Intelligent Design

ID often seems to be a perspective that is associated with science, philosophy, academics, and people who deal in ideas for a living. For its supporters it can sometimes feel like a lonely road, and for its opponents it can appear as an irritating, but minority view. But is it possible that ID is breaking out of these confines and becoming an idea that is being echoed elsewhere in the popular culture? By the term “popular culture”, I do not mean the entertainment industry, or opinions propagated via media outlets. I mean the real, serious, fabric of our civilization. Here are a couple of straws in the wind. I am not sure how many readers of UD work on Wall Read More ›

‘He Who Can Learn Things that are Difficult, and Not Easy for Man to Know, is Wise:’ An Address to the Students in MIT 10-250, Caltech 201 E. Bridge, and Similar Lecture Halls: Minds that are the Greatest Natural Resource in the World Edward H. Sisson papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1328666 January 15, 2009 Abstract: How human beings came to exist in this physical world is a question that has preoccupied mankind for as long as history records; every religion offers an answer, and so too have philosophers of natural history from Aristotle and before. The year 2009 will see celebrations of the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, progenitor of the theory – or fact, as its adherents see it – Read More ›

Christopher Booker, writing in last week’s Sunday Telegraph, highlights some of the abuse he received for questioning the validity of Darwin’s theory in an earlier article. Christopher Booker – Why do people think Darwinism is a perfect creation 14/02/09. He writes; “As an old hand at tangling with Darwinists, I was well aware that a howl of furious protests would greet my item last week describing their curious inability to recognise just how much of the story of evolution Darwin’s theory cannot explain.” For point this out he claims he was “…derided as “stupid”, “idiotic” and “scientifically illiterate”. Clearly I was unaware all these riddles had been solved by genetics and the decoding of the human genome.” “…as my colleague Read More ›

A criticism which neo-Darwinists have frequently made of Intelligent Design is that it is not a “scientific” theory. ID, they say, explains the bacterial flagellum by saying “God [sic] made it”. However, they complain, it doesn’t say when God made it, how God made it, what material substrate God was acting on when he made it, etc. It therefore gives scientists nothing to go on, nothing to work with, nothing on which they can base experiments which could confirm or disconfirm the explanation. In contrast, they believe, Darwinian explanations give scientists something to work on. The hypothesis that the flagellum slowly evolved, through a series of intermediate, functional steps, allows for testing. One can look for possible intermediate steps, e.g., Read More ›

Given enough time, inanimate matter — through the laws of chemistry and physics, and with enough random trials, filtered by natural selection which throws out stuff that doesn’t work — will self-organize into highly sophisticated information-processing machinery that produces the human mind. How could this ultimate truth not be obvious, except to those who have been indoctrinated with silly anti-scientific beliefs, like that there might be “design” in this whole process? How could anyone with an IQ above room temperature deny such an obvious truth? Science has proven it. The debate is over. The mechanism described above can explain everything. All real scientists accept it. All you ID guys should get a life and admit that your lives have no Read More ›

A cartoon in an American paper, the New York Post, has brought fresh attention to the race problems in some sections of society. The cartoon shows a chimpanzee shot dead by police with a caption apparently referring to the new American President Obama – (edit: although later denied that Obama was the target).  Note from UD Admin:  As has been pointed out in the comments, the chimp in this cartoon was a pet chimp shot by police in Connecticut.  It was never intended to represent Obama or any other human.  The cartoonist was stunned over the uproar. Where does the idea that human beings are related to apes come from? It comes straight from Darwinism. There is some irony that the left Read More ›

This is a good example of how to use ID and abandon “unintelligent” evolution. Read article here (in PDF)

Given enough time…

This Google Ocean image is 620 miles off the west coast of Africa near the Canary Islands. It is over 15,000 feet deep and the feature of interest is about 90 miles on a side or 8000 square miles. In another thread ID critics complain there is no rigorous definition or mathematical formula by which everyone can agree on whether or not something exhibits complex specified information. Believe it not, they say it like mainstream science isn’t chock full of things that not everyone can agree upon. Like duh.

‘It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Or course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well…Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thought-crime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.’ — Syme, the Newspeak editor, in George Orwell’s 1984 Biologists should no longer use the word “design,” urges evolutionary biologist Walter Bock of Columbia University, in a newly-published article, as this word and its related concepts bring with them “connotations that are undesirable or unwanted” (p. 8). Biologists should “drop all usages Read More ›

The Cambrian Explosion, what a commotion, for long-established theories on how things should occur. Sudden emergence, animal insurgence, novel parts and body plans, no ancestry we’re sure. Five fifty million years ago, a faunal troupe did truly show, what all the fossil experts know, “Biology’s Big Bang”. No intermediates came before, a true explosion to the core, those trilobites we can’t ignore, a self-assertive gang. With all the complex novelty, of body plan disparity, with legs to walk and eyes to see exquisitely designed. From what we know we can infer, a mindful manufacturer, from what we’ve seen we can concur, intelligent the mind. Intelligent the mind that made, this ‘multi-cell’lar’ cavalcade, so unperturbed and clearly laid, all so that Read More ›

