Science and Culture Today | Page 1263 | Discovering Design in Nature

Just a few months before the 150th anniversary of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, a newly released Zogby poll shows that the American public overwhelmingly rejects Darwinian theory in favor of intelligent design. When asked if life developed “through an unguided process of random mutations and natural selection,” a standard definition of Darwinism, only 33 percent of respondents said they agreed with the statement. But 52 percent agreed that “the development of life was guided by intelligent design.” The poll results come from one of four questions commissioned by Discovery Institute for a national Zogby telephone survey conducted earlier in 2009. Results from the other three questions were released previously to coincide with the bicentennial of Charles Darwin’s birth. Read More ›

Last December, I wrote a post about a book titled Life on Other Planets, aimed at junior-high-aged kids. I found it at a local library. The book promoted materialist science fiction about the origin of life on earth. More recently, the Seattle Public Library system had its annual booksale, and I loaded up. One now-former library book I bought was Journey from the Dawn: Life with the World’s First Family, by Donald Johansen and Kevin O’Farrell (Villard, 1990). I liked this book far better than Life on Other Planets, but instead of promoting materialist science fiction to kids on the origin of life, this one promoted science fiction to kids regarding paleoanthropology and the origin of humans. The book starts Read More ›

CSC Director Stephen C. Meyer will be in the studio shortly with national radio host Michael Medved to discuss his new book, Signature in the Cell, for the full second hour of the program. His segment will air live at 1:00pm PDT, and you can go here to listen.

In March, I blogged about how the National Center for Science Education (NCSE) usually tries to project a religion-friendly image, but somehow their “talking points” they released for Texas State Board of Education meeting in January advocated that activists press the SBOE to adopt scientism as the state’s official ideology and expressly deny the existence of the supernatural as a matter of state education policy. As the NCSE’s talking points argued: “Science posits that there are no forces outside of nature. Science cannot be neutral on this issue…. All educated people understand there are no forces outside of nature.” Yet in a recent radio interview with the Minnesota Atheists, Eugenie Scott claims that the NCSE “doesn’t take a stand on Read More ›

One of the many fascinating designs in biology is the workings of our senses. Here, for example, is a description of new findings on the actions of hair cells in the inner ear. It is yet another example of biology leaving evolution in the dust: Microvilli (stereocilia) projecting from the apex of hair cells in the inner ear are actively motile structures that feed energy into the vibration of the inner ear and enhance sensitivity to sound. The biophysical mechanism underlying the hair bundle motor is unknown. In this study, we examined a membrane flexoelectric origin for active movements in stereocilia and conclude that it is likely to be an important contributor to mechanical power output by hair bundles. We Read More ›

Yesterday, ENV spoke with Michael A. Flannery about his new book Alfred Russel Wallace’s Theory of Intelligent Evolution: How Wallace’s World of Life Challenged Darwinism (Erasmus Press). While credited as evolution’s co-discoverer, Wallace fell away from the Darwinian faith and came to espouse a view remarkably suggestive of intelligent design. Now, the rest of the interview.

ENV: Scientifically, how does Wallace’s culminating work, World of Life, stand up today as compared to Darwin’s Origin of Species?

MAF: That’s a complex question. Darwin’s Origin is really a metaphysical treatise supported by some biological speculations and those speculations give it the appearance of science. The thing that makes this question so difficult to answer is that for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was Thomas Henry Huxley’s brilliant public relations campaign on behalf of Darwin’s theory, Darwinism has lodged itself as the reigning biological paradigm and Origin is its magnum opus. All this means is that everyone has probably heard of (if not read) Darwin’s Origin, but few would even know who Wallace is, much less know his World of Life. That’s a big reason I wrote this book in the first place.
But that said, Darwin’s book had major problems from the start. For one thing, the title simply doesn’t deliver. It purports to be a book on the origin of species but tells us nothing of the origin of life itself, the very root of origins. Nevertheless, the book has had an influence far out of proportion to its actual value in moving science forward. For example, I can’t think of a single medical advance that is dependent upon it. In fact, Louis Pasteur, who exploded the old view of abiogenesis (biological life from nonliving matter), proved biogenesis — namely, that life must come from life — and gave us germ theory of disease, was a vocal opponent of evolution. Most of the so-called evolutionary “advances” in science we hear about have nothing to do with Darwin’s central theory of macroevolution, that random mutation eventually would produce speciation; they are really just examples of microevolution (species variation) which was wholly uncontroversial even in Darwin’s day. We could have gotten that from Wallace’s World of Life.

