Intelligent Design

As we reported earlier, Michael Behe has been responding to critics of his scientific arguments in Edge of Evolution over at his Amazon blog, concluding with this thought: Here’s a final important point. Genetics is an excellent journal; its editors and reviewers are top notch; and Durrett and Schmidt themselves are fine researchers. Yet, as I show above, when simple mistakes in the application of their model to malaria are corrected, it agrees closely with empirical results reported from the field that I cited. This is very strong support that the central contention of The Edge of Evolution is correct: that it is an extremely difficult evolutionary task for multiple required mutations to occur through Darwinian means, especially if one Read More ›

Last month, NCSE staffer Joshua Rosenau complained on his blog that I failed to report on his talk, “Why We Need to Apply Dobzhansky’s Maxim Today,” which opened the February 15, 2009 AAAS session, Evolution Makes Sense of Biology. Instead, he says, my blog post focused on issues of my own manufacture, and missed the point, not only of his talk, but of the entire session — evolution, not intelligent design.
Did I miss the point? Here’s the evidence:

The power of a slogan is that if you say it over and over again enough times, the effect is like brainwashing on yourself and many of the people who listen to you. It crowds out thought, to the point where, when a particular topic comes up in conversation, the slogan-imprinted mind simply spits back the slogan.

You’ll see this at work among scientists, journalists, and the general public.

Take, for example, a slogan that dogs the evolution debate: “There is no debate,” along with its variant, “There is no controversy.” A Google search on those two, linked with the word “evolution,” produces 20,800 and 18,800 hits respectively. One of those hits, I noticed, was from a piece I wrote in Publishers Weekly about the market for books on Darwinian evolution versus intelligent design. The editor of Eugenie C. Scott’s book Evolution vs. Creationism: An Introduction at the University of California Press was Scott Crumly, and he had this to say to me: “There is no debate about evolution. ID is not an alternative to evolution. It’s bogus.”

I remember having tentatively posed to him the question of whether the sheer volume of books being published on the subject indicated otherwise. His response was vehement and contemptuous. It would have been funnier and more fitting if he’d said it in the far-off brainwashed tone of, say, Frank Sinatra and others in the cast of The Manchurian Candidate: “Raymond Shaw is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life.”

When large-scale function was detected for non-coding DNA (once called “junk” DNA) Darwinists, knowing that their viewpoint had long boasted that junk-DNA was evidence for common ancestry and that they were losing that argument, responded in one of two ways: Some sought to rewrite history by claiming that evolutionary biology predicted all along that we’d find function for junk-DNA. Others, however, pushed the “junk” back to RNA. They effectively argued, “Sure, we know that most of the genome is being transcribed into RNA, but that doesn’t mean that the RNAs have function. Much of the transcriptome might in fact be junk.” Evolutionist biochemist Larry Moran, for example, argued that either “[t]he so-called transcripts are just noise from accidental transcription” or Read More ›

This post is the second in a series reviewing the February 15, 2009 session at the AAAS annual meeting, Why Evolution Makes Sense of Biology. The first post is here.

David Deamer: Why Evolution Makes Sense of Biochemistry

…so-called prebiotic chemistry, which is of course falsely named, because we have no reason to believe that what they’re doing would ever lead to life — I just call it ‘investigator influenced abiotic organic chemistry’…

Robert Shapiro, Chemistry (NYU), at the roundtable “Life, What A Concept!” (p. 92), August 2007

First to the podium following Joshua Rosenau of the NCSE was David Deamer, a biochemist and leading origin of life researcher from UC-Santa Cruz. After outlining the Darwinian historical context — the famous “warm little pond” of Darwin’s 1871 letter to Hooker — and probable early Earth geochemistry, Deamer asked his motivating question: “What is needed for evolution itself to begin?”

What follows directly below is a summary, with links, of Deamer’s talk, as he answers his motivating question. I then offer some critical reflections.

In a stunningly biased headline this week, The Washington Post said “Obama Aims to Shield Science from Politics.” Well that is certainly one interpretation of the Administration’s announcement that it will fund new embryo-destructive research! Of course, this is nothing new. It has been an anti-Bush mantra of the hard Left for some years now that there is “A Republican War on Science,” to borrow Chris Mooney’s delightfully fatuous phrase.

In the debate over how to teach evolution in public schools, we often hear Darwinists cry, “Science is not democratic.” To which I’ve heard John West sagely reply a thousand times, “But public policy is!”

The recent headlines, and the Administration’s own rhetoric, regarding the President’s decision to have taxpayers (many of whom are morally opposed) fund new embryo-destructive research display the same naiveté in demarcating politics and science. It seems not to occur to certain folks that the answer to the question, “Is it good policy to Federally fund embryo-destructive research?” is not a scientific one. Rather, this sort of answer involves questions of a moral and prudential (political) nature.

As Robert George and Eric Cohen note, the new President’s position is itself highly political:

[Note: For a more comprehensive defense of Ben Stein’s documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, please see: NCSE Exposed at NCSEExposed.org] Alas, poor Richard. Ever since being thrashed by Ben Stein in Expelled he’s just gotten more and more nonsensical. Then, it was that there is no intelligent design of life, except of course maybe alien-directed intelligent design. Now, it seems he has decided to follow some recent sage advice and avoid using the “d” word. And, he’s scrapped his previous idea of using designoid as a replacement. Then Dawkins got to the essential framework of the rest of his talk, making a distinction within purpose between the purpose that comes about as adaptation via natural selection, which he called “archi-purpose”, Read More ›

The debate that isn’t supposed to exist in science continues in the science journal Genetics, where Michael Behe’s book, The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism, generated a response in the form of a paper by Rick Durrett and Deena Schmidt, “Waiting for two mutations: with applications to regulatory sequence evolution and the limits of Darwinian evolution.” In their effort to refute Behe’s claims, Durrett and Schmidt get a few things wrong, which Behe is able to point out in a reply published in Genetics, which Durrett and Schmidt also responded to in the journal. What we have here is a full-fledged debate over the limits of Darwinian evolution, a debate that Behe raised with his Read More ›

P.Z. Myers at Pharyngula has responded to my open letter to the Society of Integrative and Comparative Biology. In my letter, I strongly criticized the Darwinist organization’s endorsement of censorship and its disrespect for academic freedom. I reminded its members that they have a responsibility to the millions of taxpayers who fund their grants, and part of that responsibility entails a modicum of respect and a willingness to accept an open discussion of evolutionary theory in public schools.

Myers replies: