Darwinism

And people are talking about it. In this vid and pdf from his lecture at the university’s Graham School (October 2010), he lays out his thinking:

4. The DNA record tells us that major steps in genome evolution have involved rapid genome-wide changes.5. We know of molecular processes that allow us to think scientifically about complex evolutionary events – particularly about the rapid evolution of genomic circuits
and multi-component adaptations.

As author of Evolution: A view from the 21st century, he has also said at Fermilab (2010) that arch-Darwinist Richard Dawkins “lives in a world of fantasy,” stressing as above that “evolutionary theory needs mechanisms for very rapid, coordinated change.”
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Here, at Telic Thoughts (posted June 17, 2011) is an interview (vid) with University of Otago biochemist Michael Denton. Not an ID guy exactly, he wrote Evolution: A theory in crisis (1986) and Nature’s Destiny (2002), providing a comprehensive look at evolution without Darwinism. A floodlight at last.

Many people first became interested in the fundamental question – Darwinism and “science” vs. evidence and real science – from reading Denton – including Phillip Johnson, who first brought the ID guys together to ask the key question … and so now? Read More ›

Including prominent molecular biologist Eugene Koonin:

Despite considerable experimental and theoretical effort, no compelling scenarios currently exist for the origin of replication and translation, the key processes that together comprise the core of biological systems and the apparent pre-requisite of biological evolution. The RNA World concept might offer the best chance for the resolution of this conundrum but so far cannot adequately account for the emergence of an efficient RNA replicase or the translation system.The MWO version of the cosmological model of eternal inflation could suggest a way out of this conundrum because, in an infinite multiverse with a finite number of distinct macroscopic histories (each repeated an infinite number of times), emergence of even highly complex systems by chance is not just possible but inevitable. Read More ›

Here’s an interesting perspective from Paul Benedict (War of Words, July 2, 2011):

Stephen C. Meyer, expounding Intelligent Design in his book Signature in the Cell, makes a point he does not seem to appreciate: for decades microbiologists have been abandoning Darwinism. Breakthrough technologies have shown that life at the cellular level is complex beyond anything Darwin or any 19th century biologist could have predicted. From the variety of cellular functions to the complex information transmitted in the gene, many outstanding scientists recognize that the math just doesn’t work. Intelligent Design represents only one concession to the statistical impossibility that chance caused the life of simple cells. Interrupting the following parade of microbiologists who, like Meyers, recognize that random chance alone cannot have produced the simplest cellular life, are conclusions flowing from this scientific consensus. 

Christian de Duve, for example, a Nobel Prize winner, and in no way an advocate of Intelligent Design, has abandoned random chance as the agent of upwards evolution or the ascent of man. Read More ›

Biologist and author Norbert Smith has never been a fan of Darwinism, and Evolution has Failed is his latest assessment. One of his areas of considerable experience is alligators, because his job included tagging them:

Having done well in electronics in the Air Force, Smith was interested in using telemetry on submerged alligators. He developed greatly improved telemetry equipment for monitoring rattlesnakes. He then acquired a large alligator at the Welder Refuge, fitted it with a collar, and released it into Big Lake.He was attempting to test the way in which alligators regulate their body heat (thermoregulation) for his MS thesis. To do this he would follow the alligator for days, observing it from a blind or, when necessary, from a boat.

A great deal was riding on the experiment because, contrary to the widely accepted “reptilian brain” theory of intelligence, the alligator is intelligent. Once escaped, it is gone … hard to recapture. Read More ›

In 2009, University of Chicago geneticist Jerry A. Coyne compared predictions based on intelligent design with those based on Darwinian evolution. “If organisms were built from scratch by a designer,” he argued, they would not have imperfections.

“Perfect design would truly be the sign of a skilled and intelligent designer. Imperfect design is the mark of evolution; inf fact, it’s precisely what we expect from evolution.” According to Coyne, “when a trait is no longer used or becomes reduced, the genes that make it don’t instantly disappear from the genome: Evolution strops their action by inactivating them, not snipping them out of the DNA. From this we can make a prediction. We expect to find, in the genomes of many species, silenced, or ‘dead,’ genes: genes that once were useful but re no longer intact or expressed. In other words, there should be vestigial genes.”  Read More ›

British physicist David Tyler comments at Access Research Network on the “Modern optics in the eyes of an Early Cambrian arthropod” (July 1, 2011):

We have known for many years that the eyes of trilobites, going back to the Early Cambrian, have highly sophisticated optics. Although vision has been invoked as a probable characteristic of many other types of animal, there have been few examples of preserved eyes in the fossil record, even in the Burgess Shale and Chengjiang lagerstatte. However, Read More ›

At Chronicle of Higher Education, Christopher Shea profiles Patricia Churchland, author of Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us About Morality (Princeton University Press), who explains “I would read contemporary ethicists and just feel very unsatisfied. It was like I couldn’t see how to tether any of it to the hard and fast. I couldn’t see how it had anything to do with evolutionary biology, which it has to do, and I couldn’t see how to attach it to the brain.” As an eliminative materialist (there really is no “you”), she is confident that evolutionary biology will help us understand morality. With what result?

