Intelligent Design

Over at Neurologica blog, Steve Novella speculates about non-materialist neuroscience, about which he seems to have learned from New Scientist and the Discovery Institute’s News and Views blog. (I would have read books myself, but hey.) My favourite lines: I also think the New Scientist is correct in pointing out that the ID movement may be shifting their emphasis to neuroscience. I think it is fair to say that the ID attack on evolution has been largely a failure. They failed in Dover (where a conservative judge ruled that ID was warmed-over creationism and could not be taught in public school science classes), and the movie Expelled turned out to be a huge boondoggle. They are getting some traction with Read More ›

Turns out it’s a bit more complicated than a Swiss watch. Emphasis added.

Science 31 October 2008:
Vol. 322. no. 5902, pp. 697 – 701
DOI: 10.1126/science.1150451

Structural Insights into a Circadian Oscillator
Carl Hirschie Johnson,1* Martin Egli,2 Phoebe L. Stewart3

An endogenous circadian system in cyanobacteria exerts pervasive control over cellular processes, including global gene expression. Indeed, the entire chromosome undergoes daily cycles of topological changes and compaction. The biochemical machinery underlying a circadian oscillator can be reconstituted in vitro with just three cyanobacterial proteins, KaiA, KaiB, and KaiC. These proteins interact to promote conformational changes and phosphorylation events that determine the phase of the in vitro oscillation. The high-resolution structures of these proteins suggest a ratcheting mechanism by which the KaiABC oscillator ticks unidirectionally. This posttranslational oscillator may interact with transcriptional and translational feedback loops to generate the emergent circadian behavior in vivo. The conjunction of structural, biophysical, and biochemical approaches to this system reveals molecular mechanisms of biological timekeeping.

Read More ›

Was Darwin’s horrid doubt just horrid – or a reasonable fear?: … the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind? I’d say that if his theory was true, horrid was a slam dunk (yes, you are an evolved monkey, no, your thoughts do not mean anything). But very little in science turned out to be what Darwin or his contemporaries thought. Non-materialist neuroscientists think that your mind is real and that it helps shape your brain. It is Read More ›

I have over a dozen new discoveries like this in my email backlog that I skimmed and saved as likely to be blogworthy here so expect more in the next few days as I work through it. I go into a political blogging frenzy for a few months once every four years and I’ve been derelict in posting science articles here as a result. It won’t happen again until 2012. I joined this blog shortly after the 2004 presidential election was over. This science article is one those where the researchers variously describe themselves as “stunned”, “amazed”, “surprised” or something else that conveys the notion that theory didn’t predict whatever it is they found. I also watch for discoveries that Read More ›

The time that “evolution” has had to do all its creation of the machinery of life has been constant for over a century. Since around the year 1900 it has been the consensus that the earth is several billion years old. Before then it was variously argued at around a hundred million years by some, eternal by others, and just thousands of years by yet others. Back in Darwin’s day, when life at the simplest level was thought to be just blobs of protoplasm, “evolution” didn’t have such a big job to do. A hundred million years seemed adequate. Today we know that life isn’t blobs of protoplasm at the scale of single cells but in fact each of them is such a complex network of interdependent machines and codes it makes the US space shuttle, all its launch facilities, and all the engineering and manufacturing and support that makes it possible look like child’s play in comparison. Indeed, with every passing day we discover that life is more complex that we thought just the day before. Yet the time for evolution to perform all these miraculous inventions isn’t increasing. Here’s something discovered on one of those recent days that caught my attention:

Tunnelling nanotubes: Life’s secret network

New Scientist
18 November 2008
by Anil Ananthaswamy

Read More ›

Earlier, I called attention to this longish but very informative article by Carl Zimmer, “Now: The Rest of the Genome” (The New York Times, November 11, 2008). It pretty much blows the genetic reductionism I grew up with out of the water. The “gene” – that little coil of sugar that ran our lives back then – is a dead idea. Now here’s an exchange that caught my attention: “The way biology works is different from mathematics,” said Mark Gerstein, a bioinformatician at Yale. “If you find one counterexample in mathematics, you go back and rethink the definitions. Biology is not like that. One or two counterexamples — people are willing to deal with that.” More complications emerged in the Read More ›

Just a couple of links to enliven your morning… This Science Daily story describes a paper from the latest PLOS Biology, on the role of ORFans in generating species-specific traits in animals. Konstantin Khalturin and his co-authors at the Christian-Albrechts-University in Germany note the “substantial fraction” of ORFans — genes without known homologs — in every genome thus far sequenced, and argue that the origin of unique morphologies may rest in part with these unique genes: Understanding the molecular events that underlie the evolution of morphological diversity is a major challenge in biology….All genome and expressed sequence tag (EST) projects to date in every taxonomic group studied so far have uncovered a substantial fraction of genes that are without known Read More ›

Indeed, the extraordinary social skills of humans, compared with other primates, may be honed by constant practice with imagined or absent partners.

