Intelligent Design

Christian Darwinism is the ultimate oxymoron. Its thesis is: accidentally on purpose, and intentionally designed with no intention or design. Let’s face it, either the Christian worldview is correct or the Darwinian worldview is correct in this particular debate. The two views are completely, irrevocably, and catastrophically irreconcilable on many levels. The big problem for Christian Darwinists is that rigorous scientific investigation, empirical evidence, basic combinatorial mathematics, and what is now known from cutting-edge information theory, renders the Darwinian mechanism completely impotent to produce anything but the utterly trivial in the history of life. I ask myself, Where does this bizarre Christian Darwinism self-contradictory reasoning come from? I think I have an answer. The Darwinian establishment has been remarkably successful Read More ›

This paper in RNA argues the case:

Pseudogenes: Pseudo-functional or key regulators in health and disease? Read More ›

Strangely enough, “wimpy” was early 20th century British slang for a hamburger, which somewhere in the 1930’s became American slang for an ineffectual person, to the consternation of the OED. My kids, courtesy of Dollar Tree, have been exposed to pre-WWII Popeye cartoons, in which a character named “Wimpy” has a British accent and an addiction to hamburgers. He also accomplishes a lot while appearing quite ineffectual, getting Popeye to do all the hard work for him. If we view Popeye as a stereotype for the US, many of these pre-WWII cartoons can be reinterpreted as complex political commentary. Commentary that now extends to cosmology and astrophysics. When cosmologists could not explain why galaxies formed out of the the hot Read More ›

UPDATE:
Professor Feser has drawn my attention to a remark he made in a recent post:

The dispute between Thomism on the one hand and Paley (and ID theory) on the other is not over whether God is in some sense the “designer” of the universe and of living things – both sides agree that He is – but rather over what exactly it means to say that He is, and in particular over the metaphysics of life and of creation.

In the interests of truthfulness and accuracy, I shall place this remark at the top of my post. I find it immensely heartening, as it means that the gap between Professors Dembski and Feser is much narrower than I had imagined. I would also like to assure Professor Feser that I have no intention of mis-representing his views, and I apologize for any implication on my part that Feser does not regard God as the designer of living things.

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I have written this post in the hope of achieving a rapprochement of sorts between the Thomistic philosopher Professor Edward Feser and the Intelligent Design movement, which Feser has criticized in his books, The Last Superstition and Aquinas, and also in his blog posts (see here for a round-up of Feser’s online writings on Intelligent Design).

To be specific: Feser has frequently accused the Intelligent Design movement of holding the same mechanistic view of life as the neo-Darwinian evolutionists whose views they criticize – a view which Feser, as an Aristotelian Thomist, rejects as radically mistaken, as it ignores the fact that a living thing possesses certain built-in goals which are wholly contained within it and which benefit it. Now, Intelligent Design proponents have a wide range of views, and I have previously argued, on several occasions, that the Intelligent Design movement is not tied to any mechanistic philosophy. Feser insists, however, that the whole case for ID, which Professor William Dembski makes in his book, The Design Revolution, is based on a faulty analogy between living organisms (such as oak trees) and human artifacts (such as ships). Feser argues that on the contrary, the teleology of an oak tree is fundamentally different from that of a ship (as indeed it is) and that therefore the analogy is a bad one (which it is not). Hence the title of this post. In this essay, I will be arguing that Feser has in fact innocently misread Professor Dembski’s views on teleology. The misreading is a pardonable one, but I would like to propose a more charitable and (I believe) more sensible construal of Dembski’s views on the subject. In particular, the point which Feser thinks Dembski was making about ships and oak trees is quite a different one from the point he was actually making. I shall also argue that a living thing’s being designed is perfectly compatible with it having built-in, goal-directed processes that terminate in and benefit the living thing itself (i.e. immanent final causation, in Aristotelian terminology).

The concession I’m seeking from Professor Feser is an acknowledgment that there is in fact nothing in Dembski’s writings that ties the Intelligent Design movement to the philosophy of mechanism, and that Professor Dembski’s writings, properly understood, are perfectly compatible with an Aristotelian-Thomistic view of what it means for something to be alive.
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I was recently engaged in correspondance with someone who told me that the theory of ID isn’t scientific because it doesn’t make scientific predictions. We’ve all heard it, right? Indeed, most of you are probably bored to tears having had to address, and respond to, this argument over and over, seemingly to no avail. As with so many things in this discussion, the constantly re-iterated response seems to repeatedly fall on deaf ears. So, I took a few moments to ‘brain storm’ and jot down those scientific predictions, made by ID, which immediately came to mind. This is what I came up with: Predictions In Astronomy/Cosmology ID predicts that the Universe had a beginning. ID predicts an increase (and not Read More ›

… Expelled The late Karl Popper, universally regarded as a referee of what constitutes a valid scientific theory, complained that Darwinian selection is not, strictly speaking, a scientific theory because it can neither make predictions nor be rigorously tested abve the micro-level, where it is a mere truism. Unlike Einstein’s theory of gravity, the idea of evolution by natural selection is in principle not falsifiable. No matter what the complexity of an organism, a Darwinist can always make up an “adaptive” story explaining its origin. And when pressed to explain a severe problem like the usefulness of incipient organs, he can take refuge in the unobservable. This was Darwin’s own tactic in later editions of the Origin , where he Read More ›

This* paper suggests that geoscience education struggles with  quantitative vs. qualitative research methods:

Geoscience education and geocognition researchers are an interesting group. As geoscientists, we work in the world of natural processes, and we speak a language that quantifies and categorizes our observations in an orderly fashion. As education researchers, however, we enter a different world. Here, we often find ourselves confronted with problems and data that are difficult to measure, that resist experimentation, and that are quite often impossible to quantify. “Reality” may become fuzzy, multiplying from our expected single, objective version to something iterative and subjective. In these situations, we realize that our trusted tools of observation, experiment, and objectivity fail us, so we turn to the tools of qualitative inquiry to provide the insight that we seek. But here we hit some interesting, and often frustrating, hurdles.

