Granville Sewell

In his 1956 book, “A Biologist’s View”, French biologist Jean Rostand wrote: “If it is true that neither Lamarckism nor mutationism [Darwinism] enable us to understand the mechanism of evolution, we must have the courage to recognise that we know nothing of this mechanism…Some people may perhaps feel that such a confession of ignorance plays into the hands of those who are still fighting the doctrine of evolution. But quite apart from the fact that the most elementary intellectual honesty demands that we should say ‘I do not know’ where we believe that this is so, I think that this doctrine is now so solidly grounded on its own merits that it needs no support from false advocacy. I must Read More ›

The Sri Aurobindo International Center of Education, in Pondicherry, India, has recently launched a new on-line journal Anti-Matters , which naturally has a strong Eastern flavor, but is solidly anti-materialist and anti-Darwinist; it provides further evidence that ID, at least the rejection of Darwinism, is not a uniquely American Christian phenomenon. The editor, Ulrich Mohrhoff is a German physicist with apparently a strong quantum mechanics background. This issue has an article discussing my A Second Look at the Second Law essay, which I believe the editor found from a link here at UD.

The biggest problem of all with Darwinism, in my opinion, is one that is almost never discussed by either side. In my Dec 2005 American Spectator article (updated version here) I tried to express the problem as follows: “When you ask [the modern scientist] how a mechanical process such as natural selection could cause human consciousness to arise out of inanimate matter, he says, ‘human consciousness — what’s that?’ And he talks about human evolution as if he were an outside observer, and never seems to wonder how he got inside one of the animals he is studying.” You may be able to convince a gullible layman that natural selection of random mutations can cause mud to evolve into robots Read More ›

In the popular media, the picture that we get of the ID controversy is this: primitive man attributed many phenomena in Nature to design, science has progressively removed the need for the design hypothesis from these phenomena one by one, and now a group of religious fanatics is trying to make a last stand in biological origins, where things are most difficult to explain. The true story is very different; in fact, we are discovering that primitive man was NOT wrong in attributing many phenomena to design, the design just dates back much futher than he imagined, to the origin of the universe. Science is discovering that not only life itself, but a wealth of chemical phenomena that makes life Read More ›

In my 2000 Mathematical Intelligencer article I speculated on what would happen if we constructed a gigantic computer model which starts with the initial conditions on Earth 4 billion years ago and tries to simulate the effects that the four known forces of physics (the gravitational and electromagnetic forces and the strong and weak nuclear forces) would have on every atom and every subatomic particle on our planet. If we ran such a simulation out to the present day, I asked, would it predict that the basic forces of Nature would reorganize the basic particles of Nature into libraries full of encyclopedias, science texts and novels, nuclear power plants, aircraft carriers with supersonic jets parked on deck, and computers connected Read More ›

My last post included a reference to one of several carnivorous plants whose traps appear to be irreducibly complex. One reader commented that it seems that Michael Behe’s mousetrap actually exists in Nature, and wondered why Behe didn’t mention this example in Darwin’s Black Box. Another reader explained that Behe is a microbiologist, not a botanist. However, these spectacular examples of irreducible complexity have not gone completely unnoticed by botanists; see the very interesting section entitled “The origin of carnivorous plants” (pp 5-6) in the Nature Encyclopedia of Life Sciences article here .

In any debate on Intelligent Design, there is a question I have long wished to see posed to ID opponents: “If we DID discover some biological feature that was irreducibly complex, to your satisfication and to the satisfaction of all reasonable observers, would that justify the design inference?” (Of course, I believe we have found thousands of such features, but never mind that.) If the answer is yes, we just haven’t found any such thing yet, then all the constantly-repeated philosophical arguments that “ID is not science” immediately fall. If the answer is no, then at least the lay observer will be able to understand what is going on here, that Darwinism is not grounded on empirical evidence but a Read More ›

