Science and Culture Today | Page 1273 | Discovering Design in Nature

We have a 2 year old, Saul, who is very attached to his comfort jacket. It’s like a security blanket for him, blue and quilted and thoroughly stained. He doesn’t wear it, since it is too small for him by now anyway. He holds it and sleeps with it, and if you try to take it away from him when he’s in bed — say, to put it in the laundry — watch out. He will be extremely ticked off, crying, fussing.

In an important new book, Why Us? How Science Rediscovered the Mystery of Ourselves (Pantheon), British physician and historian James Le Fanu speculates that Darwinism works that way for many people. It’s a “comfort blanket,” explaining everything about living creatures in tidy materialist terms without having to appeal to mysterious, unknowable forces outside nature. Maybe that’s why scientists and laymen alike get so very upset and even abusive when you try, however gently, to tug it out of their arms.

Darwinism hasn’t been aired out or laundered in about 150 years. It’s a closed loop, effectively unquestionable, despite the fact that major chunks of biological evidence are against it. Le Fanu, about whom I’ve been writing this series, focuses on DNA and the human brain. Darwinism stands for the belief that everything can be explained in natural terms, but these two features of biology unyieldingly defy such comforting explanations.

Consider the Hox “master” genes that determine the spatial configuration of the front and back ends of creatures as diverse as frogs, mice, and humans. The Swiss biologist Walter Gehring showed that “the same ‘master’ genes mastermind the three-dimensional structures of all living things….The same master genes that cause a fly to have the form of a fly cause a mouse to have the form of a mouse.” Stephen Jay Gould admitted the “explicitly unexpected character” of this discovery.

On Earth Day 2009, we are reminded of the ecological importance of recycling. As a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at The University of Chicago, Jerry A. Coyne must be keen on recycling: He even recycles worn-out arguments for Darwinism. If “evolution” meant simply that existing species can undergo minor changes over time, or that many species alive today did not exist in the past, then evolution would undeniably be true. But “evolution” for Coyne means Darwinism — the theory that all living things are descendants of a common ancestor, modified by unguided natural processes such as DNA mutations and natural selection. Coyne discusses the fossil record, embryos, vestigial structures, the geographic distribution of species, artificial and Read More ›

Today is Earth Day. And it is worth pondering once again how marvelous Earth really is. Yet I find my mind today asking why anyone should care for Earth. From the materialist perspective, we are not really “supposed” to be here. And, we’re the late-comers to the party! So it always amazes me that many materialists are such avid environmentalists. But maybe this should not be surprising; after all, if one is a materialist, the earth is all there is, so we better keep it going! This response, however pragmatic, doesn’t satisfy me, though. For why should we keep anything going? For if the materialist is saying that the Earth is of intrinsic value, we can (indeed we must!) ask, Read More ›

As I mentioned in Part 1 of this series, some students from a university biology class have e-mailed us trying to answer a challenge from their professor to “Find a fact (observation, data) that supports” intelligent design or evolution. These students wanted to find facts supporting intelligent design, and as I mentioned in my previous post, I told them that ID meets their professor’s definition of a theory: something that is “supported by a large amount of data (observations in the physical world)” and has a “broad application to explain a wide range of phenomena” and “a framework that allows the development of novel hypotheses (questions about nature).” In this second installment I’ll provide the rest of my response to Read More ›

Baron Georges Cuvier (1769-1832), who served as director of Paris’s Musee d’Histoire Naturelle, held that there was an unknown biological “formative impulse,” an organizational principle of some kind, that directed the formation of diverse kinds of life. It is such an idea that James Le Fanu seeks to revive in his excellent new book, Why Us?: How Science Rediscovered the Mystery of Ourselves (Pantheon). It does appear that something is guiding life’s evolution toward intelligible ends. Dr. Le Fanu, in appreciation of whom I am writing this series, urges us to be comfortable with saying science does and perhaps cannot know the nature or source of that impulse.

