Science and Culture Today | Page 1198 | Discovering Design in Nature

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.

Living in two minds has gotta be tough. Perhaps that’s why the notable and irascible Craig Venter has made such a career out of bucking the system.

“I have almost no visual memory; I think almost entirely in concepts,” says Venter, explaining his mental peculiarities.

The pioneering biochemist won national headlines earlier this year by announcing that he and a team of privately-funded fellow researchers had produced “artificial life.” The truth, however, is more modest — what they succeeded in doing was determining the DNA coding sequence of one of the simplest bacteria they could find, minutely altering it, then artificially reconstructing this sequence of DNA from subunits supplied in chemical solution, removing the DNA from a bacterial cell, then re-inserting this new DNA “software” into the dormant cellular machinery. From there, the bacterial cell successfully read the inserted instructions, and transformed into the desired organism.

Anyone who’s ever used a flash drive in a computer will see the analogy — without the working interface software and hardware of the computer itself, the information stored in the drive is inert and useless. While certainly deserving of note, Venter’s achievement hardly negates the need for the pre-existing complexity of a functioning cell.

Martin Gaskell is an astronomer who is originally from the United Kingdom. He came to the U.S. in 1975 and later received his M.S. and Ph.D. at the University of California at Santa Cruz. He’s not a creationist. As we’ll see below, he’s generally a theistic evolutionist, who has at times expressed minor criticisms of some aspects of evolution (he accepts common ancestry) and an openness to the possibility of intelligent design. In 2007, Gaskell was on the faculty at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, where he taught in the Department of Physics and Astronomy. At that time, he applied for a job at the University of Kentucky (UK), hoping to serve as the founding director of a newly planned Read More ›

For those of you wondering if you might be able to get your hands on Michael Behe’s latest paper (which we’ve been covering here at ENV), I have good news. “Experimental Evolution, Loss-of-Function Mutations, and ‘The First Rule of Adaptive Evolution,’” is now available as a free PDF at Behe’s Lehigh University website.

At Why Evolution Is True, Jerry Coyne pictures a newly rediscovered and rather unhandsome fly native to a particular rock in Kenya (and nowhere else) where it sports about in the bat guano deposited in a cleft in the rock. The fly has only vestigial wings — “evidence for evolution, of course,” notes Dr. Coyne. Isn’t it interesting how “evidence for evolution” tends to be, as in this example, evidence not for the building up of new functionality but for its loss, where the loss has some adaptive advantage? Losing information is one thing — like accidentally erasing a computer file (say, an embarrassing diplomatic cable) where, it turns out in retrospect, you’re better off now that’s it not there anymore. Gaining information, building it up slowly from nothing, is quite another and more impressive feat. Yet it’s not the loss of function, and the required underlying information, but its gain that Darwinian evolution is primarily challenged to account for.

That’s the paradox highlighted in Michael Behe’s new review essay in Quarterly Review of Biology (“Experimental Evolution, Loss-of-Function Mutations, and “The First Rule of Adaptive Evolution“). It’s one of those peer-reviewed, Darwin-doubting biology journal essays that, as we’re confidently assured by the likes of the aforesaid Jerry Coyne, don’t actually exist. Casey Luskin has been doing an excellent job in this space of detailing Michael Behe’s conclusions. Reviewing the expansive literature dealing with investigations of viral and bacterial evolution, Dr. Behe shows that adaptive instances of the “diminishment or elimination” of Functional Coding ElemenTs (FCTs) in the genome overwhelmingly outnumber “gain-of-FCT events.” Seemingly, under Darwinian assumptions, even as functionality is being painstakingly built up that’s of use to an organism in promoting survival, the same creature should, much faster, be impoverished of function to the point of being driven out of existence. Jerry Coyne’s Kenyan fly may then be the opposite of “evidence for evolution” of the kind that Darwinists really need.

So far the masters of evolutionary apologetics have ignored Behe’s damaging article. [Update: Coyne has now done so. More anon.] Trying to imagine what they would or will say if they can ever carve out the time from a busy schedule to read it, I posed a few questions to Dr. Ann Gauger, developmental biologist and senior research scientist at Biologic Institute.

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After reviewing the effects of mutations upon Functional Coding ElemenTs (FCTs), Michael Behe’s recent review article in Quarterly Review of Biology, “Experimental Evolution, Loss-of-Function Mutations and ‘The First Rule of Adaptive Evolution’,” offers some conclusions. In particular, as the title suggests, Behe introduces a rule of thumb he calls the “The First Rule of Adaptive Evolution”: “Break or blunt any functional coded element whose loss would yield a net fitness gain.” In essence, what Behe means is that mutations that cause loss-of-FCT are going to be far more likely and thus far more common than those which gain a functional coding element. In fact, he writes: “the rate of appearance of an adaptive mutation that would arise from the diminishment Read More ›

National Center for Selling Evolution Science Education’ s Program and Policy Director Josh Rosenau has made disturbing arguments in favor of abortion. On his personal blog Thoughts from Kansas, Rosenau, who has been a doctoral candidate in evolutionary biology at the University of Kansas, asserted that children in the womb were nearly indistinguishable from… cancer.
Later in his post, Rosenau defends abortion by asserting:

Is an embryo a discrete human being? I think not. An embryo is dependent on its living host…

An old-fashioned term for the “living host” of an embryo is… mother. Rosneau frames the mother-child relationship charmingly: he compares the relationship between a mother and her unborn child to the relationship between a host and a parasite.

Rosneau:

An embryo is dependent on… a woman whose nutrients it relies upon, whose immune system protects it, whose lungs provide it with oxygen, and whose body carries out every other essential function. If the woman dies, an embryo cannot survive (medical intervention alters this case somewhat, but a reliance on medical life support hardly vitiates questions about the embryo’s discreteness).

Actually, we have entire institutions devoted to children who rely on others to provide support for their vital functions. They’re called hospitals. I work in several of them. Many of the children for whom I provide care (I’m a pediatric neurosurgeon) need artificial feeding, antibiotics to augment their immune systems and protect them from infection, and need respirators to help them breathe. I assure Mr. Rosenau: hospitalized children are quite discrete human beings, tubes and machines notwithstanding. I do not consider their condition of dependence on vital support a basis for denying them the right to life. In fact, their condition of dependence is in my view justification for protecting their lives with increased vigor.