Intelligent Design

Every Friday, the BBC-TV’s flagship public affairs programme, Newsnight, broadcasts ‘Newsnight Review’, which covers the week’s worth of cultural events. This week’s was devoted to Things Darwin-ish. The panel consisted of Richard Dawkins, the Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood (whose latest book, The Year of the Flood, is about an Ultra-Green cult that, amongst other things, turns the sociobiologist and biodiversity guru E.O. Wilson into a saint), the poet Ruth Padel (who happens to be a descendant of Darwin’s) and the writer on religious and cultural affairs, the Rev. Richard Coles (who was half of the 1980s synth-pop group, Communards). As I’m writing this, I realize just how ‘postmodern’ Britain must seem to people who don’t live in this country. To me, this line-up looks pretty normal.

I want simply to highlight some remarks that were made on this programme because it gives you a sense of how well-behaved cultured liberals understand Darwin’s significance.

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Review Of The Sixth Chapter Of Signature In The Cell, by Stephen Meyer

The 2005 signal processing review by Berryman, Allison, Wilkinson, and Abbott provides a fascinating insight into how cells operate and how similar they are to human and computer processing! 🙂 Or did all this functionality this come about by “evolution”? 🙄 Consider:

Signal processing is the use of mathematical techniques to analyze any data signal. This data could be an image, a sound, or any other sequence of data, such a sequence of nucleotides. The sequences of interest could be protein coding regions, repeating elements that may be associated with various diseases (such as Huntington’s disease[7]) or regions rich in some set of complementary bases, such as A and T, which can give information on evolutionary history including lateral gene transfer in bacteria [8]. . . .
Signal processing is not just a human enterprise – even individual cells process signals in the form of mRNA, protein, and more general chemical levels (for example sugars in the environment) [16, 17, 18, 19]. As with conventional computers, cells can be genetically programmed to process signals [20, 21, 22]. Read More ›

Hungarian mathematician John von Neumann (1903 – 1957) was one of the more powerful scientific mind of the 20th century. His works span from functional and numerical analysis to quantum mechanics, from set theory to game theory, as well as many other fields of pure and applied mathematics. He was a pioneer in computer science, the first real computers were developed according to a basic model that takes his name (“von Neumann architecture”). Read More ›

Jerry Coyne visited the University of Alabama last week to explain why evolution is true. Of course the “truth” of evolution comes from religious conviction. With religion one can say that evolution is as much a fact as is gravity. The claim makes no sense from a scientific perspective. It is not that evolutionists have made an error. They did not make a mistake in their calculations or misread a scientific observation. Their claim that evolution is as obvious as gravity is not really a mistake at all. It isn’t even wrong–it simply is not scientific. Evolution is as obvious as gravity just like astrology is as obvious as gravity. These people clearly are playing by a different set of Read More ›

’bout time for this BhTV dust-up to exit, stage left. Before it does, however, a few observations:

1. Don’t worry, Bob, George, Sean, Carl, et al. — “respectability” is not transitive.

If it were, what Francis Bacon (1620) called “the kingdom of opinions” would be a lot more fluid than it is. Let’s suppose A knows B, and B knows C. And let’s define “respectability” as “no smart person I admire will ever think I’m crazy or a crackpot.” Read More ›

Podcasts in the intelligent design controversy 1: Evolution’s Glass Ceiling Podcasts in the intelligent design controversy 2: Rebutting Methodological Materialism: Interview With Angus Menuge, Part Two Podcasts in the intelligent design controversy 3: Agents Under Fire: Part One With Angus Menuge Podcasts in the intelligent design controversy 4: Hitler’s Ethic and the Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress in Nazi Policy Podcasts in the intelligent design controversy 5: Seeking God in Science: An Atheist Defends Intelligent Design Podcasts in the intelligent design controversy 6: Back to school with real science

The “fact” of Darwinian evolution finally has some support, or so they say at ScienceDaily This is a significant study, but what did they actually find? Darwinian Evolution can break complex productive genetic networks  resulting in “morphological degeneration”. “change recorded in both the fossil record and the genomes of living organisms  … shows  simultaneous molecular decay of the gene that is involved in enamel formation in mammals.” Mammals exist without mineralized teeth (e.g., baleen whales, anteaters, pangolins) and  with teeth that lack enamel (e.g., sloths, aardvarks, and pygmy sperm whales). “Mammals without enamel are descended from ancestral forms that had teeth with enamel,” Mark Springer of UC said. “We predicted that enamel-specific genes such as enamelin would show evidence in Read More ›

In my last post I commented on Nobel Prize winning physicist Eugene Wigner’s article “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences,” in which Wigner describes as “miraculous” (1) that “laws” of nature exist; and (2) that we should be able to discover those laws.

 In this post I will use an exchange in the comment section of that post between ID proponent “StephenB” and Darwinist “Delurker” to illustrate the utter vacuity of Darwinist argumentation, or at least the vacuity of the arguments of this particular Darwinist.  It is not my purpose to pick on Delurker per se.  I am using his arguments, because they are quite representative of the type of arguments Darwinists make on this site. 

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In “Restating the case for human uniqueness,” in Spiked* (Issue 25, June 2009), managing editor Helene Guldberg reviews Not a Chimp: The Hunt to Find the Genes That Make Us Human by Jeremy Taylor (Oxford University Press 2009):

She notes that

Taylor sets out to argue that it is ‘as wrong as it is misguided’ to ‘exaggerate the narrowness of the gap between chimpanzees and ourselves’: ‘It plays into the hands of our natural propensity to anthropomorphise our pets and other animals, and even our inanimate possessions, and it has allowed us to distort what the science is trying to tell us.’ His aim is ‘to set the record straight and restore chimpanzees to arm’s length’.

