Science and Culture Today | Page 1296 | Discovering Design in Nature

This is the fourth in a blog series responding to John Timmer’s online review of the supplementary biology textbook Explore Evolution. The first part is here, the second here, and the third here.

4. Well, the Tetrapods are Monophyletic: Only “Ph.D.” Malcolm Gordon Disagrees, Right?
Timmer accuses EE of what he calls the “find a Ph.D.” approach: “if you look hard enough, you can find someone with a PhD who will say anything.” In this instance, Timmer disparages the minority viewpoint of UCLA biologist Malcolm Gordon (a tenured professor, actually), who has argued that the tetrapods may have evolved polyphyletically (i.e., more than once).

Tis the season to creep yourself out with a good story — especially a true story. ID the Future features a special Halloween podcast that delves into the real-life inspiration for a fearful favorite: Click here to listen On this episode of ID the Future, John West shares the inspiration for Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. In his book, Darwin Day in America, West examines the experiments Italian scientist Giovanni Aldini conducted on human corpses. His gruesome work provided the inspiration for Frankenstein and foreshadowed the rise of a virulent strain of materialism that attempted to use science to reduce human beings to mere matter in motion.

Vancouver Sun columnist Peter McKnight has suddenly launched a crusade against intelligent design in a series of columns looking at science and religion.

In the second part we learn that McKnight is sadly uninformed about intelligent design. He conflates it with creationism, and confines it pretty much to biology. Indeed, the theory goes beyond just biology and encompasses, physics, chemistry and cosmology as well. Intelligent design is not creationism, nor was it developed to get around court rulings. A little history is in order here.

Whenever biochemist Michael Behe’s argument for design from “irreducibly complex” molecular machines appears, there is a Darwinist waiting in the wings with a devastating critique (or so he thinks).

Take as an example the following passage from biologist Craig M. Story. He recently reviewed Fazale Rana’s new book The Cell’s Design for Christianity Today (see “Same Song, Second Verse“). In his review, he critiques Behe’s argument, because according to Dr. Story, Rana merely regurgitates Behe.

Rana, like Behe before him, may be commended for providing a layman’s description of a number of astonishingly intricate cellular processes. But his portraits of cellular workings will fail to convince most mainstream scientists for the same reason that Behe’s book has been roundly dismissed: The analogy between manmade machines and cells is a poor one at best. Cellular components, although machine-like in some respects, do not behave like manmade machines. They self-assemble and self-manufacture, and they are able to transform available energy sources such as light to fuel metabolic activity.

Now what’s wrong with this reply? Didn’t we all learn from Hume that arguments from analogy are inherently weak?

Two scientists who read the second reply to John Timmer complained (one publicly, the other in an email) that I had neglected to inform readers about the refutation of one of Christian Schwabe’s claims about the protein relaxin. Their complaints, while in my view misdirected, raise some interesting questions that I’ll discuss in my next blog entry.

P.Z. Myers and Steven Novella have recent posts on a new front in the war between materialism and reality. Having convinced only a small fraction of Americans that chance and tautology — i.e. Darwinism — adequately explains life (despite a court-ordered monopoly on public education for the last half-century), materialists are moving on to your mind.

Materialism posits that your mind is meat. No soul, no spirit, just chemicals, congealed by natural selection to dupe you into believing that you’re more than an evanescent meat-robot.

It’s a hard sell, but that’s not to say that materialists haven’t tried. In the first half of the 20th century, behaviorists (e.g. B.F. Skinner) proposed that internal mental states were irrelevant or didn’t exist at all. All that mattered in the study of the mind was stimulus and response. Behaviorism turned out, unsurprisingly, to be a sterile avenue of research, as one might guess about a theory of the mind that denied or ignored mental states. As a theory of the mind, it is now largely regarded as insane, even by materialists. Behaviorism may be the only scientific theory to be finally extinguished by a joke:

This is the third in a blog series responding to John Timmer’s online review of the supplementary biology textbook Explore Evolution. The first part is here, and the second here.

3. Open Your Catechism to Page One: The Fact of Evolution

So what is the “fact” of evolution? Timmer argues that “aspects of the theory [of evolution] can be safely treated as fact,” and in support of this point, cites a paper by the Canadian geneticist T. Ryan Gregory, entitled “Evolution as Fact, Theory and Path.”

Here is how Gregory (2008, 49) defines the “fact” of evolution:

Science standards review processes always seem to send Darwinists into a misinformation flurry. The current review of Texas’ standards is no exception. Josh Rosenau has a post up yesterday attacking Casey Luskin that has a number of errors. Josh is in elite company, as these are the very same errors that spread like the flu through the MSM last spring. At that time we reported how the New York Times and Washington Post, among others, were misreporting the facts about “strengths and weaknesses” language in the Texas science standards.

Now Josh writes:

At issue is a Disco.-inspired standard in the older TEKS which requires teachers to have students “analyze, review, and critique scientific explanations, including hypotheses and theories, as to their strengths and weaknesses using scientific evidence and information” (my emphasis).

I corrected this back in June:

In my first post on TEKS reviewer Ronald Wetherington, professor of anthropology at Southern Methodist University (SMU), I discussed his history of trying to stifle free speech on evolution and then denying his intolerant actions. In one of his articles about Discovery Institute’s SMU conference, Wetherington attacked the conference because it was “not … a … balanced discussion, but rather a partisan promotion,” elsewhere attacking it as “not a debate, but a one-sided promotion.” (Wetherington must have forgotten Discovery Institute invited SMU Darwinists to participate in the conference, but they declined.) When writing about a different issue, he lamented incidents where “dissent is treated as irrelevant.” So out of one side of his mouth, Wetherington protests “one-sided promotions” and discussions Read More ›