Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

He said it: Darwin’s junk DNA zealots “have forfeited any claim … to be speaking for science”

Share
Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
Flipboard
Print
Email

Jonathan Wells on a number of established Darwinist authors who insist that there is a huge amount of “junk” in our DNA, a fact that they say supports Darwinism and casts doubt on design in nature:

All eight of the authors cited here present themselves as spokesmen for science. Yet science depends on evidence and the tide of the evidence is clearly running against them. The previous chapters cite hundreds of published articles by over 1,000 scientists on 5 continents, but they are just a small sample. Anyone with a computer and an Internet connection can go to PubMed – a freely accessible database of scientific articles maintained by the U.S. National Institutes of Health – and find hundreds of additional articles about the functions of non-protein-coding DNA. More are coming out every week.

Shermer and Kitcher are not scientists; perhaps they were just parroting what they learned from their scientific colleagues. But Shermer and Kitcher are scholars who presumably have computers and access to the Internet, so one might wonder why they didn’t check the facts for themselves before buying into the myth of junk DNA.

Dawkins studied bird behavior in the 1960s, but since then he has spent his career writing popular books and articles defending Darwinism and preaching atheism. Obviously, he is out of touch with recent genomics research. Yet from 1995 to 2008 he was Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford. As such, he should have made at least some effort to familiarize himself with the evidence. Yet even now he continues to defend the myth.

Coyne and Avise are professors of genetics at major universities, so they cannot claim ignorance of the genomic evidence without thereby admitting negligence or incompetence. In fact, one of Coyne’s colleagues at the University of Chicago is James Shapiro, co-author of the 2005 article cited in Chapter 6 that listed over 80 known functions for non-protein-coding repetitive DNA. But if Coyne and Avise were not ignorant of the evidence, then they misrepresented it – and they continue to do so. Like Dawkins, Shermer and Kitcher, they have forfeited any claim they might have had to be speaking for science.

Jonathan Wells, The Myth of Junk DNA, pp. 97-98.

And so it goes. It’s easy to see why the real Darwinist feels such contempt for the Christian Darwinist, like this one.

The real Darwinist is engaged in a massive effort to keep people from putting two and two together regarding what the evidence from nature is telling us today. His serious foe is the ID theorist who insists on studying the facts with no bias to protecting Darwinism – and on allowing as wide a public as possible to know the results.

Then along comes the Christian Darwinist, dragging his teddy bear, wanting the world to know that Jesus loves Darwin. He represents neither science nor religion, just vacuous sentimentality and earnest slogans.

Follow UD News at Twitter!

Comments

Leave a Reply