Larry Moran wrote: If Salvador Cordova can put together an audience of biology students at a reputable university (George Mason?) and get an Intelligent Design Creationist to ask these questions, I’ll be happy to come and answer them. … Some of them are easy to answer. The best answer is “I don’t know.” That is very kind of you Larry. I will even do one better, I will suggest biology students take your classes. Really I don’t think I have to even make that plug, because I’m sure they probably have to take your classes anyway. Many of my professors were openly anti ID and have campaigned against ID, such as James Trefil and Robert Ehrlich. Their anti-ID views did Read More ›

The ID-friendly version of Natural Selection was pioneered by the creationist Blyth. I have also argued that there is credible evidence that Darwin plagiarized and distorted Blyth’s work. I view Natural Selection as itself a design feature of optimization and search. Whereas Darwinist view natural selection as a mechanism of design, I view natural selection as feature of design. This essay was also partly written to correct and clarify some of my earlier choice of words in Same pattern, different implementations. When we find designs that cannot be implemented via selection, I consider that strong evidence of design. However, finding possible evidence that selection is a feature of a biological system doesn’t automatically imply there is no Designer. In fact, Read More ›

Paper snowflakes: Water (real) snowflakes: Even though the two sets of snowflakes share similar hexagonal patterns, and even though we could envision paper snowflakes having exactly the shapes of those found by Wilson “snowflake” Bentley, paper snowflakes would be regarded as designed even though they share the same pattern as those that arise via natural process. The Hexagonal structure of real snowflakes is expected, even though each pattern is unique. Whereas such patterns are not expected to form spontaneously from paper. The way we determine a paper snowflake is designed (apart from actually seeing the human designer in action) is that the paper snowflake conforms to an independent pattern and is improbable from the behavior of paper left to itself Read More ›

“Dawkins’s vulgarizations of Darwinism speak of nothing in evolution but an inexorable ascendancy of genes that are selectively superior, while the entire body of technical advance in experimental and theoretical evolutionary genetics of the last fifty years has moved in the direction of emphasizing non-selective forces in evolution… What worries me is that they [non-biologists] may believe what Dawkins and Wilson tell them about evolution.” Richard Lewontin Review of Demon Haunted World But Lewontin is in a bit of a bind. He knows selection cannot be at work in evolution to the extent Dawkins claims, but on the other hand, Lewontin really has never said what those other non-Darwinian mechanisms are except to insist intelligence can’t be one of those Read More ›

This chart is interesting. One wonders why biology students do so poorly while classics and religion students do so well. One hypothesis: classics and religion students learn critical thinking skills while biology students are taught to parrot the central dogma. The chart is from a study of which undergraduate majors correlated most highly with success on the LSAT. See here. I note that my own undergraduate major (accounting) also faired poorly. It seems my LSAT score (97th percentile) was an exception if this chart is any indication.

[cross posted at CEU IDCS, Neutral theory and non-Darwinian evolution for newbies, Part 2] Part 1 laid out the claim that most nucleotides in populations cannot as a matter of principle be under strong selection, but must be neutral. MOST certainly does not mean ALL. Clearly some deleterious traits if they appear would be lethal, and conversely in certain contexts like antibiotic and pesticide resistance, some traits can be strongly selected for, but these cases do not speak for most of the rest of the molecules in various species. As one scientist said: Most molecular evolution is neutral. Done. PZ Myers Part 2 will focus on how neutral or nearly neutral traits in small finite populations get “fixed” where the Read More ›