Faith & Science

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.”

Over at Scott McKnight’s blog at Beliefnet, an anonymous blogger has started a review thread on Steve Meyer’s book. Signature in the Cell. While the blogger (“RJS”) says he ultimately disagrees with Meyer’s argument, it’s clear that he takes Meyer’s argument seriously and is trying to do his best to present the argument accurately. This is much more than can be said for the many hysterical and misinformed “critiques” of Meyer’s argument that are now floating around the Internet. Anyone who’s actually read the book will know that most of these critiques are cliches that Meyer addresses in detail in the book, suggesting that the critics don’t even know the argument they are criticizing.

A civil review like this is welcomed, and I look forward to reading the installments.

In his first installment, RJS suggests that there’s a promising “third way” that Meyer doesn’t address in the book:

The debate between Darwin and design is coming to Tampa, Florida with a major one-night event featuring some of the leading voices challenging Darwinian evolution. Discovery Institute senior fellow and national radio personality Michael Medved will lead a two-hour discussion about the evidence for intelligent design and the challenges it proposes to modern evolutionary theory. Joining him will be Signature in the Cell author, Stephen C. Meyer, leading Darwin skeptic and author of The Deniable Darwin David Berlinski, and scientist, scholar and writer, Thomas Woodward author of Darwin Strikes Back. The event will take place at The A La Carte Pavilion, Tampa, FL, Thursday, January 28th at 7pm and is hosted by the C. S. Lewis Society. Discovery Institute is Read More ›

Incomparably more influential than any science textbook, Wikipedia with its seen-as-if-through-a-funhouse-mirror rendering of intelligent design passes along with its distortions directly into the bloodstream of popular consciousness. If you’re ever looking for a way to kill time, counting errors per sentence in any Wikipedia article that touches on ID will soak up plenty. This of course is a way to really kill time — not to use it effectively by somehow correcting the errors. No class of people on the planet has more time on their hands than the guys who edit Wikipedia articles. As part of what seems to be a 24/7 unpaid job, they stand ready at a moment’s notice to change any attempted correction back to its original erroneous version.

Along with other falsehoods, the ranks of Wikipedia errors include a group of myths, comprising a Darwinian Mythos of superstitious, credulous, fallacious and legendary beliefs about intelligent design. Among these, the myth as to falsifiability or testability ranks high on the Wikipedia Scale. The latter is a rough measure of how important a particular mythic theme is to the overarching conception of Darwinism as unquestionable “fact,” gauged by how insistent the Wikipedia editors are in emphasizing it.

Regarding the mythic idea that intelligent design can’t be tested or falsified and is therefore unscientific, the Wikipedia editors quote the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. They cite the distinguished scientist and philosopher Judge John E. Jones. They cite blogger PZ Myers on “Rule 702 of the Federal Rules of Evidence.” They quote philosopher Elliott Sober: “Defenders of ID always have a way out. This is not the hallmark of a falsifiable theory.”

Yet isn’t it funny that the Darwinist faithful are often perfectly happy to launch attempts to clobber intelligent design on factual and scientific grounds — just as if ID were genuine science — only to retreat immediately behind the barricade of the Falsifiability Myth? If they had confidence either in the myth or in the attack, presumably they would choose one and stick with it.

Try to imagine being operated on without anesthesia. A kidney is removed and then, while you are still fully awake, the surgeon displays it to you for your consideration in his hand. Sounds like a very bad nightmare but this is the kind of thing Dr. Josef Mengele did routinely with patients at Auschwitz. What would inspire a human being to such devilry? What influence, perhaps early in life, might have nudged him off the course of what could have otherwise been a conventional medical career?

A reader of my blog, Paul Burnett taunts me:

Go ahead, David, say it: “Darwin taught Hitler (and Stalin and Mao and Pol Pot) how to kill millions of people.”

That is of course a ridiculous parody of what I’ve written on Darwinism and its historical consequences, and I’ve never written a word about Darwin-Mao, but…now that you mention it, Paul, I just so happen to have before me on my desk China and Charles Darwin, by China scholar James Reeve Pusey of Bucknell University, published in 1983 by Harvard University Press. Pusey is a son of the illustrious late Harvard president Nathan Pusey. (They don’t give people names like that anymore, do they? Too bad.) Let’s just look up his conclusion, shall we? Hm, what’s this? He writes:

Mao Tse-tung finally claimed that Marxism-Leninism could all be boiled down to one sentence, tsao fan yu li — “To rebel is justified” — but that standard translation obscures the force of the li (reason or principle) that rebellion was now said to have. That Neo-Confucian word in [its] new context really meant that rebellion was a natural law, and that lesson had been taught to Mao Tse-tung not by Marx but by Sun Yat-sen and Liang Ch’i-ch’ao, who had learned it, rightly or wrongly, from Darwin. For the li of revolution, they had said, lay in evolution.

Darwin justified revolution and thereby helped the cultural revolutions of Liang Ch’i-ch’ao, Hu Shih, and Mao Tse-tung (and, of course, so many others), and the political revolutions of Sun Yat-sen, Chiang K’ai-shek, and Mao Tse-tung. As things turned out, therefore, he seemd to help Mao Tse-tung the most, and indeed he did. He helped make the Marxists the fittest.

