Intelligent Design

The two most recent books I’ve read are Biochemistry Professor M.Behe’s Edge of Evolution and Cornell geneticist J.Sanford’s Genetic Entropy. Edge of Evolution I found to be amazing. It presented a case history of a eukaryote (P.falciparum) that has replicated billions of trillions of times within a span of a few decades. More importantly this is one of the most well studied organisms in biology due to its huge toll on human lives. In the last decade we’ve gone beyond phenotype analysis of the bug and have completely sequenced its genotype. This represents the largest test of evolution that we can hope to observe. The result of random mutation + natural selection being given billions of trillions of opportunities to Read More ›

Package models and the information crisis of prebiotic evolution Daniel A. M. M. Silvestre,  Jos´e F. Fontanari http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0710/0710.3278v1.pdf The coexistence of different types of templates has been the choice solution to the information crisis of prebiotic evolution, triggered by the finding that a single RNA-like template cannot carry enough information to code for any useful replicase. In principle, confining d distinct templates of length L in a package or protocell, whose survival depends on the coexistence of the templates it holds in, could resolve this crisis provided that d is made sufficiently large. We review the prototypical package model of Niesert et al. (1981) which guarantees the greatest possible region of viability of the protocell population, and show that this Read More ›

In a recent column, Marvin Olasky observes New York Times columnist John Tierney recently offered a materialist version of “intelligent design”: All of us are actually characters in a computer simulation devised by some technologically advanced future civilization. Fanciful to the extreme, sure, but the growing number of such theories — life comes from the past (Mars, when it was theoretically livable) or future (Tierney) — is one more indication that Darwinism no longer satisfies. Reporters pretending to referee the origin debate used to have it easy: slick evolutionists vs. hick creationists, progress vs. regress. Now, Darwinism is looking fuddy-duddy, and sophisticated critiques of it are becoming more diverse. I interviewed Michael Behe, author of “Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Read More ›

. . . so long as the predicted event is safely 100,000 years in the future:  Human race will split into two different species  The human race will one day split into two separate species, an attractive, intelligent ruling elite and an underclass of dim-witted, ugly goblin-like creatures, according to a top scientist. 100,000 years into the future, sexual selection could mean that two distinct breeds of human will have developed. The alarming prediction comes from evolutionary theorist Oliver Curry . . . Dr Curry’s theory may strike a chord with readers who have read H G Wells’ classic novel The Time Machine, in particular his descriptions of the Eloi and the Morlock races.  In the 1895 book, the human race has Read More ›

Bill Dembski asked about design vs. mechanism , and quite a long thread ensued. I thought I’d post my own thoughts here, to break up the thread a bit.

Here are five things I know that may be useful to someone: Read More ›

In my last post I referred to Richard Dawkins’ assertion that a state organized according to Darwinian principles would be a fascist state.  In response some of the commenters alluded to Dawkins’ statement that he is “anti-Darwinian” when it comes to politics.  Dawkins, the commenters said, believes we can “rise above” our Darwinian impulses.  The problem with this assertion is that Dawkins is trying to have it both ways.  He writes: The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. As that unhappy poet A.E. Housman put it: ‘For Nature, heartless, witless Nature Will neither care nor know.’ DNA Read More ›

As irksome as Richard Dawkins can sometimes be, one must nevertheless admire his occasional outbursts of honesty.  Over at First Things  Fr. Ed Oakes refers to an interview  Dawkins gave to an Austrian newspaper, Die Presse (July 30, 2005), in which he said: “No decent person wants to live in a society that works according to Darwinian laws. . . . A Darwinian society would be a fascist state.”

Although ID continues to gather supporters, it happens now and again that erstwhile ID supporters lose their enthusiasm and jump ship. One such former supporter is a very prominent European scientist. I met him first in 2004, when he was still attracted to ID. Now he is no longer. I asked him about this recently: Question: If not ID, what then? The Darwinists are bankrupt. And the self-organizational theorists are hopelessly fuzzy. James Shapiro — he presupposes the very thing that needs to be explained, namely, the origin of systems that perform their own “natural genetic engineering.” Kirschner and Gerhardt are no better with their “facilitated variation” — whence the facilitation? He responded: Excellent question of course. So the search Read More ›

Last Saturday afternoon, I was working quietly in my office, when the phone rang. I recognized the number of course (416 367-2000) – the Toronto Star has had that number about as long as I can remember. A reporter wanted to know what Christians were planning to do to celebrate October 23.

October 23? Well, in my tradition, that’s the feast of the saintly John Capistrano, but I don’t expect everyone to know. I didn’t myself, until I looked it up.

It turned out that the reporter had learned that a 17th century Irish archbishop Ussher had methodically dated the origin of the world to this date about six thousand years ago. And, given that I was a “fundamentalist author”, he was sure I could tell him about the big celebrations to be expected today …  Read More ›

Ben Stein will be on the O’Reilly Factor tonight talking about his upcoming movie/documentary EXPELLED: NO INTELLIGENCE ALLOWED. Update: If you missed it on TV click me for the segment. Further update: Or watch it here from YouTube:

Horizontal Gene Transfer (HGT) is now being invoked fairly often as a magic wand by Darwinists. So what experimental evidence do we have?

