Intelligent Design

This post is intended as a follow-up on the post, Children of a better god? by idnet.com.au.

I would like to suggest that the real reason why some people (including many Christians) dislike Intelligent Design is an aesthetic one. Their notion of beauty is overly influenced by mathematics: they define beauty as a delicate and interesting balance between variety (or plenitude) and simplicity (or economy). This kind of thinking goes back to Leibniz and beyond. Both qualities are needed: a very simple world containing just one object would be simple but intolerably boring, while a world lacking simple laws would appear messy and mathematically inelegant. It follows that according to this account of beauty, a beautiful world should contain many different kinds of things, governed by just a few underlying laws or principles. The variety of elements in the periodic table is a good example: it is aesthetically pleasing, because they can all be explained in terms of just a few underlying principles: the laws of physics and chemistry, whose underlying mathematical simplicity is evident in their regularity, symmetry and order. Many people would like to think that living things possess the same kind of beauty: an ideal balance between variety and underlying simplicity. Because the underlying laws are mathematically simple in this model of beauty, these people reason that the act of generating things that possess the attribute of beauty should be a simple one. Neo-Darwinism appeals to them as a scientific theory, because it purports to account for the variety of living things we see today, on the basis of a few simple underlying principles (natural selection acting on variation arising stochastically, without any foresight of long-term goals).

But living things aren’t like the periodic table. The phenomenon that characterizes them is not order but complexity – and complexity of a particular kind, at that. The beauty you see in a living cell is more like the beauty of a story than the beauty of crystals, which are highly ordered but still not very interesting, even when you contemplate them in all their variety. Read More ›

Greetings all. Since I’m going to be contributing some posts here at Uncommon Descent, it’s been suggested I explain to everyone just where I’m coming from intellectually and in the context of the Intelligent Design discussion. Before I do that, I just want to express my thanks to the powers that be on this site for allowing me this opportunity – with luck it may lead to some interesting conversations on a topic I’ve enjoyed following over the years.

So if you’re at all curious of where I stand on the questions of ID, evolution, and so on… Well, just read on.

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It looks as though the folks at BioLogos are targeting all the main works of design theorists, and the flavor of the month this time is William Dembski’s The Design Inference. Retired Calvin College mathematics professor James Bradley has been called in to do the demolition. His “scholarly” take-down of Dembski’s book is here: http://biologos.org/uploads/projects/bradley_scholarly_essay.pdf The first of two blog posts by him against Dembski’s book is here: http://biologos.org/blog/why-dembskis-design-inference-doesnt-work All of this seems quite hamfisted. Why review a book 12 years AFTER its publication? Why focus only on the book and ignore all that Dembski has subsequently written on design inferences (e.g., in his books NO FREE LUNCH, THE DESIGN REVOLUTION, and THE DESIGN OF LIFE, all of which extend and clarify his Read More ›

 I have been listening to a few lectures by Christians who are convinced that the standard models of evolution explain all of biology including life’s origin. They say that evolution also explains all of cosmology. For them, this gives them, the evolutionary creationists, “a better god” than any model that requires a lesser form of “interventionist god”.  To quote loosely from a conversation between two of these good willed gentlemen.  “If we think of the cosmos as a game of billiards. The ID proponents have their god taking in turns and using the cue. Chance and nature are given a turn, then god comes in and sinks a ball. Finally after a long game, the eight ball is sunk, and we have Read More ›

One thing evolutionists agree on is that their theory is also a scientific fact. It is a curious point of consensus given that, of all the many, many evolutionary claims, it is the one that is most obviously and undeniably false. It is not that evolutionists fail to prove their theory to be a fact. They most definitely have done so, many times over. But their proofs are not scientific.  Read more

Many of us in the ID community are repeatedly challenged with the assertion that those without “credentials” in evolutionary biology are, essentially by definition, disqualified from questioning Darwinian orthodoxy. It is true that if a mathematician claims to have a proof of a new theorem in computational number theory, the challenger should be able to come up with a mathematically rigorous refutation, and this would require much expertise in the domain of CNT. However, as David Berlinski has pointed out, Darwinian “science” does not represent rigorous science in our usual understanding of the term — it is a “room filled with smoke.” It makes claims about the infinitely creative powers of random variation and natural selection, with no rigorous proof, Read More ›

Shattered assumptions, broken rules and overturned beliefs.  The science media seems eager these days to emphasize science’s capacity to shift paradigms.  And it was such a handful of descriptives that was used to convey the implications of a new study that redefines our view of genome architecture (1).  At the heart of such excitement lay a tunicate organism called Oikopleura dioica that carries in its genetic armory “several peculiarities” (1).  Weighing in with its 70 million base pairs of DNA Oikopleura is today venerated as the animal with the smallest known genome (1).  But what stands out for biologists who have dedicated years to unpacking Oikopleura’s treasure box genome is the ‘odd ball’ physical location of many of its genes (1).  The Scientist’s Megan Scudellari remarked that “Oikopleura’s genes appear to have been shuffled like a deck of cards” (1).