In his new book, “The Edge of Evolution,” (another masterpiece) Michael Behe looks in considerable detail at the struggle for survival between humans and the malaria parasite where, in the last 100 years, the evolution of more organisms and generations can be studied than were involved in the entire natural history of mammals. He finds that natural selection can indeed be credited with some “change”, but concludes Far and away the most extensive relevant data we have on the subject of evolution’s effects on competing organisms is that accumulated on interactions between humans and our parasites. As with the example of malaria, the data show trench warfare, with acts of desperate destruction, not arms races, with mutual improvements. The thrust Read More ›

When you really analyze them, most of the strongest arguments against ID as an explanation for the development of life are of the form: “this just doesn’t look like the way God would have created things.” Perhaps not, but we are finding more and more that it does look very much like the way “we” design things. As far back as 1985, in my first book about PDE2D here and more recently in a Mathematical Intelligencer article here , I pointed out that life developed much the way software “develops”: minor improvements are made in small increments, but major improvements always involve one or more large irreducibly complex steps, and appear suddenly (in the fossil record, or in software releases). Read More ›

We need to face the fact that it may still be a very long time before the majority of scientists will take seriously the idea that a designer may have been directly involved in the origin and development of life. However, it may not be nearly so long before they will at least finally acknowledge that science has no clue about the “natural” causes involved. I have written a short article, submitted to several publications without success so far, which encourages readers to think about what it will be like when this happens. It will, in my opinion, be a much improved world. Here begins the article, entitled “How Evolution Will Be Taught Someday”: A 1980 New York Times News Read More ›

In an April 2, 2007 post, I noted the similarity between my second law argument (“the underlying principle behind the second law is that natural forces do not do macroscopically describable things which are extremely improbable from the microscopic point of view”), and Bill Dembski’s argument (in “The Design Inference”) that only intelligence can account for things that are “specified” (=macroscopically describable) and “complex” (=extremely improbable). I argued that the advantage of my formulation is that it is based on a widely recognized law of science, that physics textbooks practically make the design argument for you, all you have to do is point out that the laws of probability do (contrary to common belief!) still apply in open systems, you Read More ›

The letter here will be sent to the ISU President (in about 10 days), with cc to the Ames Tribune and possibly other media outlets. For further background, see the May 12 story at www.evolutionnews.org and the links from this story. If you are a university engineering or science professor and would like to co-sign the letter, please e-mail me at sewell@math.utep.edu.

The Darwinian story of how the giraffe got its long neck is perhaps the most popular and widely-told story of evolution. It is popular because it seems plausible: giraffes with slightly longer necks enjoyed a slight selective advantage in reaching the higher leaves of trees, and so over the ages these slight neck elongations accumulated, resulting in the modern giraffe. In fact, I used the giraffe story myself in my Mathematical Intelligencer article as an example of purely quantitative change, that natural selection possibly could explain, as opposed to the origins of new organs and new systems of organs. Biologist and genetic mutations expert Wolf-Ekkehard Loennig has written a detailed, thoroughly researched, 100 page study “The Evolution of the Long-Necked Read More ›

Given that the most spectacular documented successes of natural selection are: changing the color of the peppered moth and the length of the beak of the Galapagos Finch, and the development of resistance to antibiotics by bacteria, and that even these trivial examples are now all in dispute, and that no competing natural explanation for evolution has ever been taken seriously by more than a small band of scientists, where is the “overwhelming” evidence that the development of life is due to natural (unintelligent) causes alone? There are, in fact, some fairly persuasive reasons to believe that the development of life was due to natural causes, but when we honestly analyze them, they all reduce to the argument “this doesn’t Read More ›

A mathematics graduate student in Colombia has noticed the similarity between my second law arguments (“the underlying principle behind the second law is that natural forces do not do macroscopically describable things which are extremely improbable from the microscopic point of view”), and Bill Dembski’s argument (in his classic work “The Design Inference”) that only intelligence can account for things that are “specified” (=macroscopically describable) and “complex” (=extremely improbable). Daniel Andres’ article can be found (in Spanish) here . If you read the footnote in my article A Second Look at the Second Law you will notice that some of the counter-arguments addressed are very similar to those used against Dembski’s “specified complexity.” Every time I write on the topic Read More ›