Science and Culture Today | Page 1227 | Discovering Design in Nature

Michael Zimmerman, the biologist who founded the pro-theistic evolution “Clergy Letter Project,” has an op-ed at the Huffington Post, “Redefining The Creation/Evolution Controversy,” which poses the following question: What do the following have in common? A. Sarah Palin’s claim that health care reform will lead to “death panels.” B. The birthers’ claim that President Obama was born in Kenya. C. The constant refrain that the evolution/creation controversy is a battle between religion and science. The simple answer is that there is overwhelming evidence demonstrating that each statement is false while proponents of each hope that the frequency and volume of repetition substitutes for truth. Of course Zimmerman is right to highlight the inaccuracy of saying “the evolution/creation controversy is a Read More ›

We were delighted to discover that students at the University of Arizona are getting a well-rounded education. “Evolution, Intelligent Design Face Off at Humanities Panel,” reports the Arizona Daily Wildcat. Hey great, finally a serious academic institution is taking the time to make sure kids hear both sides of the evolution debate! Reading down the article we noticed only a couple of things they might have been done differently and better.

The panel at UA included an evolutionary biologist and two religious studies profs, but no one actually representing the ID side. Only ID critics were allowed to participate. Well, that is disappointing. It’s like staging a “debate” between the Democratic and Republican contenders for a particular public office but inviting only the Democratic candidate, joined on stage by his campaign manager and chief of staff.

Also, no one on the panel even seemed to know what intelligent design means. Maybe that sounds like a quibble. Professor Karen Seat confused ID with Young Earth Creationism, explaining to students and colleagues that it was all about a defense of “the traditional, literal meaning of the Bible.” In fact, whatever else may be said for or against ID, it’s clearly at odds with a literal reading of the Bible.

I usually ignore ScienceBlogs because unfortunately it’s a home for many ad hominem attacks and not serious response-worthy posts. However, given that Jay Richards’ second criteria on When To Doubt a Scientific ‘Consensus’ is “When ad hominem attacks against dissenters predominate,” it’s worth noting that over at ScienceBlogs, Orac has replied to me and Jay Richards with, you guessed it, ad hominem attacks. He argues that if you show “hostility” towards the consensus, then you are a “crank.” Orac further writes: If Casey had two neurons to rub together, he could answer the question in two sentences and echo how scientists would answer the question: When you have an actual scientifically valid reason, based on science, evidence, experimentation, and observational Read More ›

Remember Ida? The fossil hailed as the “eighth wonder of the world” whose “impact on the world of palaeontology” would be like “an asteroid falling down to Earth”? She was promised to be “the link that connects us directly with the rest of the animal kingdom.” She was touted on a History Channel / BBC documentary, but then there was the bust. Well, Ida’s critics have now gotten around to publishing technical articles critiquing the hyped view promoted to the public last year. A recent news release at the University of Texas, “Recently Analyzed Fossil Was Not Human Ancestor As Claimed, Anthropologists Say,” explains: A fossil that was celebrated last year as a possible “missing link” between humans and early Read More ›

We’ve recently seen a lot of dialogue between proponents of intelligent design and critics of Stephen Meyer’s book Signature in the Cell. For example, Richard Sternberg has a fascinating series that uncovers some hints at function in SINE elements through unexpectedly conserved patterns that contradict the standard phylogeny (see Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4). Or, there’s Paul Nelson’s rejoinder to Jeffrey Shallit on whether the weather provides an example of natural processes producing specified and complex information. There’s also Stephen Meyer’s response to Francisco Ayala, as well as responses to Ayala from Jay Richards and David Klinghoffer. I recently decided to jump into this fray, publishing two articles in the latest issue of Salvo Magazine defending Read More ›

The Smithsonian has a new human origins exhibit, “What does it mean to be human?” specially targeted at swaying student visitors who might doubt Darwinian evolution. The most amusing part of the exhibit proudly explains that evolution predicted we’d lack evidence for evolution; that’s how we know it’s true! That’s right, this is how the nation’s most prestigious natural history museum presents evolution: evolution predicts that evolution is supported both when we do and when we don’t find confirming fossil evidence. Consider the following from the educator’s guide: Misconception: Gaps in the fossil record disprove evolution. Response: Science actually predicts gaps in the fossil record. Many species leave no fossils at all, and the environmental conditions for forming good fossils Read More ›

