I like this post. Like Flew said, "follow the evidence where ever it leads". Sometimes, when it comes to the creation of the universe I think the real creationists, strictly speaking I'd like to add, are the atheists because wereas theistic creationsists only believe that a small self-replicating orangism or chain of dna popped into being out of nothing, atheists believe that the entire UNIVERSE popped into being out of nothing. Now, which one of these seems more reasonable, if any? I simply don't understand how there could not be a God? The notion seems to cut against the grain of all scientific, spiritual, economic, political, sociological and psychological evidence. Whether God is who he said he was; whether he could really have been a carpenter, a carpenter's son is another matter, but whether there is intelligence behind the curtain is, well, I think, a matter of, dare I say it, fact. Atheism is a rather childish ideology. But either way most atheists in the West aren't atheists anyway, they're heretics. They worship "mother nature" instead of God our father. They don't believe in God but think they can become a God. They refuse to humble themselves and put their faith in God but their knees bend at every alter of the cult of tolerance and they profess loudly a blind allegiance to the god of socialism. Let's be honest folks, everyone believes in God, but not everyone believes in the one, real and true God. He said he was the way, in case you might think it's the 8 fold path, He said he was the truth, in case you might think it's blind merciless evolution and He said he was the life, in case you ever started to believe "mother nature" was calling you to sacrifice unborn babies and dying people to save her. The most difficult part about the Christian faith has nothing to do with any dogma, rule, or leap of faith, it has to do with our hearts and whether we can accept that God the creator of all this beauty asks nothing more of us than to accept His love the way a rebellious child comes to love his mother and father.
Merry Christmas and God bless.

What about progressive evolution of design, as evidenced by the theory of Evolution, but by advanced science and not nature over a relatively short period of time?.In this hypothesis we are talking about a backdrop, of there having been many humanities on this very ancient planet/'living' machine, which have disappeared for the self evident reason we can understand today, such as over population, environmental degradation and nuclear war. In the same way as creation of a child is a scientifically predictable process, then likewise when one consider the whole of humanity as a single growing biological entity, it's progress is also predictable. Once one can consider this idea then one can make sense of history and relate this to what is happening in the leading edge of science, particularly genetics. If we can in the future engineer life, then why not other much more advanced societies elsewhere? Here we have a compromise between the Theory of Evolution and the religious perspectives, as to the origins of our humanity.We can respect the past without living in it.Ultimately this argument is about the spiritualization of science.

The bottom line of this hypothesis, is that dangerous humanities, do not leave there solar systems. This is simply because they self-destruct before they cant reach a level of interstellar technology, where they can.If this hypothesis were correct then maybe this should be called Evolution II?

once you come to the conclusion that there is order in the universe (whaterever you may call the order giver. i call him God) , the rest becomes a secondary matter of process only. special creation ,theistic evolution, old earth or young earth are all within the pale. even so, little green men from outer space seem to be a stretch

I find this article distressing from a number of points of view. First, it makes some inaccurate statements. for example, it lists William Dembski as a "scientist". I don't think Bill Dembski would call himself a scientist. He has doctorates in mathematics and philosophy. He has done no research, as far as I know, in science, aside from his work on "intelligent design". Also, to say that the intelligent design movement "pointed out ... the impossibility of producing certain types of 'irreducible complexity' by chance interactions" is an abuse of language. One "points out" things that have been overlooked but are plain upon inspection. The correct statement would be that the intelligent design movement has "argued that" certain things are impossible, or "maintained that" they are. But their arguments have not been generally accepted, and remain, indeed, extremely controversial, to say the least.

The second problem with this article is that it is almost unintelligible in places. Just to take one example, what is meant by saying that "Fibonacci patterns ... seem to be prior to all evolutionary developments"? That there are Fibonacci patterns in nature (in the arrangements of leaves on some plants, etc.) is very well known. But "prior to all evolutionary developments"? Evolution has presumably been going on since the first living thing. No one knows exactly what preceded the first living thing, so how could one know what patterns were there prior to all evolution? And what do Fibonacci patterns have to do with the correctness of Darwinian explanations anyway? And what do the scaling factors the author refers to have to do with the correctness of Darwinian explanations?

Third, the author seems to deny, not only Darwinian ideas, but even common descent, for which the scientific evidence is overwhelming. For example, he says the "asserted tree of evolution". It is not just asserted, it is massively demonstrated by genetic and other evidence. That is why the only real scientist among the major figures in the intelligent design movement, Mike Behe, believes in common descent.

Jerry Fodor has very interesting ideas. I am sure his ideas on evolution are very much worth listening to. It is too bad that one cannot learn anything about them from this article. What, for instance, is the actual structure of the argument that Fodor purportedly makes about the reliance of neo-Darwinism on the concept of "Mother Nature"?

As a Catholic scientist I find this article extremely depressing.

"It is not just asserted, it is massively demonstrated by genetic and other evidence. That is why the only real scientist among the major figures in the intelligent design movement, Mike Behe, believes in common descent."

Pretty much! I mean even the Pope John Paul II embraces evolution.

This is dangerous to humanities indeed! This thinking prevents us from further space exploration. I do like the idea of calling it Evolution II.

