Intelligent Design

A friend of mine referred me to this article at superscholar.org about the recent 30th anniversary conference that The Center For Inquiry held in Los Angeles this past October. There seems to be a lot of disagreement among the influential in the movement advocating secular humanism.

Despite calls for unity at the conference, a significant amount of disagreement about where secular humanism needs to go was evident. During the last session, a sharp exchange occurred between the founder of The Center for Inquiry and The Counsel for Secular Humanism, Paul Kurtz, and Ron Lindsay, the current CEO and President of these organizations.

Kurtz, using the microphone set up for the audience, cited at length a recent LA Times article exposing a “rift within the Center for Inquiry.” “That rift” Kurtz said, quoting the article, “cracked open recently when Paul Kurtz, a founder of the secular humanist movement in America, was ousted as chairman of the Center for Inquiry, an organization of the Counsel for Secular Humanism.  One factor leading to this ouster, was the perception that Kurtz was on the — and this is quoting Thomas Flynn — was on the mellowing side of the movement.” Unlike some secular humanists who envision the destruction of religion, Kurtz advocates for accommodation with religion.

Kurtz stated that he had been censored for the first time in his life, and that this was through the CFI, an organization he founded, in that they refused to publish his letter of resignation as well as his neo-humanist statement of secular principles and values. He said that his ouster resulted in the “worst two years of my life.” Toni Van Pelt, who had opened the Office of Public Policy for the CFI, defended Kurtz and lamented his censorship and forced resignation by Lindsay. This was followed with simultaneous booing and applause from the audience. Several panelists, including Jennifer Michael Hecht and Sean Faircloth, left the stage during this exchange.

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Michael Behe is currently on a speaking tour around the UK (tour website here), organised by the newly founded Centre for ID UK. Last night, I attended Behe’s Glasgow lecture. The evening was entitled “Darwin or Design – What Does the Science Really Say?” As is to be expected, Behe spoke both articulately and persuasively, developing a powerful cumulative positive case for design based on the nanotechnology which pervades life at the level of the cellular world. Behe is a very gifted speaker, especially when it comes to conveying his scientific ideas and concepts to an audience without a scientific background.

Representatives from the Scottish Humanist Society were also in attendance, and took the liberty to hand out anti-ID literature outside the venue. Nothing wrong with that, of course. ID has nothing to fear from people listening to both sides and critically evaluating the strength of the respective cases. Unfortunately, however, the literature was disappointing – it recycled, in large measure, material from the NCSE and from Wikipedia: hardly your most reliable sources of information when it comes to ID. Many of the objections presented therein were, in fact, addressed during the course of the presentation. Tellingly, when it came to the Q&A, the humanists were seemingly unable to articulate a reason why we ought to reject Behe’s arguments, and it was somewhat of an anticlimax.

Nonetheless, I thought that it might be worth posting a brief response to this literature here. One of the two pieces of literature which I picked up was a pamphlet headed “It isn’t Intelligent and it isn’t Design. ID is Bad Science – ID is BS”. When one turns the page, one is confronted with four headings, and I will discuss each in turn.

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Education Week has this article expounding on the fruitfulness of campaigns designed to educate our youth in the theory of evolution.

When a federal court in 2005 rejected an attempt by the Dover, Pa., school board to introduce intelligent design as an alternative to evolution to explain the development of life on Earth, it sparked a renaissance in involvement among scientists in K-12 science instruction.

Now, some of those teaching programs, studies, and research centers are starting to bear fruit.

The National Science Foundation, the National Academy of Sciences, and other groups have increased research investment on identifying essential concepts for teaching evolution, including creating the Evolution Education Research Centre, a partnership of Harvard, McGill, and Chapman universities, and launching the first peer-reviewed journal dedicated to the subject, Journal of Evolution: Education and Outreach.