Genome-Wide Experimental Determination of Barriers to Horizontal Gene Transfer

Horizontal gene transfer, in which genetic material is transferred from the genome of one organism to another, has been investigated in microbial species mainly through computational sequence analyses. To address the lack of experimental data, we studied the attempted movement of 246,045 genes from 79 prokaryotic genomes into Escherichia coli and identified genes that consistently fail to transfer. We studied the mechanisms underlying transfer inhibition by placing coding regions from different species under the control of inducible promoters. Our data suggest that toxicity to the host inhibited transfer regardless of the species of origin and that increased gene dosage and associated increased expression may be a predominant cause for transfer failure. While these experimental studies examined transfer solely into E. coli, a computational analysis of gene transfer rates across available bacterial and archaeal genomes supports that the barriers observed in our study are general across the tree of life.

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The news I’ve heard about new Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal is that he threatens to break with a centuries-old Bayou tradition by being both a governor and an honest man. But also, this just in from the New York Times: Mr. Jindal is a technocrat and a Roman Catholic convert, a policy aficionado well-versed in free-market solutions to the crisis in health insurance and a proponent of “intelligent design” as an alternative theory to evolution, suggesting it may be appropriate in school science classes. The India Times advises, Jindal, who was born as a Hindu but converted to Catholicism, attended high school at Baton Rouge Magnet High School. In 1991, he graduated from Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, with Read More ›

Apparently, a vast fracas started on the Small Dead Animals blog, sparked by some alarmblog comments about my course in the intelligent design controversy starting this coming Tuesday evening at the University of Toronto. I posted this response.

Reprinted by permission from Imprimis, a publication of Hillsdale College.

August 2007

“Global Warming: Man-Made or Natural?”

S. Fred Singer
Professor Emeritus of Environmental Sciences, University of Virginia

S. Fred Singer is professor emeritus of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia, a distinguished research professor at George Mason University, and president of the Science and Environmental Policy Project. He performed his undergraduate studies at Ohio State University and earned his Ph.D. in Physics from Princeton University. He was the founding dean of the School of Environmental and Planetary Sciences at the University of Miami, the founding director of the U.S. National Weather Satellite Service, and served for five years as vice chairman of the U.S. National Advisory Committee on Oceans and Atmosphere. Dr. Singer has written or edited over a dozen books and monographs, including, most recently, Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years.

The following is adapted from a lecture delivered on the Hillsdale College campus on June 30, 2007, during a seminar entitled “Economics and the Environment,” sponsored by the Charles R. and Kathleen K. Hoogland Center for Teacher Excellence.

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IN THE PAST few years there has been increasing concern about global climate change on the part of the media, politicians, and the public. It has been stimulated by the idea that human activities may influence global climate adversely and that therefore corrective action is required on the part of governments. Recent evidence suggests that this concern is misplaced. Human activities are not influencing the global climate in a perceptible way. Climate will continue to change, as it always has in the past, warming and cooling on different time scales and for different reasons, regardless of human action. I would also argue that—should it occur—a modest warming would be on the whole beneficial.

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Watson is currently suspended from chancelor duties.

Watson’s own institute has itself been linked to historical Darwinian racism, even though it dutifully denounced him.

Also, here’s a spoof interview from The Brites on the reaction of a paragon of political correctness, trying to hold together Darwinism and egalitarianism. (Of COURSE it doesn’t work. As I point out here, you can’t have both Darwinism and egalitarianism. The only possible result is PC idiocy. )

More seriously, a friend offers some brief extracts from Watson’s book DNA:

“Our discovery had put an end to a debate as old as the human species: Does life have some magical, mystical essence, or is it, like any chemical reaction carried out in a science class, the product of normal physical and chemical processes? Is there something divine at the heart of a cell that brings it to life? The double helix answered that question with a definitive No” (xii).

No?

“Only with the discovery of the double helix and the ensuing genetic revolution have we had grounds for thinking that the powers held traditionally to be the exclusive property of the gods might one day be ours. Life, we now know, is nothing but a vast array of coordinated chemical reactions. The ‘secret’ to that coordination is the breathtakingly complex set of instructions inscribed, again chemically, in our DNA” (396).

One of the most innovative scientists I know has strictly cautioned me against any kind of “nothing buttery” as observed above.

Watson is nonetheless generous, after his fashion:

I do not dispute the right of individuals to look to religion for a private moral compass, but I do object to the assumption of too many religious people that atheists live in a moral vacuum. Those of us who feel no need for a moral code written down in an ancient tome have, in my opinion, recourse to an innate moral intuition long ago shaped by natural selection promoting social cohesion in groups of our ancestors.

But, unbelievers that we are, Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard and I doubt that any such “innate moral intuition” can be created by the magic of natural selection. The moral intuition of relatedness comes rather from the relationship between our limited minds and the mind that created the universe in which we live.

Oh, well, it is obvious that Watson is not a corner stool at our local coffee klatsch. He doesn’t even like Gattaca, whose limitations I concede myself – but he dislikes it for entirely different* reasons: Read More ›