Science and Culture Today | Page 1269 | Discovering Design in Nature

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.”

The failure of Darwinism to account for our human experience is something many people know intuitively — but few can articulate it so well as Harvard philosopher Harvey Mansfield and novelist Tom Wolfe. Peter Lawler, who blogs over at First Thing’s Postmodern Conservative, wrote a wonderful essay detailing the ways “America’s two most astute social commentators… have weighed in on the debate over the neo-Darwinian view of evolution.” In “Real Men Prove Darwin Wrong (Again),” Lawler synthesizes how these two masters illustrate that there are more things in heaven and earth than can be explained by Darwin:

They agree that the real controversy in our country is not between rationalists who preach evolutionism and fundamentalists who live in Darwin-denial, but between those who still believe that evolution can account for the whole of human behavior and those who see with their own eyes that it does not. The Darwinians, they observe, cannot properly account for the natural human quality that Mansfield calls “manliness” and that Wolfe, following the sociologists, describes as each individual’s concern for his own status or ranking. The Darwinians do not recognize what genuinely distinguishes the human individual from everything else in nature, so they cannot account for such admirable phenomena as Carson Holloway’s defense of transcendent human nobility against Darwinian reductionism.

Lawler’s essay is incisive and enlightening, reflecting on the denial of manliness (that character trait that drives an individual to believe that she is someone worth championing) inherent in the Darwinian fight against individualism:

Darwinians criticize the human tendency toward championism, and they fight against both our individualism and our speciesism. Science, they think, promises to free us from the illusion that there is anything special about me or mine. It frees us from our religious tendency to think God gave us a privileged place in the nature which, in truth, treats all life forms with equal indifference. The theory of evolution, according to Wolfe, is both a denial of, and a replacement for, religion. It replaces the older “championism” with the proudly dogmatic atheism of those who style themselves special enough to know that there is nothing at all special about us.

In his book Coming to Peace with Science, Point Loma Nazarene University biology professor Darrel R. Falk makes many arguments for common descent and Darwinian evolution. Many of these arguments are evidence-based (some of this evidence is countered in a previous post), but some of his most forceful arguments are not based upon evidence. They are based upon appeals to authority. Consider the following: If you’re seeing a pattern here, it’s because Dr. Falk likes to appeal to the authority of “virtually all” scientists to make his arguments. Now to Dr. Falk’s credit, he spends a lot of time talking about the evidence, but this repeated argumentum ad “virtually all” scientists is a little troubling. Now as I wrote recently, Read More ›

Recently I was e-mailed by an individual who had read the book Coming to Peace with Science, by Darrel Falk, president of the BioLogos Foundation. This person was interested in a response to the arguments for human/ape common ancestry in Dr. Falk’s book. Not having read Dr. Falk’s book before, I wrote back that I hadn’t yet read the book but had a strong suspicion that it would argue that shared non-functional (aka “junk”) DNA between humans, apes, and other species is evidence of their common ancestry. This is an extremely common argument from theistic evolutionists–Francis Collins made it in The Language of God (and Collins wrote the foreword to Dr. Falk’s book). Of course in 2010, we’re seeing more Read More ›

Unlike the reptilian Dawkins, sinister Dennett, or smug Coyne, Michael Ruse is a prominent Darwinian atheist by whom it’s hard not to feel charmed. I have never met him but his column in the Guardian could only be written by someone who is by nature very nice, very naïve, or probably both.

Ruse considers the question of what impact belief in Darwinism should be expected to have on morality, and he answers with an “on the one, on the other hand.” Since God is dead (and Darwin killed him), there can be no objective moral ideas. Moses received nothing on Sinai. Yet, not to worry! This realization will not lead to bad behavior since our genes, inscribed by natural selection, create within us a feeling, however illusory, that moral standards really are objective. Knowing that they are subjective does not dispel the impulse to be good. We feel compelled to obey ethical dictates. God’s demise is therefore not a “significant finding”:

Now you know that morality is an illusion put in place by your genes to make you a social cooperator, what’s to stop you behaving like an ancient Roman [raping Sabine women]? Well, nothing in an objective sense. But you are still a human with your gene-based psychology working flat out to make you think you should be moral. It has been said that the truth will set you free. Don’t believe it. David Hume knew the score. It doesn’t matter how much philosophical reflection can show that your beliefs and behavior have no rational foundation, your psychology will make sure you go on living in a normal, happy manner.

Of course a Darwin apologist would have to assert something along these lines. The project of defending Darwinism mandates it. What else is one going to say: “Darwinism is both true and a spreading social poison. Get used to it”? There is no constituency for that message. Various Darwinians have offered their own miscellaneous theories as to why evolutionary belief poses no threat to decency. Robert Wright, who likewise comes across as a pleasant person, has written several upbeat books contributing his own thoughts on the subject.