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Michael G. Todhunter, a creationist and geneticist had his letter to the editor published in Physics Today. He was responding to Addressing the public about science and religion by Murray Peshkin.

See: Volume 60, Issue 2, “Debate About Science and Religion Continues”

Being a PhD geneticist and a creationist, I was disappointed that Murray Peshkin did not give references for the statement “Hundreds of Darwin’s predicted missing links have been found.” I find quite the opposite.
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One of our readers, who goes by the call sign “late_model” asked for a thread on Wheeler’s thesis that information is more fundamental than matter and energy. Wheeler, was highlighted in Wired Magazine’s 2007 edition: Wired: What we don’t know.

I recently posted on Irreducible Complexity in Mathematics, Physics and Biology. That thread generated interest in a well-written article by ID proponents in Italy. The article touches on the work of Turing, Chaitin, von Neumann and relates it to ID-sympathetic literature by Dembski, Behe, Voie, Trevors and Abel. The article was so well written and informative, that I felt it deserved its own thread. Our readers can learn much about ID through this article!

Mathematics and the origin-of-life problem

Here are some excerpts:

The works of Gödel, Turing, Chaitin and Von Neumann even from different points of view, show basic limits of the reasoning power. Someone said that these results got the fall of the platonistic conceptions about mathematics. This conclusion is fully wrong. The truth is exactly the inverse of that. Plato never said the total truth could be derived from few axioms. Instead what was fallen on 1931 is the positivistic utopia that reason may get more from less! In nuce reason cannot get Infinity from finite. In short that is the moral we can learn from the theorems about information irreducibility. These are particular cases only of a more general ascertainment: total truth cannot be axiomatizable. We cannot close the Unlimited into a limited system. The Total Possibility, i.e. the Infinite, is not reducible to a system. In all fields one can find the effects of this universal truth. Gödel found them in metamathematics, Turing found them in informatics, Chaitin found them in AIT. In the following we will show as also the fundamental problem of biology – the origin of life – is unsolvable without an intelligent source indeed due to the same reasons.
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There is a new paper on Irreducible Complexity by renowned mathematician Gregory Chaitin: The Halting Probability Omega: Irreducible Complexity in Pure Mathematics Milan Journal of Mathematics, Vol. 75, 2007.

Ω is an extreme case of total lawlessness; in effect, it shows that God plays dice in pure mathematics.

On the surface Chaitin’s notion of Irreducible Complexity (IC) in math may seem totally irrelevant to Irreducible Complexity (IC) in ID literature. But let me argue that notion of IC in math relates to IC in physics which may point to some IC in biology…

First, of consider this article archived at Access Research Network (ARN) by George Johnson in the NY Times on IC in physics:

Challenging Particle Physics as Path to Truth

Many complex systems — the very ones the solid-staters study — appear to be irreducible.

The concept of “irreducible complexity” has been used by Alan Turing, Michael Behe, and perhaps now by physicists. Behe’s sense of irreducible is not too far from the sense of irreducible in the context of this physics. If biological systems take advantage of irreducible phenomena in physics (for example, what if we discover the brain uses irreducible physical phenomena ) we will have a strong proof by contradiction that there are no Darwinian pathways for biolgoical systems to incorporate that phenomena.

The possibility of IC in physics may be tied to IC in math and this may have relevance to IC in biology.
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In 1981 Dennett and Hofstadter edited a compilation of essays entitled The Mind’s I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self & Soul . The book is a compilation of essays by Dawkins, Morowitz, Searle, Alan Turing, and several other big names on the nature of mind and intelligence. Since ID implies a mind of some sort, it is appropriate to ponder what a mind really is, and this is a surprisingly good book on the topic.

Dennett’s co-author, Hofstadter, makes an interesting remark about the ultimate mind:

one way to think of the universal wave function [of quantum physics] is as the mind– or brain, if you prefer–of the great novelist in the sky, God.

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Some of the claims by ID proponents have not been adequately explored because of the cost issues involved in doing large-scale whole-genome sequencing of numerous individuals. Not even Warren Buffet has the trillions of dollars needed to accomplish such a massive amount of gene sequencing. At least not today, but maybe in the future!

