Science and Culture Today | Page 1208 | Discovering Design in Nature

Last night, I watched as Mike Behe presented a talk at Glasgow Caledonian University’s Carnegie Lecture Theatre. The lecture was titled, Darwin or Design – What Does the Science Really Say?. The event was organized by the Centre for Intelligent Design UK (event website here).

The lecture theatre was filled almost to capacity (about 500 people). Behe was on form, presenting a powerful cumulative, yet accessible, case for design in biological systems. He presented the bare bones of his two core theses, articulated and defended in Darwin’s Black Box and The Edge of Evolution. Behe talked his audience through some of the criteria which we use — as part of our everyday experience — to come to the conclusion of design, arguing that design is immediately recognisable when one encounters a complex and functionally-specific assemblage of parts. Arguing that the appearance of design is not really in dispute at all, he pointed to Richard Dawkins’ The Blind Watchmaker, in which Dawkins asserts that biology is the study of complicated things which have the appearance of having been designed for a purpose. If life gives the overpowering appearance of having been designed, argued Behe, then one is rationally justified in adhering to one’s intuitions unless and until a compelling reason is given to suggest that it the appearance of design is only apparent — that is, illusory.

Discover Magazine has a penchant for misleading its readers about intelligent design (ID). Last year it touted Ken Miller’s response to me on Michael Behe’s arguments for irreducible complexity in blood clotting as an “intelligent design fail,” even though Ken Miller had blatantly misrepresented Behe’s arguments. (Miller still hasn’t replied to my refutation of his arguments.) Now, in its October 2010 issue, Discover Magazine was able to combine multiple errors about the nature of ID science and law in one single paragraph. Quite an accomplishment! Here’s the statement:

I was recently asked by an evolutionary biologist where ID can help science generate “new knowledge.” It’s important to realize that when dealing with historical sciences like neo-Darwinian evolution or intelligent design, new knowledge takes the form of both practical insights into the workings of biology in the present day (which can lead to insights into fighting disease), as well as taking the form of new knowledge about biological history and the origin of natural structures. In this regard, I could not disagree more with suggestions that ID closes off inquiry and does not lead to new scientific knowledge. Below are about a dozen or so examples of areas where ID is helping science to generate new knowledge. Each example Read More ›

Every once in a while an article comes out on a new DNA repair mechanism or a new feature of a known DNA repair mechanism. There are so many complexities behind DNA repair and there is still more to uncover. Last October, a review article came out in Molecular Cell on regulatory factors for DNA repair mechanisms (Molecular Cell 40(2), October 22, 2010, 179-204). Basically, DNA repair mechanisms are very powerful because they can often replace or remove nucleotide bases. So these powerful mechanisms need something to make sure they do their job properly and not destroy the whole genome in the process. That is where regulators come in. If DNA repair mechanisms are medics flying out to the damaged site, then the regulators would be the control tower that finds the sites, guides the planes, and tells them when to get to work and when to retreat.

In the previous post in this series, we saw that Natural History Museum of LA County (NHMLAC) scientist Kirk Fitzhugh denied that academic freedom for intelligent design (ID) is “being suppressed.” After reviewing the severe misconceptions that Dr. Fitzhugh has about ID, we come to the California Science Center and its decision to cancel the screening of Darwin’s Dilemma last year. In that decision, Kirk Fitzhugh played no direct role but he did participate in the correspondence surrounding it. On October 15, under the subject heading “DI spin,” NHMLAC scientist John Long e-mailed Fitzhugh about attending the rescheduled American Freedom Alliance (AFA) event on October 25. He wrote: “I enjoy reading your commentary on the ID issues. Will catch you Read More ›

In his next installment Professor Ussery complains that I wasn’t enthusiastic enough in my chapter “What Darwinism Can Do.” As an example of common descent I pointed to Baker’s yeast, for which there is good evidence that sometime in the past its genome duplicated. But I also noted that other yeasts with unduplicated genomes have done fine for themselves. The point was that gene or even whole genome duplication is not the powerful tool that Darwinists often claim. That point passed over Dave’s head. His main comment on the book’s next chapter, “What Darwinism Can’t Do” is to tell the reader to search PubMed for the words “cilium” and “evolution.” One gets lots of papers that contain both those words, he assures us. He naively assumes that means progress is being made on how the cilium could have arisen by a Darwinian mechanism. Ussery is simply wrong. Most of those papers have nothing to do with how the cilium evolved. Others contain interesting studies of which ciliary proteins are similar to which other proteins (which at best concerns only the topic of common descent) as well as vague, speculative scenarios, but none of the papers describes in testable detail how a structure like the cilium could have arisen step-by-step by a Darwinian mechanism. Dave’s argument might be dubbed “The Argument from Personal Credulity” — because he and others believe the cilium could arise by Darwinian means, it must have done so, and any paper that agrees it happened must contain strong evidence that it did happen. Credulity, however, is not ordinarily considered a scientific virtue.

