Intelligent Design

As an undergraduate studying evolutionary biology — like many other such students, I suppose — I read Will Provine’s classic The Origin of Theoretical Population Genetics (University of Chicago Press, 1971), a standard history of the laying of the mathematical and conceptual foundations, in the work of Fisher, Haldane, and Wright, of what later came to be known as the Evolutionary Synthesis (i.e., textbook neo-Darwinism). When Chicago reissued the book in 2001, Provine added a remarkable Afterword. With characteristic candor, he wrote that “my views have changed dramatically.” Natural selection, for instance, Provine no longer saw as a “force” or “mechanism” of any kind: Natural selection does not act on anything, nor does it select (for or against), force, maximize, Read More ›

In this week’s Nature, an analysis of the human genome has shown tracing 4,692 homologous recombinations backwards in time leads to “24 distinct groups”. They say their work supports a “‘punctuated’ model of evolution.” I don’t have access to the entire article (maybe somebody does), but the language contained in the abstract is the kind that we might associate with “front-loading”; viz., “Our analysis reveals that human segmental duplications are frequently organized around ‘core’ duplicons, which are enriched for transcripts and, in some cases, encode primate-specific genes undergoing positive selection.”

I did a Wikipedia search for “duplicon” and found nothing; but a Google search gives the following article: Abstract Only. Duplicons appear to be something that is seen at the chromosomal level, and involves low-level repeats of the chromosome. The description this week’s Nature authors give of a duplicon “enriched for transcripts” seems to strongly suggest that the rearrangements that have taken place in the “duplicon” have resulted in more of the genome being expressed. The image I have of what might be taking place comes from my very ancient familiarity with computer programming, and, assuming programming essentials haven’t changed much, it is this: in a computer program there are decision nodes and “go to” nodes that redirect the program to various subroutines, these subroutines being present at some numbered location along the length of the program. If for some reason one subroutine in the program were substituted for another, the program would probably still run, but the output would certainly be different. And, if additional “go to” nodes were “copied”, more subroutines would be expressed. Likewise, if you have genetic instructions along the string of nucleotides that redirects the genetic program to some other downstream part of the genome that allows some particular protein/regulatory function to take place, then, through recombination, different “subroutines” might be inserted, or more signals for transcription might be included.

Maybe this is straining the programming analogy, I don’t know. But in any event, what the authors are reporting doesn’t sound to me like information is being generated (gradualism), but that already present information is being more robustly used (punctuated model of evolution).

Any thoughts?

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I just received this by email. Check out the link given. Some time back, David Anderson provided UD with high-quality amusement here. Dear friend, I’m contacting you with this because you’ve given me some previous encouragement, posted a link, or been in contact in some other way in the debate over Darwinism, creation, intelligent design, etc. Many of you will know me as the author of “Does Richard Dawkins exist?” I have just put online a major new audio-visual presentation: “Is belief in divine creation rational? (responding to atheist claims).” The talk is 77 minutes long, accompanied by slides (combined courtesy of Google video), and goes over quite a wide field – rationality, morality, laws (or not?) of logic, Richard Read More ›

ToTheSource.org Exclusive Flew Interview Benjamin Wiker: You say in There is a God, that “it may well be that no one is as surprised as I am that my exploration of the Divine has after all these years turned from denial…to discovery.” . . . But wasn’t there a point in the “argument” where you found yourself suddenly surprised by the realization that “There is a God” after all? . . . Anthony (sic.) Flew: There were two factors in particular that were decisive. One was my growing empathy with the insight of Einstein and other noted scientists that there had to be an Intelligence behind the integrated complexity of the physical Universe. The second was my own insight that Read More ›

The concept of IC is that an IC system has no *functioning* precursors with the same function. Zachriel’s program (and other similar programs randomly generating phrases) don’t challenge IC because the target phrases do not have functioning precursors. As in, they do have precursors but they do not provide the same meaning. Thus, if IC was taken into account normally these words would not promote survivability. If Darwinists would deal with programs instead of phrases they would understand quickly what a functioning precursor is.

