2010

In the Darwinist community there’s a general acceptance, however uneasy, of the necessity of speaking in design-related metaphors to describe features of organisms. Such language may be regrettable since it attracts the attention of the bogeyman, “creationism,” but really it’s kind of unavoidable. In Darwin and Design, Michael Ruse sought to offer solace to fellow Darwinians. He asked,

We still talk in terms appropriate to conscious intention….In biology, we still use forward-looking language of a kind that would not be deemed appropriate in physics or chemistry. Why is this?

His answer:

Organisms, produced by natural selection, have adaptations, and these give the appearance of being designed….If organisms did not seem to be designed, they would not work and hence would not survive and reproduce. But organisms do work, they do seem to be designed, and hence the design metaphor, with all the values and forward-looking, causal perspective it entails, seems appropriate.

So it’s precisely because organisms are not really designed, but rather built up by natural selection, that they seem designed. Well, comfort must be taken where it’s available.

Unfortunately for the Darwin faithful, the discomfort level keeps getting kicked up notch by notch as the design metaphor proves itself increasingly useful to bioengineers — as a model to be instantiated in very practical, not merely literary, ways. If you were to imagine that life really does reflect an intelligent purpose, then that purpose would probably be reflected somehow in the genetic material, coded in DNA. So it’s of interest that a couple of new projects seek to be in relationship to DNA what your local auto parts store or catalogue is to the cars we drive. Keep in mind that cars and their parts are designed products. The Scientist has an item noting the launch of a “DNA factory.”

Download the Complete “Truth or Dare” with Dr. Ken Miller Lecture GuidePermission Granted to Copy and Distribute for Educational Use. Links to our 7-Part Series Responding to Ken Miller: • Part 1: Science and Religion: Is Evolution “Random and Undirected”?• Part 2: Misrepresenting the Definition of Intelligent Design• Part 3: Confusing Evidence for Common Ancestry With Evidence for Darwinian Evolution• Part 4: The Name-Dropping Approach to Transitional Fossils• Part 5 (This Article): Spinning Tales About the Bacterial Flagellum• Part 6: Misrepresenting Michael Behe’s Arguments for Irreducible Complexity of the Blood Clotting Cascade• Part 7: Ken Miller and the Evolution of the Immune System: “Not Good Enough”? Ken Miller has been making the same objections about irreducible complexity and the bacterial Read More ›

In Segraves v. California, a California state court found it legal for a public school to teach evolution. Now, if only California’s anti-dogmatism policy would likewise protect teachers who inform students about scientific dissent from neo-Darwinian evolution. Update: For those who protest me discussing this case, I want to note that I would not have even known of this case were it not for the fact that the NCSE has been touting it and citing it for years on its Ten Major Court Cases about Evolution and Creationism page. 1. SummaryPlaintiff Kelly Segraves, a parent of children in California public schools, challenged the California State Board of Education’s Science Framework that mandated the teaching of evolution.84 Segraves alleged that the Read More ›

The silence is only eerie if you try to listen too hard. Efforts to confirm that there is intelligence elsewhere in the universe have, to put it mildly, fizzled. Each new theory about why we can’t find intelligent life anywhere else in the universe ends up like a damp firecracker: there’s a bunch of crackling in the blogosphere, but there’s never any bang.

So. It seems that Paul Davies has published the equivalent of a benign stick of TNT reiterating all the failed attempts, and then coming up with a few new zany ideas. Instead, he might consider reading in Signature in the Cell about the evidence for intelligent design that booms out of DNA right here on this planet.

What would be evidence against evolution, and very strong evidence at that, would be the discovery of even a single fossil in the wrong geological stratum….But not a single solitary fossil has ever been found before it could have evolved.
Richard Dawkins (2009, pp. 146-7)

Professor Dawkins is right: you can’t be older than your own grandfather, all country-western songs notwithstanding.

Peloza v. Capistrano Independent Unified School District is a well-known case from the 9th Circuit in 1994 where a federal court of appeals found that it is legal to teach evolution even if a teacher feels it conflicts with his religious beliefs. While the court was correct to hold that it is perfectly legal to require that evolution be part of the curriculum, unfortunately they expressed no sympathy whatsoever for the millions of Americans who feel that teaching evolution is not religiously neutral. 1. SummaryIn Peloza v. Capistrano, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals held that a teacher can be ordered to teach evolution, even if the theory conflicts with his or her religious beliefs.93 John Peloza, a high school Read More ›

To the EditorThe Times Literary SupplementThe RNA World Sir:Having with indignation rejected the assumption that the creation of life required an intelligent design, Mr Fletcher has persuaded himself that it has proceeded instead by means of various chemical scenarios. These scenarios all require intelligent intervention. In his animadversions, Mr Fletcher suggests nothing so much as a man disposed to denounce alcohol while sipping sherry. The RNA world to which Mr Fletcher has pledged his allegiance was introduced by Carl Woese, Leslie Orgel and Francis Crick in 1967. Mystified by the appearance in the contemporary cell of a chicken in the form of the nucleic acids, and an egg in the form of the proteins, Woese, Orgel and Crick argued that Read More ›

It’s always easier to refute your opponent’s position by replacing it with an outlandish straw man. The most recent issue of the Journal of Eukaryotic Microbiology contains a paper by Guillermo Paz-y-Miño of University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and Avelina Espinosa of Roger Williams University, titled “Integrating Horizontal Gene Transfer and Common Descent to Depict Evolution and Contrast It with ‘Common Design’” that takes this approach to attacking intelligent design (ID). As suggested by the title, the article attempts to critique the argument that similar features in diverse organisms can be explained by common design. It cites to both a 1996 paper by Paul Nelson in Biology and Philosophy and a response to Francis Collins published by myself and Logan Gage Read More ›

Signature in the Cell continues to stir up debate and attract attention as Thomas Nagel’s selection of SITC as one of the Books of the Year brought on an interesting series of letters, where Nagel was attacked (he responded, and he was attacked again) by a Darwinist who told people forgo reading SITC and instead just read Wikipedia.

This week, author Stephen Meyer himself responds in a letter, with a shortened version published yesterday. (Nagel himself responded with a letter that is published on the same page by TLS.) Below is Meyer’e letter in its entirety.

To the Editor
The Times Literary Supplement
Natural Selection and the Origin of Biological Information

I’ve been honored by the recent attention my book Signature in the Cell has received in your letters section following Thomas Nagel’s selection of it as one of your books of the year for 2009.

Unfortunately, the letters from Stephen Fletcher criticizing Professor Nagel for his choice give no evidence of Dr. Fletcher having read the book or any evidence of his comprehending the severity of the central problem facing chemical evolutionary theories of life’s origin.

In Signature in the Cell, I show that, in the era of modern molecular genetics, explaining the origin of the first life requires–first and foremost–explaining the origin of the information or digital code present in DNA and RNA. I also show that various theories of undirected chemical evolution–including theories of pre-biological natural selection–fail to explain the origin of the information necessary to produce the first self-replicating organism.

Yet, in his letters to the TLS (2 and 16 December), Stephen Fletcher rebukes Nagel (and by implication my book) for failing to acknowledge that “natural selection is a chemical as well as a biological process.” Fletcher further asserts that this process accounts for the origin of DNA and (presumably) the genetic information it contains.

Not only does my book address this very proposal at length, but it also demonstrates why theories of pre-biotic natural selection involving self-replicating RNA catalysts–the version of the idea that Fletcher affirms–fail to account for the origin of genetic information.

Indeed, either Dr. Fletcher is bluffing or he is himself ignorant of the many problems that this proposal faces.

Read More ›