[Editor’s Note: This is the final post in a six-part a series from microbiologist Donald L. Ewert, where he argues that the processes used by our immune system to generate antibodies are anything but “random,” and do not serve as an example of Darwinian evolution. Other posts in this rebuttal can be found at: Part One, Part Two, Part Three, and Part Four, and Part Five. In the first five posts, Dr. Ewert responded to Kathryn Applegate of the BioLogos Foundation. In this sixth post, he responds to similar arguments from Edward Max at TalkOrgins that antibody generation is “evolution in miniature.”]

One of the goals of Edwards Max’s post at TalkOrigins is to refute a narrow claim of “creationists” that “random mutations are detrimental.” But he goes further and, like Applegate, asserts that “clearly what we observe in the antibody response is evolution in miniature.” Max believes that because affinity maturation of antibodies is an established biological process, it therefore carries more weight than the computerized model of evolution used by Richard Dawkins to demonstrate that “without the intervention of any intelligent designer…successive rounds of mutation and selection could be unambiguously shown to lead to increased fitness within living organisms.” Like Applegate, Max draws inspiration from a naíve reductionist view of affinity maturation to give false comfort for his philosophical perspective.

This just in from Tom Woodward: A special edition of the weekly “Darwin or Design” program, featuring Trinity College Research Professor Tom Woodward’s interview with Discovery Senior Fellow John West, is airing tonight, Thursday, November 18th. The hour-long program begins at 7 pm Eastern (6 pm Central, 4 pm Pacific) on the Salem Network station in Tampa, WTBN, at AM 570. The discussion centers on the scientific and philosophical issues in the origins contoversy among naturalistic Darwinists, theistic evolutionists, and design theorists. Those outside Central Florida can listen live via the internet by clicking here.. The topic is the new book, God and Evolution, edited by Discovery Fellow Jay Richards. Dr. West contributed the opening chapters of the book, and Read More ›

The first part of Professor Ussery’s review of The Edge of Evolution on the website BioLogos is mainly an exercise in throat clearing, where he describes his “philosophical and personal perspective,” notes that he and I agree on common descent, and correctly points out that my book concerns the mechanism of evolution. In the second installment Dave begins to show that he somehow just doesn’t get the big points of the book. In writing of the sickle cell and other antimalarial mutations which degrade the genome, I had said that they were “hurtful.” He misunderstands this, writing, “the example [Behe] gives us is not a ‘good mutation.'” But the sickle cell and other antimalarial mutations most certainly are “good” mutations in a Darwinian sense because they are adaptive — they help the organism survive. Think of it — it was already known that most mutations that have an observable effect are deleterious. But now we know that even “good,” adaptive mutations frequently damage or break genes. That is a fact that seems to be off most Darwinists’ radar screens, although it is a profound challenge to their theory.

Dave then first employs what turns out to be a frequent tool of his: citations of papers in the literature (implying they support his position) without even an attempt to explain how they pertain to the mechanism of evolution or the edge to Darwinian evolution that I argue for in my book. He cites one paper, “Origins, evolution, and phenotypic impact of new genes,” without saying how it is known the genes arose by Darwinian processes or citing where it was that I said gene duplication and diversification couldn’t produce new genes. (I said no such thing — the book concerns the limits to Darwinian evolution; it does not say Darwinian processes can’t do anything, and I discuss the likely Darwinian origins of genes for antifreeze proteins in the chapter “What Darwinism can do.”) He cites another paper “about recent evolution of beneficial mutations in humans” without saying what those mutations are, whether they are simple or complex, or whether they are constructive or (like antimalarial mutations) degradative. A reader of Dave’s post would be quite surprised to discover that one of the last subsections of the article is called “Is Darwinian evolution enough?” where the author gingerly writes that non-Darwinian mechanisms (although — God help us — not intelligent design) “should not be categorically dismissed.” Someone just might suspect that Dave is being misleading here, but I think it much more likely that he is so enchanted by Darwinian theory that he sees overwhelming evidence for it in any paper that contains the word “evolution.”

Click here to listen CSC Senior Fellow (and sometime ENV contributor) Mike Behe is set to tour the United Kingdom starting this Saturday, speaking on “Darwin or Design? What does the science really say?” This week-long tour is sponsored by the Centre for Intelligent Design of the UK, and residents of Leamington/Warwick, London, Glasgow, Belfast, Cambridge, and Bournemouth should avail themselves of the chance to catch one of Dr. Behe’s evening lectures there. He will also be the main speaker at a day long conference in Oxford. Online registration is required. Visit http://www.darwinordesign.org.uk to register and for more detailed information.