Science

“Artificial life, the stuff of dreams and nightmares, has arrived.” So proclaimed The Economist on May 20th, after a team of scientists headed by J. Craig Venter [2] announced that it had replaced the natural DNA in a bacterial cell with DNA they had artificially synthesized.

According to University of Pennsylvania philosopher and bioethicist Arthur Caplan, “Venter and his colleagues have shown that the material world can be manipulated to produce what we recognize as life. In doing so they bring to an end a debate about the nature of life that has lasted thousands of years. Their achievement undermines a fundamental belief about the nature of life that is likely to prove as momentous to our view of ourselves and our place in the Universe as the discoveries of Galileo, Copernicus, Darwin and Einstein.”

Whoa! Wait a minute!

What Venter and his team did was to determine the sequence of the DNA in one of the world’s simplest bacteria, use the sequence information to synthesize a copy of that DNA from subunits sold by a biological supply company, then put the synthetic copy of DNA into a living bacterial cell from which the natural DNA had been removed.
As Nicholas Wade pointed out in The New York Times, Eckard Wimmer and his colleagues did something similar in 2002 by synthesizing poliovirus RNA. Wimmer and his colleagues then used that synthetic RNA to make functioning polioviruses. But viruses are not living cells. No one has ever been able to make a living cell from its DNA–not even Craig Venter.

While my chapter in Signature of Controversy responding to Stephen Matheson’s review of Signature in the Cell deals with a variety of issues, I’d like to boil it down to two or three which I feel are the most important topics. Why are they the most important? Because it’s on these topics that Matheson engages in the most name-calling, and where Matheson also happens to be the most wrong. (Is there a reason why evolutionists so often increase the ad hominem attacks when their case is weak?) With that, here’s a condensed and abridged version of my response to Matheson: What would you get if you crossed a snarky pro-evolution blog like Panda’s Thumb with a passionate defender of theistic Read More ›

Critics of intelligent design often try to dismiss the theory as not worth addressing, as a question already settled, even as being too boring to countenance. Then they spend an amazing amount of energy trying to refute it. The very evidence of the ongoing debate sparked by Stephen Meyer’s Signature in the Cell should silence that tired trope that there is no controversy over evolution and intelligent design. That controversy has reached a fever-pitch in less than a year since the book’s first release, marking Meyer’s volume as a book serious Darwinists must deal with. And dealt with it, they haven’t — in their responses, some critics have misread it, while others have simply failed to read it at all. Read More ›

Q: Which Steve said design is an excellent and irrefutable explanation?Hint: He didn’t write Signature in the Cell. This incredible interaction came at last Friday night’s presentation of Signature in the Cell by Stephen Meyer at Biola University in front of 1,400 attendees and hundreds more watching the event streamed live on the internet. In a panel discussion after his lecture, Meyer met two of his critics head-on, one of whom essentially conceded that intelligent design is a better explanation than an unguided process like Darwinian evolution. The critics were Steve Matheson, a theistic evolutionist from Calvin College, and Arthur Hunt a Darwinist and biologist from the University of Kentucky. Both have written critically of SITC and intelligent design and Read More ›

Even if you can’t make it to the free Signature in the Cell event in Southern California this Friday, you’re in luck. Biola University will be broadcasting the event with Stephen Meyer live for a fee. According to the website: The broadcast fee helps subsidize the cost of the event, and the cost of producing and hosting the video broadcast. It is intendend primarily for large groups and we hope you choose to view it in a group to foster discussion about this topic. Discussion groups, interested friends, churches, families and individuals are encouraged to participate in the broadcast on Friday at 7pm PDT. Go here for system requirements (a computer with high-speed internet) and ordering information.

