Science and Culture Today | Page 1210 | Discovering Design in Nature

A new paper in Nature magazine again shows that what was “once dismissed as junk” turns out to be another astounding example of complex and specified information in the genome and a crucial part of gene regulation. In 2008 Scientific American noted that microRNAs were “once dismissed as junk” and said the following: Tiny snippets of the genome known as microRNA were long thought to be genomic refuse because they were transcribed from so-called “junk DNA,” sections of the genome that do not carry information for making proteins responsible for various cellular functions. Evidence has been building since 1993, however, that microRNA is anything but genetic bric-a-brac. Quite the contrary, scientists say that it actually plays a crucial role in Read More ›

There’s an old saying in the law that goes like this: When the facts are on your side, pound the facts. When the facts are not on your side, pound the table. If the responses to Discovery Institute’s recent conference at Southern Methodist University (SMU) are any indication, the facts are not on the side of anti-ID faculty at SMU. To be more precise, SMU biology lecturer John Wise wrote a letter to the SMU Daily, co-authored with SMU anthropology professor Ronald Wetherington, which made no less than 8 express or implied accusations of “dishonesty” against Discovery Institute.*** In 7 instances they claimed ID is pseudoscience or religion.*** Quite a feat for an under-700 word op-ed. His online response is Read More ›

Angelo Codevilla’s new book The Ruling Class: How They Corrupted America and What We Can Do About It has been stirring enviable attention since it first appeared as an essay in The American Spectator. “Magnificent,” writes David Goldman at First Things. “I felt like I had just plunged head-first into 50-degree water.” New York Times blogger Tom Kuntz says: Few articles have resonated with conservatives this year as much as Angelo M. Codevilla’s essay…It says Americais divided between an elite, government-dependent “ruling class” — Republicans and Democrats alike — and a majority “country class”: families, businesses and institutions not dependent on subsidies and privileges. Excerpt from the book: Human equality made sense to our Founding Fathers, because they believed that Read More ›

[Note: This response was co-authored by Stephen Meyer, Paul Nelson, Rick Sternberg and Jonathan Wells, who each presented at the “4 Nails in Darwin’s Coffin” event at SMU. Doug Axe, who also presented, responded here.]

On Thursday, September 23, 2010, following a showing of the film Darwin’s Dilemma, we presented a program of short talks in the Hughes-Trigg Theatre at Southern Methodist University (SMU). We argued that the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution has not solved these related problems:

• The origin of novel protein folds (talk by Axe)
• The origin of anatomical novelties (talk by Sternberg)
• The origin of animal body plans (talks by Nelson and Wells)

SMU biology lecturer John Wise attended the event – or so it appears, because he wrote a long “reply” to both the movie and our presentations, and cites our handout distributed at the information table. Wise did not ask any questions during the Q & A, however, or interact with any of us during our visit. Over the weekend (September 25-26), he then posted his comments at his webpage.

We put “reply” within quotation marks because Wise’s page comprises such a rambling pastiche of assertions – some mutually contradictory, others irrelevant, or simply non-sequiturs – that it is difficult to sort out what he is actually arguing. Wise and 7 other SMU faculty members also published a somewhat more coherent letter in the SMU Daily Campus, objecting to the event. We have replied to that letter separately, and Doug Axe has written his own reply to Wise’s critique.

[NOTE: Today we welcome a new contributing writer to Evolution News & Views, Guy Coe. Mr. Coe graduated from the University of California at Davis with a B.A. in Rhetoric and a minor in political science. As a lifelong student of argumentation and logical analysis, his career has taken him from Executive Salesman, to News Reporter, to U.S. Senate Communications Aide, to Tour Guide, to Retail Management, to father of a budding teenager, “where all communications logic begins to break down.” With a lifelong interest in the issues of intelligent design and origins theories, his status as “interested layperson” allows him to continue to follow the evidence where it leads, while showing proper respect for the lifelong dedication displayed by practitioners of the hard sciences. And, somehow, he still manages to communicate with his teenager…]

Much ink has been spilled, and heat generated, over the “intrusion” of the intelligent design hypothesis into the now seemingly exhausted “creation vs. evolution” debate.

