Intelligent Design

In case you all have been having too much fun at UncommonDescent, don’t forget www.idthefuture.com. It has been having some stellar contributions of late.

Davidson and Erwin: Neo Darwinism Doesn’t Work for the Cambrian Explosion

Davidson smiled, somewhat ruefully, and said, “Well, I’m not sure, but I know that standard single-base-pair mutations won’t do it” — meaning, as he later explained to me, the textbook neo-Darwinism every college biology student learns. He was more blunt with the science writer Fred Heeren, who was covering the now-notorious conference we were attending. “Neo-Darwinism is dead,” he said in an interview. Read More ›

“… Would they be able to detect products of intelligence and deduce that these objects had not evolved from the surrounding materials by chance?” Look here.

Science (17 February 2006) has an article on the other selection — Darwin had identified not only natural selection but also sexual selection. According to the authors of this article, sexual selection needs to be dropped and replaced with a theory of cooperative games. Especially striking in the article is the statement “problems with this narrative have continued to accumulate” and reference to “Darwin’s central narrative.” Narrative indeed. Ordinarily, the study of narrative belongs under lit-crit. It’s finally clear why ID isn’t welcome among evolutionary biologists: the study of narratives provides no clue to the engineering problems that biological systems pose. Of course, it goes without saying that this article provides absolutely no justification for thinking that there is a controversy surrounding evolution — it merely suggests that one of Darwin’s two greatest contributions to evolutionary theory was completely out to lunch.

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It seems as though “warmth+clay” does not RNA make. For those interested, just a short update. “The results are surprising and in some ways disappointing. It seems that hot acidic waters containing clay do not provide the right conditions for chemicals to assemble themselves into ‘pioneer organisms.’” Professor Deamer said that amino acids and DNA, the “building blocks” for life, and phosphate, another essential ingredient, cling to the surfaces of clay particles in the volcanic pools. “The reason this is significant is that it has been proposed that clay promotes interesting chemical reactions relating to the origin of life,” he explained. “However,” he added, “in our experiments, the organic compounds became so strongly held to the clay particles that they Read More ›

Intelligent Design: Not Modern Science

by Father Jonathan Morris

Wednesday, February 15, 2006 — You religious folk may want to send me to the dog house after reading what I have to say today.

I’ve been thinking about the Kitzmiller vs. Dover School District case in Pennsylvania which touched off a blistering debate on the appropriateness of intelligent design theory (ID) in a public science curriculum. The case is over, but it’s not done with. You can bet that we’ll be seeing this or a similar case in the Supreme Court sometime soon. That’s why I want to get ahead of the news and look at it with you today. You may remember that the press presented the case as a duel between two conflicting visions of reality: liberal secularists vs. religious conservatives. A chance for a perfect headline: “Judge Sends Christians Packing.”

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Designed to create controversy
(thanks to Casey Luskin for alerting me to the article. Casey was co-founder of the IDEA Center which had it’s beginnings at UCSD.)

At UCSD, which is known for its strength in science and engineering, faculty members are realizing they need to pay more attention to the controversy. Two years ago, a UCSD survey found that 40 percent of incoming freshmen to the university’s Sixth College – geared toward educating students for a high-tech 21st century – do not believe in evolution, said the college’s provost, Gabriele Wienhausen.

The university now requires students who major in biology to complete a course in biological evolution, Kohn said. The policy became effective with freshmen who enrolled last fall. Professors had discussed the change for years, he said, but the Sixth College poll made it more urgent.

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Robert Hazen delivered a talk at Guillermo Gonzalez school entitled: Why Intelligent Design is Not Science. Guillermo gives a thoughtful response in the Ames Tribune here.

Hazen has participated in 2 IDEA events at GMU including one where Jonathan Wells spoke. He’s very respectful in his treatment of IDists, and has said he is open to being proven wrong. He spoke at our IDEA meeting in October 2005 before CBS News camera crews and 90 people (but the news report has never aired). In attendance were my former professor James Trefil (who debated Dembski 2 weeks later) and famous OOL researcher Harold Morowitz.

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Ohio has decided it’s children should not think critically about science. See here. This twisted logic has profound implications for America’s ability to compete with societies whose scientists are encouraged to think outside the box.

Critical thinking starts with questions and continues with questioning authority. New discoveries derive from critical thinkers who refuse to accept dogma as reality and insist on finding their own answers. Sometimes their answers line up with the status-quo, but sometimes they don’t and new discoveries are made that eventually become the new status-quo. The transition from old to new can be extremely painful, depending only on how dogmatic the keepers of the old are. Either way, we all learn something in the process. But what happens if the status-quo is wrong and is forced on an unbelieving population by legal edict to the point that those critical thinking skills that fuel innovation are subjugated to blind faith?

