Science and Culture Today | Page 1259 | Discovering Design in Nature

A new video, Journey Inside The Cell, launched today dramatically illustrates the evidence for intelligent design within DNA, as described in Stephen C. Meyer’s book, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design (HarperOne 2009). The original animation by Light Productions reveals in intricate detail how the digital information in DNA directs protein synthesis inside the cell, revealing a world of molecular machines and nano-processors communicating digital information.“This video is going to make things worse for critics of intelligent design,” Dr. Meyer explains. “They will have more difficulty convincing the public that their eyes are deceiving them when the evidence for design literally unfolds before them in this animation.” Narrated by Meyer, the video is a short Read More ›

The anti-ID crowd has an old canard about there being no serious scientists who doubt Darwin, let alone any that support intelligent design. And they like to say that there is no science being done by ID scientists. Both ideas are not just false, but absurdly so. Note this announcement of new scientific arrivals at Biologic Institute. Professor Matti Leisola, the Dean of Chemistry and Materials Science at Helsinki University of Technology in Finland; Colin Reeves, Professor of Operational Research in the School of Mathematical and Information Sciences at Coventry University; and Professor Stuart Burgess, Head of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Bristol.

In case you were wondering about that radicalism of Global Warming Climate Change fundamentalists, the President’s new science czar John Holdren made some recent assertions that should put your doubts to rest.

In a July 2008 interview on the leftist television program Democracy Now!, Holdren reiterates conventional Malthusian alarmism, complete with a running video of wildfires, storms, and floods positioned over his left shoulder. He takes shots at global warming Climate Change ‘deniers’ (at about 3:20 into the video), attributing the success of skeptics to “the preoccupation of the media with balance and with controversy”.
“Balance” and “controversy” are a bête-noire for climate alarmists.

Further into the interview (at about 7:45 into the video), the moderator raises a question about the recommendation of climate alarmist and top NASA climate scientist James Hansen that the chief executives of oil companies to “be tried for their role in spreading disinformation on climate change”. Hansen recommended that they be indicted and tried for “crimes against humanity” if they continue to “dispute” and “to fund contrarians”.

The moderator asked Holdren:

In the growing public debate about coercive population control policies and Presidential Science Advisor John Holdren, it is important to read exactly what Holdren (and his co-authors Paul and Anna Ehrlich) wrote in their 1977 textbook Ecoscience.

The question is this: were Holdren’s recommendations merely the academic exercise of listing other people’s recommendations (with disavowal or without any kind of endorsement), or did Holdren endorse any of these measures or counsel serious consideration of them.

Here are the relevant pages of Holdren’s book; there is much more than I can deal with in this post, and I will be reviewing all of Holdren’s writings in Ecoscience in future posts, word for word.

Let’s begin. Holdren bottom of first paragraph, p786):

In LDC’s [less developed countries] a childless or single lifestyle might be encouraged deliberately as the status of women approaches parity with that of men. Although free and easy association of the sexes might be tolerated in such a society, responsible parenthood ought to be encouraged and illegitimate childbearing could be strongly discouraged.

How could illegitimate childbearing be “strongly discouraged”? Holdren continues:

One way to carry out this disapproval might be to insist that all illegitimate babies be put up for adoption- especially those born to minors, who generally are not capable of caring properly for a child alone. If a single mother really wished to keep her baby, she might be obliged to go through adoption proceedings and demonstrate her ability to support and care for it. Adoption proceedings probably should remain more difficult for single people than for married couples, in recognition of the relative difficulty of raising children alone. It would even be possible to require pregnant single women to marry or have abortions, perhaps as an alternative to placement or adoption, depending on the society. [emphasis mine]

Holdren’s next paragraph is astonishing:

In the media, it’s not unusual for an interviewer and interviewee to hold similar views on whatever subject they are discussing. Radio show hosts and podcasters, for example, commonly interview friendly guests. But imagine if Paul Allen interviewed Bill Gates on the merits of Microsoft, and then published the interview as an independent journalistic article in Wired magazine. Not only would it would read like a paid advertisement, but critics would begin wondering if Wired was in business to promote Microsoft products. The Microsoft example is of course fictional, but something like it happened recently when Karl Giberson (executive vice president of the BioLogos Foundation) interviewed Francis Collins (the president of BioLogos), and then published the interview in Christianity Today‘s Read More ›

Atheist Jerry Coyne has been “chewing over” the President’s selection of Francis Collins as head of the National Institutes of Health. Collins, by consensus, is superbly qualified as a scientist and an administrator to run NIH. He’s a distinguished geneticist and directed the Human Genome Project. He’s also a Christian, and has no problem with publicly discussing his reasons and faith. For Coyne, that’s the rub. Coyne begins his post by wanting to “give the guy a break,” but his patience is quickly exhausted.
Coyne:

If you want to understand the social and political implications of the atheist/materialist worldview, you need look no further than the science blogsphere’s reaction to the appointments of Francis Collins to head the NIH and John Holdren as President Obama’s science advisor.

