In a seemingly stunning laboratory tour de force, scientists were able to extract ancient enzymatic samples and analyze their structure. From the information so gleaned, they built and tested a synthetic enzyme. Here’s what they report: ” . . . we found that enzymes that existed in the Precambrian era up to four billion years ago possessed many of the same chemical mechanisms observed in their modern-day relatives.” And what were their Darwinian expectations? “Given the ancient origin of the reconstructed thioredoxin enzymes, with some of them predating the buildup of atmospheric oxygen, we expected their catalytic chemistry to be simple.” And given the ID perspective, what would we have expected? We would have expected an almost identical degree of Read More ›

Newsflash: ID proponent William Dembski did not coin the term “specified complexity.” That term was coined by celebrated evolutionary materialist Leslie Orgel to describe the criteria by which living organisms are distinguished from non-living matter. In a previous post I challenged mathgirl to show us why “specified complexity” as used by one of the most famous evolutionary materialists in history is a meaningless concept. In her response she concedes that Orgel’s use of the term is valid, but that when Dembski is using the term he is referring to a different concept. Progress! Mathgirl finally concedes that the term “specified complexity,” at least as used by Orgel, is a meaningful concept. Sadly, mathgirl has deluded herself into believing that Orgel Read More ›

Doug Axe and Ann Gauger have a new peer-reviewed paper up at BIO-Complexity which provides a quantifiable measure of how many mutations are required for a relatively simple biological innovation – the functional conversion of one enzyme to that of its closest structural neighbor.

The authors argue that their results show that similarity of structure does not guarantee ease of interconversion, and that that goes to the root of all Darwinian trees based on such similarity.

Here’s the abstract: Read More ›

In “Scientific solutions to sin?”, Suzanne Morrison (April 08, 2011) of Canada’s Mcmaster University asks,

Most people are familiar with the seven deadly sins – pride, envy, gluttony, lust, wrath, greed and sloth – but could there be molecular solutions for this daily struggle between good and evil?That’s what first year bachelor of health sciences students in the undergraduate biology course at McMaster University were asked to find out: their assignment required that they explore the molecular underpinnings of human misbehaviour.

At the Physiological Society’s DC annual meeting, they are to be feted for their project in which Read More ›

Debra J. Saunders (“Academic Mission or UCLA Speech Code?”, April 12, 2011) reports,

If you think that academia is not the exclusive playground of the academic left, consider the fate of UCLA epidemiologist James Enstrom. Read More ›

P & R Publishing company got the rights to publish an American edition of “Should Christians Embrace Evolution?” (first published in the UK by IVP UK). Released next month, you can pre-order it at 32% off now at Amazon.com. You can see more about the book at its own website here.

“But why has the discourse become so frat house – animal house?” – Suzan Mazur, The Altenberg 16: An Expose of the Evolution Industry, North Atlantic Books, 2010, p. 235. Thoughts?

Mark Buchanan suggests (08 April 2011) at New Scientist that the “Aliens who hide, survive”. Attempting to explain why, if there are really so many space aliens, none of them have ever contacted us to pick up their legacies or their mail, he offers that – as always – natural selection is the answer: In order to explain the Fermi paradox, Kent turns to natural selection – and suggests that it may favour quiet aliens.He argues that it’s plausible that there is a competition for resources on a cosmic scale, driving an evolutionary process between alien species on different planets. Advanced species, for example, might want to exploit other planets for their own purposes. If so, the universe would be Read More ›

Mathgirl wrote in a comment to my last post:  “My conclusion is that, without a rigorous mathematical definition and examples of how to calculate [CSI], the metric is literally meaningless.  Without such a definition and examples, it isn’t possible even in principle to associate the term with a real world referent.” Let’s examine that.  GEM brings to our attention two materialists who embraced the concept, Orgel [1973] and Wicken [1979]. Orgel: . . . In brief, living organisms are distinguished by their specified complexity. Crystals are usually taken as the prototypes of simple well-specified structures, because they consist of a very large number of identical molecules packed together in a uniform way. Lumps of granite or random mixtures of polymers Read More ›

ISI Books, the publisher of The Nature of Nature , is kindly giving Uncommon Descent ten copies for our contests. Buy yours now, by all means, but win one for your dad or your cash-strapped library. First contest is next Saturday, April 16, judged weekly. Here are the multilateral contributing authors to Nature of Nature.