I was curious about how this question might be addressed by the most important among us: our children. So I set out to discover if there is any difference between our local public and private school’s technique for encouraging open, free, critical thought about the controversial issue of Evolution and Intelligent Design…
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I’m genuinely confused. Can some of the more experienced IDers explain why critcism of evolutionary theory is supressed within the scientific community?

Comment by Kibitz — February 15, 2006 @ 7:19 pm

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The Thumbsmen of Panda are ecstatic that the Ohio State Board of Education has removed “critical analysis of evolution” from its standards (see here). Question: Is there any other field of inquiry — other than evolution, that is — whose advocates become ecstatic when critical analysis of its subject is suppressed? Usually, advocates of a position are happy to entertain critical analysis because such criticism highlights the importance of their subject and facilitates its further development. Of course, there’s a qualifier that needs to be added to this question: Are there any **legitimate** fields of inquiry that discourage critical analysis of their subject areas? I used to think evolutionary theory was just a bad idea. It’s looking increasingly like a Read More ›

Propulsion with a Rotating Elastic Nanorod http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/cond-mat/pdf/0602/0602238.pdf Manoel Manghi,1 Xaver Schlagberger,2 and Roland R. Netz2 1Laboratoire de Physique Th´eorique, IRSAMC, Universit´e Paul Sabatier, 31062 Toulouse, France 2Physik Department, Technical University Munich, 85748 Garching, Germany (Dated: February 9, 2006) ABSTRACT: The dynamics of a rotating elastic filament is investigated using Stokesian simulations. The filament, straight and tilted with respect to its rotation axis for small driving torques, undergoes at a critical torque a strongly discontinuous shape bifurcation to a helical state. It induces a substantial forward propulsion whatever the sense of rotation: a nanomechanical force-rectification device is established.

Question: Can the effects of such directed gene shuffling be accomplished without direction? If so, what’s the evidence?

Gene Shuffling to Produce Food and Feed Crops
Prof. Joe Cummins
http://lists.ifas.ufl.edu/cgi-bin/wa.exe?A2=ind0601&L=sanet-mg&T=0&F=&I=-3&S=&P=9498

Gene shuffling is a process consisting of producing a large array of producing many variants of a DNA sequence from a gene or a portion of a gene representing the an active site on a protein then reassemble the gene from random fragments using recombination. The recombinants are cloned into a vector then introduced into bacteria or virus for rapid screening. Using this technique it has been possible to produce genes for enzymes, regulatory proteins or antibodies with laboratory performance far superior to the proteins obtained from living organisms. MaeWan Ho has criticized gene shuffling because it is inherently dangerous it is likely to produce viruses, bacteria or eukaryote forms with unexpected and malevolent toxicity because recombination is the basis for the appearances of novel devastating pathogens (1). In spite of these concerns gene shuffling has been burgeoning and has been described as directed evolution or rational design, Read More ›

“… public schools should not be used by people to teach their personal religious beliefs to other people’s children…” I agree. So when is the ACLU going to protect our children from being told they are unplanned and have no purpose and must believe the religion of Dawkin’s god? First prizes in the worldwide competition for most hypocritical religious zealots and most vile intellectual terrorists go to the ACLU. read here…

I cannot find the phrase phylogenetic stem cell used anywhere and suggest when we talk of possible mechanisms underlying guided, planned evolution we equate the hypothetical LUCA (Last Universal Common Ancestor) with a hypothetical Phylogenetic Stem Cell to quickly convey the gist of the front-loaded hypothesis. This phrase should have instant meaning to anyone familiar with phylogeny and stem cells.

Here is an interesting essay on design by Darwin’s contemporary John Stuart Mill. Question: are the molecular machines that Michael Behe identified as decisive evidence for design merely analogous to human-built machines or do they fully instantiate the concept of machine? Another question: Why should knowing the mode of implementation of design be so important to detecting its presence? If, for instance, biological designs vastly exceed human designs in technological sophistication, so that our current technology is incapable of grasping their implementation, why should that undercut our ability nonetheless to recognize their design?

John Stuart Mill
The Argument from Marks of Design in Nature
http://philosophyofreligion.info/theism7.html

We now at last reach an argument of a really scientific character, which does not shrink from scientific tests, but claims to be judged by the established canons of Induction. The Design argument is wholly grounded on experience. Certain qualities, it is alleged, are found to be characteristic of such things as are made by an intelligent mind for a purpose. The order of nature of Nature, or some considerable parts of it, exhibit these qualities in a remarkable degree. We are entitled, from this great similarity in the effects, to infer similarity in the cause, and to believe that things which it is beyond the power of man to make, but which resemble the works of man in all but power, must also have been made by Intelligence, armed with a power greater than human. Read More ›