The element of cultural relativism also remains somewhat mysterious in Churchland’s writings on morality. In some ways, her project dovetails with that of Sam Harris, the “New Atheist” (and neuroscience Ph.D.) who believes reason and neuroscience can replace woolly armchair philosophy and religion as guides to morality. But her defense of some practices of primitive tribes, including infanticide (in the context of scarcity) —as well the seizing of enemy women, in raids, to keep up the stock of mates— as “moral” within their own context, seems the opposite of his approach.I reminded Churchland, who has served on panels with Harris, that he likes to put academics on the spot by asking if they think such practices as the early 19th-century Hindu tradition of burning widows on their husbands’ funeral pyres was objectively wrong.

So did she think so? Read More ›

“It keeps all the old professors happy in the university. It gives them something to do. I don’t know if there’s any harm in it except they ram it down everybody’s throat.” At Evolution News & Views, David Klinghoffer elaborates on Lennon’s Darwin-dissing views: He laughed at what he regarded as the ludicrousness of Darwinian theory, comparing it with young earth creationism. This was in an interview with Playboy, one of the last he gave and reprinted in a book by journalist David Sheff, All We Are Saying: The Last Major Interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono (St. Martin’s Griffin, 2000): Nor do I think we came from monkeys, by the way… That’s another piece of garbage. What the Read More ›

Here, Martin Olasky, editor-in-chief of World tells us how “Darwin matters” (June 29, 2011):

Politics.Woodrow Wilson started federal government expansion in 1912 by opposing the “Newtonian” view that the government should have an unchanging constitutional foundation, somewhat like “the law of gravitation.” He argued that government should be “accountable to Darwin, not to Newton. It is modified by its environment, necessitated by its tasks, shaped to its functions by the sheer pressure of life. . . . Living political constitutions must be Darwinian in structure and in practice.” Wilson was the president who started the modern pattern of disregarding the Constitution, and in the 2012 election we will either start a second century of governmental expansion or yell, “Stop!” Read More ›

In “Geometric Principles Appear Universal in Our Minds” (Wired Science, May 24, 2011) , Bruce Bower reflects on the fact that research among peoples who do not even count suggests that abstract geometric principles are probably innate in humans:

If geometry relies on an innate brain mechanism, it’s unclear how such a neural system generates abstract notions about phenomena such as infinite surfaces and why this system doesn’t fully kick in until age 7. If geometry depends on years of spatial learning, it’s not known how people transform real-world experience into abstract geometric concepts — such as lines that extend forever or perfect right angles — that a forest dweller never encounters in the natural world.

As always, we needn’t wait long for a Darwin answer: Read More ›

From John Nolte at Andrew Breitbart’s “Big Hollywood,” we learn John Lennon’s take on evolutionary theory. “More on John Lennon’s Move Away from ‘Imagine’: Evolution is ‘Absolute Garbage’:

Even more shocking to the idea of Lennon as a secular leftist, or a deep thinker, the man rejected evolution. “Nor do I think we came from monkeys, by the way,” he insisted. “That’s another piece of garbage. What the hell’s it based on? We couldn’t’ve come from anything—fish, maybe, but not monkeys. I don’t believe in the evolution of fish to monkeys to men. Why aren’t monkeys changing into men now? It’s absolute garbage.”

Nolte is referring to Jordan Michael Smith’s article, “Stop Imagining,” kicking around since last December in American Conservative.

So why did his widow sue Expelled’s producers? (In the end, the court required her to Imagine fair use.)

Possible answer:

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Perhaps they weren’t thinking how other evolutionists might react. The fact that the Sage of Morris, Minnesota scored in Technorati’s top 3500 doesn’t tell us much about who reads his blog or why, and that’s now Nature made the decision. And you have to pay to read about it.

Over at Evolution News & Views (June 28, 2011), Casey Luskin advises that many fellow Darwinists are not amused by P. Z. Myers’ antics. (The one that comes immediately to some minds just now is the circus around producer Mark Mathis booting him from a screening of Expelled, but that’s probably an accident of timing.) Anyway,

In fact, the rhetorical strategies of Professor Myers and his colleagues are so uncivil that they have earned criticism from mainstream academics and writers who are otherwise pro-evolution. Read More ›

At Creation-Evolution headlines, Dave Coppedge asks, “If This Is Evolution, What Is Trivia?” (June 24, 2011): New Scientist printed a dramatic headline, “Lab yeast make evolutionary leap to multicellularity.” A leap of the imagination, as it happens. This challenge to Darwinian evolution turned out to be a cinch, it went on to claim: “In just a few weeks single-celled yeast have evolved into a multicellular organism, complete with division of labour between cells,” reporter Bob Holmes announced. “This suggests that the evolutionary leap to multicellularity may be a surprisingly small hurdle.” Trouble is, other evolutionists aren’t buying it. For one thing, William Ratcliff and colleagues at the University of Minnesota “set out to evolve multicellularity” in yeast cells by centrifuging Read More ›

And its biggest asset right now is public funding and court judgments.

Steve Fuller, agnostic sociologist at Warwick University (Britain) and author of Dissent over Descent, gives us an entertaining picture of astrology in the decades  before its collapse that unmistakably echoes Darwinism today:

… in the four centuries that separated the early Oxford scholastics from Newton, astrology grew in secular importance, resulting in the field’s knowledge claims becoming “unfalsifiable,” the specific quality Popper attributed to pseudoscientific theories. In other words, astrologers refused to submit to a public test that might reveal a fundamental error in their theories.

[As in arch-Darwinist Richard Dawkins refuses to debate, despite fellow Oxford atheist’s chastisement? ] Read More ›