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Darwinism

The Evolution of the Long-Necked Giraffe — A Preview

Granville Sewell asked me to post this: “The Evolution of the Long-Necked Giraffe” A Preview of W.E.Loennig’s Part II By Granville Sewell Darwin’s 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 (at www.discovery.org/csc) as an example of purely quantitative change, that natural selection possibly could explain, as opposed to the origins of new organs and new systems Read More ›

If you could be a fly on the wall — now you can!

Rarely does the public catch a glimpse of how Darwinists actually behave toward colleagues who disagree with their view of biological origins. Thus, as a public service, I’m presenting here a correspondence, initiated by Darwinists and unsolicited by our side, that provides readers of this blog with such a glimpse. Briefly, a Johns Hopkins biologist named David Levin sent an unsolicited and wonderfully insulting letter to Michael Behe (the entire letter is given toward the bottom of this post). Levin also attached a pdf of a Nature article (see the very bottom of this post). As it is, Levin copied Ken Miller, Richard Dawkins, and the usual suspects. Ken Miller, thinking that Levin had a slam-dunk against ID, then suggested to Levin that he also send me what he had sent Behe (presumably to crush my spirits). Here, then, is the exchange. To trace the chronology, you’ll need to start from the bottom and work your way up. I post Mike Behe’s response to Levin with Mike’s permission. After Behe’s response and my second response to Levin, we never heard from him again.

—– Original Message —–
Date: Thu, 22 Feb 2007 23:36:44 -0600
To: “David E. Levin”
From: “William A. Dembski”
Subject: Re: Fw: Evolution of a biochemical pathway by gene duplication and specialization
Cc: richard.dawkins AT zoo.ox.ac.uk, robison AT nucleus.harvard, aorr AT mail.rochester, rdoolittle AT ucsd, Kenneth_Miller AT Brown, lziska AT asrr.arsusda, Lisa West , Behe

Dear Dr. Levin,

I receive many unsolicited emails asking me to comment on how the theory of intelligent design deals with this or that objection to it. You are asking me to respond to an informal letter that you wrote to Michael Behe sketching out some worries you have about his notion of irreducible complexity. Let me suggest you write up your thoughts in a formal article and submit them to a peer-reviewed publication. Once it’s accepted, I’ll be happy to look at it more closely and offer comment. As it is, Michael Behe was gracious enough to send you some comment on your letter (I’ve pasted his comments below for continuity), though he appears much less impressed with your work than you are.

In your note to me below you write: “you seem incapable or unwilling to discuss the data or the inescapable conclusion that emerges from them.” Actually I’m quite willing. If you would like me to speak at your campus on the topic of intelligent design and address your data, I can put you in touch with my speakers bureau.

Best wishes,
Bill Dembski

—– Original Message —–
At 09:26 AM 2/22/2007, David E. Levin wrote:

Dr. Dembski,

You seem to have missed the point of my letter to Behe. It was not to bring to his attention the Kellis et al. paper. That was merely the starting point, the prerequisite understanding from which my work followed. It did not escape my notice that you had nothing whatever to say about my demonstration of how a real biochemical pathway has evolved to a more complex state. Perhaps all the biochemistry and genetics is beyond you.

Still, your criticism of the Kellis et al. paper was telling. Lets see, you asserted that it is now three years old, as though its age as some bearing on the validity of its conclusions. You clued into the phrases computational algorithm and statistical analysis as though such things invalidate any conclusions the authors might derive. These guys sequenced and assembled the genome of a species and aligned its eight chromosomes with the 16 chromosomes of another species. Yes, they used computers and statistics to assist them in their analysis. Its a 10 megabase eukaryotic genome! You sort of need computers and statistics to crunch all that information.

Whats important here is to look at the remarkable picture that emerges from this work. A species ancestral to the bakers’ yeast underwent a whole-genome duplication, followed by loss of most of the duplicated genes. This is how bakers’ yeast arrived at current genomic organization. As I said before, there is no other way to interpret these data. But you seem incapable or unwilling to discuss the data or the inescapable conclusion that emerges from them. I am taken aback by the extreme level of intellectual dishonesty that pervades the intelligent design circle. Your tactic is always to deflect and misdirect. Never mind the data, its old, or it uses statistics, or it presupposes common descent. Why are you so afraid of the data? Its as though you creationists have closed your eyes, covered your ears with your hands and are muttering to yourselves My mind is made up, dont confuse me with facts.