The human genome project took 3 billion dollars and 13 years to complete. By comparison, Solexa might be able to do a comparable job for a few thousand dollars per person (ideally even less) and in a much shorter time frame. (See the UD sidebar on Solexa Genomics.) Solexa might be viewed as an unwitting research partner of the ID movement.
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What are the speed limits of naturalistic evolution? We know from experience it takes time to evolve a species. Would naturalistic evolution be fast enough in geological time to turn a cow into a whale, an ape-like creature into a human? What are the speed limits of evolution?
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Through a little detective work, I found out where some of the Discovery Institute’s research funding has gone. It was an obscure comment in a paper that clued me in. The funding was for an exploration into the fundamental Speed Limits of Naturalistic Evolution. What was the plight of this exploration?

Here is a great collection of internet radio interviews by Jason Rennie of the SciPhi Show: The ID Files The ID Files is a compilation of interviews about the recent Intelligent Design Controversy taken from The Sci Phi Show (http://thesciphishow.com). These interviews are with Dr Michael Shermer of the Skeptic Society, Salvador Cordova of the IDEA Centre, Dr Mike Behe of Lehigh University and Nick Matzke from the NCSE. The individuals represent a spectrum of positions on the question of Intelligent Design and these interviews serve as a useful introduction to the issues at stake and the ideas involved.

I’m honored to have the chance to present a post-Darwinist conversion account by one of our Uncommon Descent readers, Dr. David Cook, MD. Physicians like him serve as role models to the young and are a symbol to the scientific community that highly intelligent and scientifically literate people can be skeptical of Darwinian evolution.
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DNA researcher Andras Pellionisz has found unwitting friends in the ID community. He observed that while Darwinists like Richard Dawkins are dismissive of his field of scientific research, ID proponents are surprisingly enthusiastic about his work and that of his colleagues. We have thus found here at Uncommon Descent a friend from quarters I would have never guessed in Dr. Pellionisz and his colleagues.

Pellionisz lamented here that it is the ID proponents who show more interest than people like Dawkins in the highly important areas of research within biology [and imho, evolutionary biology is not a highly important field of research, SYSTEMS Biology is]. Pellionisz then added:
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See: Billions of Missing Links

It is my speculation the notorious Beyond Belief Conference and Dawkins call to make religion illegal are signs secularism could be on the brink of crisis. Ironically, Daniel Dennett unwittingly gives powerful “scientific” reasons why secularism is doomed and why religion (which tends to be ID-friendly) will prevail as the dominant paradigm in human culture. See Evolution is Cruel to Dawkins and Dennett.

Mike Gene said it so well:

And therein may lie the most cruel irony of evolution. While it may make it possible for Richard Dawkins to be intellectually fulfilled, it also means that Dawkins, from an evolutionary perspective, embraces a world view that is maladapted to his biological essence and thus is nothing more than another evolutionary oddity whose lineage is a dead-end.

Cornell geneticist John Sanford pointed out many problems confronting the theory of Darwinian evolution, particularly human evolution. (See: Genetic Entropy ) Many of his arguments were subtle. Among them was his discussion of a somewhat obscure paper: Estimate of the Mutation Rate per Nucleotide in Humans by Nachman.

Nachman writes:

The high deleterious mutation rate in humans presents a paradox.

What Nachman’s paper discusses is the idea of purifying selection (getting rid of bad mutations). If a population on average is receiving 3 deleterious mutations per individual, each female would have to be making 40 offspring to provide sufficent population resources to purge the bad mutations out of the population. But only 3 deleterious mutations per individual might be extremely optimistic. What if we’re dealing with more?
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There’s a bigger genetic jump between humans and chimps than previously believed

A lot more genes may separate humans from their chimp relatives than earlier studies let on. Researchers studying changes in the number of copies of genes in the two species found that their mix of genes is only 94 percent identical. The 6 percent difference is considerably larger than the commonly cited figure of 1.5 percent.

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