At the apex of this presumed shuffling is that all-elusive but much loved patch-all process called evolution.  “UV rays and other mutagens” that bombard Oikopleura as it ekes out its existence just below the ocean surface are the suggested deck dealers of this particular shuffle (1).  But apart from this rather misty association between cause and effect, there is precious little in the evolutionary inferences of this study to satisfy an appetite for robust scientific argumentation. Read More ›

Proteins are very unlikely machines but post synaptic proteins are even more unlikely.  Read more

For anyone who might have choked on their coffee while reading that headline, let me state up-front that Professor Coyne has not undergone an overnight conversion. Instead, what he has done is give the Intelligent Design movement a perfect Christmas gift. Santa Claus himself couldn’t have picked a better one. And here it is: an airtight legal argument for allowing Intelligent Design to be taught in public schools.

But wait, there’s more! A second present from Professor Coyne! An open admission that public schools should be teaching our kids that they are machines. Thank you, Professor Coyne!
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New research is uncovering the details of how the cell’s protein factory—the ribosome—is constructed. The ribosome translates messenger RNA molecules—edited copies of DNA protein-coding genes—into a string of amino acids, according to the genetic code. The ribosome has two major components (one smaller and one larger), each made up of both RNA and protein molecules, and is constructed via a complex sequence of events.  Read more

A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to attend a lecture by microbiologist Phillip Aldridge, of the University of Newcastle. The topic of his lecture was “The Regulation of Flagellar Assembly”. Being an ID proponent, I had a natural interest in what Aldridge was going to say, and I had been looking forward to the event for some time. I was already familiar to a degree with several of the key mechanisms and regulation of flagellar biosynthesis. Nonetheless, the lecture succeeded in re-kindling my passion for biology, and inspired me to do some in-depth research on my own with regards the workings of this engineering marvel.

I must confess that I was blown away. If one thought that the functional-specificity of arrangement with respect to the flagellum’s key components may well provide adequate grounds for a design inference, the mechanisms of flagellar construction take this intuition to a whole new level. So mesmerized I was by the motor’s intrinsic beauty and elegance, that I decided to provide a sketch overview of this amazing process for the benefit of readers of this blog. Of course, there are variations in the flagellum’s overall construct from species to species. The archetypical flagellum, however, is probably that of the closely related species, Escherichia coli, Salmonella enterica, and Salmonella typhimurium. It is this that I want to primarily focus on.

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 Merry Christmas and Season’s Greetings! May you and all your friends be cheerful. Posting at Uncommon Descent is a pleasure for all of us authors, and I would like to take this opportunity to thank our generous donors. Recent posts explain why we put so many hours into the site: Evidence and honest discussion of evidence. But now, suppose I told you that a theory about how life forms change over time has been known since the 1960s to be mathematically impossible (assuming evidence-based circumstances). Yet courts order it to be taught to all children uncritically in tax-supported schools. Anyone who raises doubts, public or private, is not only demonized or silenced in the academy but trashed by a Read More ›

Available here. Axe’s analysis was motivated in part by the recent flurry of papers dealing with the problem of the waiting time for multiple independent mutations. Here is Doug’s abstract: To explain life’s current level of complexity, we must first explain genetic innovation. Recognition of this fact has generated interest in the evolutionary feasibility of complex adaptations–adaptations requiring multiple mutations, with all intermediates being non-adaptive. Intuitively, one expects the waiting time for arrival and fixation of these adaptations to have exponential dependence on d, the number of specific base changes they require. Counter to this expectation, Lynch and Abegg have recently concluded that in the case of selectively neutral intermediates, the waiting time becomes independent of d as d becomes Read More ›

In the seventeenth century Isaac Newton figured out how the solar system worked. The same gravitational force that makes apples drop to the ground also steers the planets in their orbits about the sun. But the English physicist warned against over estimating the power of his new laws. Though the planets “persevere in their orbits by the mere laws of gravity,” Newton concluded, “yet they could by no means have at first derived the regular position of the orbits themselves from those laws.” Gravity alone can maintain an orbit about the sun, but not establish such an orbit. In the centuries since Newton evolutionists have constructed a solar system origin narrative replete with contingent events and all manner of natural Read More ›

Colorado Springs, CO – December 21, 2010 Access Research Network has just released its annual “Top 10 Darwin and Design Science Stories” for 2010. Gaining top honors on the list was new research that revealed the optimal design of the human eye. Physicists from the Israel Institute of Technology have created a light-guiding model of the retina, which reveals that the glial (or Müller) cells provide low-scattering passage of light from the retinal surface to the photoreceptor cells, thus acting as optical fibers. Researchers concluded “The fundamental features of the array of glial cells are revealed as an optimal structure designed for preserving the acuity of images in the human retina. It plays a crucial role in vision quality, in Read More ›