As for your assertion that nonteleological evolutionary mechanisms are not sufficient to drive the evolutionary process, I have provided an excellent example of precisely how this happens. Deal with it!

David E. Levin, Ph. D.
Professor
Dept. of Biochem. & Molec. Biol.
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
615 N. Wolfe St.
Baltimore, MD 21205

Ph. (410) 955-snip
fax (410) 955-snip

—– Original Message —–
At 01:26 PM 2/22/2007, Michael Behe wrote:

Hello, Professor Levin, nice to meet you. Well, I see that even though you work in Baltimore, you’ve managed to avoid acquiring any Southern charm. Most folks consider it rude to send insulting, unsolicited mail to people you’ve never met, even if you don’t like their views. I hope at least you are polite toward people who agree with you.

Thanks for sending me the brief report on your work. Clearly you are excited about it, so I hope you don’t mind that I find it unimpressive even if your interpretation of events is correct. Here’s how I see your scenario: Roughly a hundred million years ago the ancestor of S. cerevisiae had a well-regulated, multicomponent pathway, including a prodigy protein, Mpk1, that had several activities. That complex pathway is taken by you for granted, as an unexplained starting point. Then the genome duplicated. In one of the duplicated copies of the prodigy protein a point mutation caused it to lose one of its pre-existing abilities. In the other copy of the prodigy protein, although it hasn’t happened yet in nature, you have in your own lab demonstrated that, by golly, a simple mutation can cause the other pre-existing ability to be lost too. I’m afraid I find all of that unsurprising. It has been known for quite a long time that mutations can inactivate protein functions.

The single gain of function in your whole story is the new binding site for Rlm1. That, however, is a comparably modest change; since the consensus binding sequence for MADS-box proteins is about ten nucleotides, with considerable redundancy, such a sequence would be expected to occur by chance perhaps every ten kilobases or so, and either to have been present in some segment of the population at the time of the genome duplication, or to be produced by point mutation very shortly thereafter. Such sites are thought to be gained and lost continually. At the very best then, assuming that modern Mpk1 eventually does lose the ability to activate SBF, according to your own scenario we are left with yeast that does pretty much the same thing with two very similar pathways that its ancestor did with one. And that meager (potential) result required enormous evolutionary resources: a hundred million years, whole genome duplication, and huge numbers of yeast likely many orders of magnitude more than the numbers of a vertebrate species that would be available in a similar span of time.

Frankly, I’m puzzled why that is supposed to be an example of the power of Darwinian processes. Id be happy to cite it myself as an illustration of genome drift within tight limits set by severe constraints. The trivial changes the scenario involves would be expected to have been available in the yeast population a very short time after the initial genome duplication event. Yet here we are twiddling our thumbs, tens of millions of years later, still waiting for the scenario to complete itself. This suggests to me that your scenario is overlooking many complicating factors, such straightforward issues as whether genome duplications or gain/loss of regulatory binding sites or loss of protein function even in a duplicated copy are deleterious, and whether there are useful functions close by existing functions. Such questions plague any simplistic Darwinian scenario, including the ones you cite that were proposed for the blood clotting cascade, but it seems few people are willing to take the difficulties seriously.

I wish you well with your work, Professor Levin. But please don’t write to me again unless you can restrain your childish sneers.

Sincerely,

Mike Behe

P.S. – I apologize for bothering all the people who were copied by Professor Levin on his original email.

Read More ›

Dawkins’s 66th birthday — Hey, what about my birthday greeting?

