Science Reporting

Last week National Geographic published an article, “Evolution vs. Intelligent Design: 6 Bones of Contention,” that did a mixed job of conveying the pro-intelligent design (ID) viewpoint. When the article actually provided quotes from me (or other ID proponents) about ID–which I very much appreciated–it was accurate. When the article purported to convey the views of ID proponents, sometimes it went badly astray. The article also provided the views of ID-critics, namely Donald Prothero. That’s fine, but unfortunately in each case, the pro-ID viewpoint was immediately rebutted by Prothero with zero sur-rebuttals defending ID. Dr. Prothero, who is a geology professor at Occidental College, is debating with Michael Shermer against Stephen Meyer and Richard Sternberg today in Los Angeles on Read More ›

Although this year has been widely touted as the “Year of Darwin” because of its big Darwin-related anniversaries, the book reviewers at the Times Literary Supplement (TLS) in London seem less than enthralled with the year’s crop of pro-Darwin retreads from the publishing industry. Indeed, the TLS’s “Books of the Year” issue just released last Friday fails to include any of the year’s big pro-Darwin tomes such as Jerry Coyne’s Why Evolution Is True or even Richard Dawkins’ The Greatest Show on Earth among its “Books of the Year.” Instead, the only book so honored that focuses on the Darwin-ID debate is Stephen Meyer’s Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design, which was selected by noted Read More ›

A new podcast out today at ID the Future features breaking news that could affect your freedom to present views that dissent from Darwin in a public place. CSC Associate Director John West explains in an interview here.

The Los Angeles Daily News this morning is reporting the California Science Center’s outrageous cancellation of a screening of the new intelligent design documentary, Darwin’s Dilemma: The Mystery of the Cambrian Fossil Record. The California Science Center is a “department of the State of California,” and its IMAX Theater had been rented by a private group, the American Freedom Alliance, to hold the Los Angeles premiere of the film as part of a series of activities commemorating the 150th anniversary of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. But after the screening became public knowledge, the pressure from Darwinist censors apparently became too intense. So this week the Science Center expelled the film, possibly after being intimidated by the Smithsonian Institution, Read More ›

Today on the Michael Medved show, arch-Darwinist Richard Dawkins, author of The Greatest Show on Earth, was asked point-blank by Discovery Institute President Bruce Chapman why he wouldn’t debate Stephen Meyer, author of Signature in the Cell. His response? Weak sauce:

I have never come across any kind of creationism, whether you call it intelligent design or not, which has a serious scientific case to put.
The objection to having debates with people like that is that it gives them a kind of respectability. If a real scientist goes onto a debating platform with a creationist, it gives them a respectability, which I do not think your people have earned.

Hm. Did Professor Dawkins have these same scruples when he went up against John Lennox in 2007?
No matter — Professor Dawkins made his position clear enough: address young earth creationism, then tell your audience that you’ve destroyed intelligent design… which of course, even Richard Dawkins admits, is not the same thing as young earth creationism.
Read the transcript of the entire exchange below — and note Bruce Chapman’s great line about Expelled:

Nature has recently published an interesting paper which places severe limits on Darwinian evolution. The manuscript, from the laboratory of Joseph Thornton at the University of Oregon, is titled, “An epistatic ratchet constrains the direction of glucocorticoid receptor evolution.” The work is interpreted by its authors within a standard Darwinian framework, but the results line up very well with arguments I made in The Edge of Evolution. This is the second of several posts discussing it.

Using clever synthetic and analytical techniques, Bridgham et al (2009) show that the more recent hormone receptor protein that they synthesized, a GR-like protein, can’t easily revert to the ancestral structure and activity of an MR-like protein because its structure has been adjusted by selection to its present evolutionary task, and multiple amino acid changes would be needed to switch it back. That is a very general, extremely important point that deserves much more emphasis. In all cases — not just this one — natural selection is expected to hone a protein to suit its current activity, not to suit some future, alternate function. And that is a very strong reason why we should not expect a protein performing one function in a cell to easily be able to evolve another, different function by Darwinian means. In fact, the great work of Bridgham et al (2009) shows that it may not be do-able for Darwinian processes even to produce a protein performing a function very similar to that of a homologous protein.

Before reading their paper, even I would have happily conceded for the sake of argument that random mutation plus selection could convert an MR-like protein to a GR-like protein and back again, as many times as necessary. Now, thanks to the work of Bridgham et al (2009), even such apparently minor switches in structure and function are shown to be quite problematic. It seems Darwinian processes can’t manage to do even as much as I had thought.

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.

Seeking relief from the demands of geschaeft, The Washington Times reported recently, senior officials at the National Science Foundation routinely spend a great deal of their time (and our money) visiting pornographic sites on the Internet.

Just possibly, I suspect, they spend all of their time on stress relief and none on the public’s business, stress relief so striking as to cancel its cause entirely.

“The problems at the National Science Foundation (NSF) were so pervasive,” the Times reported, “they swamped the agency’s inspector general and forced the internal watchdog to cut back on its primary mission of investigating grant fraud and recovering misspent tax dollars.”

The Los Angeles premiere of Illustra Media’s new science documentary Darwin’s Dilemma: The Mystery of the Cambrian Fossil Record will be held on Sunday, October 25th in the IMAX theater of the prestigious California Science Center, which describes itself as “the West Coast’s largest hands-on science center.” Sponsored by the American Freedom Alliance, the premiere starts at 7:00 pm and will also include a showing of the IMAX film Born of the Stars as well as a post-screening discussion of Darwin’s Dilemma featuring the film’s director Lad Allen; David Berlinski, author of The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions; and biologist Jonathan Wells, author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design. For tickets or more information, Read More ›

Nature has published an interesting paper recently which places severe limits on Darwinian evolution. This is the first of several posts discussing it.

The manuscript, from the laboratory of Joseph Thornton at the University of Oregon, is titled “An epistatic ratchet constrains the direction of glucocorticoid receptor evolution.” The work is interpreted by its authors within a standard Darwinian framework. Nonetheless, like the important work over the years of Michigan State’s Richard Lenski on laboratory evolution of E. coli, which has shown trillions of bacteria evolving under selection for tens of thousands of generations yielding just broken genes and minor changes, the new work demonstrates the looming brick wall which confronts unguided evolution in at least one system. And it points strongly to the conclusion that such walls are common throughout all of biology.

In the paper Bridgham et al (2009) continue their earlier work on steroid hormone receptor evolution. Previously they had constructed in the laboratory a protein which they inferred to be the ancestral sequence of two modern hormone receptors abbreviated GR and MR (Bridgham et al 2006). They then showed that if they changed two amino acid residues in the inferred ancestral receptor protein into ones which occur in GR, they could change its binding specificity somewhat in the direction of modern GR’s specificity. (All the work was done on molecules in the laboratory. No measurements were made of the selective value of the changes in real organisms in nature. Thus any relevance to actual biology is speculative.) They surmised that a gene duplication plus sequence diversification could have given rise to MR and GR. As I wrote in a comment at the time, that was interesting work, and the conclusion was reasonable, but the result was exceedingly modest and well within the boundaries that an intelligent design proponent like myself would ascribe to Darwinian processes. After all, the starting point was a protein which binds several steroid hormones, and the ending point was a slightly different protein that binds the same steroid hormones with slightly different strengths. How hard could that be?