Is intelligent design only reworked creationism, or is it something dynamically different? Now that intelligent design has “evolved” a little, and the theory of evolution has been a little more “intelligently designed,” the focus of our attention has been changed back to the very puzzling questions of the origins of the complexity within cellular organization, while the “old regime” merely argues over the vestiges of an assumed progression from this unexplained point.

For their parts, many creationists and evolutionists are at such an impasse in old paradigms that each of them are left shaking their heads in wonder at the apparently willful ignorance of their opponents — building their knowledge base on two supposedly vastly different approaches, and being at a loss to explain how the “convincing” evidence each position marshals can be so blithely dismissed by the “other side” — to the point that charges of irrationality, and even willful self-deception, are rife.

As an eager observer of this unfolding drama over the last several decades, I have to say that my honest impression is that both sides manage to play fast and loose with the facts, ignore the anomalies, and distort the evidence, by virtue of prior philosophical convictions. Or perhaps it is more charitable to say that, given the same set of facts, many come to vastly different interpretations by virtue of poorly-constructed logic, selective evidence, and poor methodology.

When it comes to teaching young children about Darwin, the NSF’s $2 million Evolution Readiness Project recommends resources that give him no end of praise. One of their recommended resources, the book Life on Earth: The Story of Evolution, calls “the theory of evolution … one of the great accomplishments of science.” One of the prime examples of evolution in the book is the classic Galápagos finch beak story. Darwin, we are told, visited the Galápagos islands and “found a [sic] unusual group of finches” which “gave Darwin important clues about the way evolution works.” Supposedly Darwin “noticed that on each islands the birds’ beaks were shaped differently” and “Darwin believed that small changes in the birds over many generations Read More ›

Seth Borenstein of the Associated Press is reporting that astronomers have discovered an extrasolar planet in the “goldilocks” zone of its star. That is, the planet appears to be in the circumstellar habitable zone where water can persist at liquid temperatures on its surface. The planet, named Gliese 581g, is a mere 20 light years away from Earth.

The article is referring to the circumstellar habitable zone, though presumably it is also in the galactic habitable zone since it’s so close to Earth. That means that Gliese 581g may have two of the major factors needed to make a planet hospitable to life.

Unfortunately, we’ve seen hundreds of reports like this, so I now read them with a bit of skepticism. For the last fifteen years, we’ve been hearing about supposedly Earth-like planets around other stars. The headline is so common that even Borenstein, in an otherwise breathless articles, admits: “Scientists have jumped the gun before on proclaiming that planets outside our solar system were habitable only to have them turn out to be not quite so conducive to life.”

Researchers have finally figured out why those of us in the public who are skeptics on scientific orthodoxies like Darwinism and human-induced global warming choose not to align our views with the scientific “consensus.” Science Daily reports: It is likely to depend on whether the position the scientist takes is consistent with the one believed by most people who share your cultural values. This was the finding of a recent study conducted by Yale University law professor Dan Kahan, University of Oklahoma political science professor Hank Jenkins-Smith and George Washington University law professor Donald Braman that sought to understand why members of the public are sharply and persistently divided on matters on which expert scientists largely agree. Isn’t that special?  So if you’re Read More ›

Biologic Institute’s Doug Axe has just responded to SMU lecturer John Wise’s attacks on the presentations at last week’s 4 Nails in Darwin’s Coffin event. As responses are published we will be archiving them at that page. I was among the speakers at an event held at Southern Methodist University last week [1]. The purpose was to give students and others a glimpse of the growing scientific case against Darwin’s theory, so the talks were tailored to a non-technical audience. Faculty members were welcome too, of course, and I’m told that a few were in attendance. Attesting to this, their denouncements began surfacing online shortly afterward [2]. It’s all very familiar. When you persist in challenging a cherished tradition like Read More ›

“Rabbits, cacti, bumblebees, jellyfish, penguins, sunflowers–all living things on the earth are the descendants of simple, single-celled organisms,” opens the book Life on Earth: The Story of Evolution. This short 40-page book is one of the primary resources that the NSF’s new “Evolution Readiness Project” recommends reading to “young children” so they will “believe in” evolution. In my prior post, we saw that the project justifies teaching students that “evolution by natural selection is the fundamental model that explains the extraordinary complexity and interdependence of the living world” because allegedly there is “universal agreement among scientists” on that point. The evolution readiness project justifies excluding dissenting scientific views from students by pretending they don’t exist. The argument you’re likely to Read More ›