For whatever reason, the people at richarddawkins.net put me on their mailing list and sent me an invitation some time back to write a birthday greeting for Richard Dawkins, who celebrates his 66th birthday today. Go to richarddawkins.net/happybirthdayRD, and you’ll find birthday greetings from Dan Dennett, Sam Harris, P.Z. Myers, Michael Shermer, etc. But my birthday greeting is nowhere to be found. Here’s the panegyric I sent in a few weeks back (yes, I’ve posted it at UD before; note that I cribbed from Harry Jaffa, Daniel Dennett, and Barbara Kingsolver). I figure just in case the ID thing doesn’t work out, I’ll have a backup . . . . There are rare times and places, in the illustrious history Read More ›

Ken Miller: “Blame the BBC’s bad editing”

Two days ago I commented on a post at evolutionnews.org that seemed to catch Ken Miller red-handed in misrepresenting my work on specified complexity (go here for my post). Specifically, on a BBC program titled THE WAR ON SCIENCE, Miller is seen, right after I was shown speaking on probabilities, commenting on the use of probabilities by ID proponents to underwrite ID. Given what I’ve written on this topic and given what Miller said on the program, if he were commenting on my work, there’s no question it would be a blatant misrepresentation. Now Miller is claiming that he was not commenting on my work at all. Rather, this was all the BBC’s fault. Miller claims that through bad editing, Read More ›

SMU in a tizzy over ID

SMU appears upset about the Darwin vs. Design conference taking place in April and reported here yesterday (go here). The article below in today’s Dallas Morning News says that the anthropology department at SMU wrote to the administration: “These are conferences of and for believers and their sympathetic recruits…” Doesn’t the “M” in SMU refer to “Methodist” and aren’t Methodists believers in God? Is SMU’s anthropology department committed to hiring anti-God faculty?

SMU profs protest intelligent design conference
11:40 AM CDT on Saturday, March 24, 2007
By JEFFREY WEISS / The Dallas Morning News
jweiss@dallasnews.com
SOURCE: www.dallasnews.com

Professors opposed to the Bush library aren’t the only angry faculty members at Southern Methodist University this week.

Science professors upset about a presentation on “Intelligent Design” fired blistering letters to the administration, asking that the event be shut down.

The “Darwin vs. Design” conference, co-sponsored by the SMU law school’s Christian Legal Society, will say that a designer with the power to shape the cosmos is the best explanation for aspects of life and the universe. The event is produced by the Discovery Institute, the Seattle-based organization that says it has scientific evidence for its claims.

The anthropology department at SMU begged to differ:

“These are conferences of and for believers and their sympathetic recruits,” said the letter sent to administrators by the department. “They have no place on an academic campus with their polemics hidden behind a deceptive mask.”

Similar letters were sent by the biology and geology departments.

The university is not going to cancel the event, interim provost Tom Tunks said Friday. The official response is a statement that the event to be held in McFarlin Auditorium April 13-14 is not endorsed by the school: Read More ›

Proving my point at the Panda’s Thumb

At the Panda’s Thumb (go here), PvM suggests that I quoted Darwin’s remarks about the Irish out of context in a recent blog entry (go here for the quote). Darwin, quoting a certain Mr. Greg with approval, refers to “the careless, squalid, unaspiring Irishman.” Mr. Greg goes on to say that the Irish multiply like rabbits whereas the more civilized Scot doesn’t. What I didn’t quote is Darwin’s subsequent qualifications, in which he sees factors as lowering Irish birthrates and raising Scottish birthrates. Thus, in my quote, I didn’t provide the proper nuance to Darwin’s theory as it applies to Irish and Scottish birthrates. Hello, Everyone. Have you had your morning coffee? The point of the quote was not to Read More ›

Professional Life Investments and Objectivity in Evaluating ID’s Logic and Evidence

A bunch of people are mad at me for my “wasted life” comment, and I confess to an injudicious choice of words. Of course I don’t believe that Ken Miller’s, or anyone else’s life is a total waste just because one’s professional career might be invested in something that turns out to be wrong. But I do think there is a valid point concerning one’s professional life investment and objectivity in evaluating evidence, and I think that Darwinism has caused countless people to invest their careers in a pursuit that will turn out to have been a waste of time and effort. What paleontologist would want to admit that he invested his life’s work in looking for transitional intermediates that Read More ›

SMU: “Did I say leprosy? I meant intelligent design!”

In response to the upcoming Darwin vs. Design seminar at Southern Methodist University April 13th and 14th (featuring Lee Strobel, Steve Meyer, Mike Behe, and Jay Richards — go here), the university is set to issue the following statement in response: Under SMU’s procedures for making appropriate campus facilities available for community events, McFarlin Auditorium has been rented by the Discovery Institute April 13-14 for a program titled “Darwin vs. Design.” SMU policy requires that groups using campus facilities must have a University organization as a co-sponsor. In this case, the Christian Legal Society, a student group in SMU’s Dedman School of Law, is co-sponsoring the event. Although SMU makes its facilities available as a community service, and in support Read More ›

Freedom to Mutate

Mutations create variation in the gene pool, and the less favorable mutations are removed by natural selection, while more favorable ones tend to accumulate, resulting in evolutionary change. To give our children and children’s children the advantage of accelerated evolution, it is now possible to speed evolution with a new food supplement from Finch’s Foods. Details are HERE. [Caution: May Cause Birth Defects]

“No thanks, I’ll take two fivers” — Dumping Darwin from British currency

British paper currency — the 10-pound note — features Charles Darwin. (The custom is that the notes all have the Queen on one side and a famous Briton on the other. The notes are in denominations 5, 10, 20, and 50; there are no 1-pound or 2-pound paper notes, these are coins). A couple of days ago the Bank of England issued a new 20-pound note, using new security features, and took the occasion to change the “famous person.” This is a news-worthy cause for British Darwin-doubters, who should urge that Darwin be dumped from the 10-pound note whenever there is a new security-upgrade version, on grounds that he is the chief prophet of the materialist religion, and his presence Read More ›

It’s a happy Darwinian world after all …

Every now and again when I want to feel good about our shared humanity, I curl up with Darwin’s DESCENT OF MAN and read passages like the following: The reckless, degraded, and often vicious members of society, tend to increase at a quicker rate than the provident and generally virtuous members. Or as Mr. Greg puts the case: “The careless, squalid, unaspiring Irishman multiplies like rabbits: the frugal, foreseeing, self-respecting, ambitious Scot, stern in his morality, spiritual in his faith, sagacious and disciplined in his intelligence, passes his best years in struggle and in celibacy, marries late, and leaves few behind him. Given a land originally peopled by a thousand Saxons and a thousand Celts—and in a dozen generations five-sixths Read More ›

Now that’s more like it for a disclaimer …

Remember those disclaimers such as “this paper in no way endorses intelligent design” or “this article in no way challenges evolutionary theory” (see here for instance). Well here’s a disclaimer that appears right at the start of a forthcoming book on evolutionary computation — one that is being published through a recognized academic outlet: Disclaimer: The Editors are not endorsing evolution as a scientific fact, in that species evolve from one kind to another. The term “evolutionary” in the evolutionary computation (EC) simply means that the characteristics of an individual changes within the population of the same species, as observed in the nature. Way to go!!

“Climate Denial” — What’s Next, “Evolution Denial”?

Actually, we’re already there. Many Darwinists critical of ID no longer reside in the culture of rational discourse. They know they are right as much as any religious dogmatist. But the alarmism takes this one step further. Because denial poses a danger to the body politic, deniers must to rooted out. Moreover, those who root them out, as the defenders of virtue against evil, thus require additional powers to root them out. After that, persecution Soviet-style is not far away. “A former professor of climatology at the University of Winnipeg has received multiple death threats for questioning the extent to which human activities are driving global warming. ‘”Western governments have pumped billions of dollars into careers and institutes and they Read More ›

The NCSE’s Behind-the-Scenes Role in the Sternberg Affair

Over a year ago I urged readers of UD to provide me with behind-the-scenes correspondence showing that the NCSE (National Center for Science Education) and others had attempted to derail Richard Sternberg’s career after The Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington published an article on intelligent design by Stephen Meyer while Sternberg was still its managing editor (go here and here). I was finally sent that information. The following link takes you to the Congressional Report on the Sternberg Affair along with that correspondence, which is given in the appendix (the file is 3Mbytes): www.uncommondescent…/Sternberg_Cong_Rep_App.pdf Note especially Eugenie Scott’s role in this affair.