Science and Culture Today | Page 1271 | Discovering Design in Nature

Just as it seemed the hullaballoo about Great Grandma Ida might go on forever, there is just the hint of some perspective on what the fossil find really means. That the hype around Ida is more selling then compelling is beginning to become clear. The New York Time’s business page wrote about how it all seems nicely orchestrated to boost ratings of the History Channel’s accompanying documentary. A tongue in cheek report from a London science writer also helped to highlight the fact that the welcome for Ida has been more than just a little over the top. By the far the most insightful is this post from a science writer at the Smithsonian, offering some more tempered words than Read More ›

Any critic making the inaccurate claim that Stephen C. Meyer is the “President of the Discovery Institute” is bound to be fairly uninformed about both intelligent design (ID) and Discovery Institute.1 Thus, when I recently viewed a YouTube video making this very mistake while allegedly “Challenging the Discovery Institute to Discover,” I first thought: Why should I accept a challenge from someone who can’t even correctly “discover” the identity of our organization’s president? Regardless, this video was enlightening, but not in the way that its creators intended. Rather than posing any difficult challenge for ID, the video unwittingly exposes the unfortunate ignorance that apparently abounds regarding the nature of the theory of intelligent design and how we detect and test Read More ›

Editor’s Note: This is crossposted at David Klinghoffer’s Beliefnet blog, Kingdom of Priests.

Some readers thought I was unfair in a previous entry explaining the difference between my perspective on evolution and that of my fellow Beliefnet blogger Dr. Francis Collins over at Science and the Sacred. Am I really not being fair? Well, let’s test that hypothesis by picking out one idea from Dr. Collins’s book and from his website BioLogos. It’s his treatment of the idea that somehow a moral law in every heart points us to the existence of God.

Because BioLogos — or theistic evolution, however we may designate the general approach — surrenders so easily to naturalism, it must be willing to accommodate Darwinism’s explanation of where that moral law comes from. Dr. Collins thinks radical acts of altruism may defy an evolutionary explanation, or maybe not. Thus quoth BioLogos:

Even if a purely natural account of moral development could be found, the simple fact that morality has evolved is something that would be expected in a world created by a just and loving God.

On the contrary, it would be another indication that religion is superfluous in our quest to grasp the answers to life’s ultimate questions. Dr. Collins merely holds it out as a possibility that an evolutionary understanding of moral development could possibly be solidified. But other prominent Darwinists seem confident, as Darwin himself was, that the evolutionary explanation is already in hand.

A recent forum “Evolution and the Ethical Brain” explored the issue in honor of Darwin’s 200th birthday. You can watch the video online or read the transcript. It was sponsored by the opulently endowed Templeton Foundation, which by the purest coincidence also funds Dr. Collins’s BioLogos. With New York Times columnist David Brooks leading the amiable discussion, three evolutionary scientists explored their conclusion that morality is a human capacity whose development is no more mysterious than the evolution of adult lactose tolerance.

If they weren’t atheists, you’d think the scientists raising the ballyhoo over Ida were hailing the second coming. Here is yet another icon of evolution. Every time one of these discoveries is made, there’s a huge PR snow job from the Darwin lobby to make it seem like it answers all the questions and objections. I thought Tiktaalik did that. Or maybe Archaeopteryx. It goes at least as far back as Proconsul. Each time the Darwinists seem to forget they already found the missing link — the one fossil to rule them all — and re-find it all over again. At least CBS News was a bit more skeptical than Sky News when they reported it on Friday. While the Read More ›

Scientist and theologian Alister McGrath has a new essay over at Christianity Today, “Augustine’s Origin of Species.” Knowing how Augustine has often been co-opted by Darwinians as a proto-Darwinist, I came to this article rather skeptical. But I was delightfully surprised. McGrath notes that Augustine’s dominant image of the natural world’s relation to God is that of a “dormant seed.” As McGrath explains: God creates seeds, which will grow and develop at the right time. Using more technical language, Augustine asks his readers to think of the created order as containing divinely embedded causalities that emerge or evolve at a later stage. Yet Augustine has no time for any notion of random or arbitrary changes within creation. The development of Read More ›

Editor’s Note: This is crossposted at David Klinghoffer’s Beliefnet blog, Kingdom of Priests.

Astute readers will have noticed that Beliefnet runs two blogs that deal with evolution on a more or less frequent basis but in very different ways: this blog and Science and the Sacred, where former Human Genome Project head Francis Collins and other contributors from the BioLogos Foundation share their thoughts. An Evangelical Christian, Dr. Collins would like to find a reconciliation between Darwinian evolution including its randomly driven, unplanned, unguided mechanism of natural selection, with Biblical religion, which is premised on God’s creative guidance of life’s history.

I wish Dr. Collins all the luck in the world. He’ll need it. An Orthodox Jew, I find his to be an impossible quest, though attractive to believers who find it expedient to dodge the radical challenge to theistic religion posed by Darwinism.

Note: This post is the last in a series reviewing Jerry Coyne’s Why Evolution Is True. Read Part 1 here, Part 2 here, Part 3 here, Part 4 here, Part 5 here, Part 6 here, and Part 7 here.

Darwin called The Origin of Species “one long argument” for his theory, but Jerry Coyne has given us one long bluff. Why Evolution Is True tries to defend Darwinian evolution by rearranging the fossil record; by misrepresenting the development of vertebrate embryos; by ignoring evidence for the functionality of allegedly vestigial organs and non-coding DNA, then propping up Darwinism with theological arguments about “bad design;” by attributing some biogeographical patterns to convergence due to the supposedly “well-known” processes of natural selection and speciation; and then exaggerating the evidence for selection and speciation to make it seem as though they could accomplish what Darwinism requires of them.

The actual evidence shows that major features of the fossil record are an embarrassment to Darwinian evolution; that early development in vertebrate embryos is more consistent with separate origins than with common ancestry; that non-coding DNA is fully functional, contrary to neo-Darwinian predictions; and that natural selection can accomplish nothing more than artificial selection — which is to say, minor changes within existing species.

Regis Nicoll at Break Point has an excellent article for those interested in understanding the relationship between faith and science (like so many seem to be these days *cough* Francis Collins *cough*): In a recent essay in The New Republic, evolutionary scientist Jerry Coyne asked, “Does the empirical nature of science contradict the revelatory nature of faith? Are the gaps between them so great that the two institutions must be considered essentially antagonistic?” Coyne has no doubt that the answer is yes. Religion is so hopelessly inimical to scientific progress that any attempt to reconcile them is futile. As Coyne explains, “Accepting both science and conventional faith leaves you with a double standard.” And to make sure you are clear Read More ›

Note: This is Part 7 in a series reviewing Jerry Coyne’s Why Evolution Is True. Read Part 1 here, Part 2 here, Part 3 here, Part 4 here, Part 5 here, and Part 6 here.

Coyne writes that Darwin “had little direct evidence for selection acting in natural populations.” Actually, Darwin had no direct evidence for natural selection; the best he could do in The Origin of Species was “give one or two imaginary illustrations.” It wasn’t until a century later that Bernard Kettlewell provided what he called “Darwin’s missing evidence” for natural selection — a shift in the proportion of light- and dark-colored peppered moths that Kettlewell attributed to camouflage and bird predation.⁴⁰

Since then, biologists have found lots of direct evidence for natural selection. Coyne describes some of it, including an increase in average beak depth of finches on the Galápagos Islands and a change in flowering time in wild mustard plants in Southern California — both due to drought. Like Darwin, Coyne also compares natural selection to the artificial selection used in plant and animal breeding.