Intelligent Design

About twenty five years ago Lars Olov Bygren discovered that feast and famine years can affect not only those who endure them, but their progeny as well. Bygren was not the first to observe that environmental influences can be transmitted to subsequent generations. And as with the earlier discoveries, even in recent decades such empirical findings have not been welcomed by evolutionists. Why? Because such findings go against evolutionary theory. As a recent Time magazine article explained:  Read more

Critics of intelligent design often try to dismiss the theory as not worth addressing, as a question already settled, even as being too boring to countenance. Then they spend an amazing amount of energy trying to refute it. On this episode of ID the Future, Anika Smith interviews David Klinghoffer, editor of the new digital book Signature of Controversy: Responses to Critics of Signature in the Cell, featuring essays by David Berklinski, David Klinghoffer, Casey Luskin, Stephen C. Meyer, Paul Nelson, Jay Richards, and Richard Sternberg. Listen in as Klinghoffer examines the responses of these various critics in this new volume, available as a free digital book. Click here to listen.

Evolutionists insist that evolution is a fact even though there is much debate about how it occurred. But if they debate the question of how evolution occurred, that means it is an open question. And does this not, in turn, mean that whether evolution occurred is also an open question? No, evolutionists assure us, there is no question that evolution occurred—it is a fact—because we observe it occurring. But therein lies the rub:  Read more

The enormously influential mathematics and science writer, skeptic, and encourager of many, Martin Gardner, has died at the age of 95. I came to know Gardner through a mutual friend, the late science writer and skeptic Bob Schadewald (1943-2000), who occasionally visited Gardner at the latter’s home in North Carolina. [Here’s a tiny but relevant fact that shows the surprising reticulations of the science-and-theology debate in America. During one such visit, Gardner gave Schadewald much of the contents of his library, which he found had grown unwieldy. Then, years later, following the devastating fire that destroyed nearly all of YEC paleontologist Kurt Wise’s library, Schadewald packed much of his personal library into boxes to send to Kurt. Schadewald died a few days later, at nearly the same time his books arrived at Kurt’s home in Tennessee. Kurt unpacked the books, carefully wrapped in tissue, in tears, knowing that the person who sent them had just died. So, chances are, at least some of Martin Gardner’s personal library now resides with Kurt Wise. Go figure.] Schadewald told Gardner about this crazy YEC philosophy of science graduate student he knew, at the University of Chicago, and in response, Gardner sent back a letter to me. Read More ›

Male crickets attract females with their chirping, but some males are incapable of chirping. Now, new research shows that those silent males are affected by their singing comrades. Specifically, silent males that develop in the presence of abundant male song tend to be larger, with more reproductive potential, than male crickets growing up in a silent environment. Insects are more complicated than thought. As one researcher explained:  Read more

Over on Biologos, Francis Beckwith has posted a third and a fourth instalment of his “Intelligent Design and Me” series.  He has dedicated these instalments to some of his critics, naming some UD people specifically, and also discussing the views of Jay Richards of the Discovery Institute.

I’m grateful that Dr. Beckwith has seen fit to reply.  I must confess that I had almost written him off as a “drive-by shooter”, but now I must say “better late than never”, and thank him for his effort to get back to us.

First, as one of the UD people mentioned by Dr. Beckwith, I should apologize for misreporting, in my earlier column, some of the chronological details of Dr. Beckwith’s religious and intellectual life.  Dr. Beckwith has corrected me on these in his new article.  I can assure him that there was no conscious attempt to misrepresent anything, and I am glad he has reminded us that his adoption of Thomism preceded his return to Rome by many years.  This makes the important point that Thomism is a theological approach rather than a religious confession, and is open to Christians other than Roman Catholics.

I won’t comment on Dr. Beckwith’s new articles point by point, but will focus only on two main ideas which I think need discussion.

A.  Dr. Beckwith tells us that Thomas Aquinas did not have an argument from design in the style of William Paley, but an argument from the existence of final causes.  Read More ›

I am going to tell you something unbelievable. It will sound like hyperbole or a parable contrived to make a point. It isn’t—it is true. You have heard of the many crazy things people believe but, believe it or not, there is a group that is certain that there is a way for the four fundamental forces of nature (gravity, electromagnetism, the weak nuclear force and the strong nuclear force) to rearrange fundamental particles to form spaceships, nuclear power plants and computers. I am indebted to Granville Sewell for this information, and why it is important.  Read more

The twentieth century’s revolution in molecular biology has produced volumes of sequence data which evolutionists have marshaled in defense of their theory. One high-profile example is the molecular similarity between humans and chimpanzees. First proteins and later the genomes of these two species were found to be practically identical. These findings have often been touted as compelling confirmations of evolution. But there are also differences—significant differences. One example is the differences in the Y chromosome, which recent research has elucidated. These differences are explained by evolutionists, of course, as arising from various evolutionary processes. But the differences are significant and the evolutionary scenarios are speculative. In fact a recent paper appealed to several different mechanisms in order to explain the Read More ›

Review Of Chapter 13 Of Signature In The Cell, by Stephen Meyer, HarperOne Publishers, ISBN: 9780061894206

I never would have suspected that the literary sensation Dr Seuss’ The Cat In The Hat Comes Back would be used to make a point about the devastating shortcomings of origin of life theories (1). But when I read one of the later chapters of Meyer’s Signature In The Cell which in one foul swoop discredited Hermann Muller’s fortuitous origins of DNA, Henry Quastler’s DNA self replication hypothesis and Manfred Eigen’s ideas on hypercycles I could not help but be fascinated by his use of this children’s classic in his exposition. Of course in their own unique ways each of these scientists became steadfastly convinced that they were onto something of great significance that would lead to fruitful avenues on the all important question of how life had begun.

