Intelligent Design

Since the beginning of 2008, we’ve seen the publication of some excellent popular books introducing the topic of intelligent design (ID), including Intelligent Design 101 (with contributions by Phillip Johnson, Michael Behe, J.P. Moreland, William Dembski, and Jay Wesley Richards) and William Dembski’s Understanding Intelligent Design. Another book just out is a small self-published book that is a gem, titled Probability’s Nature and Nature’s Probability, by Donald E. Johnson. Johnson holds two Ph.D.’s — one Ph.D. in Computer & Information Sciences from the University of Minnesota and another Ph.D. in Chemistry from Michigan State University. Given Johnson’s background, it was unsurprising that he has a good grasp of the issues. What was pleasantly surprising was Johnson’s ability to communicate some Read More ›

It must be hard to be the Darwinist editor of a major science journal, to have to constantly maintain the party line that there is no scientific debate between intelligent design and evolution while publishing articles whose authors seem haunted by design arguments, often taking it upon themselves to stick up a straw man of ID to knock down with a puff of hot air. It must be especially hard when a scientist like Michael Behe bothers you, thinking it his duty to advance the debate by correcting the Darwinists’ mistaken views of irreducible complexity which you published, hoping that maybe he would go away. Alas, for the editors of Science and Trends in Microbiology, Michael Behe has not gone Read More ›

New Scientist, is calling The Universe: Order without design by Carlos Calle “excellent.” Why? There’s nothing new here, just the same old multiverse stuff that has been critiqued. The author combines a bunch of highly speculative, mostly metaphysical, controversial theories to reach his conclusions: eternal inflation, string theory and colliding branes. There will ALWAYS be speculative, untestable “cosmological” theories, so someone can always point to the latest ones and say, “See no need for a beginning or fine-tuning by a designer–the latest science says so!” These speculative theories have half-lives measured in years, unlike the now well-established Big Bang theory. In any case, multiverse speculations do not explain those aspects of our existence that are not necessary for our existence Read More ›

Just as it seemed the hullaballoo about Great Grandma Ida might go on forever, there is just the hint of some perspective on what the fossil find really means. That the hype around Ida is more selling then compelling is beginning to become clear. The New York Time’s business page wrote about how it all seems nicely orchestrated to boost ratings of the History Channel’s accompanying documentary. A tongue in cheek report from a London science writer also helped to highlight the fact that the welcome for Ida has been more than just a little over the top. By the far the most insightful is this post from a science writer at the Smithsonian, offering some more tempered words than Read More ›

Any critic making the inaccurate claim that Stephen C. Meyer is the “President of the Discovery Institute” is bound to be fairly uninformed about both intelligent design (ID) and Discovery Institute.1 Thus, when I recently viewed a YouTube video making this very mistake while allegedly “Challenging the Discovery Institute to Discover,” I first thought: Why should I accept a challenge from someone who can’t even correctly “discover” the identity of our organization’s president? Regardless, this video was enlightening, but not in the way that its creators intended. Rather than posing any difficult challenge for ID, the video unwittingly exposes the unfortunate ignorance that apparently abounds regarding the nature of the theory of intelligent design and how we detect and test Read More ›

Note: This post is the last in a series reviewing Jerry Coyne’s Why Evolution Is True. Read Part 1 here, Part 2 here, Part 3 here, Part 4 here, Part 5 here, Part 6 here, and Part 7 here.

Darwin called The Origin of Species “one long argument” for his theory, but Jerry Coyne has given us one long bluff. Why Evolution Is True tries to defend Darwinian evolution by rearranging the fossil record; by misrepresenting the development of vertebrate embryos; by ignoring evidence for the functionality of allegedly vestigial organs and non-coding DNA, then propping up Darwinism with theological arguments about “bad design;” by attributing some biogeographical patterns to convergence due to the supposedly “well-known” processes of natural selection and speciation; and then exaggerating the evidence for selection and speciation to make it seem as though they could accomplish what Darwinism requires of them.

