Science

I’m grateful to Dr. Alan Packer, Senior Editor of Nature Genetics, for his thoughtful comments on my recent post Spit-Brain Research, in which I addressed claims made by Perry et al. about their paper “Diet and the Evolution of Human Amylase Gene Copy Number Variation.” Dr. Packer makes some good points with which I agree, and some points with which I disagree.

A senior research scientist at the National Center for Biotechnology Information has published a paper that claims: “The relationships between major groups within an emergent new class of biological entities are hard to decipher and do not seem to fit the tree pattern that, following Darwin’s original proposal, remains the dominant description of biological evolution.”

The author is Eugene Koonin of the National Center for Biotechnology Information, National Library of Medicine, and National Institutes of Health, and the paper is entitled: “The Biological Big Bang model for the major transitions in evolution.”

It’s now available on-line.

Koonin is widely regarded and is certainly at the center of the scientific establishment. So it is no surprise that the orthodox Darwinian priesthood were careful in denouncing his heresy.

Dr. Alan Packer, Senior Editor of Nature Genetics, contacted me recently and asked to publicly comment on my recent post on Evolution News and Views entitled Spit-Brain Research. My post was critical of a press release about an article published in Nature Genetics . I am grateful for his observations. My reply follows in my next post.

Michael Egnor has been kind enough to allow me to contribute a comment on his recent post ‘Spit-Brain Research’. The post discussed work by George Perry, Nathaniel Dominy and colleagues, published in a paper entitled “Diet and the evolution of human amylase gene copy number”. As one of the editors at Nature Genetics, where the paper was published, I was pleased to see the paper receive so much attention. I was concerned, however, by what in my view was the highly misleading nature of Dr. Egnor’s post. I would like to make three general points, so that readers of this site will have a fuller picture of what was in the paper, and what was not:

In this video clip, Richard Weikart delivers a presentation based on his book From Darwin to Hitler. Weikart explains that Darwin’s ideas about species competition not only inspired eugenics movements in Germany and the United States, but also influenced intellectuals like Friedrich Hellwald to view brutal human conflicts as a natural part of the human struggle to survive. In short, Darwinian principles greatly undermined notions about the value of human life. This DVD is available from Access Research Network.

When it comes to teaching intelligent design in social studies classes, not science classes, mind you, but social studies, ID critics were for it before they were against it. Their strategy of attack has been simple: equate ID with creationism because creationism isn’t allowed in science classes. Thus, for years we’ve heard things like: “it may be appropriate to discuss these beliefs in a comparative religion or social studies classroom”; and “to present it as a valid alternative to evolution in a science class (as opposed to teaching about it in a social studies class) is unconstitutional.” The Darwin only lobby group National Center for Science Education published a piece advocating exactly this approach in 2004: Elementary teachers have backbones, Read More ›

[Editor’s note: This was the third installment of a three-part series. The full article, A Response to Dr. Dawkins’ “The Information Challenge”, can be read here.] In Part 1 and Part 2 of this response to Richard Dawkins’ article, “The Information Challenge,” I explained why gene duplication is not an adequate explanation of how Darwinian processes can produce new information. But Dawkins’ article has other problems. He writes that “most of the capacity of the genome of any animal is not used to store useful information.” This is another good example demonstrating how Neo-Darwinism led may scientists to wrongly believe that non-coding DNA was largely junk. Dawkins’ statement is directly refuted by the findings of recent studies, which the Washington Read More ›

The Catholic magazine, Crisis, is now online with an October article by two Discovery fellows, Benjamin Wiker and Jonathan Witt. Their book, A Meaningful World, appeared in 2006 and forms a backdrop for their current reflections. Very much on their minds from 2006 is also the Regensburg address of Pope Benedict–not the Muslim comments, but the references to Reason. It is another and interesting take on all the atheist fantasy tracts coming out of Darwin-land these days. Look at nature, Wiker and Witt say, but also look at the philosophy of science, the nature of genius, the beauty of mathematics and even works of art.

CSC senior fellow Jay Richards used to joke that reporters covering evolution simply sit down at their keyboards and type ALT + CTRL + SCOPES, and out pops a complete story that simply reiterates the false storyline that the primary challenge to evolution is a religious one, just as was the case during the infamous Scopes Monkey Trial in the early days of the 20th century. I laughed when he told me, because I was familiar with how often that bogus storyline was repeated by reporters, and the idea of a computer macro being used to deploy it was funny.

It’s not so funny now, though. It looks like the New York Times might indeed have some sort of macro in place for all stories concerning the ongoing debate over modern evolutionary theory. The Times has defaulted to this standard line: “There is no credible scientific challenge to evolution.” This current line has survived mainly intact and been selected out of a number of mutations over the last few years. It’s clearly been a guided and purposeful project, so it’s not really evolution at all.

This is one busy week for debates. Who says there’s no debate among scientists over Darwinian evolution?

[Editor’s note: This was the second installment of a three-part series. The full article, A Response to Dr. Dawkins’ “The Information Challenge”, can be read here.] In Part I, I demonstrated that specified complexity is the appropriate measure of biological complexity. In this section, I will show why merely citing gene duplication does not help one understand how Darwinian evolution can produce new genetic information. Dawkins’ main point in his “The Information Challenge” article is that “[n]ew genes arise through various kinds of duplication.” So his answer to the creationist question that so upset him is gene duplication. Yet during the actual gene-duplication process, a pre-existing gene is merely copied, and nothing truly new is generated. As Michael Egnor said Read More ›