Intelligent Design

This month’s edition of Touchstone Magazine has a great column by the godfather of intelligent design, Phillip Johnson, offering his review of Stephen Meyer’s Signature in the Cell and his take on why the book has been met with such an uproar in the blogosphere: In another way, however, it is peculiar that there is such a furious and often ill-informed objection to a learned volume that isn’t even about the theory of biological evolution. The book advances well-reasoned arguments based on solid evidence about a prior problem — the origin of the cell’s information content — concerning which most scientists would concede that they know very little. The one thing that many of these scientists think they do know Read More ›

Scientific American recently reported on what has transpired since the completion of the Human Genome Project ten years ago. When the HGP was first announced in 2000, many scientists said that it would be the key to understanding disease and for developing cures. Ten years later, however, this has not been the case. The human genome project has aided in developing better research and technology, particularly in our abilities to sequence genes. It has also shown us that much of what we once considered junk DNA isn’t really junk at all. (See here, here, here, and here for past ENV discussions on junk DNA). However, scientists are coming to a sobering conclusion that perhaps their models and assumptions on the nature of disease may be mistaken.

[Editor’s Note: This is part three of a six-part response from microbiologist Don Ewert to Kathryn Applegate’s arguments that the vertebrate adaptive immune system is an example of Darwinian evolution in action. Part one can be found here, and part two is here.]

The second stage of B cell receptor development is initiated when a foreign protein enters our body and is detected by a circulating B cell using its cell surface antigen receptor (BCR). The BCRs that recognize these antigens improve their affinity (binding capacity) for the antigen by entering into a fine-tuning process called affinity maturation. This process ensures that highly effective antibody receptors are produced and released as cell-free antibodies into the circulation as the B cell completes its development. This increase in the strength of binding between a single antigenic determinant and an individual antibody combining site does not affect the specificity of the antibody, i.e. its ability to distinguish between small regions (epitopes) on the same antigen. Rather it allows for antibodies to remain bound to the foreign antigen for longer periods of time, thus giving the body a greater chance to clear the antigen-antibody complexes. The changes in the affinity of the receptor for an antigen results from the accumulation of nucleotide replacements that change the attractive and repulsive forces, mainly electrostatic forces, of the antigen combining site. The molecular mechanism for improving the affinity of the BCR is called somatic cell hypermutation (SHM), since the changes that are introduced in the DNA of the B cell (a somatic cell) cannot be passed on to the offspring of the animal.

My eight questions and answers for New Atheists have generated some amusing replies. Most just criticize me for asking, calling me ‘dishonest’ (that’s for my questions, not just for my answers). ‘No matter what, God didn’t do it’ is the typical reply.

One dyspeptic New Atheist was uncommonly amusing. Chuck O’Connor at Battling Confusion writes:

Michael Egnor (a fellow of the Discovery Institute – the PR organization that tries to deny biological evolution for the sake of Judeo/Christian creationism and theocracy – see their aims articulated in “The Wedge Strategy”) offers excellent evidence of this obsessive psychological quirk towards certainty when he creates a “strawman” argument against “New Atheism” at the Discovery Institute Web-site.

My “obsessive psychological quirk” was to ask important questions and to answer them coherently. After posting my questions, he asserts:

First off, Eignor’s [sic] unwillingness to enable comments at his blog post indicates he does not want to know what “New Atheists” believe.

We don’t take comments on ENV because much of what New Atheists believe is expressed in 4-letter parcels. They have their own blogs for that.

The Smithsonian Institution, a wonderful taxpayer-supported educational establishment, has a bad record when it comes to treating scientific Darwin-doubters with due respect for academic freedom and free speech. Now to this list of indictments add respect for intellectual property.

Readers will recall the Richard Sternberg affair, in which supervisors at the National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) persecuted an evolutionary biologist on staff just for editing a peer-reviewed research paper supportive of intelligent design. More recently, senior figures at the Smithsonian may have pressured the affiliated California Science Center to cancel a contract to show a Darwin-critical documentary, in what seems to be an instance of a public facility illegally regulating speech.

In both of those cases, the indications suggest it was the intention to squash a controversial viewpoint that motivated Smithsonian personnel. In the case of renowned lepidopterist Bernard d’Abrera, there’s no reason to believe that it was his Darwin-doubting itself that led to an act of startling brazenness.

Brazen…what? “Theft,” as d’Abrera calls it in his account published in a recent book in his series Butterflies of the World. He actually puts the word in quote marks since, he observes wryly, his attorney advised him that while it looks to the untrained eye exactly like theft, it wasn’t a criminal case, ending up instead in the Court of Federal Claims.