In contrast, Wallace’s book is a more complete and comprehensive work. It assumes common descent but argues that it is guided and infused with design. Its principle thesis presents what I call intelligent evolution, the idea of common descent based upon natural selection strictly bounded by the principle of utility in which nature is viewed as having design and purpose within a theistic context. Wallace understood that the origin of life could be addressed more simply as a problem of cellular complexity. Haeckel, an early and ardent Darwin supporter, had a very simplistic idea of the cell as merely a mass of protoplasm. Darwin held similar reductionist views. But Wallace knew better; the cell was a far more complex and intricate system. Wallace discusses this at length in The World of Life, thus making it far more prescient than the Origin.

Last year I wrote a series of posts about biomimetics (also called “biomimicry”), a term used to describe the way human engineers mimic nature in order to improve human technology. In fact, I recently blogged about how biomimicry of cuttlefish luminescence in new television technology further strengthens the case for intelligent design (ID) in biology. Even some members of the media cannot deny the relevance of biomimicry to the ID debate. A recent article in the London Telegraph was titled “Biomimicry: Why the World is Full of Intelligent Design.” It reported, “Forget human ingenuity — the best source of ideas for cutting-edge technology might be in nature, according to experts in ‘biomimicry’.” Of course the writer felt compelled to deny Read More ›

To judge from previews, the new Darwin biographical movie Creation will emphasize the challenge Darwinian theory posed from the beginning to religious belief. Yet the life of evolution’s co-discoverer, Alfred Russel Wallace, suggests that properly understood, and that’s a major proviso, evolution needn’t upset faith at all. On the contrary, Wallace reasoned from what he knew about life’s history to a belief that an “Overruling Intelligence” guided life’s development, much as intelligent design (ID) does today. Science historian Michael A. Flannery calls Wallace’s evolutionary thinking a “preamble” to ID.

An opportunity to evaluate this provocative claim is now before us in the form of Flannery’s new edition of Wallace’s great work, A World of Life (1910), which slims the dense and massive volume down to a manageable size and includes an illuminating introduction by Flannery. His book is Alfred Russel Wallace’s Theory of Intelligent Evolution: How Wallace’s World of Life Challenged Darwinism (Erasmus Press).

Wallace famously arrived at his own version of evolutionary theory while Darwin was still sitting on his. When Wallace made contact and shared his thoughts, Darwin panicked and rushed to make his theory public so as not to be scooped. Yet the two men did not formulate their ideas in exactly the same way. As Flannery writes, “Wallace emphasized the ‘principle of utility,’ namely, that ‘no organ or attribute can exist in a natural species unless it is or has been useful to the organisms that possess it.'”

This emphasis led to the increasingly rapid unraveling of Wallace’s confidence that natural selection by itself could account for the most interesting features of life: major items like sentience, the complexity of the cell and of the hemoglobin molecule, the origin of life itself, and more discrete features like a bird’s wing and feathers (evidence of a “preconceived design,” Wallace wrote) and the “unnecessarily elaborate” patterns and coloration of butterfly wings. Vladmir Nabokov — novelist, lepidopterist, and Darwin doubter — would make that same observation in the middle 20th century, as I’ve noted in this space previously.

Adding to all this Wallace’s comfort with the idea of common descent, it starts to sound like a mix of Michael Behe, Stephen Meyer, and William Dembski. ENV was intrigued, naturally, and caught up with Flannery to pose a few questions.

If you hvaen’t got your copy of Signature in the Cell yet here’s a chance to try before you buy. You can get a good sneak peek inside SITC over at the Harper Collins website. Click here to Browse Inside.