Science

When intelligent design (ID) proponents press neo-Darwinian evolutionists on the inability of Darwinian evolution to produce new functional genetic information, a common response from evolutionists is that they get angry and engage in name calling. That’s what happened when Michael Egnor asked How does evolution produce new functional genetic information?, and it again seems to be the case now after Jonathan Wells bravely observed that “duplicating a gene doesn’t increase information content any more than photocopying a paper increases its information content.” Mathematician and ID-critic Jeffrey Shallit responded by calling Wells a “buffoon.” Dr. Shallit then proceeded to offer an irrelevant definition of information which supposedly showed that Wells was wrong. William Dembski has responded to Shallit here, but Shallit’s Read More ›

Wednesday, Stephen Meyer will be a guest on The Dennis Miller Show. Listen in with Dennis’ other 1.75 million fans as they discuss the California Science Center’s recent banning of pro-ID film Darwin’s Dilemma and Meyer’s landmark book Signature in the Cell. The segment is scheduled live at 7:30am Pacific coast time, which is mid-way through the show’s first hour.

For those interested in the history and philosophy of origins and in the present controversy over the “establishment” understanding, this is a helpful book. For those wishing to have a better understanding of DNA and a “simple cell,” this is an astonishing book. For those who wish to honestly consider what is the best explanation for the origin of specified complex information found in living things, this is an invaluable book. For those who have for whatever reason gravitated to the general proposition that design seems to make intuitive sense, this is an essential book so you can appreciate there is a scientific foundation for your belief. For those who disagree with intelligent design this is the crucial book you Read More ›

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 last of three posts discussing it. (see here and here)

Bridgham et al (2009) are interested in the reversibility of evolution, and discuss their results in terms of something called “Dollo’s law.” Louis Dollo, an early 20th century paleobiologist, was interested in discerning phylogenies. He maintained that one could always distinguish ancestral forms from descendant forms. Stephen Jay Gould (1970) commented that Dollo’s “law” was not an empirical observation, but rather a postulate which he felt was necessary to properly construct phylogenies. Over the years the meaning of “Dollo’s law” transmogrified. In modern usage, the phrase has come to mean that complex traits, once lost, do not re-evolve in the same lineage. For example, whales do not re-evolve gills, even though they are aquatic creatures who descended from fish, because gills are a lost, complex trait in that lineage.

Richard Dawkins’ new book, The Greatest Show on Earth, is being touted as a scathing rebuttal to intelligent design (ID), yet an actual response to mainstream ID thinking can hardly be found in the book. Though the book makes passing mention of “irreducible complexity” in a couple places, there are zero mentions of leading ID proponents like Michael Behe, William Dembski, Jonathan Wells, Phillip Johnson, Stephen Meyer, or any other well-known ID proponent. Instead, Dawkins refers extensively to “creationists,” repeatedly attacking young earth creationism, while also making heavy use of fallacious (and dubious) “poor design” examples that rebut no argument made by a leading advocate of design since perhaps the 19th century. It seems that Dawkins didn’t have the stomach Read More ›

As someone who has studied the concept of “junk DNA” for over twenty years, I am dismayed by two statements that appear repeatedly on various blog sites discussing evolution. No, I am not referring to arguments of the form “the onion has six times more DNA than do mammals; therefore, there is no deity,” that are invariably followed by terms of disparagement hurled at anyone who even marginally departs from the Darwinian perspective. Rather, my consternation stems from a half-truth and a false fact that are recycled ad nauseum by those who apparently believe that, despite all the genomic and transcriptomic data that have been obtained only in this decade — data that have overturned a number of trenchant assumptions–a certain hypothesis published in 1980 is outside the purview of serious questioning.

The half-truth is the oft-read comment that goes something like this: “No one ever asserted that junk DNA is without function…it was long suspected that these sequences have important roles in the cells.” Now, to be fair, it is correct to say that models for, say, repetitive DNA-based operations in metazoan development, have been proposed since the 1960s.¹ It is also true that the evolutionary process of exaptation — the accidental acquisition of a function — has been used to explain how the odd transposon here or there along a chromosome can regulate a locus. Nonspecific effects of “extra” DNA on the cell have also been suggested for around three decades, if not longer. That said, the junk DNA hypothesis that one commonly reads as being an unassailable observation, as an incontrovertible empirical conclusion, presents as a clear prediction that the vast majority of non-gene sequences are devoid of any precise specificational role in ontogeny. Allow me to explain.

I thought Richard Dawkins’ science was outdated, but I didn’t realize just how badly outdated until I watched this amazing You Tube clip from “The Genius of Charles Darwin,” a science documentary Dawkins hosted last year. If you watch until 7 minutes and 30 seconds into the clip, you will see Ernst Haeckel’s bogus embryo diagrams magically appear onscreen right before your very eyes: That’s right, Richard Dawkins circa 2008 was still peddling fraudulent “evidence” for evolution that no self-respecting embryologist would defend, and that most biology textbooks dropped years ago due in large part to biologist Jonathan Wells’ masterful book Icons of Evolution, which shamed Darwinists into cleaning up their act. Randy Olson, call home. Armed with retro science Read More ›

Scientists sometimes find themselves wishing things were different. In one sense that’s a thoroughly unremarkable observation. After all, scientists are human, and humans have always found themselves wishing things were different.
But what if some of the things scientists wish were different are the very things they have devoted themselves to studying? In other words, forget about salaries, teaching loads, and grant funding. What if some scientists want the brute facts of their own field of study to be other than what they really are?

As odd as it may seem, particularly to non-scientists, that tension between preference and reality has always been a part of doing science. Like everyone else, scientists don’t just have ideas — they favor them… even promote them. And for scientists, as for everyone else, sometimes those cherished ideas are just plain wrong.

Seattle — Richard Dawkins, the world’s leading public spokesman for Darwinian evolution and an advocate of the “new atheism,” has refused to debate Dr. Stephen C. Meyer, a prominent advocate of intelligent design and the author of the acclaimed Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design.

“Richard Dawkins claims that the appearance of design in biology is an illusion and claims to have refuted the case for intelligent design,” says Dr. Meyer who received his Ph.D. in the philosophy of science from the University of Cambridge in England.

“But Dawkins assiduously avoids addressing the key evidence for intelligent design and won’t debate its leading proponents,” adds Dr. Meyer. “Dawkins says that there is no evidence for intelligent design in life, and yet he also acknowledges that neither he nor anyone else has an evolutionary explanation for the origin of the first living cell. We know now even the simplest forms of life are chock-full of digital code, complex information processing systems and other exquisite forms of nanotechnology.”

The missing link presently being touted in the media, Ardipithecus ramidus, has had more reconstructive surgery than Michael Jackson. Assuming that their “extensive digital reconstruction” of its “badly crushed and distorted bones” is accurate, what does A. ramidus (or “Ardi” as the fawning media is affectionately calling it) really show us that we didn’t already know? We already knew of upright walking / tree-climbing, small-brained hominids–that’s what Lucy, an australopithecine, was. We already knew that there were australopithecine fossils dating back to before 4 million years, and this fossil is only a little bit older. So what does this fossil teach us? Assuming all the reconstructions of Ardi’s crushed bones are objective and accurate, this fossil teaches us at least Read More ›