It is noticeable that many intelligent design supporters (and creationists) have written in support of Michael Reiss, despite the fact that Reiss claims to be a theistic evolutionist. The latest is a piece in the November issue of the UK Evangelical Times by David Tyler, (who often writes for ARN) in which he welcomes Reiss’s call for respectful dialogue in the classroom so that the views of those who hold to different worldviews can be recognised, respected and treated fairly. Reiss has argued that disrespecting those who have different worldviews only turns children away from science and is therefore counter-productive to providing good science education. Many ID supporters and creationists broadly agree with this assertion and therefore welcome calls for Read More ›

DaveScot has resigned his position as UD’s primary moderator. We wish him well in his endeavors. Update: The previous title to this post raised questions about whether I booted DaveScot. That is not the case. DaveScot resigned as moderator, but he remains a friend to the site.

Climb down from the drapes, you idiot! The pattern looks better without you in the middle of it.

In the combox here, in response to this post, “scottrobinson” wanted me to be more clear as to where I stand on teaching creationism in science class.

I see now that my comments may require some unpacking if the reader is not familiar with the point of view that underlies them. So here goes:

1. I do not think that creationism should generally be taught in science classes because creationism is by nature an apologetics project: It harmonizes scripture or tradition with current findings of science. Hugh Ross (Christian), Gerald Schroeder (Jewish), Harun Yahya (Muslim), and Vine DeLoria Jr. (Native American) have all written in this area. I understand that there is a work in progress from Hare Krishna as well.

What should be obvious from my list is that a demonstrated harmony between current science and  a scripture or tradition is of interest only to those for whom a given work or way of life is scripture or tradition. Otherwise, it will sound like an attempt to introduce the religion itself in a more favourable light than other religions.

And how shall we address the Dalai Lama’s obvious disappointment with Big Bang theory in his book The Universe in a Single Atom? (Buddhists are happier with an eternal universe, or perhaps a Big Bounce universe, as recently proposed by Roger Penrose.)

I live in a multicultural society, and I will not attempt to prescribe for a monocultural society. But I would say that the obvious solution for a multicultural society is just not to have any such material on the curriculum.

2. That said, I am intrigued by the neo-fascists who want their government to hound creationist teachers. I worry that these people themselves would be perfectly happy teaching vast reams of Darwinian or Dawkinsian nonsense. Here are some examples of stuff they don’t like and have to teach around: Read More ›

The primary objective of this site is to discuss the relative strengths and weaknesses of ID and materialist Darwinism. That is our focus, and we intend to keep the posts on topic. For example, there is some terrific news on today’s Drudge Report once again debunking global warming, and I was tempted to write a post linking to it. But we have decided that global warming discussions are not within our mission, and we will no longer post on that topic. Where does theism/atheism fit within this mix? On the one hand, our mission goes beyond discussing only the empirical science, and posters and commenters should feel free to discuss the metaphysical/philosophical (including within that term “theological”) implications of both Read More ›

The Schrodinger partial differential equation of quantum mechanics is the heart of atomic physics. This elegant PDE governs the behavior of all particles under the fundamental forces, but, unlike other PDEs, it cannot be derived from simpler principles. Like time, space, matter and energy, it “just is”. To quote from one of my PDE books, “Schrodinger’s equation is most easily regarded as simply an axiom that leads to the correct physical conclusions, rather than as an equation that can be derived from simpler principles…In principle, elaborations of it explain the structure of all atoms and molecules and so all of chemistry.” The Schrodinger equation contains a parameter, h, called Planck’s constant, which is one of the many constants of Nature Read More ›

In The Daily Telegraph, Martin Beckford tells us “One in three teachers says teach creationism alongside evolution” (07 N0v 2008).

The poll found that 31 per cent of teachers agree that creationism or intelligent design – the theory that the universe shows signs of having been designed rather than evolving – should be given the same status as evolution in the classroom, including 18 per cent of science teachers.

Half of those questioned agreed that excluding the alternative to evolution would alienate religious pupils, and almost nine out of 10 believed they should be allowed to discuss creationism if pupils bring it up.

Mr Bethell said: “Although over half of teachers either disagreed or strongly disagreed with the idea that creationism should be given the same status as evolution, there is a significant minority who believe that it should be given equal weight.

“Nearly half of teachers also agreed with Professor Michael Reiss’ sentiment that excluding alternative explanations to evolution is counter-productive and alienates pupils from science.

No surprise here, except, were I advising those teachers, I would tell them to keep quiet about their doubts for now. The people who fired Michael Reiss are perfectly capable of a purge, and indeed, a purge has already been threatened. Read More ›

When someone informs you that it (whatever “it” is) is in their genes – so forget asking them to grow up and accept some responsibility – show them this article: …. new large-scale studies of DNA are causing her and many of her colleagues to rethink the very nature of genes. They no longer conceive of a typical gene as a single chunk of DNA encoding a single protein. “It cannot work that way,” Dr. Prohaska said. There are simply too many exceptions to the conventional rules for genes. It turns out, for example, that several different proteins may be produced from a single stretch of DNA. Most of the molecules produced from DNA may not even be proteins, but Read More ›