Science and Culture Today | Page 1195 | Discovering Design in Nature

At Biologic Institute’s website Ann Gauger has posted a piece about the new peer-reviewed article in BIO-Complexity : In the recent past, several papers have been published that claim to demonstrate that biological evolution can readily produce new genetic information, using as their evidence the ability of various evolutionary algorithms to find a specific target. This is a rather large claim. It has thus fallen to others in the scientific or engineering community to evaluate these published claims. How well do these algorithms model biology? How exactly was the work done? Do the results make sense? Are there unexamined variables that might affect the interpretation of results? Are there hidden sources of bias? Are the conclusions justified or do they Read More ›

National Center for Science Education official Josh Rosenau has chosen to pick up the pro-abortion mantle from P.Z. Myers, who despite expressing the wish that more women would abort their children, seems to have developed writer’s block since I asked him to define the characteristics that a human being must acquire before Myers would grant him/her the right to life.
Rosenau, the Programs and Policy Director at the NCSE, is less reticent to publicly defend the pro-abortion cause. He begins his post by botching even the rudiments of the pro-life argument:

Rosenau:

“[Egnor] declares by fiat that every fertilized egg is a human and entitled to all the rights associated with personhood.”

No. Biological science affirms that every fertilized human egg is a human (it has its own gender, unique DNA, and is no other species but Homo sapiens). The question is not whether a zygote (or embryo or fetus) is human. It is. The question is whether a human at that stage of life has any rights.

Contra Rosenau, I have never asserted that human zygotes have “[a]ll the rights associated with personhood,” which would include the right to freedom of speech, to freedom of assembly, freedom of the press, trial by jury, etc. I do not assert that human beings at conception have all rights of personhood. Some rights of personhood depend on age, citizenship, acquisition of skills, condition of legal peril, etc.

I assert that all human beings have at least one right of personhood — the right to life.

Human life is a continuum from conception to natural death. At every stage there is a human being with a right to life. The right to life is not affected by age, size, appearance, intelligence, race, creed, or condition of dependency. The right to life depends only on being human.

Next, Rosenau goes off the deep end. Rosenau denies that human beings in the womb have a right to life by comparing them to cancer:

Slate startled us the other day by publishing an insightful essay asking whether political and worldview presuppositions drive the debate over climate change on both sides — not only for those on the Right, but for combatants on the Left too, including scientists (who are mostly on the Left). It’s an elementary observation that should be evident to anyone who follows the evolution debate, but of course a welcome surprise coming from a venue like Slate.

Author Dr. Daniel Sarewitz worries that because the ranks of scientists are so politically skewed, that threatens the trust that scientists currently enjoy among the public:

This exceptional status could well be forfeit in the escalating fervor of national politics, given that most scientists are on one side of the partisan divide. If that public confidence is lost, it would be a huge and perhaps unrecoverable loss for a democratic society.

I wonder, though, whether the loss of confidence isn’t already happening and whether that might be a healthy development.
Recently a pair of scholars at the American Enterprise Institute, considering various published news sources, tabulated the increasingly common use, by reporters and other writers, of authoritarian phrases like “science says we must,” “science says we should,” “science dictates,” and “science commands.” Typically, the phrases introduce a doctrinaire insistence that “science” demands our belief in catastrophic global warming, Darwinian evolution, assorted dietary or other health practices, and so on.

Science is seemingly so confident in itself that it now dictates belief in areas — from morality to eschatology — once deemed to be the special domain of religion. Once, it was religion that dealt in narratives of global apocalypse, life’s origins, and taboos on assorted foods and unclean practices. Now it’s science that tells us, for example, that the perception of ourselves as possessing free will is only an illusion. It’s our “selfish genes” that manipulate us through the meaty computer of our brains. Alternatively, science can tell us how to distinguish right from wrong based on considerations of human “flourishing.”

At his blog, Why Evolution is True, Jerry Coyne, professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Chicago, has been analyzing my recent paper, “Experimental Evolution, Loss-of-Function Mutations, and ‘The First Rule of Adaptive Evolution,’” which appears in the latest issue of the Quarterly Review of Biology. Although I usually don’t respond to blog posts I will this time, both because Coyne is an eminent scientist and because he does say at least one nice thing about the paper.

First, the nice thing. About half-way through his comments Professor Coyne writes:

My overall conclusion: Behe has provided a useful survey of mutations that cause adaptation in short-term lab experiments on microbes (note that at least one of these–Rich Lenski’s study– extends over several decades).

Thanks. Much appreciated.

Next, he turns to damage control. Directly after the mild compliment, Coyne registers his main complaint about the paper: the conclusions supposedly can only be applied to laboratory evolution experiments and say little about (Darwinian) evolution in nature. “But his conclusions may be misleading when you extend them to bacterial or viral evolution in nature, and are certainly misleading if you extend them to eukaryotes (organisms with complex cells), for several reasons.” Below I deal with Coyne’s three reasons in turn.

One needs to hammer and hammer away at the simple but crucial lesson of the scandalous Martin Gaskell case out of the University of Kentucky. A superbly qualified astronomer was rejected for a job because he expressed very modest Darwin doubts. Darwinists and their useful idiots are full of reminders to us to recall that a “consensus” of scientists compels our assent to Darwinian evolution. Yet with the Gaskell story being merely the latest instance, we see again and again how Darwin-doubting scientists are punished for speaking up in even the mildest way. A fortune in research money is at stake, as well as institutional reputations. Anyone who’s had the experience of being penalized by an employer for saying something Read More ›

Jerry Coyne is ticked off that readers are attributing significance in the wider evolution debate to Michael Behe’s current paper in the Quarterly Review of Biology, explicating the results of viral and bacterial evolution studies — notably the famous long-term study of Richard Lenski: As I predicted, the IDers completely ignore the limitations of this paper (see my analyses here and here), and assert, wrongly, that Behe has made a powerful statement about evolution in nature. What Coyne “completely ignores” is that Darwinists have accustomed themselves to waving Lenski as a banner that makes “a powerful statement about evolution in nature.” In The Greatest Show on Earth, Richard Dawkins devoted an ecstatic and detailed discussion to Lenski’s work, enthusing: Creationists Read More ›

In the prior post, we saw that Martin Gaskell’s actual position on origins is probably closest to a theistic evolution position (he accepts common ancestry), with an openness to the possibility of intelligent design (ID). However, because his online notes from a talk expressed skepticism towards biological and chemical evolution, the faculty on a search committee who were considering him for a job at the University of Kentucky (UK) called him a “creationist” and denied him a job at the university. Because UK believed (wrongly) he was a “creationist” and discriminated against him on that basis, Gaskell has since filed a lawsuit against UK alleging religious discrimination. He is represented by the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ). After Read More ›

A paper by Wilf and Ewens recently published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, titled “There’s plenty of time for evolution,” reads like a printed version of Groundhog Day — the classic movie where comedian Bill Murray keeps awakening to find it’s the same day again. The paper’s authors sniff at unnamed benighted folks who think there hasn’t been enough time for (Darwinian) evolution to build the complexity we see in life. Not so, they protest. Why, all one has to do to see the light is to use the right mathematical model: “After guessing each of the letters, we are told which (if any) of the guessed letters are correct, and then those letters are Read More ›

Consider this from John Lukacs At the End of An Age (2002):

In Chapter 1 of this book I suggested another fundamental limitation of Darwinism, which is the application of Evolution ever further and further backward, claiming that humans may have existed as early as one million years ago. That is a prime example of how unreason lies buried at the bottom of any and every materialist interpretation of mankind, because of its thesis of matter preceding human mind, with mind gradually appearing: when? perhaps in dribs and drabs, much later. (I happen to believe that there is no such thing as ‘pre-historic’ man, historicity being the fourth dimension of human existence from the beginning.) But perhaps the essential fault of Darwinism is its implicit denial that there is any fundamental difference, no matter how physically slight, between human beings and all other living beings. One need not be a religious believer to struggle against this notion: for if there is really no essential difference between human beings and all other living creatures, then there is no reason to have laws and institutions and mores prohibiting certain human acts and protecting human dignity, indeed, human lives. (pp. 120-121)

Lukacs, of course, is saying that Darwinists completely misconstrue humanness, both in the context of what it means to be human in time (historicity) and in the unique qualities of what humanness is (the mind). Because Darwinists are infatuated with morphological affinities, ape-like “ancestors” become “prehistoric man.” But (whatever else we may say of primordial hominid forms millions of years ago), is this “man”? Without the unique attributes of empathy, love, reasoning, a sense of the numinous, etc., can there be a “man” before there is a history of mankind? It seems doubtful. In short, is “prehistoric man” an oxymoron? Lukacs is correct in suggesting that it is. At best, the alternative is to see the grunts and groans of ape-like creatures as a largely seamless continuum to Plato’s dialogues, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, and onward. Darwin tried to make his case for it and it has been problematic ever since, sometimes with tragic consequences.

Display content from YouTube Click here to display content from YouTube. Learn more in YouTube’s privacy policy. Always display content from YouTube Open video directly At 4:38 of this interview, Paul Nelson says that the Miller-Urey experiment is incorrectly interpreted by textbooks as having “synthesized life.” What he meant to say was “the building blocks of life.” Dr. Nelson regrets the error.