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Intelligent Design

Clarification of the limits to self organisation

In the couple of weeks since I posted a summary of my work on self organisation, I’ve been hoping to receive criticism – none so far unfortunately.  However, by trawling the web I did find some anonymous comments.  While these were mostly of low quality, some recurrent objections have made me want to clarify a couple of points.

Clarification #1  “Quantheory”, a grad student in physics, criticises the applicability of the results to evolution.  He writes:

“… evolution is not described by the search for one specific target. Rather, there is a large range of living things that can exist in many different environments”.

Of course this is true.  Nevertheless it doesn’t contradict anything I say in my paper.  I’m examining the claim that living organisms (more generally, large and irregular objects) can self organise.  The number of possible living organisms simply isn’t relevant to this question, and so isn’t considered in the paper.  Recall that a self-organising object is strongly preferred by the dynamics, so that it appears much more quickly and probably than it would in a purely random system.

The author may be suggesting that evolution isn’t a case of self organisation, after all.  Perhaps there are so many possible kinds of life that some kinds at least are likely to have emerged even by pure chance, given a few billion years?  I hope s/he is not, for this notion is ridiculous, as for example Richard Dawkins has pointed out:

“It is true that there are quite a number of ways of making a living – flying, swimming, swinging through the trees, and so on.  But, however many ways there may be of being alive, it is certain that there are vastly more ways of being dead, or rather not alive.  You may throw cells together at random, over and over again for a billion years, and not once will you get a conglomeration that flies or swims or burrows or runs, or does anything, even badly, that could remotely be construed as working to keep itself alive.”

(R. Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, Penguin Books, 1988, p. 9)  Read More ›

Finding: Bees Solve The Traveling Salesman Problem

It is a classic problem in the field of computer science: In what order should a salesman visit his prospects? The traveling salesman problem may appear simple but it has engaged some of the greatest mathematical minds and today engages some of the fastest computers. This makes new findings, that bees routinely solve the problem before pollinating flowers, all the more remarkable.  Read more

Christian Darwinism: Now you see the “Creator” and now you don’t, but believe anyway

Well, believe something anyway, subject to rapid change.

Once, years ago, I got a rather long phone call from a Christian evolutionist who wanted me to know that Darwin had added to the second edition of his Origin of Species the words “by the Creator” to imply that evolution was God-directed. That was supposed to show that Darwin was really, at heart, a theist.

That Christian evolutionist must have thought I an one of those dim, wimpy Christian writers who nod appreciatively, make vacuous statements about “faith and science,”and worse, make cute little jokes, and then just run off to cover a praisefest somewhere.

Sorry, chump. You dialed the wrong number. Read More ›

Theory of Everything: Putting failure to find such a theory to good use

Sure. Why waste a failure?

In “The imperfect universe: Goodbye, theory of everything” (New Scientist, 10 May 2010, Magazine issue 2759), Marcelo Gleiser mourns,

FIFTEEN years ago, I was a physicist hard at work hunting for a theory of nature that would unify the very big and the very small. There was good reason to hope. The great and the good were committed. Even Einstein, who recognised that our understanding of reality is necessarily incomplete, had spent the last 20 years of his life searching for a unified field theory that would describe the two main forces we see acting around us – gravity and electromagnetism – as manifestations of a single force. For him, such a mathematical theory represented the purest and most elegant expression of nature and the highest achievement of the human intellect.

Fifty-five years after Einstein’s death, the hunt for this elusive unified field theory continues. To physicist Stephen Hawking and many others, finding the “theory of everything” would be equivalent to knowing the “mind of God”. The metaphor is … subject to you buying an online subscription to New Scientist.

Maybe it’s worth it. I mean, so rich a source of authentic pop culture rebranded as science, how can you resist? If you want to know what politicians and pundits fund and defend and why they do, read NS – on someone else’s dime, to be sure.

Why is a theory about the Theory of Everything so important? As soon as you think you’ve worked everything out, it all changes again. Personally, I’d rather have a sound theory of something in particular.

Gleiser argues, says endorser Stuart Kauffman,

… that there is a profound link in Western science between monotheism and the scientific search for a Theory of Everything. He argues persuasively that we must give up this dream. This may augur a profound transformation in our understanding of the world.”