Darwin created the ideological vacuum [by undermining traditional ideas] that cried out for something like Marxism, and he established criteria for what that something should be. The new fit and fittening ideology had to be based on the Western science of evolutionary progress. It had to identify inevitable, natural stages of human social development. It had to promise historical inevitability and yet at the same time recognize the vital importance of human action. It had to be based on struggle and yet stress mutual aid among members of the ch’un. It had to provide a non-racial enemy to explain China’s inner and outer troubles without damning the Chinese — and it had to give the underdog a chance.

That last stipulation was not Darwin’s by any stretch of the imagination, but every Chinese Darwinist we have seen forced Darwin to give the underdog a chance….

More:

Confronted with problems in life, it’s useful to think in terms of trends. Whether I am a consumer strapped with paying off credit card debit or a Darwinian biologist strapped with trying to explain the origin and development of life, is a given problem’s power to bedevil me getting, on the whole, bigger or smaller? If smaller, then that’s a cause for relief. Evolutionists talk grandly, seeking to give the impression that their problem is increasingly in hand, or in the bag, or under control, whichever metaphor you prefer. But this is mostly bluff, as a report in Nature Structural and Molecular Biology reminds us.

If the evolutionary origin of DNA coding remains an enigma, try adding to that the origin of histone coding that’s associated with it. A group of researchers from Emory University School of Medicine have revealed ways that histones receive modifications in such a way as to convey information that in turn allows the information in DNA to be properly read.

When things like cells and the proteins that make them go were understood to be simple blob- or crystal-like entities, then explaining how their structure could be accounted for in terms of natural selection seemed a task that was not far out of reach. On the contrary, it appeared to be intuitively easy to imagine how a full and satisfying account could be detailed.

Histones are proteins that form the nucleosome spools on which DNA is coiled tightly to fit the stuff into the minute confines of the cell. Steve Meyer observes in Signature in the Cell, “[I]t is the specific shape of the histone proteins that enables them to do their job….Thanks in part to nucleosome spooling, the information storage density of DNA is many times that of our most advanced silicon chips.”

At his website Why Evolution Is True, Jewish atheist and U. of Chicago biologist Jerry Coyne has responded in twoposts to my own entry on Chanukah, knee pain, and suboptimal design in creatures as a bogus argument for atheism. (As an aside, note the gentleman’s last name. I’m guessing it started out as Cohen, meaning that he is presumably a cohen, a descendant of Aaron. In Ashkenazic pronunciation the Hebrew name often comes out as coyne. Pending information to the contrary, take a moment to appreciate the irony of his illustrious priestly lineage.) Professor Coyne is full of “Aha’s!” and “Gotcha’s!” 

He writes: 

[T]he “bad designs” [in creatures] are more than just random flaws in the “design” of organisms: they are flaws that are explicable only if those organisms had evolved from ancestors that were different.

Why do cave fish have nonfunctional eyes? That’s bad design for sure. You could impute it to the quirks of God, but isn’t it more parsimonious to conclude (and we know this independently from molecular data) that those fish evolved from fully-eyed fish that lived above the ground?

No doubt about it. Life has a history. It has been changing in the forms it takes for a very long time and some of that history is inscribed on it, as artifacts of its development. Creatures give birth to other creatures in a chain of descent. They have a lineage, just like cohanim. Some of these descendants enjoy advantages, others exhibit defects. Who would disagree?

A very small part of the suffering in our world can be linked to these artifacts of history. Knee pain or back pain might be examples. So what? This is an example of the classic Darwinist straw-man tactic of making it appear that intelligent design proponents doubt not only the sufficiency of natural selection in explaining life’s history but that life has a history at all. In this connection, Professor Coyne berates me as a “creationist,” usually taken to mean a Biblical literalist, but I am not a creationist. Words have meanings.

It’s somehow cheering to know that while the pompous know-nothingism of Darwinian atheists in the U.S. is matched by those in England, so too not only in our country but in theirs the screechy ignorance receives its appropriate reply from people with good sense and an open mind. Some of the latter include atheists who, however, arrived at their unbelief through honest reflection rather than through the mind-numbing route of fealty to Darwinist orthodoxy. Such a person is Thomas Nagel, the distinguished NYU philosopher. He praised Stephen Meyer’s Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design in the Times Literary Supplement as a “book of the year,” concluding with this enviable endorsement:

[A] detailed account of the problem of how life came into existence from lifeless matter — something that had to happen before the process of biological evolution could begin….Meyer is a Christian, but atheists, and theists who believe God never intervenes in the natural world, will be instructed by his careful presentation of this fiendishly difficult problem.

Nagel’s review elicited howls from Darwinists who made no effort to pretend they had even weighed the 611-page volume in their hand, much less read a page of it. On his blog, Why Evolution Is True, University of Chicago biologist Jerry Coyne complained that they hadn’t ought to let such an opinion even appear in the august columns of the TLS:

“Detailed account”?? How about “religious speculation”?
Nagel is a respected philosopher who’s made big contributions to several areas of philosophy, and this is inexplicable, at least to me. I have already called this to the attention of the TLS, just so they know.

No doubt the editors appreciated his letting them know they had erred by printing a view not in line with the official catechism. Coyne then appealed for help. Not having read the book himself, while nevertheless feeling comfortable dismissing it as “religious speculation,” he pleaded:

Do any of you know of critiques of Meyer’s book written by scientists? I haven’t been able to find any on the internet, and would appreciate links.

Coyne was later relieved when a British chemist, Stephen Fletcher, published a critical letter to the editor in the TLS associating Meyer’s argument with a belief in “gods, devils, pixies, fairies” and recommending that readers learn about chemical evolution by, instead, reading up on it elsewhere from an unimpeachable source of scientific knowledge: