Science and Culture Today | Page 1257 | Discovering Design in Nature

Recently the Wall Street Journal published dueling articles by Karen Armstrong and Richard Dawkins entitled Man vs. God. The editors’ choice of Dawkins to represent the atheist viewpoint is understandable enough; in the interest of balance, it seems that the WSJ editors searched hard to find a theist who mangles theism as effectively as Dawkins mangles atheism. Author Karen Armstrong, a former Catholic nun given to syncretism who believes that “we need God to grasp the wonder of our existence,” answered the WSJ’s “Mangler of Theology” Ad, and Dawkins had his disputant. Armstrong: …Darwin may have done religion — and God — a favor by revealing a flaw in modern Western faith. Despite our scientific and technological brilliance, our understanding Read More ›

As Jonathan Wells reminds us in his new article, “Deepening Darwin’s Dilemma,” 2009 is a year of anniversaries for evolution — not just for Darwin and The Origin, but also the centennial of Charles Walcott’s discovery of the Burgess Shale. With Darwin’s Dilemma coming out next week and premiering at the Oklahoma Museum of Natural History, Dr. Wells’ article couldn’t be more timely. As he explains in the film and will be on hand to explain in person on September 29, Darwin saw the Cambrian explosion as a serious argument against his theory, but he countered it by supposing “that fossils of the ancestors of Cambrian animals once existed but were destroyed…The discovery of microscopic and soft-bodied Precambrian fossils makes Read More ›

For those of you in Oklahoma, two events two weeks from now are bringing intelligent design to your doorstep. First, Stephen C. Meyer will give a free lecture at the University of Oklahoma on September 28. The next day is the Southwestern premiere of Darwin’s Dilemma at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History September 29th. Darwin’s Dilemma will be screened at 7pm in Kerr Auditorium in the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History, with a post-film discussion featuring two leading intelligent design scientists, Dr. Stephen C. Meyer, author of Signature in the Cell, and Dr. Jonathan Wells, biologist and author of Icons of Evolution. The screening is sponsored by the student run IDEA (Intelligent Design and Evolution Read More ›

Recently a paper appeared online in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, entitled “The reducible complexity of a mitochondrial molecular machine.” As you might expect, I was very interested in reading what the authors had to say. Unfortunately, as is all too common on this topic, the claims made in the paper far surpassed the data, and distinctions between such basic ideas as “reducible” versus “irreducible” and “Darwinian” versus “non-Darwinian” were pretty much ignored.

Since PNAS publishes letters to the editor on its website, I wrote in. Alas, it seems that polite comments by a person whose work is the clear target of the paper are not as welcome as one might suppose from reading the journal’s letters-policy announcement (“We wish to provide readers with an opportunity to constructively address a difference of opinion with authors of recent papers. Readers are encouraged to point out potential flaws or discrepancies or to comment on exceptional studies published in the journal. Replication and refutation are cornerstones of scientific progress, and we welcome your comments.“) My letter received a brusque rejection. Below I reproduce the letter for anyone interested in my reaction to the paper. (By the way, it’s not just me. Other scientists whose work is targeted sometimes get the run around on letters to the editor, too. For an amusing / astounding example, see here.)

Call me paranoid, but it seems to me that some top-notch journals are real anxious to be rid of the idea of irreducible complexity. Recall that last year Genetics published a paper purportedly refuting the difficulty of getting multiple required mutations by showing it’s quick and easy in a computer–if one of the mutations is neutral (rather than harmful) and first spreads in the population. Not long before that, PNAS published a paper supposedly refuting irreducible complexity by postulating that the entire flagellum could evolve from a single remarkable prodigy-gene. Not long before that, Science published a paper allegedly refuting irreducible complexity by showing that if an investigator altered a couple amino acid residues in a steroid hormone receptor, the receptor would bind steroids more weakly than the unmutated form. (That one also made the New York Times!) For my responses, see here, here, here, and here. So, arguably picayune, question-begging, and just plain wrong results disputing IC find their way into front-line journals with surprising frequency. Meanwhile, in actual laboratory evolution experiments, genes are broken right and left as bacteria try to outgrow each other.

