Evolution

[Editor’s note: This was the third installment of a three-part series. The full article, A Response to Dr. Dawkins’ “The Information Challenge”, can be read here.] In Part 1 and Part 2 of this response to Richard Dawkins’ article, “The Information Challenge,” I explained why gene duplication is not an adequate explanation of how Darwinian processes can produce new information. But Dawkins’ article has other problems. He writes that “most of the capacity of the genome of any animal is not used to store useful information.” This is another good example demonstrating how Neo-Darwinism led may scientists to wrongly believe that non-coding DNA was largely junk. Dawkins’ statement is directly refuted by the findings of recent studies, which the Washington Read More ›

[Editor’s note: This was the second installment of a three-part series. The full article, A Response to Dr. Dawkins’ “The Information Challenge”, can be read here.] In Part I, I demonstrated that specified complexity is the appropriate measure of biological complexity. In this section, I will show why merely citing gene duplication does not help one understand how Darwinian evolution can produce new genetic information. Dawkins’ main point in his “The Information Challenge” article is that “[n]ew genes arise through various kinds of duplication.” So his answer to the creationist question that so upset him is gene duplication. Yet during the actual gene-duplication process, a pre-existing gene is merely copied, and nothing truly new is generated. As Michael Egnor said Read More ›

[Editor’s note: This was the first installment of a three-part series. The full article, A Response to Dr. Dawkins’ “The Information Challenge”, can be read here.] Last week I posted a link to a YouTube video where Richard Dawkins was asked to explain the origin of genetic information, according to Darwinism. I also posted a link to Dawkins’ rebuttal to the video, where he purports to explain the origin of genetic information according to Darwinian evolution. The question posed to Dawkins was, “Can you give an example of a genetic mutation or evolutionary process that can be seen to increase the information in the genome?” Dawkins famously commented that the question was “the kind of question only a creationist would Read More ›

What a difference a month, and a couple likely internal memos, can make. Last month I discussed the fact that newly reported Homo erectus fossils predated fossils of “Homo” habilis, meaning that habilis could not possibly have been an evolutionary link between the Australopithecine apes and our genus Homo. When the press covered that story, Harvard biological anthropologist Daniel Lieberman was quoted in the New York Times stating that those fossils “show ‘just how interesting and complex the human genus was and how poorly we understand the transition from being something much more apelike to something more humanlike.’” It’s a fascinating admission, and I wrote at the time, “Daniel Lieberma[n] apparently did not get the memo about refraining from making Read More ›

I just found out about a debate tomorrow that will be of interest to any of you in the Penn State area. Dr. Michael Shermer and Dr. Paul NelsonEvolution vs. Intelligent Design – A DebateThursday, September 20, 20077:30 p.m. – Wolf Kuhn Theatre – Misciagna Family Center for Performing ArtsClick here for more details.

In July, I noted that Francisco Ayala wrote an article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences describing evolution as “randomness and determinism interlocked in a natural process” where “is no entity or person who is selecting adaptive combinations.” Clearly, some theists might find that such descriptions of evolution contravene their religious beliefs. Indeed, there are a number of recent examples of scientific papers promoting evolution alongside anti-religious sentiments: It seems that none of these scientists got Eugenie Scott’s memo to not promote evolution alongside materialistic philosophy. While I may not agree with what these Darwinists assert, and personally hope that more scientists would take Eugenie Scott’s advice to leave out materialistic philosophy when promoting evolution, it seems that Read More ›

Evolutionary ‘theory’ is immune to satire. Satire depends on exaggeration, and evolutionary theory is such far-fetched science– substituting preposterous generalizations, non-sequiturs and jargon for meaningful scientific inference– that it can’t be satirized. It can only be described, which is funny enough.

Much of recent evolutionary self-satire involves the origin of the human brain. How did an organ of such staggering complexity and biological novelty arise? For evolutionary biologists, no speculation (except design) is too outlandish. Evidence: a paper in Nature Genetics offers a new theory to account for the human brain: spit.

[Editor’s note: This was the preface of a three-part series responding to Dr. Dawkins. The full article responding to Dr. Dawkins, A Response to Dr. Dawkins’ “The Information Challenge”, can be read here.] Want to learn about how Darwinian evolution generates new information? This video clip, which includes the raw footage of the original question, shows how Richard Dawkins responded, in context, when the question was directly posed to him during an interview. Phillip Johnson described this interview as follows: “In response to the question, Dawkins hesitated for at least eleven seconds, an agonizingly long time in the context of a video interview, before he finally gave a completely irrelevant reply about the transition between fish and amphibians. The creationists Read More ›

Baylor University continues to come under fire for its suppression of Professor Robert Marks’ Evolutionary Informatics Lab. Clearly, Marks’ site was removed because it was implicated with ID (not because of any Baylor policy) and there are plenty of labs and groups (some belonging to Marks himself) that have not faced similar discrimination. It seems obvious that his site is being singled out — regardless of what Baylor says.

The story was on the front page of today’s Waco Tribune Herald and reported that:

. . . at an Aug. 9 meeting, attended by Beckenhauer, Gilmore, Marks, Kelley, provost Randall O’Brien and engineering department chair Kwang Lee that “a disclaimer would be put on the Web site and that it would then go back online as the provost had promised at the close of the meeting.”

It also quoted Marks’ attorney John Gilmore as saying:

(The disclaimer) might not have satisfied the absolutists who don’t want anyone at Baylor to think, even on their own time, about I.D. and its related issues. . . . Baylor has an obligation to defend Bob Marks’ position. Unfortunately, they’ve been taking the position of his persecutors. . . . It’s viewpoint discrimination.

The story is somewhat similar to that of noted astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez who suffered academic persecution at the hands of Iowa State University earlier this year. Like Gonzalez, Marks is an especially accomplished scientist and scholar. Among Marks’ numerous professional accomplishments are 120 peer-reviewed journal papers, 140 conference papers, and three patents. Just check this out.

MSNBC loves to promote the view that humans evolved from anthropoid ancestors (see here or here for a couple examples). Now MSNBC has created an online exhibit (and accompanying article) entitled “Before and After Humans” that not only promotes standard views of humans evolution, but also supports transhumanism: the view that humans will evolve into a new, higher species. MSNBC’s “possible futur[e]” for the human species goes something like this: Within one million years, global gene mixing eliminates the races and the “Unihumans” develop a global “monoculture.” That sounds reasonable enough. Next some global catastrophe kills off large portions of humanity, and the “Survivalistians” must adapt to extreme conditions, evolving “night-vision” and “radiation-shielding skin.” If that sounds a little weird, Read More ›