September 2009

ENV: Were you always subversive? Tell us about the childhood David Berlinski.

I am not sure that I would care to think of myself as subversive. It is a mole-and-badger kind of word, isn’t it? So long as we are searching for similes, I would prefer lion-like. Regal is another fine word.

I was from an early age indisposed to accept what I had been told. Having been urged not to insert a fork into an electrical outlet, I stuck one in anyway; I was shocked to discover that it was a poor idea, just as my mother had maintained. An impatient child, I became a school yard terror, and a high-school bully. At the Bronx High School of Science I was a part of the clique — Moose Moscowitz, Steven Parker, Arthur Klein, June Tauber, Alan Abramson — that inflicted a life-long feeling of inadequacy on everyone else. I am often astonished that we got out of high school alive.

For an idea that Darwinists say has no value, intelligent design still seems to captivate them a great deal. Darwinists in Oklahoma have their own list-serv which they use to make announcements, and currently are using to stir up more anti-ID animosity amongst evolutionary foot soldiers in the heartland. They’re all aflutter about the screening of Darwin’s Dilemma, and about Stephen Meyer’s lecture on ID at University of Oklahoma next week. Note this bit of bogus puffery: 2. AND ANOTHER DI INTELLIGENT DESIGN TALK AT OU!As part of the DI appearance on the OU campus Dr. Stephen C. Meyer will deliver a free lecture about his new book, Signature in the Cell: DNA and Evidence for Intelligent Design, at 7 Read More ›

For those who need a dose of urbane wit and keen insight, never fear; David Berlinski is back. With his excellent book is finally in paperback (after it sold out last year, The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions was selling for more than three times its retail value on eBay), ENV interviewed Dr. Berlinski for a fascinating series of Q&A which we’re kicking off tomorrow, as well as an upcoming series of podcasts over at ID the Future. For more on Dr. Berlinski, including audio and video clips, articles, and continuing updates on his upcoming U.S. tour, head over to DavidBerlinski.org.

In a new segment, Bloggingheads chief Robert Wright and Bloggingheads correspondent George Johnson go on for 75 minutes about the trauma of a pair of heretics (me and Paul Nelson, on separate segments) appearing on their site. I would urge everyone who doesn’t have pressing matters to attend to, such as the need to wash your hair, to tune in for the full time. It’s really fascinating in its way to see two grown men in such a hand-wringing lather. It’s also fascinating to see that neither of them in 75 minutes offers a reason for the correctness of their own views, or the wrongness of ours. The closest they come is when George Johnson invokes the hoary “methodological naturalism.”

It’s funny how a little thing like a documentary film can send the Darwinist choir into tizzy tantrums. If Darwin’s theory is the be all end all of science, why are they so worried by a small, independent film? Because, it is the power of the ideas in the film that have them scared.

The makers of Unlocking the Mystery of Life and The Privileged Planet have produced the third in their trilogy of films about intelligent design, Darwin’s Dilemma The Mystery of the Cambrian Explosion. It’s a fantastic film and the producers are screening it in various venues around the country before it’s release on DVD next week. One of which is the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History, which has PZ Myers — who has one of the biggest Darwinian bullyhorns anywhere — really in a fit. How dare a natural history museum allow such a film to be screened!

This latest installment of my ongoing responses to Ken Miller regarding the irreducible complexity of the blood clotting cascade will critically analyze Professor Miller’s citation of a 2008 paper co-authored by blood clotting expert Russell Doolittle. Citing to Doolittle, Miller claims that the lamprey lacks blood clotting components that Michael Behe, in Darwin’s Black Box, actually did describe as being part of the irreducibly complex core of the blood clotting cascade. The problem for Miller is that Doolittle’s conclusion was based on there allegedly being only one gene in the lamprey homologous to blood clotting factors V or VIII, but Doolittle’s reported data belies that conclusion: it shows there were multiple potential homologues for those factors — including at least Read More ›