David Berlinski’s collection of essays, The Deniable Darwin, garnered a favorable review over at Hot Air, where CK Macleod had this to say: The Deniable Darwin collects essays written from 1996 to 2009 mostly on the same general theme: That the insufferable pretensions and aggressive self-certainty of science ideologues prevent us from justly appreciating how much we actually have learned about the natural world, and how wonderfully little that is. He applies his dauntingly well-informed, remorselessly cogent skepticism to several fields of study — theoretical physics, mathematics, linguistics, molecular biology — but it’s his dismantlement of Darwinism that he takes to center stage for a virtuoso recital. Macleod understands that critics of Berlinski are wrong to accuse him “of the Read More ›

Ever since Thomas Nagel selected Signature in the Cell as one of 2009’s best books, the Times Literary Supplement has had a vigorous back and forth in its letters section. The last salvo published was by Loughborough University chemistry professor Stephen Fletcher. The response below was submitted by Stephen Meyer to TLS, but they opted not to publish it. To the Editor The Times Literary Supplement Sir–I see that the Professor Stephen Fletcher has written yet another letter (TLS Letters, 3 February, 2010) attempting to refute the thesis of my book Signature in the Cell. This time he cites two recent experiments in an attempt to show the plausibility of the RNA world hypothesis as an explanation for the origin Read More ›

Francisco J. Ayala, a biologist at U.C. Irvine who has won the 2010 Templeton Prize, is known for his attacks on intelligent design. He even tars it as a kind of “blasphemy” because ID would allow the attribution of intent and purpose to a designer guiding the development of life. What an odd thing to say. That would make most mainstream theology in Christianity and Judaism “blasphemous” too. You would expect that before using such a hyper-charged word, a distinguished guy like Dr. Ayala would take the time to think a little more carefully.

With Ayala, that expectation is often doomed to be disappointed. Thus as readers may recall, when he accepted an invitation to critique Stephen Meyer’s recent book, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design, he went ahead and wrote his review as if he had the read the book whereas — it should have been to clear to anyone who had simply glanced at Meyer’s Table of Contents — Dr. Ayala had not done even that. The invitation came from the website BioLogos, specializing in Christian cheerleading for Darwin, which Dr. Darrell Falk appears to operate as editor-in-chief. Falk has read Signature in the Cell, and written about it. Presumably he read Ayala’s essay before publishing it.
The episode illustrates how hard it is for anyone in the intelligent design community to get a fair hearing. Ayala critiqued Dr.

Meyer’s book despite having no idea what’s in it. Falk published Ayala’s attack despite knowing that it distorts Meyer’s thesis, while also displaying Ayala’s overall ignorance of the sophisticated case for design that has been mounted by philosophers, biologists, physicists, and other scientists over the past decade. Ayala has made his reputation, as a peacemaker in the supposed stand-off between science and religion, based on a presumed ability to bring his own scholarship, discernment, and intelligence to bear on ultimate questions. What kind of a meaningful response can you have to an idea if you haven’t taken the time to inform yourself adequately about it?

Francisco J. Ayala, biologist and former Dominican priest, has won this year’s Templeton Prize. Valued at $1.53 million, the prize has sought to reward serious thought, writing and research pointing the way to a reconciliation of science and faith. In Ayala’s case, for “science” read “Darwinism.” So a word or two is in order about the faith of Dr. Ayala.

Advocates of a supposedly religion-friendly Darwinism have seized on the idea of God’s acting through secondary causes. In his book Darwin’s Gift to Science and Religion, Ayala argues that since God acts through intermediate causation to create geological features (mountains, rivers), why may the same analysis not be applied to the evolution of life? In the latter context, he insists that the idea of God’s acting through “specific agency…amounts to blasphemy.” For such direct control would imply that God bears responsibility for all the cruelties, pains, and dysfunctions that have accompanied the unfolding of life’s history.

But there is a real and important difference between secondary causation of the kind that results in the formation of rivers and mountains, on one hand, and that which, according to the evolutionary model, results in life in all its forms. The operation of geological forces follows paths described by physical laws. Whatever role chance plays, the overall process is predictable. The religious believer may reasonably picture God, having authored those laws, as the creator of geological features, having planned and foreseen what those features would be. Similarly, He is the author of those laws that govern patterns in the weather, in the alternation of the seasons, of day and night, and so on. God could thus confidently tell Noah that “So long as the earth exists, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease” (Genesis 8:6).

But life — including human life — is different. If Darwin and the vast majority of his modern advocates are right, then the path of life’s evolution was inherently unpredictable — not wholly random, since natural selection plays its role, but generated by chance and governed by no plan, design, or teleology. Ayala himself has said this very clearly: “It was Darwin’s greatest accomplishment to show that the complex organization and functionality of living beings can be explained as the result of a natural process — natural selection — without any need to resort to a Creator or other external agent.”