Robert Deyes at Uncommon Descent continues his analysis of Signature in the Cell. A sound approach to scientific investigation does not necessarily bring with it a mandatory requirement to be a ‘nose to the grindstone’ experimentalist. Indeed scientists can and often do take data that others have amassed and interpret it in light of their own understanding of the matter at hand. Therein lies a lesson that, as science historians will note, is backed by an impressive list of prominent cases. In fact Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton and even Charles Darwin challenged the viewpoints of their day through their own theoretical interpretations of reality. For Darwin this meant for the most part collecting data from botanists, breeders, ecologists, and paleontologists Read More ›

The world is awash with charities. Most are quite worthwhile. For pennies a day, you can send a child in an impoverished country to school, and kindle a lifetime of learning. But there remain many unmet needs.
What about people living in ideological poverty?

We’ve all heard the stories. Materialist philosophers of the mind who deny that the mind exists. Full professors of evolutionary biology who misunderstand demonstrations of the existence of God that are routinely mastered by teenagers in Introductory Philosophy courses. Atheist authors of letters to Christian nations who excoriate religion and ignore the unparalleled atrocities of atheism. Unrepentant Trotskyites who scold Christians for adherence to a messianic ideology.

Some of our fellow men live in intellectual squalor.

A few weeks ago I discussed how the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London A devoted its April, 2009 issue to the topic of biomimicry. The issue was introduced with a review by Bharat Bhushan, trying to deflect any possibility of intelligent design overtones from biomimicry by repeatedly referring to the power of “nature” to “evolve” these technologically useful structures. I concluded that “Dr. Bhushan’s chosen blindness to the intelligent design implications of his field does not negate the many dozens of instances of biomimicry discussed in his article and other articles in this recent issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London A.” What follows is a list of some of the fascinating examples Read More ›

From ID the Future: Click here to listen. On this episode of ID the Future Anika Smith interviews Illustra Media producer Lad Allen on the new film out next week, Darwin’s Dilemma. As the third film in the intelligent design trilogy from Illustra Media, Darwin’s Dilemma represents a capstone for Allen, who traversed the globe to present the story of Darwin’s journey to his theory of evolution and the Cambrian Explosion, the nagging problem for Darwin in the fossil record that has become a crisis for evolution today. Listen in as Lad Allen shares with us what it’s like to shoot on location in four continents and work with scientists like Simon Conway Morris and Stephen Meyer.

Darwin’s Dilemma is the third film in the intelligent design trilogy from Illustra Media, and arguably the best in the series (though Unlocking the Mystery of Life and The Privileged Planet were both excellent in their own right).From the full announcement here: One of the most spectacular events in the history of life, the Cambrian explosion, is brought to life through stunning animation in the new documentary Darwin’s Dilemma: The Mystery of the Cambrian Explosion released by Illustra Media September 15, 2009. This major documentary, the third in Illustra’s internationally-acclaimed intelligent design series, probes one of the great mysteries of science, the Cambrian explosion, when in a moment of geological time complex animals first appeared on earth fully formed, without Read More ›

Jerry Coyne and Jim Manzi have been mixing it up lately over the religious implications of evolution. Coyne asserts, quite rudely at times, that evolution disproves the existence of God. Manzi disagrees, and asserts that theism is compatible with evolutionary science.

I’ve had a blog discussion or two with Manzi, and he’s a thoughtful courteous interlocutor. He doesn’t believe that intelligent design is a legitimate scientific inference (so he’s not perfect), but he is logically rigorous and very well informed on scientific matters as well as on the broader philosophical issues. He believes that evolution, understood as an algorithmic process by which populations of organisms change over time, is compatible with belief in God. He asserts that evolutionary science does not demonstrate that atheism is true. He’s right.

Jerry Coyne is another matter. Coyne’s manner is sarcastic and supercilious, or at least as supercilious as one can get without relevant literacy. Coyne is an evolutionary biologist of the first rank, but that is where his competence ends. His arguments against the existence of God are embarrassing, and, like the arguments of Richard Dawkins and other New Atheists, are eliciting a backlash among intellectuals who have at least a modicum of philosophical and theological education. I don’t claim for myself any more than a marginal competence — an amateur’s competence — on such matters, but in refuting Coyne, that’s all that’s necessary.¹
Coyne: