Science and Culture Today | Page 1261 | Discovering Design in Nature

Recently, I discussed how in his book Only a Theory, Kenneth Miller badly misrepresented intelligent design (ID) as it relates to common descent. Another egregious error in the book comes in Dr. Miller’s section titled “Just Not Good Enough” (pgs. 70-74). Anyone familiar with the Dover trial knows exactly what Miller’s error is and where this is going. Dr. Miller claims that when the plaintiffs’ attorneys at the Dover trial did a literature-dump bluff on Michael Behe during cross-examination — placing before him over 50 papers and nearly a dozen books purportedly explaining the evolution of the immune system — Behe said, in Judge Jones’s report of the exchange, that they were “not ‘good enough.’” Miller even goes so far Read More ›

CSC director, and author of the Signature in the Cell, Stephen C. Meyer spoke to a full house at the Seattle Art Museum’s Plestscheef Auditorium last night presenting compelling evidence for intelligence behind the origin of life. On a beautiful summer evening in downtown Seattle, an eager crowd of over 200 relaxed inside the museum’s state-of-the-art theater to hear Dr. Meyer explain the problem of “The DNA Enigma” — that is, where does the highly specified and complex information inside the cell come from? Read the full report here and see some pictures from the event.

In his new book, 40 More Years: How the Democrats Will Rule the Next Generation, Democratic strategist James Carville badly misrepresents intelligent design (ID) as a wholly negative argument against evolution. What’s most incredible is that Carville makes this inaccurate characterization directly after quoting passages from ID proponents making wholly positive arguments for design. One such passage he quotes is from our Intelligent Design Briefing Packet for Educators, as follows: Intelligent design “begins with the observation that intelligent agents produce complex and specified information (CSI)….One easily testable form of CSI is irreducible complexity, which can be discovered by experimentally reverse-engineering biological structures to see if they require all of their parts to function. When [intelligent design] researchers find irreducible complexity Read More ›

In elevating the economic value of Charles Darwin over Adam Smith in the New York Times, Robert Franks misrepresents Smith. Franks claims that Darwin, better than Smith, accounted for conflicts between individual and collective interest. But Smith knew of such conflict. His invisible hand reliably guides private self-interest to socially beneficial outcomes only under a stable rule of law. For markets to work, rule of law must fetter private actors–prevent them from killing, defrauding, and stealing from each other. So Smith’s market “competition” is neither anarchy nor Darwinian nature, red in tooth and claw. Franks offers examples that he claims favor Darwin’s account. From illegal steroid use to mortgages that misrepresent the underlying risk of a loan, however, we have Read More ›

In medical ethics, there is a growing conflict between two important principles: autonomy and dignity. In an important way, autonomy and dignity are virtues derived from different worldviews. Autonomy owes much to the secular/materialist view of man, whose very existence is the product of an autonomous struggle for existence. Dignity owes much to the Judeo-Christian understanding of man, who is created in the image of God. Certainly there is overlap; advocates of autonomy obviously have some respect for dignity, and advocates for dignity have some respect for autonomy. But the differences in approaches to ethics are real, and are of great consequence.

The differences are particularly clear and important in the issue of physician-assisted suicide. Oregon has passed a law allowing physician-assisted suicide, and a similar statute was recently passed in Washington State. Physician-assisted suicide is even more common in Europe, with some nations such as Switzerland attracting “suicide tourists”. Bioethicist Jacob Appel has even endorsed physician-assisted suicide for some healthy people who request it.

It’s the question that Darwin never even began to address: How did the very first life begin? Dr. Stephen Meyer, author of the new book Signature in the Cell (HarperOne, June 2009), investigates how new scientific discoveries are pointing to intelligent design as the best explanation for the complexity of life and the universe. “It’s only in the past decade that the information age has finally come to biology. We now know that biology at its root is digital code information,” states Dr. Meyer. “In the cell, information is carried by DNA, which functions like a software program. The signature in the cell is that of the master programmer of life.” On Tuesday, July 21, Dr. Meyer will present his Read More ›

In the world of peppered moths, gray is the new black. The “peppered moth” became famous after textbooks started using it as an iconic example of evolution. It’s still employed in some current textbooks: Douglas Futuyma’s 2005 edition of Evolution states, “By the 1930s, however, examples of very strong selection came to light. One of the first examples was Industrial Melanism in the peppered moth (Biston betularia). … There is considerable evidence, obtained by several independent researchers, that birds attack a greater proportion of gray than black moths where tree trunks, due to air pollution, lack the pale lichens that would otherwise cover them.” (p. 393) While Futuyma is right to further note that “other factors also appear to affect Read More ›

Responses from the Darwin faithful to anything touching upon intelligent design are often so thoughtless it takes your breath away. I guess this is how they manage to stay impervious to the evidentiary challenge to their religion — they just don’t think it through, or even read it. A single article in a newspaper or journal taxes their ability simply to read what a person says and respond to that, rather than to what they imagine he would say. Consider the cases of Ewen Callaway and Jerry Coyne.

When Stephen C. Meyer wrote an op-ed in the Boston Globe on Thomas Jefferson as a proto-ID supporter, outraged science journalist Callaway at the New Scientist couldn’t even mount an argument. He calls linking Jefferson and ID a “ridiculous assertion.” But he doesn’t tell us why it’s ridiculous. He writes:

Public schools didn’t exist in their current form in America during Jefferson’s time, but Dr. Meyer never pauses to consider whether Jefferson would have supported the teaching of ID — a religious philosophy — in government-funded schools.

Meyer “never pauses to consider”? Whether Jefferson would have supported teaching ideas critical of Darwinian evolution is the subject of Meyer’s first paragraph and it goes on from there. Jefferson would not have supported teaching a religious doctrine in government schools, but Jefferson did not consider design in nature and the cosmos to be a religious doctrine but rather an empirical idea, supported by reason, “without appeal to revelation.”

Callaway then concludes in oracular fashion: “He wouldn’t have” — Jefferson would not have supported acknowledging Darwinism’s scientific shortcomings in a public school setting. This isn’t an argument. It’s an assertion. Actually, it’s necromancy. Callaway believes that he can speak with authority for the dead Jefferson.

He goes on to airily dismiss the massive scientific evidence in Meyer’s Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design as if it were a kind of temper tantrum:

Meyer cannot accept that the genetic code evolved naturally. Never mind the fact that the building blocks of DNA and its cousin molecule RNA existed on early Earth and even in space.

Check out that link. This is mind-boggling. Callway cites as evidence against Meyer’s book that a meteorite in Australia was found to contain “uracil, a base that is essential for the creation of RNA, and xanthine, a close chemical relative of the DNA base, guanine.” But what’s so mysterious about DNA is how the bases got into the specific sequence needed to carry information in the first place. This is the enigma of life’s origin. That’s the whole question that materialist science is unable to answer, about which intelligent design at least gives a clue. Pointing triumphantly to that meteorite is like pointing to a baby with a box of Scrabble letters in front of him and saying it’s thereby obvious that the baby can now proceed to write works of equal merit to Jefferson’s because hey, he’s got all the letters ready to work with.

But let’s lay off Ewen Callaway. He’s just a science writer. More startling is the laziness of University of Chicago biologist Jerry Coyne, author of Why Evolution is True.

A friend recently wrote me an e-mail asking if I had any critiques of Ken Miller’s 2009 book Only a Theory. Writing back to him, I observed that the book has many problems, but that I would offer a few quick responses to two or three of its most egregious errors. This serious of three posts (or three topics, really) will look at three errors and mischaracterizations of intelligent design (ID) in Only a Theory, starting with Miller’s mischaracterization of ID and common descent. On page 51, Miller states: What does design theory tell us about the details of the horse family over the past 55 million years? First, it would not consider it a family at all. From the Read More ›

Stephen Meyer has an interesting op-ed in today’s Boston Globe about founding father Thomas Jefferson’s view of intelligent design. A view which Meyer argues comes from the scientific evidence, not from religious authority, and which is foundational to our nation’s adherence to inalienable rights for all: Contemplating everything from the heavenly bodies down to the creaturely bodies of men and animals, he argued: “It is impossible, I say, for the human mind not to believe that there is, in all this, design, cause and effect, up to an ultimate cause, a fabricator of all things from matter and motion.” The “ultimate cause” and “fabricator of all things” that Jefferson invoked was also responsible for the “design” of life’s endlessly diverse Read More ›