The actual evidence shows that major features of the fossil record are an embarrassment to Darwinian evolution; that early development in vertebrate embryos is more consistent with separate origins than with common ancestry; that non-coding DNA is fully functional, contrary to neo-Darwinian predictions; and that natural selection can accomplish nothing more than artificial selection — which is to say, minor changes within existing species.

Note: This is Part 7 in a series reviewing Jerry Coyne’s Why Evolution Is True. Read Part 1 here, Part 2 here, Part 3 here, Part 4 here, Part 5 here, and Part 6 here.

Coyne writes that Darwin “had little direct evidence for selection acting in natural populations.” Actually, Darwin had no direct evidence for natural selection; the best he could do in The Origin of Species was “give one or two imaginary illustrations.” It wasn’t until a century later that Bernard Kettlewell provided what he called “Darwin’s missing evidence” for natural selection — a shift in the proportion of light- and dark-colored peppered moths that Kettlewell attributed to camouflage and bird predation.⁴⁰

Since then, biologists have found lots of direct evidence for natural selection. Coyne describes some of it, including an increase in average beak depth of finches on the Galápagos Islands and a change in flowering time in wild mustard plants in Southern California — both due to drought. Like Darwin, Coyne also compares natural selection to the artificial selection used in plant and animal breeding.

An announcement from Professor David Snoke: “Grill the ID Scientist” Tuesday, June 9 7 PM, University of Pittsburgh Campus (room TBA) A network of scientists known as the Intelligent Design (ID) community continues to question basic tenets of Darwinism and origin-of-life scenarios. Not only are their views controversial in scientific circles — many in the evangelical world, who might be expected to embrace ID, are also not sold on the value of the ID program. This event brings together a panel of scientists associated with the ID movement. After a short presentation, the bulk of the evening will be given to questions from the audience. This event is aimed primarily at researchers, graduate students and advanced undergrad students in the Read More ›

Note: This is Part 6 in a series reviewing Jerry Coyne’s Why Evolution Is True. Read Part 1 here, Part 2 here, Part 3 here, Part 4 here, and Part 5 here.

Theological arguments are also prominent in The Origin of Species. For example, Darwin argued that the geographic distribution of living things made no sense if species had been separately created, but it did make sense in the context of his theory. Cases such as “the presence of peculiar species of bats on oceanic islands and the absence of all other terrestrial mammals,” Darwin wrote, “are facts utterly inexplicable on the theory of independent acts of creation.” In particular: “Why, it may be asked, has the supposed creative force produced bats and no other mammals on remote islands?” According to Darwin, “on my view this question can easily be answered; for no terrestrial mammal can be transported across a wide space of sea, but bats can fly across.”³⁴

But Darwin knew that migration cannot account for all patterns of geographic distribution. He wrote in The Origin of Species that “the identity of many plants and animals, on mountain-summits, separated from each other by hundreds of miles of lowlands, where Alpine species could not possibly exist, is one of the most striking cases known of the same species living at distant points without the apparent possibility of their having migrated from one point to the other.” Darwin argued that the recent ice age “affords a simple explanation of these facts.” Arctic plants and animals that were “nearly the same” could have flourished everywhere in Europe and North America, but “when the warmth had fully returned, the same species, which had lately lived together on the European and North American lowlands, would again be found in the arctic regions of the Old and New Worlds, and on many isolated mountain-summits far distant from each other.”³⁵

So some cases of geographic distribution may not be due to migration, but to the splitting of a formerly large, widespread population into small, isolated populations–what modern biologists call “vicariance.” Darwin argued that all modern distributions of species could be explained by these two possibilities. Yet there are many cases of geographic distribution that neither migration nor vicariance seem able to explain.

In the wake of the Texas school board decision to require students to analyze and evaluate certains aspects of Darwinian evolution, CSC program officer for public policy Casey Luskin appeared on Fox & Friends this morning to discuss common problems regarding evolution still found in biology textbooks.