Science and Culture Today | Page 1191 | Discovering Design in Nature

A recent article in The Scientist titled “The Devolution of Evolution” states: Nearly 40 years ago Theodosius Dobzhansky wrote: “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.” How is it, then, that so few newly minted PhDs in the biological sciences have taken any formal graduate school courses in evolution or biodiversity? This fosters a knowledge gap that can become difficult to fill by “osmosis” later in a scientific career. Consider the two to five years of intense postdoctoral work, followed by the even more challenging process of earning tenure. Success requires complete dedication to a specialized field of knowledge for professors who then act as advisors for the next generation of scientists, judge hundreds of submitted Read More ›

Tantalus Prime and I have been discussing abortion. Tantalus takes exception to my observation that human life begins at conception. He believes that the humanity of a human zygote/embryo/fetus isn’t a scientific fact, but merely a matter of linguistics:

The exact moment at which a fertilizing egg becomes human… is a horrible scientific question! Is asking the exact size beyond which a stream becomes a river a good scientific question? Of course not, because this is not an empirical problem but one of definition. Define the term human however you want, but don’t pretend it is an empirical question to be solved. Scientists can’t even agree on what constitutes a living organism, so what makes you think pinpointing the demarcation between human being and not human being is easily solved in a testable and falsifiable manner….

Tantalus doesn’t like to mix definitions with his science. Especially definitions that aren’t congenial to his ideology.
Yet a human embryo is surely something. But I’m not going to ask Tantalus that nasty beginning of life question. I’ll ask Tantalus a different question, hopefully one that he finds less irritating:

What is a human embryo?

There would seem to be 5 different things that a human embryo in the womb could be:

1. The human embryo is part of the mother.
2. The human embryo is not part of the mother, and is of a non-human species (i.e. not Homo sapiens).
3. The human embryo is some hitherto unclassified thing, neither of any species nor a part of the mother.
4. The human embryo is a proto-human being.
5. The human embryo is a human being.

Let’s explore Tantalus’ dilemma:

The 2011 edition of Ken Miller textbook Biology states, “Similar patterns of embryological development provide further evidence that organisms have descended from a common ancestor.” (p. 469) But what happens when supposedly similar types of organisms have very different patterns of embryological development? Would that count as evidence against common ancestry? In fact, researchers are finding striking differences in the development of vertebrates. A recent ScienceDaily release from November 30, 2010, “Marsupial Embryo Jumps Ahead in Development,” states: Duke University researchers have found that the developmental program executed by the marsupial embryo runs in a different order than the program executed by virtually every other vertebrate animal. “The limbs are at a different place in the entire timeline,” said Anna Read More ›

In a peer-reviewed paper titled “Evidence of Design in Bird Feathers and Avian Respiration,” in International Journal of Design & Nature and Ecodynamics, Leeds University professor Andy McIntosh argues that two systems vital to bird flight–feathers and the avian respiratory system–exhibit “irreducible complexity.” The paper describes these systems using the exact sort of definitions that Michael Behe uses to describe irreducible complexity: [F]unctional systems, in order to operate as working machines, must have all the required parts in place in order to be effective. If one part is missing, then the whole system is useless. The inference of design is the most natural step when presented with evidence such as in this paper, that is evidence concerning avian feathers and Read More ›

In my last post I reported that University of Chicago evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne, who had critiqued my recent Quarterly Review of Biology article concerning laboratory evolution studies of the last four decades and what they show us about evolution, had asked several other prominent scientists for comments. I replied to those of experimental evolutionary biologist John Bull. In a subsequent post Coyne discussed a recent paper by the group of fellow University of Chicago biologist Manyuan Long on gene duplication in fruitflies. After a bit of delay due to the holidays, I will comment on that here.

Try as one might to keep Darwinists focused on the data, some can’t help reverting to their favorite trope: questioning Darwinism simply must be based on religion. Unfortunately Professor Coyne succumbs to this. Introducing his blog post he writes:

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A 2009 peer-reviewed scientific paper by David Abel in International Journal of Molecular Sciences titled “The Capabilities of Chaos and Complexity” asks, “If all known life depends upon genetic instructions, how was the first linear digital prescriptive genetic information generated by natural process?” The author does not consider himself per se a proponent of intelligent design, and warns materialists that there is an easy solution to the challenges posed by intelligent design: “To stem the growing swell of Intelligent Design intrusions, it is imperative that we provide stand-alone natural process evidence of non trivial self-organization at the edge of chaos. We must demonstrate on sound scientific grounds the formal capabilities of naturally-occurring physicodynamic complexity.” However, while the author notes that Read More ›

Whenever the old stream media report on someone who is supposedly “conservative” but who nevertheless agrees with them, you can be pretty sure a snow job is coming.

On January 6, Neela Banerjee reported (in the Seattle Times and elsewhere) about conservative scientists who nevertheless . . . wait for it . . . believe in climate change. Wow! (Of course, “believe in climate change” is the confusing euphemism for believing that we are catastrophically altering the natural climate — which always changes — and that the only solutions involve increasing the power of the federal government and the UN. But never mind that for now.)

Banerjee tells us about scientists, such as “politically conservative” Kerry Emanuel, from MIT, and various evangelical and Mormon scientists who believe that we’re harming the global climate and that a political solution is needed.

Proponents of evolutionary theory assume that human beings as well as every other living creature evolved through natural selection. They theorize that humans evolved from an ape-like ancestor and cite various archeological examples of possible pre-homo sapiens in hopes of filling in the missing links leading up to today’s version of human. Evolutionary biologists, therefore, tend to look towards the past to find confirming evidence of what they presume to be true, humans evolved. Transhumanists, on the other hand, tend to look forward to a day when, though the assistance of technology, a new species of human will evolve. As Nick Bostrom, one of the major spokespersons for the transhumanism movement, writes, “After the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859), it became increasingly plausible to view the current version of humanity not as the endpoint of evolution but rather as an early phase” (“A History of Transhumanist Thought” Bostrom, Nick originally published in Journal of Evolution and Technology vol 14, issue 1, April 2005).

This is not a blog about foreign affairs, but I came across a refreshing and illuminating piece on the New Republic website that, in the context of talking about Islam and terrorism, suggested to me a reason for hope in the Darwin debate. In the current culture of science, where the 19th-century materialist Church of Science rules and the congregation bows obediently, what’s needed is a modernizing reformation. Doubts about Darwinism are part of that. We can draw a parallel to past reformations in the religious sphere, and future ones. Most of us in the West agree, for example, that Islam urgently requires a reformation. Some observers see radical Islamism not as the leading edge in Muslim life — that Read More ›