David Deming, associate professor of arts and sciences at the University of Oklahoma, and the author of Science and Technology in World History (Vols. 1 & 2) decided to dissent from Darwinism, because In 2008, I published a critique of intelligent design theory in the peer-reviewed journal Earth Science Reviews. I concluded that intelligent design cannot be construed as a scientific theory, and that the apparent goal of the intelligent design movement was to restore Christian theology as the queen of the sciences.But I also argued that to the extent creationists were highlighting areas in which scientific theory was inadequate they were doing better science than biologists. We ought to stop pretending that science has all the answers. Science is Read More ›

For us here at UD, this article doesn’t need much explanation. It certainly fits into the “Genetic Entropy” scheme, and what Michael Behe has demonstrated of late. This is just for your information. Enjoy! How’s this for a quote: The finding mirrors accumulating evidence from other species that changes to regulatory regions of DNA – rather than to the genes themselves – underlie many of the new features that organisms acquire through evolution. And think of all those who say over and over: “Evolution is a change in gene frequency.” Well, I guess it isn’t. It’s a change in gene regulation. It appears to be the end of “gene-centrism” (and, with it, classical population genetics as we’ve known it).

gelaskin. If his Pastaship can have one, I wonder if someone would design one for the rest of us. My own gelaskin is, basically, pink bunnies growing on trees. An acquired taste, let us say.

I commend to all DonaldM’s backgrounder on this news, which broke last night, about the journal Synthese disowning the attack on Christian scholar* Frank Beckwith published in its pages by one of Darwin’s familiar broomsticks . If someone has to put a stopper in, Synthese might as well be first. It’s their journal, after all. But let’s not lose sight of two critical facts: First, the only real reason Synthese had to disown Forrest’s attack is that Beckwith is not an ID sympathizer, and Forrest had assumed he was. That is the substance of his rebuttal, and the true reason the journal had to act. Forrest would likely have been free to publish any factual inaccuracy she pleased about an ID Read More ›

Over the past several weeks, I have been reviewing the case presented by Daniel Fairbanks for common ancestry in his 2010 book, Relics of Eden. For my previous articles on this topic, see my discussion of the first three chapters here, here and here. Chapter 4 of Fairbanks’ book is entitled “Solving The Trichotomy”. In this chapter, Fairbanks addresses what he calls the “trichotomy problem”— that is, of humans, chimpanzees, and gorillas, which two of the three are most closely related to each other? In the latter half of his chapter, Fairbanks draws evidence from mitochondrial DNA and nuclear DNA studies in support of the traditional view that humans and chimpanzees are the closest genetically related. Before turning to this question, however, Fairbanks offers an array of evidence in view of confirming the standard evolutionary view that the mitochondrion is derivative of alpha-proteobacteria and became incorporated into the now-eukaryotic cell by virtue of an endosymbiotic event. I am going to divide my discussion of this chapter into two separate articles — in the first (this article), I am going to address the purported case for the endosymbiotic origin of mitochondria. In the second, I will discuss Fairbanks’ comments on the “trichotomy problem”.

When I held my former views on common ancestry, I was greatly compelled by the array of evidence often marshalled in support of the endosymbiotic origin of the eukaryotic mitochondrion. Indeed, if such a claim is true, then the proposition of the common ancestry of all eukaryotic life seems to be close at hand. This, I think, is an important area to discuss, for the argument — if sound — does not only establish the common ancestry of our order, primates. It also serves to support the somewhat grander claim that all extant eukaryotes are derivative of a common ancestral progenitor. But the important and fundamental question must be raised: Is this argument sound? Does the evidence support this claim? It is to this question that I now turn.

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Denyse O’Leary writes about Barbara Forrest’s fact-free attack on Frank Beckwith, which recently appeared in Synthese. While Denyse focused more on Beckwith’s response to Forrest’s scholarly article diatribe, it might be worth taking a closer look not only at Forrest’s article, but the entire issue of Synthese in which it is found. First Forrest. In the abstract for her article with the breathtaking title “The non-epistemology of intelligent design: its implications for public policy”, Bar writes:

Intelligent design creationism (ID) is a religious belief requiring a supernatural creator’s interventions in the natural order. ID thus brings with it, as does supernatural theism by its nature, intractable epistemological difficulties.

Okay, so we’re only 2 sentences into the abstract and we can already see that Bar has no clue what ID is about. Read More ›

File this under: Darwin conspirazoid’s paper disowned by respectable journal.

Of course it had to happen eventually.

I remember reading Barbara “ID is coming to GET you” Forrest’s 2009 attack-from-nowhere on  Beckwith (philosophy and church-state studies*).

Phrase “tinfoil hat” haunted me all that day, for whatever reason.

It’s one thing, of course, to publish a potboiler like her Trojan Horse, entertaining the Darwin faithful with dark tales of the big ID conspiracy. I mean, the faithful would vastly prefer space aliens, but the aliens haven’t been by lately.