Darwin, of course, sought to identify the principle or law behind evolution as mindless, unguided natural selection. But among the delights of Le Fanu’s book is his utterly apology-free take down of Darwin.

Long before today’s modern Darwin Lobby perfected the polemical art of the false dilemma — wherein you are either a Biblical creationist or a full communicant in the Church of Darwin, for there can be no other alternative — Darwin himself “portray[ed] those who might dispute his explanation as being Biblical creationists.” That included even Cuvier, about whose thinking on natural history Darwin wrote in the Origin of Species: “Nothing can be more hopeless than to explain this similarity of pattern [in body plans by supposing] it has pleased the Creator to construct all the animals in each great class on a uniform plan.”

We’ve recently received a number of e-mails from students asking for help. A university biology professor has apparently challenged his class to “[f]ind a fact (observation, data) that supports” evolution or intelligent design. The students e-mailed us asking for help answering his challenge with regards to intelligent design. My response, which I’ve now sent to a few of the students in the course, has been, “Where to begin?” Below I post Part 1 or my reply to one student, with names and quotes removed to protect the innocent: I’ll finish the rest of my response to this student in a subsequent post.

When the novelist, biographer and literary critic A.N. Wilson came out recently as a Darwin skeptic, in comments to the New Statesman the book he mentioned as substantiating his skepticism is James Le Fanu’s new and outstandingly readable and informative book Why Us?: How Science Rediscovered the Mystery of Ourselves (Pantheon). For the moment, this is probably the one book you should buy for your Darwin-devoted friends — if you are going to buy just one. In this little series, continued from last week, I am just trying to give a flavor of the book.

Le Fanu is a distinguished British physician and author of peer-reviewed medical journal essays. He exemplifies the Talmud’s note of advice that a person should “Teach your tongue to say ‘I do not know'” (Berachot 4a). Le Fanu knows a lot and wears his erudition very lightly, but his main point is that the more science reveals about the most important question a human can ask — What is man and how did he come to be? — the more we have to admit that we don’t know.

Le Fanu demonstrates this by masterfully recounting the epic crack-up of expectations that prevailed till recently for the prospects of three scientific enterprises. Darwinian evolution, genetics, and brain research were supposed to combine to give a compelling, coherent and united account of man’s origin and nature. They did no such thing and the prospect of their doing so in the future appears hopeless.

Among other things, for example, the Human Genome Project and the Chimpanzee Genome Project revealed the similarity in the genomic coding region of humans and chimps — 98 percent interchangeable, as we’re always reminded. Something like that figure includes other vertebrates as well, such as the modest mouse. Le Fanu readily agrees that this suggests evidence of common descent.

Today at Beliefnet, David Klinghoffer has a provocative essay commemorating the 10th anniversary of the Columbine High School massacre in Colorado. Klinghoffer notes that Columbine killer Eric Harris was inspired in part by his fanatical devotion to Darwinian natural selection, a trait Harris unfortunately shared with many opponents of human dignity during the past century. Given the pervasive influence of Social Darwinism in our culture, Klinghoffer suggests that Darwin’s Tree of Life might be more appropriately viewed as a Tree of Death: Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution with its Tree of Life is applauded by most sophisticated Americans and Europeans as a scientific idea pure and simple, without the aura of dread and terror that, properly, should surround it in Read More ›

Timothy Sandefur is an atheist legal commentator who believes that it is unconstitutional to teach the weaknesses, along with the strengths, of evolutionary theory in schools. His reason: he believes that evolutionary theory has no weaknesses: …to teach the (non-existent) “weaknesses” of evolution in a government classroom is almost always (a) contrary to the lesson plan–and therefore a violation of a teacher’s employment contract–or (b) in reality an attempt to teach creationism to school children as true…[t]he Establishment Clause forbids the government from declaring any religious viewpoint to be true. [emphasis mine] Sandefur is particularly upset by the participation of Christians in the public square. His view of the Establishment clause is, even by his own admission, “extreme”: I believe Read More ›