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Should we all pack up and go home with such erudite opponents as this?

Watching Intelligent Design – Alexander Nussbaum Free Enquiry April / May 2012 Volume 32, Number 3 (edited exerpts below)

Watches are a product of intelligent design and are often used as an example of such by creationists in their beloved – and deeply misleading – analogy.

Watches are a poor analogue for living systems, as they bear one characteristic that is common in products of intelligent design but absent from the products of biological evolution. Watches tend to be engineered for performance far beyond what is needed in use. Evolved living systems never display this kind of overdesign except, arguably, in certain characteristics used for sexual selection.

Biological evolution makes use of what is already available and generally produces not optimal design, but rather design just good enough to survive. Biological evolution is a master of jerry-building, of making do, and of overlooking design flaws as long as reproduction is achieved before the system dies.

For the human brain, amazing product of evolution though it is — capable of calculus, creating computers, and even of reaching the Moon — is also a deeply flawed belief machine that is unable to shake itself of delusions like creationism.

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PZ has a lot to say. I present some gems below for your education. I’m sure that I have some irrational beliefs of my own. I have no idea what they are. It’s not holding irrational beliefs that makes you an idiot. It’s holding the irrational beliefs and demanding that those be imposed on everyone else. Nobody has convinced me that God exists. That’s not going to happen. Science is the answer. I’m sorry; you may be a very devout religious person, but praying is not going to solve the world’s problems. It never has.  We’re living in an enlightenment, which is fuelled by rational thinking and science. Science is the answer. I’m buddies with a lot of the big Read More ›

PZ has done an interview. I have compiled some statements that interest us here at UD. Here is the first installment.

ON ID

Host Stephen Smith: “You spend a lot of digital ink, if you will, attacking intelligent design and the people who are behind that movement. They argue that “certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process, such as natural selection.” Why do you have such scorn for these beliefs?”

Myers: “Well, for one thing, they’re dishonest. They’re grossly dishonest about this stuff. That’s not really where they’re coming from. When they say this stuff, they say, “Oh, we’re taking an objective view. We’re taking a secular view of the universe in saying that there’s a designer behind it.” They’re misleading you. That’s not where they come from. Where they come from is typically a very religious background. What intelligent design is, is taking their religious beliefs, sanitizing them of any mention of God, and presenting them in this cleaned up format. The sole premise, the sole impetus for doing this stuff is their belief in God.

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Non-adaptive origins of interactome complexity NATURE

According to the BBC

Ford Doolittle said “Darwinists are a little bit like the pre-Darwinists before them, who would have marveled at the perfection of God’s creation. We tend to marvel at the Darwinian perfection of organisms now, saying ‘this must have been highly selected for, it’s a tuned and sophisticated machine’. In fact, it’s a mess – there’s so much unnecessary complexity.”

Tiny structural errors in proteins may have been responsible for changes that sparked complex life, supporting the idea that natural selection is not the only means by which complexity rises.

Single-celled life gave rise to more complex organisms, and with them came ever-more complicated networks of gene and protein interactions.

Natural selection (praise be upon it) is a theory with no equal in terms of its power to explain how organisms and populations survive through the ages; random mutations that are helpful to an organism are maintained while harmful ones are bred out. But the “adaptive” nature of the changes natural selection (praise be upon it) wreaks may not be the only way that complexity grew.

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Some years ago I read a book called “Lying for God”. It was a systematic emotionally laden deconstruction of YEC. I wondered with disbelief at the time, whether people who are YECs really would knowingly lie to promote their understanding of the world. That was a long time ago, and since then I have frequently come across many people who spout what seem to me to be lies to uphold all sorts of worldviews. It was with this background that I was intrigued by a headline in New Scientist “Biologists create self replicating RNA molecule“. This piece of writing is unashamedly designed to promote the RNA world wishful thinking hypothesis of the spontaneous generation of life. The post describes how Read More ›

Image processing is but one of the many very clever design features in our eyes. Mores the pity that many who are focused on the blind spot cannot understand eyes to be Intelligently Designed. The fovea of the eye captures the small section of our visual field where we are looking directly. It is richly replete with colour sensing cones. It requires more light but has very high precision. When we look directly at someone or something in good light, that is where we get the detail from. In contrast to a TV screen and a video camera, which have the same detail all over the screen, the eyes economically concentrate on our point of direct interest, and scan the remaining Read More ›

 I have been listening to a few lectures by Christians who are convinced that the standard models of evolution explain all of biology including life’s origin. They say that evolution also explains all of cosmology. For them, this gives them, the evolutionary creationists, “a better god” than any model that requires a lesser form of “interventionist god”.  To quote loosely from a conversation between two of these good willed gentlemen.  “If we think of the cosmos as a game of billiards. The ID proponents have their god taking in turns and using the cue. Chance and nature are given a turn, then god comes in and sinks a ball. Finally after a long game, the eight ball is sunk, and we have Read More ›

Extracted from the UK Telegraph comes the faith creed of modern scientism. “Evolution by natural selection, and all the other processes that produced our planet and the life on it, are sufficient to explain how we got to be the way we are, given the laws of physics that operate in our universe. However, there is still scope for an intelligent designer of universes as a whole. The designer may have been responsible for the Big Bang, but nothing more. A very advanced civilisation would have the ability to set precise parameters, thereby designing the universe in detail. It would not be possible – even at the most advanced level – for the designers to interfere with baby universes once Read More ›

Eric Werner of the University of Oxford published a blog piece in PLOS which I have liberally edited below. I think it is an important development in thinking about design in biology.

