Intelligent Design

In an earlier post (go here), I relayed to UD readers two programs that had been emailed to me by someone named Oxfordensis. After careful scrutiny, my colleagues and I at the Evolutionary Informatics Lab concluded that these are by far the best candidates that we have to date for Dawkins’s original WEASEL program(s) (as I note in the previous UD post, it appears that there were in fact two programs, one described by Dawkins in his book THE BLIND WATCHMAKER, the other appearing in his BBC video about the book). Are these in fact the original WEASELs? When I contacted Richard Dawkins to confirm their authenticity, he replied, in an email dated 9.21.09, “I cannot confirm that either of them is mine. They don’t look familiar to me, but it is a long time ago. I don’t see what more I can say.”

In that email, Dawkins rightly raised the question of these program’s provenance and the fact that UD had issued a reward for them. Yet the reward was so small (a mere book) that this hardly seems sufficient for someone to write these programs as a hoax. The question of provenance is more worrisome, but then again so is the failure of Dawkins to keep copies of the program, especially when they are of such historical interest in ongoing debates over evolution. Are, then, the programs listed in my previous post in fact the originals? Even if this question cannot be answered with iron-clad certainty, we submit that they deserve to be taken as originals. Why? Three reasons:

1. They are written in PASCAL and they compile in the PASCAL compilers available in the mid- to late-80s.

2. These programs were widely circulated at the time. Charles Thaxton informs me, in an email dated 8.27.09, “As for the Dawkins program, I picked up a copy in 1989 at Princeton from a physics grad student after my talk there.” Like Dawkins, he adds, “But Bill, I have no idea where it is.” Presumably, these programs are still out there on people’s computer memory (or floppy disks). So why can’t an anonymous person like Oxfordensis have the originals?

3. Their performance is precisely what we would expect given the historical record that we have of these programs.

This last point has been the main sticking point keeping critics from embracing these programs as the originals. As Wesley Elsberry put it to me in an email dated 9.21.09: “Putting mutation on a per-copy basis rather than per-base would be rather unlike the biology.” And yet, Dawkins does indeed seem to have made this non-biological assumption in programming his WEASELs. In what follows, I draw from my consultation with a programmer colleague: Read More ›

StephenB, at 50, won, for the appended comment in response to the question: Is accidental origin of life a doctrine that holds back science?

The prize? A free copy of Steven Meyer’s Signature in the Cell (Harper One, 2009). (But StephenB must send me a working postal address at oleary@sympatico.ca)

The accidental origin of life idea Read More ›

This week, Simon Conway Morris visited Australia. The following are extracts from a talk he gave in Sydney on Monday 21 Sept. They indicate how he sees ID and Dawkins.

“I suspect, having re-read the Origin from cover to cover, that the Origin is as much to, not only attempt, but in fact to destroy creationism irrevocably. In as much as, as a young man Darwin was hugely influenced by Paley, who we can describe if you like, as the grand daddy of creationists, in as much as he is the person who points to biological structures and organisation and says “look these things are so ludicrously complex, that they must surely represent the hand and authority of a designer.” Paley was of course was referring to the action of God. This is effectively the position which remains to the present day in intelligent design, which I think is non sense.

What I think is interesting is that at each point Darwin simply says “Look nobody is going to accept this as evidence for a creationist argument.” But he does it with enormous subtlety, and he doesn’t have this belligerent sort of “How could you be so stupid as to believe something like that?” But I think it is as clear as I can make out that Darwin really did want to undermine permanently the notion that God was involved, if you like on a day to day action. He had perhaps in the end an almost deistic view of the world which revolved around the primary laws so established that then led to as he said himself “this grandeur of life”.

I think these attitudes, if you like really go very deep and these tensions remain with us today.”