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Recent experiments have revealed that when perturbed in flight, a fruit fly can recover its heading to within 2 degrees in less than a tenth of a second. Here’s how the researchers describe the results:  Read more

When light enters your eye it triggers a sequence of actions, ultimately causing a signal to be sent to your brain. Even a mere single photon can be detected in your vision system. It all starts with a photon interacting with a light-sensitive chromophore molecule. The interaction causes the chromophore to change configuration and this, in turn, influences the large, trans-membrane rhodopsin protein to which the chromophore is attached. This is just the beginning of the cellular signal transduction cascade. But before any of this begins, in some species the incoming light has already been filtered and focused.  Read more

In a previous blog, I had analyzed Sir Roger Penrose‘s new cosmology (CCC) as a reworking of Sir Fred Hoyle’s “Steady State Theory“. And of course, Sir Fred’s is a reworking of the Greek model of Democritus, and one of the three pillars of materialism. Also in the news is Hawking’s attempt to make the Creator unnecessary with a different kludge, invoking an infinite Monte Carlo casino of universes. Since Sir Roger is not a theist, it may be that like Sir Fred, he finds a certain attraction to recovering an infinite universe that makes a Creator unnecessary. Unfortunately, it looks as if he’s proven the opposite. But first let’s look at his theory. Read more…

Seeing is believing, and they say that a picture is worth a thousand words. Over at Creation.com, Brian Thomas has posted a fascinating article entitled, ATP synthase: majestic molecular machine made by a mastermind. ATP synthase is an enzyme that synthesizes an energy-rich compound, ATP (adenosine triphosphate), which is used by almost every biochemical process in the body. ATP synthase is also the world’s tiniest rotary motor, and it operates at near 100% efficiency, which is far greater than that of any man-made motor. In his article, Brian Thomas does an excellent job of describing the workings of this enzyme and of exposing the inadequacies of proposed evolutionary explanations for its origin.

But don’t take my word for it. Have a look at this video by Creation.com, and you’ll see at once that ATP synthase is the product of design. It’ll only take 86 seconds of your valuable time.
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Scientific mistakes are no sin, but it would be a mistake to think there is no ethical dimension to the theory of evolution. The ethical aspects of evolution are most obvious in its misrepresentation of science. Even evolutionists agree scientists are responsible for the accurate transmission of scientific knowledge to the public. And yet evolutionists consistently misrepresent science, claiming evolution is an undeniable fact. It would be irrational, they say, to think otherwise. What is striking is the degree of this misrepresentation. We’re not talking about a minor mistake or two that led to an error in the third decimal point. We’re not talking about a subtle blunder that could easily go undetected. Consider, for example, the evolution of the Read More ›

The recent Dembski-Hitchens debate is available here. As Dembski points out, Hitchens hitches much of his atheistic wagon to Darwinism (the creation myth of atheistic materialism, which is dissolving rapidly in the universal acid* of genuine scientific rigor). Very revealing is Hitchens’ reference to cave-dwelling creatures that lose their eyes. He thinks that this is evidence of “evolution.” In fact, this is evidence of devolution — the loss of information, not the origin or creation of it. It is evidence for informational entropy. Decay happens all by itself. Consider computer code like mine that simulates human intelligence in the game of checkers. It is approximately 65,000 lines of highly optimized and refined computer code in the C/C++ language. (This does Read More ›

Written by Felipe Aizpún Viñes,  OIACDI; 2010, ISBN 10-1452800790; Review by Carlos Javier Alonso, University of Navarra, Spain (see original review in Spanish at OIACDI); Translation by Robert Deyes

Evolucionismo y conocimiento racional (Evolution and rational thought) presents a thoroughly comprehensive analysis of both the arguments in favor and against evolution and demonstrates the author’s  deep understanding of  scientific literature published over the last few decades on the subjects of life’s origins and the evolution of man.  This timely volume deals with the subject matter in extraordinary depth through its coverage of both classical and contemporary viewpoints from the various schools of evolutionary thought.  The 622-page text of Evolucionismo y conocimiento racional is divided up into 21 chapters that systematically unpack the following topics: Darwinism, Evolution: fact or theory, materialist prejudices, creationism, fundamentalism, rational thought, science and philosophy, routes of reason, shortcomings of the scientific method, the ‘new biology’, intelligent design, evolution and creation and the philosophy of life.

Evolucionismo y conocimiento racional stands out as a resource that brings together the core elements of the topics it covers and thus provides an avenue for readers to assess the current state of debate.  In this regard Evolucionismo y conocimiento racional can be seen as the ‘evolution bible’.  Rather than giving the impression of a rapidly assembled collection of facts put together for the sole purpose of disseminating information, the book bears all the hallmarks of a well thought out literary masterpiece.  Most notable is the rich collection of arguments through which each of the evolutionary hypotheses are expounded and systematically considered.  And yet Evolucionismo y conocimiento racional is not exclusively directed towards specialist readers.  On the contrary.  In my assessment, it is easily accessible to those who have a basic training in philosophy and science and a firm grasp of the multi-faceted problems surrounding evolutionary reasoning. Read More ›

In the latest edition of Science, Michael Gray, Julius Lukes, et.al, tackle what they see as a big dilemna for Darwinism: “gratuitous complexity”. The first two sentences of their short piece are these: “Many of the cell’s macromolecular machines appear gratuitously complex, comprising more components thatn their basic functions seem to demand. How can we make sense of this complexity in the light of evolution?” I’ll translate: “Based on directional selection, there’s way more proteins at work in these ‘machines’ that we can possibly explain.” So, ‘adaptionist’ and ‘selectionist’ explanations will not do. How big then is the problem? Well, when it comes to the spliceosome, they tell us: “The spliceosome uses five small nuclear RNAs and hundreds [my emphasis] of proteins to do the same job that some catlytic introns (called ribozymes) can do alone.” That’s some kind of problem: where did the ‘hundreds’ of proteins come from? And how did they become functionally integrated into the spliceosome? Or, as they put it: “For the addition of some of these proteins, selection probbly did drive increased complexity, but there is no basis to assume that this explains all, or even most, of the increased complexity of these machines.”(My emphasis again)[Note the continual use of the word ‘machine’.]

Well, how do the Darwinists get out of this one? The authors begin their journey to the Promised Land by citing the work of Michael Lynch, who invokes the “fixation of neutral or slightly deleterious features as a general and unavoidable source of complexity in taxa with small populations.” Such “non-selective processes” can lead to “neutrally fixed complexities”, but, of course, if selection is not involved, then these ‘complexities’ can be “neutrally ‘unfixed'” through random inversion. So, what is a evo-biologist to do? Here they turn to a “ratchet mechanism” proposed by Maynard Smith and Szathmary in the early nineties termed “contingent irreversibility”, which says “previously independent evolutionary units” can become “interdependent . . . for ‘accidental reasons that have little to do with the selective forces that led to the evolution of the higher entity in the first place” [J. Maynard Smith, E. Szathmary, The Major Transitions in Evolution (Oxford Univ. Press, Oxford 1995)]

The basic idea is that some kind of evolutionary novelty arises (how? they don’t tell us—see below and TEoE), and then this novelty becomes embedded through subsequent ‘neutral’ mutations that cause the embedded structure to bind more strongly and thus not allowing disassociation (it is a very rough idea). As examples they cite the symbiosis of mitochondria and plastids that become ‘harbored’ to cells, and the presence of tyrosyl tRNA synthetase as a splicer in Neurospora whose mitochondria have “self-splicing” introns. (Notice we come down from “hundreds” of extra proteins to just one.) Well, how might this synthetase have come about, and why is it still there? The authors state that the usual explanation is this: the interaction [with the synthetase] arose “‘to compensate for structural defects acquired’ by the intron sequences.”

Now, quite interestingly, the authors go on to make this observation: “But this order of events puts the cart before the horse: Introns bearing such defects would be at an immediate selective disadvantage and would not likely be fixed in populations before they TyrRS (synthetase) binding evolved to suppress their deleterious effects.” Well, join the club. This is exactly what critics of neo-Darwinian say all the time. This has now become obvious to the Darwinists (that is, they’re willing to state it out loud!) only because they now think they have a solution. And what is that solution: “If the order of events is reversed, then there would be no deleterious intermediate. Specifically, if the binding interaction arose first—fortuitously or for some reason unrelated to splicing—its existence could allow the accumultation of mutations in the intron that would have inactiviated splicing, were the protein not bound. Because the compensatory or suppressive activity of the protein is imagined to exist fortuitously before any intron mutation, this might be called “presuppression,” and the acquisition of protein dependence by the intron could be selectively neutral ( or, even slightly disadvantageous), and yet also inevitable, in finite populations.”