—Stuart Kauffman, Fellow of the Royal Society, Canada, Author of Reinventing the Sacred

Oh, I see now. Read More ›

Which one is different: gravity, continental drift or evolution?

Newton’s theory of gravity, Wegener’s theory of continental drift and Darwin’s theory of evolution all have one thing in common: they have all been ridiculed as impossible at one time or another, because they lacked a plausible mechanism. So which theory is different from the rest? I shall argue that Darwin’s theory is unique, in that it has won widespread acceptance despite the existence of weighty scientific arguments showing that its mechanism is incapable of accounting for the phenomena that it purports to explain. However, if Darwin had formulated his theory of evolution in the same way that Newton formulated his theory of gravity, Darwin’s theory would have been invulnerable to these scientific difficulties. It is also a curious fact that although Darwin’s original theory has undergone radical transformation, like those of Newton and Wegner, many scientists and philosophers are proud to call themselves “Darwinists,” whereas no modern scientist would refer to him/herself as a “Newtonian” or “Wegnerian.”

In this short essay, I also address the fierce resistance in scientific circles to teaching Intelligent Design in high school classrooms, and I propose a legal strategy for neutralizing the Darwinian crusade.
Read More ›

Another Layer on the Information Story: Quorum Sensing

I was recently directed to a video lecture on the phenomenon of quorum sensing, the mechanism by which bacteria communicate with one another to establish the population density of micro-organisms of their own kind within their proximal environment. Bonnie Bassler, the lecturer in this video, does a masterful job of portraying fairly technical concepts and ideas to a lay-audience. Read More>>>

Geese

Bacterial ‘High-Flyer’ Takes Center Stage In The Biotechnology Arena

The blogosphere is brimming with commentaries over the ever-visible changes that usher in the arrival of Autumn in the northern hemisphere (1). The beckoningly bright colors of the foliage on our trees and the seasonal appearance of pumpkins that adorn our porches and abound in the fields around our cities serve as reminders of a festive transition. Throw the occasional honking of migrating Canadian geese into the mix and it is easy to see why many of us cannot help but momentarily stop in awe. The geese in particular are my gaze-catchers. Craning my neck as I look straight up I have become obsessed with capturing the flight of these birds on camera.

But there is more that interests me about Canadian geese than simply their migratory ‘order of business’.  Unknown to many a bird watcher, Canadian geese are one of several ‘gold mine’ species that harbor a strain of bacteria called Bacillus licheniformis in the tufts of their plumage (2).  These feather-degrading bugs are prevalent in all manner of ground-foraging birds and occur in greatest numbers during the late autumn and winter months.  Because of their tough keratin-rich microfibril composition, feathers are extraordinarily resistant to biodegradation (2). But not so tough that keratinolytic bacteria such as B. licheniformis cannot break them down (2). And biotechnologists are exploiting this ability to the full.  Read More ›

Are machine-information metaphors bad for science?

According to Massimo Pigliucci and Maarten Boudry, the widespread use of machine-information metaphors is unfortunate and misleading. They complain about textbooks that develop metaphors to a considerable level of detail. As an example, they cite Alberts, who is often quoted for his analogy between a cell and a “miniature factory, complete with assembly lines, messengers, transport vehicles, etc.” Another machine metaphor they dislike is that of the genome as a “blueprint”, notably in the hype surrounding the Human Genome Project. Whilst these analogies are widely held within the scientific community and by educators, the main target of Pigliucci and Boudry’s paper appears to be intelligent design: “The analogy between living organisms and man-made machines has proven a persuasive rhetorical tool Read More ›

It’s Amazing What Evolution Can Do!

This article here recounts the now documented ability of bees to solve the “traveling salesman problem” faster than computers. And to imagine that evolution has done this! My, what a wonderful thing it is!—-(he says with sarcasm dripping). By just doing something over and over again, with little changes accumulating, a ‘computer,’ better than any we have, somehow comes into existence. And, of course, this ‘computer’ is the size of a grass seed (!!). One of the experimentalists said this: “Despite their tiny brains bees are capable of extraordinary feats of behaviour. . . We need to understand how they can solve the travelling salesman problem without a computer.” I agree with his statement. I would only suggest that RM+NS Read More ›

Michael Behe Goes Head-to-Head With Keith Fox

A radio debate featuring Michael Behe and Keith Fox, discussing issues relating to the scientific substance, and theological implications, of ID was made available today on the Premier Christian Radio website. The audio can be found here. The introductory comments on the website read as follows: Michael Behe is professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University, Pennsylvania and the founder of the modern Intelligent Design movement.  His book “Darwin’s Black Box” ignited the controversy 14 years ago when it claimed that certain molecular machines and biological processes are “irreducibly complex” and cannot be explained by Darwinian evolution. His new book “The Edge of Evolution” takes his conclusions further, arguing that the Darwinian processes of random mutation and natural selection are incapable of producing the variation Read More ›

“Coming clean” about YEC?

Jack Krebs at Panda’s Thumb claims that I have “come clean” as a young earth creationist. There are a couple of problems with his announcement: (1) It’s not true, and (2) there’s nothing in my words that he quoted to justify his claim. Krebs seems to think that my recent statements clarifying my views represent either a compromise or a “retraction” of my earlier views. But that is false. It’s a matter of public record that I am an evangelical Christian. I have publicly defended the complete trustworthiness and inerrancy of Scripture; but my comments in The End of Christianity led some to believe otherwise. The purpose of my recent statement was to make it clear that I believe in Read More ›

The 10^(-120) challenge, or: The fairies at the bottom of the garden

In an earlier post, I wrote that my faith in Intelligent Design was falsifiable, and I listed two criteria by which it might be falsified:

1. An empirical or mathematical demonstration that the probability of the emergence of life on Earth during the past four billion years as a result of purely natural processes, without any intelligent guidance and starting from a random assortment of organic chemicals, is greater than 10^(-120). [Note: when I wrote “life,” I meant “cellular life.”]

2. An empirical or mathematical demonstration that the probability of the emergence of any of the irreducibly complex structures listed on this page, as a result of non-foresighted processes (“random mutations plus natural selection”) is greater than 10^(-120).

I could have added:

3. An empirical or mathematical demonstration that the probability of the emergence of eukaryotes from prokaryotes, or of the 30+ phyla of animals from a single-celled ancestor, or of the different classes of vertebrates from a common ancestor, as a result of non-foresighted processes (“random mutations plus natural selection”) is greater than 10^(-120). Indeed, I might have added “orders” and “families.”

In my post, I deliberately set the bar very, very low, in terms of probabilities – in fact, quite a bit lower than I need have done. I wanted to be as generous as possible to skeptics who might argue that a lot might happen in a large cosmos, over a long enough time.

Astonishingly, no-one in the “skeptic” camp took up the challenge. I was genuinely surprised, because I wasn’t asking for much.
Read More ›

Autumn Reading for Jerry and friends

Japanese maple leaves. Over at Why Evolution is True, Professor Jerry Coyne has been busy at work. He has not only outlined a scenario that would convince him of God’s existence, but he has written an article entitled On P. Z. Myers on evidence for a god with a point-by-point rebuttal of P. Z. Myers’ assertion (backed up by eight supporting arguments) that there was no amount of evidence that could convince him of the existence of any kind of God. I believe in giving credit where credit is due, so I would like to congratulate Professor Coyne. Let me hasten to add that Professor Coyne is still a convinced atheist. As he writes: “To me, the proper stance is, Read More ›

Yet More “Junk DNA” Not-so-Junk After All

Proponents of intelligent design (ID) have long predicted that many of the features of living systems which are said to exhibit “sub-optimal” design will, in time, turn out to have a rationally engineered purpose. This is one of several areas where ID actively encourages a fruitful research agenda, in a manner in which neo-Darwinian evolution does not. One such area, and a field for which I have long held an inquisitive fascination for, is the subject of so-called “junk DNA,” and the non-coding stetches of RNA which are transcribed from them. Skepticism of the “junk DNA” paradigm is not a phenomenon which is limited to proponents of ID. This popular view of the genome — while still resonating as the Read More ›

GTAs: Agents of Change

Oceanic bacteria can swap genes remarkably fast, new findings reveal. Such horizontal gene transfer is facilitated, in this case, by tiny gene-transfer agents, or GTAs:  Read more