And so what? Well, here’s what: A respectable journal, Synthese, has a habit of making every fifth issue a special, with outside editors. Unfortunately for the folks at Synthese, they left a recent issue (Vol 178, No22010) in the hands of the Darwin lobby, with NCSE employee Glenn Branch as co-editor.

Oops.

Oopser: One of their gems was Barbara Forrest’s “The non-epistemology of intelligent design: its implications for public policy”, where Forrest once again whacks Beckwith with her magical Darwinbroom.

This might have been a mistake on her part, for two reasons. First, Beckwith is a gentleman and a scholar, but not a wimp. And second he is not, as Forrest assumes, an ID sympathizer. So he isn’t someone to whom the elementary principles of justice do not apply.

Anyway, he complained. The journal editors let him publish a 23-page rebuttal that mostly defends scholarly integrity, including his own, against the tangled Forrest of insinuations. It’s a zinger.

Better still, the editors have done “something unprecedented” – they have issued a disclaimer and, in Beckwith’s words, “distanced themselves from her literary misconduct”.

Good for them: I take a somewhat populist view: The public supports and respects scholarship when it means high intellectual combat.

But when it is the intellectual equivalent of machine politics (as it becomes when it gets lost in the Forrest), it’s not clear why support or respect is warranted.

So I see Beckwith as backstopping a form of corruption, and am thankful for it.

I guess someone who wasn’t an ID sympathizer had to be buzzed by Darwin’s broomstick before anyone could call these people for what they are.

Here are some brief excerpts from Beckwith’s rebuttal: Read More ›

This is mildly off-topic. And I’m guilty of little bit (maybe a lot) of ‘venting’. But here’s a link to what has allegedly happened at Oregon State University. It appears that a scientist whose children are on their way to Ph’D’s at OSU are being thrown out of the Ph’D program (one has been there 4 years already) because faculty members with connections to local Democratic politics are not happy that the scientist ran for state office as a Republican. It is simply mind-numbing what has happened to our Universities. When I was young and in college in the 60’s, the local SDS (Students for a Democratic Society–of Marxist bent) chapter yelled and screamed for a “free speech” area to Read More ›

An anthology based on the NATURE OF NATURE conference at Baylor (April 12-15, 2000) has just come out (see the preceding post here at UD). All of the contributors to this anthology who were at the original conference have revised and updated their contributions, so the volume is thoroughly up to date. Many of the presenters at the original conference, however, were not represented in this volume. Mainly this was a matter of space limitations (the volume is even now at 500,000 words). As it is, the original conference had about 30 plenary speakers and another 35 or so concurrent speakers. A detailed description of the original NATURE OF NATURE conference can be found online here (scroll down) and is reprinted below:

—————————-

THE NATURE OF NATURE:

An Interdisciplinary Conference on the Role of Naturalism in Science

April 12-15, 2000

 Is the universe self-contained or does it require something beyond itself to explain its existence and internal function? Philosophical naturalism takes the universe to be self-contained, and it is widely presupposed throughout science. Even so, the idea that nature points beyond itself has recently been reformulated with respect to a number of issues. Consciousness, the origin of life, the unexpected effectiveness of mathematics at modeling the physical world, and the fine-tuning of universal constants are just a few of the problems that critics have claimed are incapable of purely naturalistic explanation. Do such assertions constitute arguments from incredulity – an unwarranted appeal to ignorance? If not, is the explanation of such phenomena beyond the pale of science? Is it, perhaps, possible to offer cogent philosophical and even scientific arguments that nature does point beyond itself? The aim of this conference is to examine such questions. Read More ›

Michael Flannery, author of a biography of Darwin’s co-theorist, Alfred Russel Wallace, reacts to my comment here regarding Wallace’s social land trust proposal,

Wallace’s idea of nationalization of land leaves me cold, however, because what most people value about their space is that, however humble – even just one half of a bedsit – it is theirs and not anyone else’s and certainly not the government’s. Maybe he had seen too many homeless people to think of that, and anyway, he himself travelled a lot.

Flannery points out that I had merely assumed that Wallace hadn’t considered the question:

I ‘m glad your linked to Gaffney’s article on Wallace and land nationalization. He notes, “Wallace’s Land Nationalization was individualist, not collectivist. Individual lessees were to have secure tenure, and tenant-rights to improvements. Rents to the state would be used, not to engross the state, but to obviate taxes.” However, like you, I’m skeptical of the idea. Wallace was well intentioned but I think he was naive to think that the state would refrain from using any type of land nationalization plan to its own advantage at centralized aggrandizement. I mean that what centralized bureaucracies do! But Wallace was genuinely concerned for the poor and the impact of the Enclosure Act (esp. upon the Welsh farmers he considered his friends and neighbors) affected him deeply. How far away was Darwin and his comfortable coterie of elites! For Wallace these poor farmers were being victimized by interest groups of power and wealth; for Darwin and others of his class they were simply “unfit.”