Muller drew inferences from his own work on viruses, in particular bacteriophages (‘bacteria eaters’), equating these simple organisms to “a gene that copies itself within the cell” (2). He envisioned these as being somehow analogous to primitive DNA floating around in the chemical-rich soup of the early earth (2). Quastler on the other hand suggested that polynucleotides could act as templates for replication through complementary base pairing (3). And Eigen chose to assume that ‘self-reproducing molecular systems’ involving RNA molecules and basic enzymes could somehow supply an early form of transcription and translation, later forming hypercycles that would have preceded the arrival of the earliest cells (4).

So how is the Cat in the Hat relevant? Crucial aspects of the above mechanistic propositions, writes Meyer, parallel the antics of our feline friend as he unwillingly redistributes the mess he has created in the house of his none-too-happy hosts. Origin of life scientists have similarly been trying for decades to “clean up the problem of explaining the origin of [biological] information” only to find that they have “simply transferred the problem elsewhere- either by presupposing some other unexplained sources of information or by overlooking the indispensable role of an intelligence” (1). And their modern day brethren, with the apparent sophistication of computer-housed evolutionary algorithms, have fared little better. Meyer’s unpacking of the reality behind Ev, for example, described by its author Thomas Schneider as “a simple computer program” that attempts to evolve the information content of DNA binding sites in a hypothetical genome, is a case in point (5). In Ev Schneider specifies the sequence of these DNA binding sites and incorporates the code for the binding site ‘recognizer’ (protein) into the genome (5). The relative penalties for mis-binding or non-binding of the recognizer to sequences are pre-set into the program (5). Read More ›

A friend of mine sent me a link to a recent article by Giberson. In it Giberson claims that the problem with ID is that “first they need a fertile idea—one that generates new scientific knowledge”. I think it has already done this.

Many eminent scientists have noted that the reductionist way of looking at biology in the 20th century cannot remain forever the way biology operates. Carl Woese’s “A New Biology for a New Century” is a good example of this. The question, though, is what to replace the reductionist view with.
Read More ›

Judging from the comments to the homochirality post, Darwin (aka evolution) still gets support and Pasteur still endures ridicule. Some suggested that I had misread the meteorite data, others suggested that homochirality is easily obtained in the laboratory, while still others proposed circularly polarized light. So it is with a certain sense of vindication that I read the New Scientist article, Did exploding stars shatter life’s mirror? The article begins by saying all life is L-amino, and then admits that all amino acids found on meteorites has an excess of L-amino. “For every type of amino acid found in meteorites there is an excess of the left-handed form over the right-handed of between 2 and 18 per cent,” says Uwe Read More ›

Once again evolution has come up with an ingenious design, this time a multilayered protective material with a range of potential applications. The material was discovered in the shell of a deep-sea snail, Crysomallon squamiferum, which is able to withstand powerful crab attacks. Here is the summary of the new findings:  Read more

One of the most popular evidences proclaimed for evolution in recent years is the high similarity between the human and chimpanzee genomes. The cousin genomes are about 99% similar and this has repeatedly been expounded as an obvious proof text of evolution. But these comparisons did not include the finicky Y chromosome which only recently has been decoded from the chimp genome. These new results show an entirely different picture.  Read more

Big news at Craig Venter’s Synthetic Genomics: Summary: Link 1 Press Release: Link 2 The rhetoric is interesting. What they’ve done is stuck a synthetic genome inside a nonsynthetic cell. Nonetheless, they’ve slipped into talking of a “synthetic bacterial cell.” Indeed, one headline reads “The First Self-Replicating Synthetic Bacterial Cell.” This is hype. If something is going to be called “synthetic,” shouldn’t the whole of it be synthesized and not merely a minuscule portion of it? Also, does such a cell knowably signal design and, if so, why wouldn’t cells untouched by Synthetic Genomics do the same, i.e., implicate design?

Greetings to all. I have been interested for some time in the question-begging character of the logic of natural selection. This is old hat, of course, but just in a nutshell: a new well-adapted trait must first exist in an individual before it can be selected, so while natural selection could potentially explain the proliferation of such a trait throughout a population, it could never explain its origin. Of course, the Darwinist will say, No problem, new traits are thrown up by chance due to random genetic mutation. There are two things wrong with this reply, however. The first is a conceptual point. Even if it were the case that every mutation at the level of the genome were indeed Read More ›