In my prior post, I noted that for years I’ve owned a graduate assignment on evolutionary classification by LA County Museum of Natural History scientist Kirk Fitzhugh. After completing this “Classification” project, he went on to earn his PhD in biology and today is Curator of Polychaetes at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County (NHMLAC). Fitzhugh was part of the internal discussions at NHMLAC that I’ve been writing about, in which participants at one point planned to tell the California Science Center (CSC), “We urge you to cancel this event.” Fitzhugh, however, is not nearly so private about his disagreement with ID as some of his NHMLAC colleagues. It’s important to note that Dr. Fitzhugh should have every Read More ›

P.Z. Myers answered my eight questions about what New Atheists really believe. Myers provided his “fast and flippant” answers; yet he provides a fine synopsis of New Atheist atheology. More detailed book-length New Atheist apologetics (Dawkins, Harris, etc) are less fast but no less flippant.

My original questions are followed by Myers’ answers, then by my reply.

1) Why is there anything?

I’ve written here before about novelist and lepidopterist Vladimir Nabokov, a self-described “furious” critic of Darwinian theory. An erstwhile butterfly researcher and curator at Harvard and the American Museum of Natural History, Nabokov thought that butterflies possess powers of mimicry inexplicable on Darwinian assumptions:

“Natural Selection,” in the Darwinian sense, could not explain the miraculous coincidence of imitative aspect and imitative behavior, nor could one appeal to the theory of “the struggle for life” when a protective device was carried to a point of mimetic subtlety, exuberance, and luxury far in excess of a predator’s power of appreciation.

In the same tradition of butterfly-induced Darwin heresy, meet Bernard d’Abera. A kind of latter-day Audubon of lepidoptera, D’Abrera is a philosopher of science, renowned butterfly photographer, one of the world’s most formidable lepidopterists — and if anything, an even more furious Darwin doubter than Nabokov. His series of enormous volumes, The Butterflies of the World, a heroic act of categorization and illustration, is almost completed with the recent publication of Butterflies of the Afrotropical Region, Part III: Lycaenidae, Riodinidae, in a revised edition including a lengthy assemblage of introductory essays. The latter comprise one of the most colorful, amusing, enraged, and wildly unclassifiable attacks on Darwinism that I’ve come across.

The book is huge — I’ve been carrying it around as I bicycle to work and my sore back attests to this — and gorgeously furnished in the systematic section with d’Abrera’s incredibly detailed butterfly photos. His pictures were taken both in the field and in the unsurpassed collections of the British Museum (Natural History) where he has been a longtime visiting scholar in the Entomology Department. Unfortunately, priced at more than $500 a copy, the book probably isn’t a realistic purchase for you unless you have a professional or at least very serious amateur interest in butterfly classification.

After yesterday’s plenary session with Dr. Falk at the Vibrant Dance of Faith and Science, I was looking forward to attending his breakout session and hearing more about his view of evolutionary creation.

And I was not disappointed.

There were fewer than twenty of us sitting in a U-shape at tables in a classroom, which felt a little bit like we were all having a small class session on theistic evolution evolutionary creation, up close and personal. In addition to the volunteers working with Dr. Falk on a film project (more on that later), Dr. Walter Bradley, conference organizer Larry Linenschmidt, Dr. Dennis Venema, and Dr. Richard Sternberg were in attendance, as well as a few younger thinkers.

Falk explained what he means by the term “evolutionary creation” and why he prefers it to “theistic evolution,” then outlined his particular view with three major points:

1. God speaks natural laws into existence.
2. Natural laws are a reflection of God’s ongoing activity.
3. Through God’s ongoing natural activity, and through supernatural intervention, God is there at work and we have all the glory of creation.

We were then treated to a clip from a new film BioLogos is doing with Highway Media, which looked very good – beautiful, compelling, and full of talking heads with British accents sitting in nice churches. And a shot of C. S. Lewis’s grave, just in case you didn’t get the point that “evolutionary creation” is the smart Christian choice. (They also have Americans like Brian McLaren, but that’s less impressive to their evangelical targets, IMO.)

Finally, Dr. Falk took questions from the small group of us assembled there.

Previously I noted that BioLogos has created a taxonomy of various viewpoints in the debate over origins that First Things blogger Christopher Benson called “helpful”. Given how badly it misrepresents ID, in my view it is anything but. Previously I showed that ID finds its supporting evidence in the fields of cosmology/physics and biology, thus refuting BioLogos’s mistaken assertion that “Intelligent design (ID) proponents believe that much of modern science is wrong and must be rejected because of its naturalism.” Let me reiterate two more points I made in response Benson’s orginal post: