Science and Culture Today | Page 1222 | Discovering Design in Nature

ENV is pleased to welcome guest blogger Tom Bethell, a senior editor of The American Spectator and author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science (Regnery) and other books.

Many years ago I interviewed Eric Hoffer (1898-1983), and may have been the last journalist to do so. Widely known as the Longshoreman Philosopher, he was for years a member of the dockers’ union in San Francisco, but his views were not those of your typical stevedore. He had published The True Believer in 1951, and more books after that. Impressed by the breadth of his mind and the unconventional nature of his opinions, I wrote and asked if I could come and interview him. That was in 1980. He invited me to come.

He had written that “when God died in the middle of the 19th century there was immediately set in motion a process which tended to reverse the separation of nature and human nature.” Darwinism, and the intellectual currents of his day, “aimed to reduce human nature to nature.” Biologically, man was now seen as nothing more than “a superior monkey.” Politically, he was an automaton who could be manipulated by a Mao or a Stalin.

Hoffer’s refusal to join the parade of thinkers who accepted that man was little more than a boastful ape was perhaps his finest hour as a philosopher. It showed him at his most independent. And his perception of the unique qualities of man encouraged him to ponder man’s Creator.

Out of the blue, when I arrived in San Francisco, I asked Hoffer whether he believed in evolution. His reply was immediate: “It’s easier to believe in God.”

The Darwinian model of evolution holds that one of the key mechanisms of evolutionary innovation is the duplication of genes and the subsequent divergence of one of the duplicate copies to undertake a new functional role. Because a probability of a single gene stumbling upon a significantly different (yet functionally advantageous) sequence is so small, the idea is that, following a duplication of a gene, one copy is able to retain the original function, while the other is free to explore the vast sea of combinatorial possibilities in search of some novel function.

It is widely believed that a duplicate gene has no phenotypic cost or advantage associated with it – that is, it is selectively neutral. In such a state, it is thought that the gene is free to mutate, independent of selection constraints or pressure. When a previously protein-coding gene incurs deleterious mutations such that it no longer codes for a useful polypeptide, the gene is rendered a “pseudogene”.

One recent paper, which recently appeared in the open-access journal, PLoS Genetics, by Kuo and Ochman, entitled “The Extinction Dynamics of Bacterial Pseudogenes”, offers a potent challenge to this view. According to the paper’s abstract:

Evolutionary evangelist Jerry Coyne argues that we are all just slaves to our genes and that behaviors likes racism and sexism are facts of evolution. They’re in our “own nature”. We may also have evolved to be sexist and xenophobic, but that doesn’t mean that we should give up trying to extirpate racism and sexism from our world. After all, by asking people to stop disliking foreigners, or those of different races, we may be asking them to defy their own nature. Yet, he thinks we should try to stamp them out anyhow. But, if these traits are simply a result of our genetic make-up won’t evolution eventually either enhance such traits or eradicate them forever? In its own good Read More ›

In 2006, the New York Times published an exceedingly long book review titled “An Evolutionary Theory of Right and Wrong,” covering Harvard evolutionary psychologist Marc D. Hauser’s theories of the evolution of human morality. “Religions are not the source of moral codes,” stated the review when describing Hauser’s ideas, further noting that this claim, “if true, would have far-reaching consequences.” The review observed that “[m]atters of right and wrong have long been the province of moral philosophers and ethicists,” but after Hauser’s work, “[m]oral philosophers may not welcome a biologist’s bid to annex their turf.” So who has authority over morality: evolutionary psychologists, or theologians? In his book, Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong, Read More ›

On August 19, Gina Kolata reported in The New York Times that geneticists “have seen a dead gene come back to life and cause a disease.”

According to Kolata, the human genome “is riddled with dead genes, fossils of a sort, dating back hundreds of thousands of years–the genome’s equivalent of an attic full of broken and useless junk,” though some of those genes “can rise from the dead like zombies.”

Now a supposed “zombie gene” is implicated in a type of muscular dystrophy abbreviated FSHD–a hereditary disease that affects about 1 in every 20,000 people.

Kolata cites a recent Science article that begins by reviewing work dating back to the 1990s that establishes a link between FSHD and a specific region on human chromosome 4. The region contains multiple repeats of “D4Z4” DNA; people with 11 or more repeats are normal, while people who have from 1 to 10 repeats are susceptible to FSHD.

Biologists used to think that D4Z4 DNA was neither transcribed into RNA nor translated into protein. In other words, D4Z4 was thought to be biologically inactive–what some people have called “:junk DNA.” Recently, however, researchers discovered that D4Z4 DNA is transcribed, and that part of it is translated into a protein, DUX4.

For some evolutionists, the First Amendment is less important than enforcing strict Darwinian dogma. In October 2009, the California Science Center (CSC) cancelled a showing of Darwin’s Dilemma, which led to a lawsuit alleging viewpoint discrimination and breach of contract filed by the group whose event was cancelled, American Freedom Alliance (AFA). The lawsuit revolves around one crucial question: Was the showing cancelled because of a contractual violation (as CSC claims), or was it cancelled because the publicly operated Science Museum discriminated against AFA on the basis of its pro-intelligent design (ID) viewpoint? Recent internal CSC emails disclosed by CSC per the terms of its settlement of Discovery Institute’s open records lawsuit show that AFA’s contract was cancelled for reasons Read More ›