I replied, thanking him for the clarification, and said, Read More ›

In my second response to Arthur Hunt on the origin of the T-urf13 gene (which specifies a mitochondrial ligand-gating pore-forming receptor for T-toxin in maise), I briefly mentioned towards the end of my post Arthur Hunt’s comments on the Panda’s Thumb blog regarding the Axe (2004) result concerned with the rarity of catalytic domains within sequence space.

As I noted in my previous post, Axe’s 2004 JMB paper is not an isolated result. I cited a number of papers which attained similar results with respect to the rarity of functional domains within sequence space. In one study, published in Naturein 2001 by Keefe & Szostak, it was documented that more than a million million random sequences were required in order to stumble upon a functioning ATP-binding protein, a protein substantially smaller than the transmembrane protein specified by the gene, T-urf13, discussed by Hunt. In addition, I noted, a similar result was obtained by Taylor et al. in their 2001 PNAS paper. This paper examined the AroQ-type chorismate mutase, and arrived at a similarly low prevalence (giving a value of 1 in 10^24 for the 93 amino acid enzyme, but, when adjusted to reflect a residue of the same length as the 150-amino-acid section analysed from Beta-lactamase, yields a result of 1 in 10^53). Yet another paper by Sauer and Reidhaar-Olson (1990) reported on “the high level of degeneracy in the information that specifies a particular protein fold,” which it gives as 1 in 10^63. In my previous post, I also strongly encouraged Arthur Hunt and others to read Douglas Axe’s excellent review article in Bio-complexity which covers this topic in more detail, as well as to read the recently-published The Nature of Nature — Examining The Role of Naturalism in Science, which is highly accessible for non-specialists.

Yesterday, I posted a short itallicised update to my previous article, having now looked somewhat closer at the article to which Hunt referred me. For those that missed it, allow me to highlight just a few of the points at which Hunt errs.

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Or maybe not. From Britain’s Independent (Olly Bootle, 28 February 2011), we learn, “Our species is still evolving, but future humans might be more like Danny DeVito than Stuart Broad”: The realisation that differing fertility levels might be driving change in our species has led evolutionary biologist Stephen Stearns, from Yale University, to look at evolution in a radical way. By analysing data gathered in an otherwise unremarkable town, Framingham in Massachusetts, he can tell how the people of the town will evolve in the coming generations. His calculations have convinced him that people are still evolving, and in a surprising direction. “What we have found with height and weight basically is that natural selection appears to be operating to Read More ›

A friend put me onto this human genetic research program (no, no, it all sounds reasonable, keep your shirt on; no one is looking for the  missing link andyou are him and the genetic police are waiting outside … wake UP, will you?): Ethnically diverse people are donating DNA to science, and the wealth of genomic data emerging from the project already is shedding light on human evolution.A decade ago it was a big deal to spell out the entire DNA sequence of a single human being. That event marked the success of the initial Human Genome Project. Now hundreds of human genomes have been decoded. Scientists who study human evolution are using the new data to make discoveries about how Read More ›

On 3 Mar 2011, we learned from Britain’s Daily Telegraph that “Millions of NHS patients have been treated with controversial drugs on the basis of “fraudulent research” by one of the world’s leading anaesthetists,”:

He published dozens of papers “proving” their benefits and contradicting studies which suggested they could increase the risk of death in surgery and cause kidney failure, severe blood loss and heart failure.German medical authorities are scrutinising 92 of his key publications and a criminal investigation is under way into allegations that he forged documents, tested drugs on patients without their consent and fraudulently claimed payments for operations he had never performed.

[ … ]

Sources close to the investigation said that the editors would announce the formal retraction of 89 papers next month.Rhineland state prosecutors are investigating Mr Boldt over allegations that he forged the signatures of his alleged “co-authors” on his studies, conducted drugs trials without official approval and claimed money for operations that he never performed.

[ … ]

Dr Rupert Pearse, a senior lecturer in intensive care medicine at Barts and the London School of Medicine, and co-author of the British guidelines on fluid drugs, said last night: “…For me, it shakes the world I work in and makes me feel less confident in it, and if I were a member of the public I would feel the same.”

These cases are so common now, it might be worth taking a look at reasons that aren’t anyone’s direct fault: Read More ›

In a review of several recent science books, Dartmouth professor Alan Hirshfeld offers us a view of the Royal Society (former employer of sinner in the hands of an angry god, Michael Reiss), and similar societies, as engines of perpetual revolution (The Wall Street Journal) , opining “The Royal Society’s history of open-minded debate epitomizes science as a self-correcting process”: The group is more effective than the individual at sussing out weak hypotheses, flawed experiments or biased observations, and one of the vital contributions of Europe’s “natural philosophers” during the Enlightenment was the creation of societies to disseminate and evaluate their ideas. Such conclaves served as intellectual hubs before the rise of modern research universities and institutes, and remain important Read More ›