Q. How do you differ from Dawkins?

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In light of Judge Jones coming to Southern Methodist University today and tomorrow, for what seems to be an unbalanced discussion of ID, I thought I would add some clarity to the affair with these remarks by Nick Smyth  from the blog 3quarksdaily pertaining to Jones’s poor reasoning in his 2005 Kitzmiller decision as to what constitutes science: For any formal definition of science, it either excludes too much, or includes too much, or both. It is enough to say that today, even those writing anti-pseudoscience manifestos concede that it is not possible to give a complete definition of what constitutes science or pseudoscience. Rather, they tend to revert to weak, vague and totally indefensible “ballpark” definitions that are designed Read More ›

We’ve been discussing Falk and Ayala’s theological support for evolution. However, while reading Falk’s arguments, I came to the realization that the only way Falk’s arguments about evolution freeing God from responsibility for the created world make sense is if they assume Intelligent Design is true.
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As noted by Dr. Dembski in a previous blog, Darrel Falk has written a theological blog about what God would and would not design: So while we may love to think about the Intelligent Designer as being the great engineer in the sky drawing up magnificent plans to make things like the mammalian eye, the blood complement system, the immune system, or even the bacterial flagellum, it is not that simple. Countless millions of these structures and processes are designed to make people very sick and even to kill them. The Creator described in the Bible is not a sinister God who is off in a great machine shop “intelligently designing” machinery to make people very sick. Some will say Read More ›

Darrell Falk, one of the key people at Francis Collins’s BioLogos Foundation, has a remarkable piece arguing that Darwinian evolution is the only way to preserve Christian orthodoxy in the face of intelligent design (go here). His line is that a micro-managing designer would be responsible for all the nasty designs we find in biology, so natural selection must have done all the creative work in producing biological complexity and diversity. I’ve seen this line increasingly taken by Christian Darwinists. Until this piece by Falk, Francisco Ayala’s DARWIN’S GIFT TO SCIENCE AND RELIGION was the most extreme form of it. But Falk has taken it to a new level:

Some of the by-products of natural selection are intricate structures that can fashion cellular machines that are able to harm us, just like the machines that we humans make. It happens in the context of freedom–God-granted freedom. However, the notion that irreducibly complex structures are built and put in place by a meticulous detail-driven intelligent designer is not consistent with Christian theology and should not have been embraced by Christians. With all due respect to my friends who hold this view, I would venture to say it borders on the heretical–certainly it is scientifically heretical, but I wonder if it is not theologically so as well. God is not the engineer that built these intricate little terror machines. And the Satan that we know from Christian theology is not a designer of life’s machinery. Those who wish to believe this are free to do so, but they have moved onto an island of scientific fantasy and perhaps even theological heterodoxy. The greatest beauty in the universe emerges through processes that arise through God-ordained freedom. Let us celebrate that beauty, even as we, in the presence of God’s Spirit, grit our teeth, and endure the hardships that come as a by-product.

For Falk and fellow Christian Darwinists ID is bad science and bad theology and Darwinian evolution is the key to reforming the faith. As an antidote to Christian Darwinism, let me suggest reading my book THE END OF CHRISTIANITY: FINDING A GOOD GOD IN AN EVIL WORLD. Here is a relevant passage from ch. 20 (titled “What about Evolution?” — substitute “Falk” for “Ayala” when reading it):

I want next to turn to the charge made by some theistic evolutionists that Christian theism requires God to create indirectly by evolution rather than directly by intervention (as in special creation). Theistic evolutionists worry that a God who creates by direct intervention renders the problem of evil insoluble. Such a God would be responsible for all the botched and malevolent designs we find in nature. By letting Darwinian natural selection serve as a designer substitute, theistic evolutionists can refer all those botched and malevolent designs to evolution. This, in their view, is supposed to resolve the problem of natural evil and thereby help validate Christian theism. Read More ›

Just so we are clear, I am certain that everyone who posts at this site believes evolution is a fact (or fact! fact! fact! as some of our more breathless opponents prefer). 

Whoa Barry!  Are you telling us that Uncommon Descent does not oppose the concept of evolution?  Yes, I am telling you exactly that.

Then what is all the fuss and disagreement about?  I’m glad you asked.  But before I answer that question, let me begin with what the fuss and disagreement are NOT about.

 The fuss and the disagreement are not about whether evolution occurred.  Obviously evolution occurred if by “evolution” one means, “things are different now than they were in the past.”  I don’t know anyone who disagrees with that.  That bare fact is uninteresting, even trivial. 

