolutionary psychologists today to explain human behavior. Rossano focuses on the institution of marriage, and shows that many of the concepts which figure in “parental investment theory” – a theory invoked by evolutionary biologists to explain parental behavior in the animal world – can also be found in Aquinas’ discussion of marriage, in his Summa Contra Gentiles, Book III, question 122. He goes on to argue that Aquinas, if he were alive today, would be an evolutionist, and in the title of his article, even goes so far as to nominate him as the patron saint of evolutionary psychologists!

To his credit, Professor Rossano gets a lot right about Aquinas: most of his factual assertions about Aquinas’ philosophical views are correct. However, his attempt to marry Aquinas’ thinking with evolutionary psychology is doomed to failure. Here’s why.
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markf asks what observation would falsify ID.  Gpuccio responded that an example of an incredibly improbable digital string that was developed in a stochastic system would tend to falsify ID and gave as an example 500 coins tosses that when interpreted as a code spelled out a meaningful message.   Not good enough says markf.  “Nothing can falsify ID if you make no assumptions about the designer – because a designer of unspecified powers and motives can produce anything.”  In other words, gpuccio’s example assumes that the designer does not capriciously intervene in the outcome of coin tosses. Yes, we assume that.  And we also assume that we are not plugged into the Matrix with all of our sense impressions being Read More ›

In the comment thread to a prior post gpuccio, markf and I had a little debate about whether functional complex specified information can be generated by random (stochastic) processes.  BTW, before going on let me say that I truly appreciate markf and our other opponents who appear regularly on these pages.  How boring it would be if this blog were merely an echo chamber.  Now to the debate.

Gpuccio started it off with the following challenge to markf:  Can you name one example of a functional incredibly improbable random digital string.

After some waffling, markf finally admitted:  “The short answer is that I think it is most unlikely that there exists a digital string which is functional and complex and we have no reason to suppose it is designed – other than in living things.”

Back to gpuccio:  “The strings in protein coding genes are strings which are interpreted according to a quaternary code.  They are digital, complex and functional.  The code is not my invention or yours, it is regularly decoded by the translation system in the cells, and we have simply learned it from the cells themselves.  It is the code which allows us to read the meaning in protein coding genes.  Nucleotides in themselves are not digital.  They are just of four different types.  It is the specific sequence they have in the gene, which in no way depends on biochemical laws, which, correctly translated, reveals their function.”

Just so.

Now here is the next question for markf:  You all but admit that it is impossible to name a single example of a functional incredibly improbable random digital string – OTHER THAN IN LIVING THINGS.  Why the exception?  The burden is on your to demonstrate the exception is valid.

 The ID position can be summarized in a series of simple syllogisms:  Read More ›