First of all, it is an unfortunate fact that many of us have little or no formal training in qualitative research methods. Usually working in isolation, we enter an entirely new literature base; we engage with unfamiliar and, at times, uncomfortable ways of thinking and practicing. Each application of a new method or approach is, in a sense, a private re-invention of the wheel. The inevitable outcome of this private labor is that we tend to work in isolation—we are an archipelago, laboriously discussing in our publications the theory behind qualitative convention and justifying standard processes (“…is well established in the social and behavioral sciences…”). Having negotiated this challenging (but eminently rewarding!) process, we then find that our geoscientist peers are often highly skeptical of our methods, results, and interpretations. Sometimes skepticism becomes criticism without critique. The following comments, or variants of them, will be familiar to many geoscience education researchers:

• It’s all subjective!

• That’s not an interpretation! That’s just what you wanted to say! Read More ›

In “Dark matter no-show at sensitive underground lab” (New Scientist, 14 April 2011), Celeste Biever reports that the WIMPs (yes, yes,) wimped out: It’s just like a wimp to be a no-show when summoned for interrogation. That seems to be the result of an experiment to detect the weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs, thought to make up elusive dark matter that is thought to make up much of the mass of the universe. After 100 days of monitoring, a tub of cryogenically chilled liquid xenon deep in an Italian mountain has shown no trace of the particles it is designed to catch. The result doesn’t rule out the existence of WIMPs, but it does seem these particles are slipperier Read More ›

Here are some excerpts from Nancy Pearcey’s Saving Leonardo, and some articles, not for the faint of heart. For example, Secularism has crippled America’s ability to respond effectively to such threats, because it reduces morality to the subjective level—to personal feelings or ethnic tradition. These are things that cannot be rationally debated.Persuasion gives way to emotional manipulation and personal attacks. “Racist!” “Hater!” “Intolerant!” “Islamophobe!” The word tolerance once meant we all have the right to argue rationally for our deepest convictions in the public arena. Now it means those convictions are not even subject to rational debate. Canadian free speechers, alas, wrote the book on that.

“It must be acknowledged that there is a big difference in the degree of confidence we can have in neo-Darwinism and in the multiverse. It is settled, as well as anything in science is ever settled, that the adaptations of living things on Earth have come into being through natural selection acting on random undirected inheritable variations. About the multiverse, it is appropriate to keep an open mind, and opinions among scientists differ widely. In the Austin airport on the way to this meeting I noticed for sale the October issue of a magazine called  Astronomy, having on the cover the headline “Why You Live in Multiple Universes.” Inside I found a report of a discussion at a conference at Stanford, Read More ›

… as the God of the Gaps. Has anyone ever noted an ID theorist to use the term “gaps”, to support an argument for apparent design? Can anyone attest that Collins has ever read an actual ID theoretic work? See also here and here where Collins appears to have backed away from an earlier claim that so-called “junk DNA” proves that there is no design in life.

Thought you all might be interested in this video on whether or not mutations are random. It covers both why we originally thought mutations were random plus more current information which shows that the random mutation idea is not the whole picture.

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From Physorg, we learn that the spotted salamander is “the first known vertebrate to have an endosymbiont”, in the form of an alga conferring a benefit on the eggs by living inside them: Naturalists first noticed an association between spotted salamander eggs and green algae more than 100 years ago. This relationship was formalized by name in 1927 by Lambert Printz, who named the algal species Oophilia amblystoma. The genus name means “egg loving.” The nature of that symbiosis was not known until the 1980s, when experimentation revealed the salamander embryos do not develop as quickly or as fully in the absence of the green algae. Likewise, algae grown separately from the embryos but in the presence of water exposed Read More ›

From ScienceDaily we learn (Apr. 11, 2011), “A polyploidy event is basically the acquisition, through mutation, of a ‘double dose’ of genetic material,” explained Yuannian Jiao, a graduate student at Penn State and the first author of the study. “In vertebrates, although genome duplication is known to occur, it generally is lethal. Plants, on the other hand, often survive and can sometimes benefit from duplicated genomes.” Jiao explained that, over the generations, most duplicated genes from polyploidy events simply are lost. However, other genes adopt new functions or, in some instances, subdivide the workload with the genetic segments that were duplicated, thereby cultivating more efficiency and better specialization of tasks for the genome as a whole. Jiao also explained that, Read More ›

Christian evolutionary biologist Todd C. Wood has been dismissing ID-related research that attempts to determine the boundaries of Darwinism, demanding that ID researchers show what ID can do.

In this, he overlooks a simple fact: Today’s Darwinism functions as a sort of magic. It can do anything at all. Thus, no other mechanism, design or whatever, is needed.

In fact, no science can be done in the area of evolution until that ol’ Darwinian magic is discredited in favour of a rational evaluation of the probabilities of various proposed methods of evolution.

Otherwise, everything devolves into the usual witches’ cauldron of Darwindunit, complete with cackles from the broomsticks overhead.

The ID guys are only doing what everyone should be doing now, but few dare or have the sense to: Read More ›