The important question is not WHETHER things are different now than they were in the past.  They obviously are.  The important question is “WHY are things different now than they were in the past?”  As Phil Johnson has pointed out, the Darwinist starts with the following proposition:  “Given materialist premises, Darwinian evolution or something very much like it simply must be true.”  Therefore, since the Darwinist already “knows” that Darwinian evolution exhausts all of the options open to investigation, he interprets all of the data to – big surprise here – confirm Darwinian evolution.  It is almost literally the case that a Darwinist is incapable of seeing data that does not confirm or tends to disconfirm his theory.  Read More ›

This thread inspired the following observations. The bottom line is that none of Dawkins’ computer programs have any relevance to biological evolution, because of this in WEASEL1: Target:Text=’METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL’; and this in WEASEL2: WRITELN(’Type target phrase in capital letters’); READLN(TARGET); which allows the user to enter the “target” phrase. No search is required, because the solution has been provided in advance. These programs are just hideously inefficient means of printing out what could have been printed out when the program launched. The information for the solution was explicitly supplied by the programmer. Once this is recognized, further conversation about the relevance of the programs to biological evolution is no more illuminating than conjecture about the number Read More ›

On August 26th last month, Denyse O’Leary posted a contest here at UD asking for the original WEASEL program(s) that Richard Dawkins was using back in the late 1980s to show how Darwinian evolution works. Although Denyse’s post generated 377 comments (thus far), none of the entries could reasonably be thought to be Dawkins’s originals.

It seems that Dawkins used two programs, one in his book THE BLIND WATCHMAKER, and one for a video that he did for the BBC (here’s the video-run of the program; fast forward to 6:15). After much beating the bushes, we finally heard from someone named “Oxfordensis,” who provided the two PASCAL programs below, which we refer to as WEASEL1 (corresponding to Dawkins’s book) and WEASEL2 (corresponding to Dawkins’s BBC video). These are by far the best candidates we have received to date.

Unless Richard Dawkins and his associates can show conclusively that these are not the originals (either by providing originals in their possession that differ, or by demonstrating that these programs in some way fail to perform as required), we shall regard the contest as closed, offer Oxfordensis his/her prize, and henceforward treat the programs below as the originals.

For WEASEL1 and WEASEL2 click here: Read More ›

We are often told that bunnies in the pre-Cambrian would be evidence against evolution, but that is just posturing. But what of real known anomalies? The Chinese fossil layers are throwing up all sorts of out of place evidence. It would be nice if we were told more about such fossils. But slowly word is getting out. We find now for instance a Tiny T Rex Raptorex kriegsteini in the early Cretaceous of China (or is that the late Jurassic?).

Tiny ancestor is T. rex blueprint – BBC  

Although the Jehol Group of China is now thought to be of Early Cretaceous age, many taxa are from the ‘Late Jurassic, or older.’ It is suggested that perhaps East Asia was a ‘refugium for some of these more typically ‘Jurassic’ taxa in the Lower Cretaceous.’

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I know both Robert Wright and George Johnson. I invited Wright to the NATURE OF NATURE conference at Baylor back in 2000, where he debated Michael Shermer. And I met Johnson at a Templeton event in Santa Fe back in 1999. Go here for their Bloggingheads discussion, which really amounts to a confessional in which Wright is the penitent and Johnson the confessor. Wright can’t fall enough over himself for giving ID too much place at his Bloggingheads forum. Discourse in our culture has become truly pathetic. Johnson, when he’s not intoning “yeah” and “umh,” comes across as a condescending prig. He dismisses Michael Behe’s views on design because they “conveniently dovetail with his religious belief.” These atheists and agnostics Read More ›

Pulitzer Prize-winning author and professor Jonathan Weiner will be giving the second lecture of the Darwin Celebratory Lectures on the topic of variation. Weiner’s award winning book, The Beak of the Finch, documents the adaptive variations observed in the finches on the Galapagos islands. Such adaptive change is both rapid and intelligent. For instance, the beaks of the finches adapted to changes brought about by drought years. It is another piece of evidence that species have incredible adaptive abilities, not that reptiles changed into birds.   Read more

The following two books are complete and will be out early next year: … The first is coming out with InterVarsity, the second with Baker. They’ll serve as a nice counterblast to the theistic evolutionism promoted by Denis Alexander, Karl Giberson, Francis Collins, and others. P.S. Barbara Forrest in her book against ID complains that I publish too many books. Deal with it Barbara — they sell well and they get read, especially in the Christian community. In any case, Barbara, please make sure to cite these two in your next edition.