Collins is a superbly qualified scientist (a leading molecular geneticist) and administrator (former head of the Human Genome Project). He is also a Christian, and holds fairly traditional Christian beliefs. He is not a young earth creationist, and there is no evidence that his Christian faith has hampered his scientific work in any way.

The reaction in the scientific blogsphere to Collins’ appointment has been apoplectic. P.Z. Myers, Jerry Coyne, Sam Harris, and other atheists have excoriated the President for his appointment of Collins. They believe that Collins’ traditional Christian views either disqualify him or raise grave doubts about his fitness to serve in a high position in science administration.

The atheist science blogshpere has taken a very different view of John Holdren’s appointment. For example, P.Z. Myers gushed

The bads [Rick Warren and Ken Salazar] are awful, but I’ve got to say that [President Obama’s] good decisions are very, very good. The director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy will be John Holdren of Harvard University, a professor of environmental policy who takes a hard line on global climate change — he was an advisor to Al Gore on the movie, An Inconvenient Truth

It’s hard for a religious believer not to appreciate, at least in part, the spirit in which Robert Wright presents his new book The Evolution of God. On one hand, he regards the history of religion as the history of an illusion. On the other hand, he argues that the evolution of that illusion represents humanity’s groping toward a truth about the universe that may include the existence of a force operating in human lives, a force that it may even be fair to call God.

He writes admittedly as a materialist — for whom the most basic postulate holds that reality can be explained in purely material terms. He sees an “evolution” in the Bible where relatively primitive, even polytheistic concepts are gradually replaced by more enlightened ones. His case for religion, such as it is, is about as compelling as you can expect, given the postulation of materialism.

I like the person I see in Wright’s writing. Other materialists, on the basis of their own faith in such an arbitrarily constricted picture of the world, leap to demand the dismantling of religion, the mockery of religion’s defenders, and their exclusion from public office. We have the example of bestselling atheist author Sam Harris attacking poor old Francis Collins, Obama’s pick for the National Institutes of Health, on the New York Times op-ed page. Why? Because Collins is an Evangelical Christian. And we have Jerry Coyne in the New Republic attacking Wright himself as peddling “creationism for liberals.” Wright must find such insults unsurprising.

In his Afterword, he notes that following the Islam-inspired attacks of 9/11, faith as a whole acquired a foul odor. Many who previously would have been content to keep quiet about their atheism chose to go on the offensive. Today voicing even the mildly religion-friendly view that Wright does would invite mockery at, “say, an Ivy League faculty gathering unless you want people to look at you as if you’d just started speaking in tongues.”

Luckily, Wright is not a professional academic but a scholarly journalist. He has also taught at Penn and Princeton, so he knows that terrain. What I like about him, apart from the fact that he writes wonderfully readable yet learned prose, is his generosity to people of faith. I’m not being ironic. He writes that he finds it “nice” (and I think there he is being ironic) that some people can lead morally exemplary lives without God. Yet he also finds this surprising: “the natural human condition is to ground your moral life in the existence of other beings, and the more ubiquitous the beings, the firmer the ground.” It’s for that reason that he wants to find, again given his materialist premise, the most compelling case for faith that he can.

Dear President Obama,

I note with dismay your appointment of Dr. John Holdren as Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, Assistant to the President for Science and Technology, and Co-Chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. Although Dr. Holdren’s experience in academia and administration may be adequate, his publicly expressed views regarding population control disqualify him from holding office.

I will set aside objections to Dr. Holdren’s scientific competence. Despite his strong scientific credentials, he advanced theories in the 1970’s and 1980’s that have become the paradigm of ideologically motivated junk science. He and his collaborators (such as co-author Paul Ehrlich) predicted world-wide famine as a consequence of over-population by the late 20th century, and they advocated radical coercive public policies to avert catastrophe. These predictions were explicit, public, and were published under professional imprimatur. Obviously, the predictions were wrong. Dr.Holdren’s predictions are an exemplar of scientific incompetence.

But it is the spectre of Dr. Holdren’s competence, not his incompetence, that concerns me. In 1977 Dr. Holdren and his colleagues Paul and Anne Ehrlich published the book Ecoscience. In it, Holdren and his co-authors endorse the serious consideration of radical measures to reduce the human population, particularly third world populations, such as India, China and Africa. The measures include:

Some evolutionary-development researchers must be taking cues from the PR team that overhyped “Ida.” A recent article on ScienceDaily was titled, “How Evolution Can Allow For Large Developmental Leaps,” but the article documents nothing of the kind. It begins by discussing a long-recognized problem in evolution: “when it comes to traits like the number of wings on an insect, or limbs on a primate, there is no middle ground. How are these sorts of large evolutionary leaps made?” I appreciate the author’s acknowledgment that functional intermediate forms can be a problem for Darwinian evolution. I then expected the article to discuss how “large evolutionary leaps” might occur, but instead, it went on to discuss research that showed trivial biological changes Read More ›