Intelligent Design

Rabid ID-hater Larry Moran offers some insights that sound almost like the founding book of Intelligent Design: The Mystery of Life’s Origin. Sometimes the truth is so obvious even Larry Moran has to concede it. Moran writes in: More Prebiotic Soup Nonsense The problem is that most scientists are not thinking critically about the origin of life. There are several possibilities and none of them are particularly convincing. However, the Primordial Soup Hypothesis has a number of glaring weaknesses that need to be addressed honestly and it doesn’t do anyone any good if scientists sweep these weaknesses under the rug. HT: Mike Gene

Here: Srivastava had been hooked by a different sort of lure—that spooky voice, whispering to him about a flaw in the game. At first, he tried to brush it aside. “Like everyone else, I assumed that the lottery was unbreakable,” he says. “There’s no way there could be a flaw, and there’s no way I just happened to discover the flaw on my walk home.” And yet, his inner voice refused to pipe down. “I remember telling myself that the Ontario Lottery is a multibillion-dollar-a- year business,” he says. “They must know what they’re doing, right?” Oh yes, Mohan, that’s something you can count on for sure. The government around here knows what it’s doing. Or someone knows what they’re Read More ›

Some have described the survey as shocking. The authors of the report are gloomy about their findings. The perceived problem is this: evolutionists have won court cases bearing on the teaching of evolution in schools; state curricular standards have been revised to reinforce the status of evolutionary theory in biology – but despite all this, “considerable research suggests that supporters of evolution, scientific methods, and reason itself are losing battles in America’s classrooms”. The problem is that only 28% of teachers are forthrightly explaining evolutionary biology. The situation is deemed to “expose a cycle of ignorance in which community antievolution attitudes are perpetuated by teaching that reinforces local community sentiment”. The recalcitrant teachers are “hindering scientific literacy in the United Read More ›

2011 got off to an exciting start with the announcement of Kepler-10b, the first rocky planet ever discovered outside our solar system. The announcement was widely expected. Last August, a NASA scientist referred to 140 candidates for rocky planet status and now, it appears, they have a confirmed result. The discovery was announced at the a meeting of the American Astronomical Society by Nasa’s Kepler team, accompanied by a press release. Richard Kerr, writing in Science, pointed to the significance of the find: “Astronomers have announced the discovery of an extrasolar planet not much larger than Earth – the smallest exoplanet yet found. Although the world orbits too close to its sun to sustain life, the finding is a milestone Read More ›

An interesting paper published in Nature by Evgenia et al. documents the ability of the DNA double helix to exist in a functional alternative form for 1% of the time, called an “excited state.” What does this mean for neo-Darwinism? What is particularly remarkable is that the base-pairs present in these alternative forms show the ability to break apart and come together again to form stable structures which are non-characteristic of Watson-Crick base-pairing (called “Hoogsteen base pairs”). While these Hoogsteen base pairs have been observed before in instances where DNA has been subjected to damage or bound to drugs, this is the first time where such Hoogsteen base pairs have been observed under normal circumstances. Read More>>>

In my work in aerospace R&D I produce computer simulations using what is arguably the most sophisticated Finite Element Analysis program ever developed: LS-DYNA. It was originally conceived and developed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the mid-1970s for research into variable-yield nuclear weapons. For more than 35 years it has been under constant refinement and development by the best and the brightest in the field. This computational tool is phenomenally valuable and powerful, because it can tell you what is likely to work and what is not. However, it is not a perfect representation of reality — simplifying assumptions must be made or the computational overhead will become insurmountable. The trick is knowing and identifying what simplifying assumptions can Read More ›

Three months ago Princeton evolutionary biologist Andrea Graham became the talk of the ecoimmunology town through her summarization of the apparent connection between immunity and fertility (1). From trials carried out on 1476 individuals of wild Soay sheep from the St Kilda island archipelago in northern Scotland, Graham et al painted a complex picture of competing trade-offs the strengths of which were intimately dependent on the prevalence of environmental extremes. They found that higher immunity amongst animals, while promoting better survival, negatively affected reproductive prowess (1,2). More specifically sheep with increased immune readiness against ‘parasite infested winters’ were less likely to sire offspring, which Graham et al attributed to the concomitantly higher levels of auto-reactive antibodies (1,2).

Low immune-response animals fared better in low ‘parasite prevalence’ environments perhaps because energy for reproduction was not frivoled away on energy-costly antibody manufacture (1,2). The conclusion drawn was that the selective advantage of low immune-and high-immune response animals in low parasite prevalence and high parasite prevalence environments respectively explains why evolution has in effect “failed to eliminate alleles that confer susceptibility to infection or promote autoimmunity”(2).

So can we pack our bags and head home content with yet another open-and-shut case in which natural selection has been incontrovertibly authenticated? Not quite. Read More ›

In “Evolution by Mistake: Major Driving Force Comes from How Organisms Cope With Errors at Cellular Level” ScienceDaily (Jan. 26, 2011), Joanna Masel and Etienne Rajon posit “pre-selection” by error in order to explain how natural selection works its Darwinian wonders:

In nature, it turns out, many new traits that, for example, enable their bearers to conquer new habitats, start out as blunders: mistakes made by cells that result in altered proteins with changed properties or functions that are new altogether, even when there is nothing wrong with the gene itself. Sometime later, one of these mistakes can get into the gene and become more permanent.

“If the mechanisms interpreting genetic information were completely flawless, organisms would stay the same all the time and be unable to adapt to new situations or changes in their environment,” said Masel, who is also a member of the UA’s BIO5 Institute.

Living beings face two options of handling the dangers posed by errors, Masel and Rajon wrote. One is to avoid making errors in the first place, for example by having a proofreading mechanism to spot and fix errors as they arise. The authors call this a global solution, since it is not specific to any particular mistake, but instead watches over the entire process.

The alternative is to allow errors to happen, but evolve robustness to the effects of each of them. Masel and Rajon call this strategy a local solution, because in the absence of a global proofreading mechanism, it requires an organism to be resilient to each and every mistake that pops up.

Offhand, this sounds a lot like design. Would anyone like to calculate the probability of such a process forming by Darwinian means (natural selection acting on random mutation)? Read More ›

As if we needed more evidence that the myth of the warfare thesis is alive and well, Charlie Rose supplied it in abundance in his interview with legendary actor Anthony Hopkins last week. Fortunately Hopkins was able to disabuse the audience of Rose’s misconceptions, though it is not clear Rose was the better for it. Here is the relevant discussion, beginning at the 11:25 mark of the interview:  Read more

    In my new book, Alfred Russel Wallace: A Rediscovered Life, I take the reader on a journey from 19-century England, to the wilds of the Amazon River Basin, to the Malay Archipelago, and back to the highly charged scientific climate of Victorian London. Wallace’s story is one of discovery, from shocking Charles Darwin with his own theory of natural selection to his realization that the very principle he used to explain the diversity of biological life itself had limits, limits with profound implications about humankind and nature itself. After years of research across the globe, Wallace came to believe that some intelligence was required to explain the natural world. This intelligent evolution would be explained by Wallace as directed, detectably designed, Read More ›

Adult pteranodon fossils from Royal Ontario Museum. Courtesy  Kenn Chaplin from Toronto Jonathan Amos reports at BBC News (20 January 2011) on a “Fossil female pterosaur found with preserved egg“. Wonderful news, and note this: The egg indicates this ancient flying reptile was a female, and that realisation has allowed researchers to sex these creatures for the first time. Writing in Science magazine, the palaeontologists make some broad statements about differences in pterosaurs, including the observation that only males sported a head-crest. “Broad” statements indeed, about the head-crest. They couldn’t really be sure unless they could sex a flock, and there’s a risk of being led off course. The state of the egg’s shell suggests it was well developed and Read More ›

Today’s PhysOrg.com site contains this article. To my view, their investigation has important implications for ID. Many critics of ID ask us: “Well, how does your Designer design?” This is their way of saying to us that a Designer who lies outside the physical realm cannot possibly act within it. Of course, this amounts to a theological claim, and not a scientific one; nevertheless, it’s made. What’s new here, though, is that, whereas formerly it was thought that energy was needed to “erase” information (which leaves its own physical residue–that is, it’s measurable), now this is no longer the case. However, if it is true that energy is not needed to “erase” information, contrariwise, wouldn’t it also be true that Read More ›

This short essay was inspired by Denyse here. She appears to have an inspirational effect on me. Older scientists are still stuck in the past. Richard Dawkins is a prime example, although I don’t consider him to be a “scientist” who has demonstrated any devotion to legitimate scientific rigor throughout his career. He is essentially nothing more than a relatively eloquent storyteller with a very creative imagination, who has no experience in the real world with designing or engineering anything that can be demonstrated to actually work. With the discovery of the fine-tuning of the laws of physics for life, and the discovery that living systems are fundamentally based on the most sophisticated nano-technological, information-processing system ever devised, the Darwinian Read More ›