Recently the Wall Street Journal published dueling articles by Karen Armstrong and Richard Dawkins entitled Man vs. God. The editors’ choice of Dawkins to represent the atheist viewpoint is understandable enough; in the interest of balance, it seems that the WSJ editors searched hard to find a theist who mangles theism as effectively as Dawkins mangles atheism. Author Karen Armstrong, a former Catholic nun given to syncretism who believes that “we need God to grasp the wonder of our existence,” answered the WSJ’s “Mangler of Theology” Ad, and Dawkins had his disputant. Armstrong: …Darwin may have done religion — and God — a favor by revealing a flaw in modern Western faith. Despite our scientific and technological brilliance, our understanding Read More ›

As Jonathan Wells reminds us in his new article, “Deepening Darwin’s Dilemma,” 2009 is a year of anniversaries for evolution — not just for Darwin and The Origin, but also the centennial of Charles Walcott’s discovery of the Burgess Shale. With Darwin’s Dilemma coming out next week and premiering at the Oklahoma Museum of Natural History, Dr. Wells’ article couldn’t be more timely. As he explains in the film and will be on hand to explain in person on September 29, Darwin saw the Cambrian explosion as a serious argument against his theory, but he countered it by supposing “that fossils of the ancestors of Cambrian animals once existed but were destroyed…The discovery of microscopic and soft-bodied Precambrian fossils makes Read More ›

For those of you in Oklahoma, two events two weeks from now are bringing intelligent design to your doorstep. First, Stephen C. Meyer will give a free lecture at the University of Oklahoma on September 28. The next day is the Southwestern premiere of Darwin’s Dilemma at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History September 29th. Darwin’s Dilemma will be screened at 7pm in Kerr Auditorium in the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History, with a post-film discussion featuring two leading intelligent design scientists, Dr. Stephen C. Meyer, author of Signature in the Cell, and Dr. Jonathan Wells, biologist and author of Icons of Evolution. The screening is sponsored by the student run IDEA (Intelligent Design and Evolution Read More ›

Recently a paper appeared online in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, entitled “The reducible complexity of a mitochondrial molecular machine.” As you might expect, I was very interested in reading what the authors had to say. Unfortunately, as is all too common on this topic, the claims made in the paper far surpassed the data, and distinctions between such basic ideas as “reducible” versus “irreducible” and “Darwinian” versus “non-Darwinian” were pretty much ignored.

Since PNAS publishes letters to the editor on its website, I wrote in. Alas, it seems that polite comments by a person whose work is the clear target of the paper are not as welcome as one might suppose from reading the journal’s letters-policy announcement (“We wish to provide readers with an opportunity to constructively address a difference of opinion with authors of recent papers. Readers are encouraged to point out potential flaws or discrepancies or to comment on exceptional studies published in the journal. Replication and refutation are cornerstones of scientific progress, and we welcome your comments.“) My letter received a brusque rejection. Below I reproduce the letter for anyone interested in my reaction to the paper. (By the way, it’s not just me. Other scientists whose work is targeted sometimes get the run around on letters to the editor, too. For an amusing / astounding example, see here.)

Call me paranoid, but it seems to me that some top-notch journals are real anxious to be rid of the idea of irreducible complexity. Recall that last year Genetics published a paper purportedly refuting the difficulty of getting multiple required mutations by showing it’s quick and easy in a computer–if one of the mutations is neutral (rather than harmful) and first spreads in the population. Not long before that, PNAS published a paper supposedly refuting irreducible complexity by postulating that the entire flagellum could evolve from a single remarkable prodigy-gene. Not long before that, Science published a paper allegedly refuting irreducible complexity by showing that if an investigator altered a couple amino acid residues in a steroid hormone receptor, the receptor would bind steroids more weakly than the unmutated form. (That one also made the New York Times!) For my responses, see here, here, here, and here. So, arguably picayune, question-begging, and just plain wrong results disputing IC find their way into front-line journals with surprising frequency. Meanwhile, in actual laboratory evolution experiments, genes are broken right and left as bacteria try to outgrow each other.