In the land that gave us Shakespeare and Isaac Newton, all is well in the schools.

Encouraging signs are stuff like: A girl is suspended for wearing a crucifix but Sikh religious gear is permitted; national public observances are ignored to avoid conflict with the timetable routine; vile anti-Hindu propaganda and unprovoked beatings at some schools. Parents, of course, respond to all this by such moves as expressing outrage over a school ban on tight pants.

Of course, spectacular academic results have accompanied these developments: Scores lower than Estonia (Sorry, Estonia, Tere tulemast! You in fact do much more with much less.)

But into this atmosphere of calm and orderly application to the great disciplines of learning, followed by the thrill of achievement, suddenly, shudder!! [cue frite muzak “Insidious creationism”] enters the … creationist!: Read More ›

NOTE: This is a post about probability estimation, rather than about inferring design. All systems – whether designed or not – have a certain level of specified complexity associated with them. Only if that level exceeds a certain threshold can we reliably infer intelligent design. The definition of a pattern’s specified complexity makes reference to P(T|H), the probability of a pattern T with respect to the chance hypothesis H. In this case, the pattern we see is an observed structure in a meteorite, and there are two competing hypotheses as to how it arose (leaving aside the possibility of contamination). What I’m interested in is how we would calculate the probability of that pattern if it arose abiotically, as opposed to the probability of that pattern if it is a bacterial fossil. It’s this kind of number-crunching which I feel we need to become proficient at. It would definitely be a feather in our caps if the ID movement could develop a readily utilizable metric to assist NASA in evaluating claimed discoveries of life from outer space. – VJT.

Recently, NASA scientist Richard Hoover looked at some slices of three very rare meteorites using an electron microscope technique called Field Emission Scanning Electron Microscopy, and saw what he believes to be tiny fossils of Cyanobacteria. Hoover’s article, Fossils of Cyanobacteria in CI1 Carbonaceous Meteorites has generated a storm of controversy. Physicist Rob Sheldon has recently blogged about Hoover’s findings here and responded to some common criticisms of Hoover’s work here. Alan Boyle’s report on MSNBC is available online here. Science blogger Dan Satterfield has a post about Hoover’s discoveries here, and a review by “Discover” magazine correspondent Phil Plait can be found here. A critical review by microbiologist Rosie Redfield can be found here, while P.Z. Myers’ dismissal of Hoover’s claims is available online here.

I thought this would be an interesting test case for the concept of complex specified information (CSI), which has been getting quite a bit of attention on this blog recently (see for instance Mathgrrl’s post here, and my posts here and here). So without further ado, let’s proceed.
Read More ›

Recently, well-known biologist Lynn Margulis has been in the news, letting Discover Magazine know that Darwinism is vastly overrated as a theory of evolution.

That said, here are a couple of challenges noted for her own theory of endosymbiosis (some life forms evolved by swallowing others (bacteria might have swallowed mitochondria when the latter was an independent life form), which then became part of their inner workings, resulting in greater complexity): Read More ›

ID opponents sometimes attempt to dismiss ID theory as an “argument from ignorance.”  Their assertion goes something like this: 1.  ID consists of nothing more than the claim that undirected material forces are insufficient to account for either the irreducible complexity (IC) or the functionally specific complex information (FSCI) found in living things.  2.  This purely negative assertion is an invalid argument from ignorance.  As a matter of logic, they say, it is false to state that our present ignorance concerning how undirected material forces can account for either the IC or the FSCI found in living things (i.e., our “absence of evidence”), means no such evidence exists.  In other words, our present ignorance of a material cause of IC Read More ›

Richard Weikart, history professor at the University of California Stanislaus, has just published Hitler’s Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress (Palgrave Macmillan April 2011) In this book, Weikart helps unlock the mystery of Hitler’s evil by vividly demonstrating the surprising conclusion that Hitler’s immorality flowed from a coherent ethic. Hitler was inspired by evolutionary ethics to pursue the utopian project of biologically improving the human race. This ethic underlay or influenced almost every major feature of Nazi policy: eugenics (i.e., measures to improve human heredity, including compulsory sterilization), euthanasia, racism, population expansion, offensive warfare, and racial extermination. For your enjoyment: You can look inside Hitler’s Ethic. Podcast with Weikart on this book here. Here’s Larry Arnhart’s review and here’s Read More ›