I like the phrase they use for how this protein function came about: “fortuitously or for some reason unrelated to splicing”. When was the last time you read an article that contained both the words “gratuitous” and “fortuitous”? I “imagine” it’s been a while. Well, this is where the Designer comes in handy. You see, I, too, can imagine that the Designer has “fortuitously” inserted this new function, and that later mutations were just neutral accretions. So I propose that we heretoforward respond to Darwinists as to “how” the Designer designs by answering that the Designer uses “contingent irreversibility”!

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Some scientists grow more conservative with age; others, more radical. Carl Woese (age 82) represents a vivid example of the latter group. His latest paper, “Life is physics: evolution as a collective phenomenon far from equilibrium,” co-authored with fellow U of Illinois scientist and frequent collaborator Nigel Goldenfeld, includes more heterodox ideas per page than just about anything I’ve read recently. (The paper is forthcoming in the Annual Reviews series.) For instance (p. 12): IS EVOLUTION RANDOM? We would be remiss in ending this article if we did not briefly mention the fascinating question: is evolution random? More precisely, does variation precede but not cause adaptation—the central tenet of the modern synthesis—or do environmental changes alter the stochastic nature of Read More ›

Array tomography, yet another new biological imaging technology is yielding early results. Click here, for example, to see a video rendition of a mouse cortex. Here’s how one writer described the new results:  Read more

Dr. William Dembski will be debating Christopher Hitchens at the Prestonwood Baptist Church Nov. 18th, 2010. “Does a Good God Exist?” will be the topic debated. The debate will be held from 8:40 a.m. to 11:00 a.m. There will be a live webcast of the debate. Dr. William Dembski, Research Professor in Philosophy at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, is a leader in the Intelligent Design community and is a Senior Fellow with Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture. His most comprehensive treatment of intelligent design to date, coauthored with Jonathan Wells, is titled The Design of Life: Discovering Signs of Intelligence in Biological Systems. In November of 2009, he published a book on theodicy titled The End of Christianity: Read More ›

Five quick questions:

(1) What is your favorite metaphor for our Earth? Is your favorite metaphor an animate one (e.g. the Earth is our mother / our sister / a super-organism), or an inanimate one (e.g. the Earth is our home / a jewel / our spaceship / our way-station)?

(2) In the course of an average day, what percentage of your waking hours do you spend thinking about the following: (a) God; (b) issues that invoke abstract ideas, such as philosophical and moral questions (whether speculative or practical), mathematics, the sciences and the arts; (c) yourself; (d) people you love; (e) other people; (f) animals (including your pets) and other living things; (g) the global environment as a whole (Gaia, for some)?

(3) Imagine that the construction of a highway linking a small town to a large city is planned to go through an area where an endangered species (say, a community of frogs) lives, and there is no commercially viable alternative route. You are a politician with the power to veto the project. How do you decide on the right thing to do? Do you attempt to weigh the interests of the people involved against those of the frogs, or do you make a decision based on an appeal to some universal moral principle? Would you use a different decision procedure if the endangered animals were mammals instead of frogs?

(4) How worried are you about environmental problems in the world today? Do you believe we can solve each and every one of them? Or do you believe that the environmental problems confronting the human race may destroy it very soon, and will inevitably destroy it at some future date?

(5) Do you believe we were put here for a purpose on this Earth?

As we’ll see, there are strong correlations between the answers people give to these questions, and for a very good reason.

I intend to show that Intelligent Design has significant implications for how we view the world. In this post, I’m going to talk about the world in a very literal sense: I mean our Earth. I’m also going to discuss two environmental problems that concern many scientists today: global warming and ocean acidification.
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