Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Our Danish correspondent, Karsten Pultz, brings us up to date on Jørn Dyerberg and the growth of ID thinking in Scandinavia

Share
Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
Flipboard
Print
Email

Two important events in 2020, both originating in Scandinavia have strengthened the ID-cause considerably. One was the publishing of the Hössjer/Thorvaldsen paper, the other I’m about to report on here.

2020 was the year when Danish scientist Dr. Jørn Dyerberg announced his support for ID. Dyerberg is widely known for his research in omega 3 fatty acids and the impact this work has had on people’s health worldwide. Dr. Dyerberg is one of Denmark’s internationally most well known contemporary scientist so it’s a big deal when he now steps forward and confesses his adherence to ID.

In an interview at a Danish website, Dyerberg states that “Intelligent Design is a scientific discipline. Neo-Darwinism is something one chooses to believe in.” These two sentences got me excited because when such a distinguished scientist makes a statement in the field of his own, namely biology, I expect it to carry pretty much the same weight in the scientific community as when the pope speaks ex cathedra to the catholic community.

Also noticeable is, that one thing is to reckon ID as true science, another thing is within the next sentence to demote Neo-Darwinism to a sheer belief. In the interview Dyerberg says “I declare adherence to intelligent design, where the suspicion towards Neo-Darwinism and faith in a creating intelligence are justified by statistical considerations”.

My excitement made me overcome my telephone-phobia and I called Dyerberg to have him elaborate on this statement. He told me that the probabilistic issues alone obviously render Neo-Darwinian evolution unscientific and pointed specifically to the Neo-Darwinian origin of life scenario being totally improbable and therefore not scientifically viable.

Adding to that the problems of having speciation occur and the lack of support from the fossil record you cannot call the theory of evolution science. He continued that it baffles him that we have to discuss this at all, – a thought I’m sure we all at some point have had. Dyerberg expressed audible annoyance by the fact that evolution at all is being taken seriously, – I can’t recall exactly what he said but I do remember the word “kindergarten” being used.

While speaking with Dyerberg, I expressed my gratitude that he had come to embrace ID but he kindly corrected me and said that he had in fact always believed in intelligent design, but had kept quiet since he early on realized that such a standpoint was definitely not welcome in academia.

It was back in the seventies he identified the nature of the citric acid cycle as, something that Behe later would have included in the term, irreducibly complex. For the cycle to work we need 10-12 enzymes and 3-6 co-enzymes which all have to be present at the same time. The individual enzymes are in themselves extremely complex and the process they perform as an ensemble irreducibly complex. This, in Dyerberg’s views, excludes the Neo-Darwinian theory of random evolution.

Richard Dawkins has famously said “science works”, implying that, if evolution is “science,” it too works.

Well, Jørn Dyerberg’s omega 3-research certainly is a testimony to the claim that science works, but I can imagine how frustrating it must be for Dawkins, that while Dyerberg would agree that science works, he also happens to insist that evolution not only doesn’t work it’s not even science.

See also: Karsten Pultz’s comes to the defense of the editors who said that they did not know that the paper was [or could be construed as] ID-friendly.

Comments

Leave a Reply