Camille Paglia has made interesting comments about global warming in the past that have made me think she might be a (very quiet) Darwin skeptic. Not the NCSE’s Josh Rosenau. His selective quote mining of her comments meant to imply the exact opposite is Orwellian. To make matters worse he really twists things up when attempts to paint those who champion critical thinking on evolution as postmodern Marxists. “Critical thinking” sounds great. But it’s a Marxist approach to culture. It’s just slapping a liberal leftist ideology on everything you do. You just find all the ways that power has defrauded or defamed or destroyed. It’s a pat formula that’s very thin. At the primary level, what kids need is facts. Read More ›

Pretty much everyone agrees that natural selection acting on random genetic mutations can explain some things. The really interesting question is, how much can it explain? Since Darwin’s mechanism seems intuitively plausible, we’re often tempted just to trust our intuitions rather than to look at the hard data. And yet the data increasingly show that, whatever its intuitive attractions, the powers of selection and mutation are surprisingly limited. In many cases, new biological functions require several mutations. And everyone agrees that natural selection doesn’t have foresight. But it’s widely assumed that if each of the individual mutations leading to new functions are themselves adaptive, then natural selection can traverse the pathway. Again, this makes intuitive sense. But what about the Read More ›

The last time Darwin’s Dilemma: The Mystery of the Cambrian Fossil Record was scheduled for a screening in the Los Angeles area, it sparked a couple (still ongoing) lawsuits. This time, the film is showing at Biola University, with scientific experts from the film speaking on a panel afterwards, including Paul Nelson, Richard Sternberg, Douglas Axe, and Stephen Meyer. This notable group will then discuss the details of what is “one of the most difficult and dynamic counterexamples to Darwinian evolution that the fossil record has ever revealed” — a show worth catching in its own right. According to the Biola website, the event runs from 9 am – 12 pm this Saturday at Mayers Auditorium, Biola University, and will Read More ›

Last fall, I participated in a symposium at University of St. Thomas School of Law nand presented a paper titled “The Constitutionality and Pedagogical Benefits of Teaching Evolution Scientifically.” The article has now appeared in the legal journal University of St. Thomas Journal of Law & Public Policy Vol. IV(1):204-277 (Fall, 2009). As seen in an abstract for the article below, the paper makes three main points. First, the inquiry method of teaching science stresses that students should understand not just scientific content, but also the processes of scientific investigation. The inquiry method of science education seeks to inculcate in students habits of mind employed by successful scientists such as open mindedness, skepticism, curiosity, and a distaste for dogmatism. This Read More ›

Last week Stephen Meyer presented his groundbreaking Signature in the Cell at Mackenzie Presbyterian University in São Paulo, one of Brazil’s oldest and most prestigious colleges, as hundreds of students listened.

The Brazilian press was there, as well, giving intelligent design ample coverage. Unfortunately, instead of reporting intelligent design straight (you know, that radical idea of letting the proponents of an idea tell you what it is they actually support), ISTOÉ Independente is cribbing from the American mainstream media, repeating tropes they’ve read from their counterparts at TIME and Newsweek and inserting their bias into the article, mis-defining ID as “based on the idea that a higher entity would be responsible for the creation of all life forms,” calling Behe’s irreducible complexity a “pseudoscientific concept,” and generally painting the main thrust of ID as a program to get religion into American school (which it most emphatically is not — Discovery’s education policy has always been to teach more about Darwin, not mandating intelligent design).

However, when reporter Hélio Gomes lets his subjects speak for themselves, it’s not a bad at all:

The event held in Sao Paulo in the last days brought to Brazil two of the most well-know ID advocates in the United States. Stephen C. Meyer, Ph. D. in History and Philosophy of Science, is one of the movement founders, and one of its most vocal spokesmen. Author of three books, among which the recent “Signature in the Cell” (Assinatura na Célula, unpublished in Brazil), he affirms that his mission in Brazilian lands was simple: “We came to raise a discussion — our work is scientific, and not political or educational”, said Meyer, one of the most active Discovery Institute members, a non-profit research center connected to the conservative sectors of the American society. “As I believe in God, I believe he is the intelligent designer. But there are atheist scientists who accept the theory in other fashions”, concludes the researcher.