Here is a modification of the Phrasenation program that I’d find interesting and possibly even relevant to discussions of ID. I’d like suggestions on how to more accurately reflect the problem Darwinists face.
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Have you got an Expelled story, for the movie about the current frantic attempt to suppress evidence of intelligent design in the universe? Go here to tell it. Here are a few stories that have appeared recently: a steep cost for heresy Added by: Jerald, kill the messenger when they discovered they could not kill the message Credible Sources Added by: Robert, A college paper thrown out and a failing grade given simply because some of my sources where written by authors who show evidence for Intelligent design Alligator man fired Added by: Norbert, After studying over 200 wild alligators and publishing over 100 papers I was denied tenure. Intolerance at Christian Colleges. Added by: Jerry, My experience of being Read More ›

In a post a couple of days ago I asked the class to discuss a little computer program designed to “illustrate” natural selection.  Of course, the class jumped all over it and easily demonstrated how ludicrous the program’s assumptions were.  That day I got the following emai:

First, let me agree that the simulation does [not?] make a good case for RM&NS, but that is because the simulation itself is poor.  One of your more astute commentators makes the comment that intermediaries should themselves be words, to be ‘viable as life’.  This can be done. Zachriel . . . has a very good simulation that will do that. http://www.zachriel.com/mutagenation/ 

XX

I am just a humble lawyer, so evaluating Mr. X’s claim that this simulation really is as “golly gee whiz right on the money” as claimed is beyond my ken.  So I asked Gil Dodgen, UD’s resident programing expert, to review the program and give me his take.  His kind reply is below. Read More ›

Following up on Grant Sewell’s interesting discussion of consciousness as a hard problem for Darwinism, and my response:

In “Brave Newark World”, law prof and columnist Mike S. Adams exposes an Orwellian world of reprogramming inside the dorms at the University of Delaware:

Presently, students are actually pressured or even required to take actions that outwardly indicate agreement with the university’s official ideology, regardless of their beliefs as individuals. Such actions include displaying specific door decorations and committing to reduce their ecological footprint by at least 20% and fighting for “oppressed social groups.” (There is no indication that one of these groups is made up of University of Delaware residents who are oppressed by RAs who can’t stop asking “how do you feel?”).

In the Office of Residence Life’s internal materials, these programs are described using a chilling language of ideological re-education. In a manual relating to the assessment of student learning the residence hall lesson plans are actually referred to as “treatments.”

I wrote a letter to Adams because, while I greatly respect the work of groups like The Fire in fighting intellectual oppression, I also think that a critical dimension is missing – the role that materialism inevitably plays in producing the Orwellian conditions is too often ignored: Read More ›

In a prior post the order of a deck of cards was used as an example of specified complexity.  If a deck is shuffled and it results in all of the cards being ordered by rank and suit, one can infer design.  One commenter objected to this reasoning on the grounds that the specified order is no more improbable than any other order of cards (about 1 in 10^68).  In other words, the probably of every deck order is about 1 in 10^68, so why should we infer something special about this deck order simply because it has a low probability. Well, last night at my friendly poker game I decided to test this theory.  We were playing five card Read More ›

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 a prior post DRG wonders how could Behe’s EoE inform the development of drugs that fight antibiotic resistant bacteria? Today’s WSJ, for example, describes the problem of MRSA and other superbugs that defy existing antibiotics. Given the expense of the pharmaceutical development process, an ID-oriented research program ought to reduce the cost of development by only focusing on drugs that would require resistant bacteria to evolve beyond the EoE (which Behe shows is not possible).  http://drugwonks.com/

Alex Tee Neng Heng and David C. Green think they have demonstrated that the “monkeys typing” hypothesis is true here.  The class is assigned the task of identifying their blunder.

As Michael Behe discusses in the article I linked in my last post, Darwinists Kenneth Miller and Francisco Ayala reject ID, because they believe it makes God (if one assumes God is the designer) culpable for all of the pain and misery in the natural world.  Ayala goes so far as to suggest that ID is blasphemous because it implicates God in causing this pain and misery. Miller and Ayala are wrong, and their error stems from their failure to understand elementary principles of culpability that any 1st year law student can stand and recite from memory. Generally, the law recognizes four culpable mental states (mens rea for the Latin buffs).  In descending order they are: Intentional conduct.  An actor acts intentionally when Read More ›

See here:  www.amazon.com/gp/blog/A3DGRQ0IO7KYQ2/…

I was looking at some numbers concerning the Cambrian explosion.  The results were quite stunning to me. Simple life, we are told, emerged 3.8 billion years ago, and the Cambrian Explosion occurred 550 million years ago.  In a single 10 million year period (taking the longest estimate), 95% of the animal phyla appeared.  The math: For the first 85% of the history of life there was no significant animal life. Almost all animal life arose in only the last 15% of the history of life. Indeed, 95% of animal phyla arose in a length of time that is only one forth of one percent of the history of life (0.25%). If the entire history of life were 3,800 years long, almost all Read More ›