“The chimp really started people wondering if genes can account for the difference between humans and animals. Since the genes of chimps and humans are 98.8% identical, the differences between chimps and humans cannot be the result of the information in those few different genes.

Humans, chimps and mice are very different even if made of the many of the same parts. The information for construction and structure lies not in the information that describes the parts, rather in an architectural plan that is used by agents to construct the organism.

The information resides in the genome, but not in the genes. It is in the network architecture that consists of coding and non coding areas that determine the timing and spatial patterning of cells that ultimately results in the development of the organism.

Many traits are the result of the mutation of genes. However most genes are instructions for building parts so a mutation in a gene results in a change of a part not the overall architecture. The information for the form is not in the parts-genes. It is in the control architecture, the regulatory networks of control units, most likely contained in the vast non parts coding regions of the genome.

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In a recent PNAS paper John Avise argued that evolution emancipates “religion from the shackles of theodicy” by getting any god off the hook as the source of seemingly cruel design defects in the human genome. Giving a god credit for the good designs, so the story goes, makes that god responsible for the bad designs too. Defending his opinion in this week’s PNAS letters Avise restates that a “God directly responsible for the many malfunctions that characterize the human genome, would seem to be quite malevolent as well as bumbling”. Believing as he does that “IDers promulgate the notion of an omnipotent and benevolent deity who directly crafts life ex nihilo” and “vehemently oppose any suggestion that God has Read More ›

‘Non-coding’ pieces of RNA can encode short proteins that regulate genes, researchers have found. Various non-coding RNA molecules do not produce protein but either regulate gene expression or carry out other functions in the cell. Many researchers question whether the rest of the apparently non-coding RNA made in cells has any function. Some believe many RNA molecules in the cell are merely junk — the accidental by-products of the process that transcribes RNA from a DNA template. “We missed microRNA for decades — maybe we missed ‘micropeptides’ for even longer.” Researchers in Japan have found a ‘non-coding’ RNA that directly codes for four peptides, short chains of amino acids from 11 to 32 amino acids long, that act to regulate Read More ›

I can’t let this one go without posting the reference to the paper generating all the fuss. Retinal glial cells enhance human vision acuity.   A. M. Labin and E. N. Ribak Physics Department, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa 32000, Israel “We construct a light-guiding model of the retina outside the fovea, in which an array of glial (Muller) cells permeates the depth of retina down to the photoreceptors. The retina is revealed as an optimal structure designed for improving the sharpness of images. The results provide evidence for a natural optical waveguide array, which preserves almost perfectly images obtained through a narrow pupil. Light guiding within the retinal volume is an effective and biologically convenient way to improve Read More ›

When you have made a bad call, hold on to it with all your might.  From NEW SCIENTIST. The eye was evolution’s great invention  06 May 2010  “Creationists have used the eye to make the “argument from design”. Evolutionary biologists say that the “inside out” vertebrate retina – leaves us with a blind spot – one of evolution’s “greatest mistakes”. Creationists have argue that the backwards retina has no problems providing excellent vision – and its structure enhances vision. A study by (non-creationist) neurophysicists in Israel has found just that. Müller cells, which support and nourish the neurons overlying the retina’s light-sensitive layer, also collect, filter and refocus light, before delivering it to the light sensors to make images clearer. Read More ›

Over in Spain, ex priest Francisco J. Ayala is spreading his silly and distorted views about ID. “It is not even a matter of conviction. I am certain that the five or seven scientists (mostly social scientists) on the Discovery Institute’s payroll, do not believe what they say. Creationism (which Ayala obviously conflates with ID) is the biggest aberration that can be conceived — not to science — but to faith. It is an atrocity that it attempts to solve the challenge of theodicy; that is how to reconcile the existence of evil in the world with that of God, placing on God the blame for everything that goes wrong. I cannot conceive anything more disastrous to religion than intelligent design. According Read More ›

Richard Dawkins on Australian TV waxes lyrical on science and religion, morality, the cross of Christ and the afterlife.

SCIENCE AND RELIGION

RICHARD DAWKINS: The implication you make is that there’s something about religion which is personal and upon which evidence doesn’t have any bearing. Now, as I scientist I care passionately about the truth. I think that the existence of a supreme being – a supernatural supreme being – is a scientific issue. Either there is a God or there isn’t. Either there are gods or there are no gods. That is a scientific issue. Yes, it’s a supremely important scientific question. If the universe was created by an intelligence, then we are looking at an entirely different kind of scientific theory than if the universe came into existence by natural means. If God or gods had something to do with the creation of life, then we’re looking at a totally different kind of biology.

So I think you can’t just say religion and science have nothing to do with each other. Science can get on and you let people have their own religious – of course you let people believe whatever they like. But you cannot say that science and religion are completely separate because religion makes scientific claims. It certainly makes scientific claims about miracles, and you cannot reconcile an authentic approach to science with a belief in miracles or, I suspect, with a belief in supernatural creation. At least the very least you should say is that this is a scientific question. Read More ›