Eugene V. Koonin, “Darwinian evolution in the light of genomics,” Nucleic Acids Research 2009, 1-24. The overall pattern of life’s history, he argues, may be a Forest, not a single Tree of Life [TOL]: Evolutionary genomics effectively demolished the straightforward concept of the TOL by revealing the dynamic, reticulated character of evolution where HGT, genome fusion, and interaction between genomes of cellular life forms and diverse selfish genetic elements take the central stage. In this dynamic worldview, each genome is a palimpsest, a diverse collection of genes with different evolutionary fates and widely varying likelihoods of being lost, transferred, or duplicated. So the TOL becomes a network, or perhaps, most appropriately, the Forest of Life that consists of trees, bushes, Read More ›

In the most recent edition of the Canadian Science Writers’ Association’s ScienceLink (Vol 28, No. 4, 2008), there is an interesting piece by Graeme Stemp-Morlock on the decision by the United Church Observer , the leading United Church-related magazine, to co-sponsor the Royal Ontario Museum’s “Evolution Revolution” exhibit ($15,000 cash and $35,000 advertising):

If a small operation like ours was able to stand up without fear and proudly support this exhibit then we thought it would draw attention to the fact that huge corporations much bigger than ours were afraid to,” said David Wilson, editor of the United Church Observer. “We were trying to say ‘you don’t need to be afraid.'”

(Note: I have not so far been able to find Stemp-Morlock’s ScienceLink article online.)

I suspect that Darwin’s racism was a factor in corporate disinterest. What if someone started quoting key relevant passages from Darwin’s Descent of Man? Like that black people are closer to gorillas than white people are? Not prevaricating or explaining them away, just quoting what the old toff actually said – and honestly believed?

In the early Nineties, there was an enormous, career-limiting uproar at the Museum – including daily demos – around allegations of racism in connection with an exhibit from Africa. I don’t imagine anyone wants more of that.

In any event, editor Wilson opines thusly:

I got the sense that evolution challenges religious dogma but not religion

and

I found myself musing on how the theory evokes the inherent beauty of a creation that is constantly and eternally evolving.

Wilson says that creation is “eternally” evolving, it is likely a slip of the tongue. That would be a non-theistic vision of life which is at odds with conventional science (which holds that the universe has a beginning and an end). He adds,

There is nothing in the Darwin exhibit that threatens or diminishes religion or people of faith.

which is interesting because Toronto columnist and literary lion Robert Fulford got the exact opposite impression:

In the 1860s, when the world was first compelled to deal with him, his theory was terrifying, world-shaking, religion-threatening. It still raises furious controversy.

Who’s right? Well, they’re both right, really. There is nothing specifically Christian or even theistic about “the inherent beauty of a creation that is constantly and eternally evolving,” and the idea that Wilson expresses is more commonly used to construct a case for atheism. Which raises the question: What is the point of a liberal church-related magazine getting involved? According to Stemp-Morlock, the staff was worried about “creationist chill.”

Revealingly, Drew Halfnight writes this, Read More ›

Those who follow the Darwin industry are very familiar with Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist by Adrian Desmond and James Moore. In that biography they were one of the few biographers to highlight young Charles’ Edinburgh years (October 1825 to April 1827) and show the powerful influences that experience had on the teenager. Here too in Desmond and Moore’s new Darwin’s Sacred Cause, Edinburgh becomes the substantive starting point. This is as it should be since the freethinkers he would be exposed to in the radical Plinian Society (a largely student-based group Darwin seemed to relish given his attendance at all but one of its 19 meetings during his stay there) would have a profund influence on his thinking for the rest of his life. Desmond and Moore correctly acknowledge this, observing that this period “helped condition his life’s work on the deepest social — and scientific — issues” (17). Indeed the Plinians would steep Charles in a radical materialism that the present biographers admit was “mirrored” in his work a decade later (35).

All well and good so far. But not quite.  This is a book with its own cause. From the outset the authors explain frankly that , “We show the humanitarian roots that nourished Darwin’s most controversial and contested work on human ancestry” (xviii). And those “humanitarian roots,” we are told again and  again throughout its 376 narrative pages was Darwin’s passionate and unwavering hatred of slavery.  “No one has appreciated the source of that moral fire that fuelled his strange, out-of-character obsession with human origins. Understand that,” they insist, “and Darwin can be radically reassessed” (xix).  And what is that reassessment?  The reader is not left waiting:  “Ours is a book about a caring, compassionate man who was affected for life by the scream of a tortured slave” (xx).

At issue, of course, isn’t the horrific abomination of slavery nor Darwin’s abhorrence of it (this has long been known and acknowledged by historians) but rather the purported impact that Desmond and Moore claim his abolitionism had on his theory’s development and purpose.  In short, the question is, does the anti-slavery Darwin necessarily make for a “kinder, gentler” Darwin? An affirmative answer must rest upon two supports, one conceptual and the other factual. The remainder of this essay will examine both to answer this question.

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