Good idea that. Remember the horrific case of Travis the chimp? Travis would have been a fine chimp, left to himself in a natural environment. But he went on a rampage and horribly maimed and mutilated the employee of the owner of a towing company, who was keeping him. Her family are now suing for $50 million.

This is the tragedy of anthropomorphizing animals. They neither become people nor fit in with other animals of their kind. Travis was shot by a police officer. But had he lived, one may wonder whether he could even adapt to life in a troupe of chimpanzees, after a career in show business and later as a pet whose mistress thought he was like a son.

In the chapter titled ‘Povinelli’s Gauntlet’, Taylor outlines the fascinating work of the comparative cognitive psychologist Daniel Povinelli, who runs the Cognitive Evolution Group at the University of Louisiana. Povinelli is unequivocal in arguing that no test to date has reliably demonstrated that chimpanzees – or any other primate for that matter – have an understanding of the mental life of others or an understanding of causation in the physical world.

To investigate chimps’ so-called understanding of ‘folk psychology’, Povinelli tested whether chimps understood that their begging gestures will only be effective if the person they are begging from can see them. When one of two experimenters either wore a blindfold, held their hands over their eyes or wore a bucket over their head, the chimps showed no preference for whom they made their begging gestures to.

No surprise there. Chimpanzees do not usually perform as well as dogs in reading human gestures.

Even more interesting:

In order to demonstrate that far too much has been made of the tool-using abilities of chimpanzees in the wild, Taylor outlines recent discoveries showing that the tool-making of some birds equals, or in many cases betters, anything observed in chimpanzees. ‘In two species that parted company 280million years ago, performance is either very similar, or corvids might even have an edge. Bird brains, in specific contexts, are a match for chimp brains’, he writes. What this shows is that chimpanzees may not tell us that much more than corvids about the evolution of our unique genetic make-up, he argues.

Now that is a story that should be investigated more openly than it is. Why are some birds so smart, yet they have key brain differences from the animals that are supposed to be smart – mammals? Clearly, intelligence is not what we have assumed.

I will spoil no more for you; go here for more.

See also:

Dogs more like humans than chimpanzees are? Read More ›

In 1960 Nobel prize winning physicist Eugene Wigner published a brief article entitled “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences.” See it here. In this article Wigner describes as “miraculous” (1) that “laws” of nature exist; and (2) that we should be able to discover those laws.

vjtorley has taken the time to give us a nice summary of and commentary on the article:

BEGIN QUOTATIONS FROM ARTICLE:

…The first point is that the enormous usefulness of mathematics in the natural sciences is something bordering on the mysterious and that there is no rational explanation for it. Second, it is just this uncanny usefulness of mathematical concepts that raises the question of the uniqueness of our physical theories….

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The one on the left is a coyote and the one on the right is a wolf. Hybrids can be anywhere in between. Does anyone remember when “speciation” meant something? Here’s an item from the Toronto news: “Meet the coywolf: A newly emerging species is behind the brazen attacks in Durham”: The predators that are plaguing Durham Region and showing up in urban areas appear to be an emerging species resulting from wolves and coyotes interbreeding. The larger, highly adaptable animals “have the wolf characteristics of pack hunting and aggression and the coyote characteristics of lack of fear of human-developed areas,” says Trent University geneticist Bradley White, who’s been studying the hybrids for 12 years. We’re seeing “evolution in action,” Read More ›

In a just published article in Plos Genetics, Merdith, et. al., study the enamilin gene (ENAM) in four different orders of placental mammals having both toothless and/or enamelless taxa. Their results show that, indeed, the enamelin gene is basically in place in the toothless taxa, but that either “frameshift mutations and/or stop codons” are found in the toothless and enamelless taxa. They then use a “novel method based on selection intensity estimates” to determine whether molecular evolutionary history of ENAM would ‘predict’ the occurence of enamel in “basal representative of Xenartha (sloths, anteaters, armadillos)”, which contains many frameshift mutations. Their conclusion? Our results link evolutionary change at the molecular level to morphological change in the fossil record and also provide Read More ›

Dawkins’ new book is reviewed in the Economist. How humans are related to chimpanzees—and to cheese mites and cherry trees too, Sep 3rd 2009, The Economist, From the review there are no new arguments, just more of the same polemical rhetoric and the same tired old evidences. If this is the best RD can do then Darwinian evolution is clearly on its last legs. Does Dawkins really appeal to the homology of skeletal plan which could be equally evidence of common design, or to the fossil record with all its out of place fossils including a Jurassic Beaver, Carboniferous dragonflies and Cambrian vertebrates. Does Dawkins really retreat to the rhetoric and polemics of a schoolyard bully again by misrepresenting arguments Read More ›

As an old proverb has it, first they’ll reject the truth and then they’ll appropriate it and say they knew it all along. Enter Paul Kammerer, the Austrian biologist who almost a century ago was assailed as a fraud for his anti Darwinian findings. His crime: he found evidence for Lamarckism–the idea that organisms can pass on traits they have acquired to their offspring. Kammerer ended up committing suicide and now, almost a century later, evolutionists are figuring out that he was right. Guess what they’re calling him now? That’s right, Kammerer has now been crowned an “evolutionist.” Today’s Orwellian headline reads:   Read more