2010

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 ›

During the 1990s I had untold opportunities to witness the full exuberance of nature’s rich offerings. My parents’ house on the southwestern edge of Ecuador’s capital Quito was set in a prime location for observing all manner of wildlife. And most memorable of all were the hummingbirds that frequented our garden attracted as they were to the blooming plants that had been strategically potted next to the outside walls of our living room. These veritable masters of flight, the smallest of warm blooded creatures on our planet, arrived with the sole purpose of extracting sweet nectar from the flowers we had laid before them. Their hovering maneuverability was their most striking attribute. Read More ›

See David Hart’s account of Marks’ realization of the “blindingly obvious”  here.

Yet again, we have this utterly meaningless question asked of an electoral candidate during a debate, in an attempt to discredit her. My response, had I been asked this question, would have been as follows: Does evolution mean that living things have changed over time? Does evolution mean universal common ancestry? Does evolution mean that random errors filtered by natural selection explain all of biology, including the origin of the functionally specified information encoded in the base-four digital code of the DNA molecule, along with the information-processing machinery that translates it, performs error detection and repair, and much more? If your definition of “evolution” is the latter, can you supply us with adequate evidence that the probabilistic resources have existed Read More ›

Evolutionists are adamant that science must be free of religion or anything that smacks of religion. And while that sounds good, evolutionists are all-the-while driven by religion. They are sure all of biology is a fluke because of their religious convictions. Religion is both the source of evolution’s certainty and the target of its wrath. While not proclaiming that science must be free of religion, evolutionists make a wide spectrum of religious claims that mandate their theory.  Read more

I’m writing to tell people about a paper of mine that was published in Synthese last month, titled:  “Self-organisation in dynamical systems: a limiting result”.  While the paper doesn’t address intelligent design as such, it indirectly establishes strict limits to what such evolutionary mechanisms as natural selection can accomplish.  In particular, it shows that physical laws, operating on an initially random arrangement of matter, cannot produce complex objects with any reasonable chance in any reasonable time.

The published version may be downloaded (payment or subscription needed) from Springer at:

         http://www.springerlink.com/content/74316rt8373k560x/

Alternatively, a pre-published version is freely available at:

         http://faculty.arts.ubc.ca/rjohns/spontaneous_4.pdf

The argument is based on a number of original mathematical theorems that are proved in the paper.  A less technical presentation of the argument is however given below.

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In this article British neuroscientist Patrick Haggard has his assistant stimulate parts of his brain in a way that causes his fingers to twitch.  Then the scientist announces in magisterial tones, “See, we have no free will.”  Rubbish.   For decades we have known that stimulating certain areas of the brain with electrical impulses causes reactions in the muscles.  No one has ever disputed this or that there is a material (in the philosophical sense of that word) cause-effect relationship between brain function and body function.  It is one thing to conclude there is a material cause and effect relationship between the brain and body function, but it is something entirely different to assert that the existence of this material cause Read More ›

The archetypal image of Neanderthals has been one that reinforced the Darwinian story of human evolution. A Washington Post story puts it like this: “Early study of Neanderthals described them as very hairy, brutish, unable to talk or walk like more-modern humans.” Although things have changed slowly, media presentations have continued to create an impression that does not differ much from this description. However, the evidence for their humanity has accumulated rather rapidly in recent years, and the past month has seen two significant additions to the literature. A Wired Science report introduces one of these studies like this: “For decades, Neanderthal was cultural shorthand for primitive. Our closest non-living relatives were caricatured as lumbering, slope-browed simpletons unable to keep Read More ›

Drosophila melanogaster is a model organism for the study of genetics and some laboratory populations have been bred for different life-history traits over the course of 30 years. Professor Michael Rose, of UC Irvine, began breeding flies with accelerated development in 1991 (600 generations ago). Doctoral student Molly Burke compared the experimental flies with a control group on a genome-wide basis. This is significant because it is the first time such a study of a sexually reproducing species has been done. Burke examined specific genes and also obtained “whole-genome resequencing data from Drosophila populations that have undergone 600 generations of laboratory selection for accelerated development.” The results are noteworthy on several counts: “For decades, most researchers have assumed that sexual Read More ›

The 2005 Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District court case was a disaster for evolution. This may seem strange given that the ruling struck down the teaching of the opposing Intelligent Design idea. Evolutionists celebrated the decision, how could it be a disaster for them? It was a disaster because, as is sometimes the case in politics and law, the cost of victory is far greater than the spoils.  Read more

In a recent article in USA Today, Professor Jerry Coyne made the following claim:

I’ve never met a Christian, for instance, who has been able to tell me what observations about the universe would make him abandon his beliefs in God and Jesus. (I would have thought that the Holocaust could do it, but apparently not.) There is no horror, no amount of evil in the world, that a true believer can’t rationalize as consistent with a loving God.

Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Vincent Torley, and I’m a Christian whose faith in God, Jesus Christ and Intelligent Design is falsifiable. I have the greatest respect for your acknowledged expertise in the field of biology, and I don’t wish to question it for a moment. My Ph.D. is in philosophy, not science. For the record, I accept that the universe is approximately 14 billion years old, and that all living things spring from a common ancestor that lived approximately 4 billion years ago. However, I do not believe that non-foresighted processes (random mutations plus natural selection, in popular parlance) are adequate to account for the complexity we observe in organisms today, or that natural processes suffice to explain the origin of life. Here is a list of observations that would cause me to abandon belief in God, belief in Christianity and belief in Intelligent Design.

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