Jonathan Wells

On August 19, Gina Kolata reported in The New York Times that geneticists “have seen a dead gene come back to life and cause a disease.” According to Kolata, the human genome “is riddled with dead genes, fossils of a sort, dating back hundreds of thousands of years–the genome’s equivalent of an attic full of broken and useless junk,” though some of those genes “can rise from the dead like zombies.” Now a supposed “zombie gene” is implicated in a type of muscular dystrophy abbreviated FSHD–a hereditary disease that affects about 1 in every 20,000 people. Kolata cites a recent Science article that begins by reviewing work dating back to the 1990s that establishes a link between FSHD and a Read More ›

I was not in Los Angeles on May 14, when Stephen Meyer debated Stephen Matheson and Arthur Hunt at Biola University. But I have followed some of the blog war that preceded and followed the debate–a blog war that now includes Richard Sternberg and Laurence Moran.

Since Matheson, Hunt and Moran are all tenured professors at institutions of higher learning, one might have expected a discussion based on reason and conducted in a collegial spirit. And since the discussion is about science, one might have expected lots of references to evidence published in the scientific literature. But Matheson, Hunt and Moran have abandoned reason and resorted to ridicule; and instead of citing evidence they expect us to bow to their authority.

“Artificial life, the stuff of dreams and nightmares, has arrived.” So proclaimed The Economist on May 20th, after a team of scientists headed by J. Craig Venter [2] announced that it had replaced the natural DNA in a bacterial cell with DNA they had artificially synthesized.

According to University of Pennsylvania philosopher and bioethicist Arthur Caplan, “Venter and his colleagues have shown that the material world can be manipulated to produce what we recognize as life. In doing so they bring to an end a debate about the nature of life that has lasted thousands of years. Their achievement undermines a fundamental belief about the nature of life that is likely to prove as momentous to our view of ourselves and our place in the Universe as the discoveries of Galileo, Copernicus, Darwin and Einstein.”

Whoa! Wait a minute!

What Venter and his team did was to determine the sequence of the DNA in one of the world’s simplest bacteria, use the sequence information to synthesize a copy of that DNA from subunits sold by a biological supply company, then put the synthetic copy of DNA into a living bacterial cell from which the natural DNA had been removed.
As Nicholas Wade pointed out in The New York Times, Eckard Wimmer and his colleagues did something similar in 2002 by synthesizing poliovirus RNA. Wimmer and his colleagues then used that synthetic RNA to make functioning polioviruses. But viruses are not living cells. No one has ever been able to make a living cell from its DNA–not even Craig Venter.

Occidental College professor Donald Prothero, who along with Michael Shermer debated Stephen Meyer and Richard Sternberg on November 30, complains that folks at Discovery Institute are now attacking him with “everything they have.” Prothero writes on the NCSE’s blog Panda’s Thumb, “Normally, it is not worth dignifying their garbage with a response,” but in this case he wants people “to get the straight facts.”
According to Prothero:

When evo-devo came up in Monday’s debate, Meyer and Sternberg began arguing with each other about reconstructions of a 12-winged dragonfly that I had published in my book. They tried to get a laugh by claiming that such a bug has never been found. As usual, they completely missed the point of that illustration, and failed to read any of the explanation or discussion in the caption or text. The text clearly points out that the 12-winged dragonfly is a thought experiment, an illustration to show that a simple change in Hox genes allows the arthropods, with their modular body plan of adjustable numbers of segments and interchangeable appendages on each, to make huge evolutionary changes by simple modifications of regulatory genes. This is the aspect of evo/devo that should answer structuralist Sternberg’s objections to Neo-Darwinism, if he only bothered to comprehend it, and solves much of the question over how macroevolutionary changes take place.

Unfortunately, it’s Prothero who needs “to get the straight facts.” First, the dragonfly in his book did not have 12 wings, but 18. Second, there is no evidence that “such a bug” ever existed, so it was not “reconstructed,” but invented.

Norman, Oklahoma, that is.

Okay, so there aren’t any real beaches in Norman, Oklahoma. But when Steve Meyer and I went there recently, the Darwinists who have installed themselves as absolute dictators at the University of Oklahoma (OU) made our arrival feel like D-Day.

On September 28, Steve gave a talk on his best-selling book Signature in the Cell at the Oklahoma Memorial Union on the OU campus. The following evening, September 29, Steve and I answered questions after a showing of the new film Darwin’s Dilemma at the Sam Noble Museum of Natural History, again on the OU campus.

Darwinists at OU are still gloating over the abuse to which they subjected Dr. William A. Dembski in 2007. On September 14, 2009, one of the organizers of that abuse, OU graduate student Abbie Smith, announced on her foul-mouthed blog that Steve and I were coming to OU and urged her readers to give us the same treatment.