Observation:

The book market is hysterical. The goal is now to pitch a book effectively arguing the opposite of what everybody else has ever argued.

So atheists defend ID and Christians defend Peter Singer. Thank you book publishers.

What I find most depressing is that ID is actually anti-science. Proponents point to those elements that they believe are "irreducible" and say "stop here...no further research on the origin of this structure is necessary because it is irreducibly complex." What would happen if ID were accepted as true and became the dominant paradigm? How much time and good science research would be lost?

I think this quote from Feynman is very important:

"Philosophy of science is important to scientists the way that ornithology is important to birds."

Many things in science fly in the face of "good" philosophical arguments. Quantum Mechanics is full of contradictions that are not easily resolved, yet it is a very important area of physics. It is time to put ID away and move on. Philosophers have no say in what is correct in science.

@CRW ***What I find most depressing is that ID is actually anti-science. Proponents point to those elements that they believe are "irreducible" and say "stop here..***

Not true. This tiresome strawman has been rebutted for years. (See: http://www.evolutionnews.org/2011/08/id_a_science_stopper_heres_the049811.html)

Whether ID is good science or not, it is *not* a science stopper.

It must be very convenient for creationists to not understand evolution. It allows you to think that, because evolutionary science does not yet have a fossil for every creature that ever lived or a second-by-second account of our universe's 13+ billion year history, the theory itself is weak enough to be replaced by your myths.

Not that creationism or ID tells us more than evolution does. Quite the opposite; both ID and creationism tell us that we cannot possibly know most of our history, because our learning is at the whim of a god we cannot detect or understand. Thus, ID cannot tell us why bacteria become resistant to our antibiotics, why human physiology and psychology so closely resemble those of apes and other animals, or why the Designer is so inordinately fond of beetles.

Even if evolution were completely false, it still brings us far more useful knowledge than theistic alternatives can hope to.

When good scientists criticize evolution their goal is to improve the theory. To the extent the authors cited above are trying to replace evolution with gods, they aren't being good scientists.

"Philosophers have no say in what is correct in science. "

Hunh? How about ethicists? The idea that SCIENCE! can remain aloof and apart from all other fields of learning is insane.

CRW says: "Philosophers have no say in what is correct in science"

I presume what you mean is that philosophers "ought to", or "ought to be permitted to" have "no say in what is correct in science".
But, my friend, I believe that if you think about it, you must admit that "what is correct in science" is an eminently philosophical concept. You see, no one can think for long, or deeply, without eventually having to reflect on what it is we are actually doing when we think, and that is philosophy!

Joe Carter says, "Not true. This tiresome strawman has been rebutted for years," and then refers us to an argument by a Fellow of the Center for Science and Culture of the Discovery Institute on a web site run by the Discovery Institute.

@David Nickol ***and then refers us to an argument by a Fellow of the Center for Science and Culture of the Discovery Institute on a web site run by the Discovery Institute.***

Um, yes I did. What's your point? What flaws did you find in the rebuttal? (I suspect you didn't even read it.)

Joe - The problem is that the examples of irreducibly complexity that have been advanced - e.g. the bacterial flagellum, the vertebrate clotting cascade, the immune system - have been shown to be evolveable, and not 'irreducible'. But that was shown by scientists doing science, *not* by ID proponents.

ID *could* in fact be useful... if it were actually approached as a science. Imagine a new, virulent disease appears. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to tell if it arose naturally, or if it were deliberately designed by bio-terrorists? If the ID types were to show their techniques could work in such a case, that would be big news. Somehow nobody actually seems to be *pursuing* such a research program, though. Why not?

Hello, Stephen M. Barr,

I take it that your position is that ID is not science, not that the Universe and the life within it was not intelligently designed, since I understand you are a Catholic.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church states:

303 The witness of Scripture is unanimous that the solicitude of divine providence is concrete and immediate; God cares for all, from the least things to the great events of the world and its history. The sacred books powerfully affirm God's absolute sovereignty over the course of events: "Our God is in the heavens; he does whatever he pleases." And so it is with Christ, "who opens and no one shall shut, who shuts and no one opens". As the book of Proverbs states: "Many are the plans in the mind of a man, but it is the purpose of the LORD that will be established."

“... the least things to great events of the world and its history” would include natural history down to the movements of each and every subatomic particle from the beginning of creation. It seems to me that to doubt that God knew about and intended *every* natural event no matter how small is to fail to understand the meaning of omniscience, omnipotence and “God's absolute sovereignty over the course of events.” For God there can be no such thing as randomness or chance. So, from a Catholic theological perspective – and I assume you agree – there is no doubt that the Universe and the life within it were intended and intelligently designed by God.

As for ID not being science, intelligence is a known reality. As such it is entirely scientific to acknowledge that it can be a causal factor in a given phenomenon coming about. True science is relentlessly objective and utterly neutral regardless of the religious/philosophical implications of its discoveries. Do you suppose the objection to ID reveals a lack of objectivity and neutrality on the part of modern science? Could it be that they just don't like the religious/philosophical implications of the fact that currently the best explanation for the nanotechnology of life, which has been found to be light years beyond anything modern science know how to build from scratch, is that an intelligent agent was involved in bringing it about?

As one who has worked with computer hardware and software most of my adult life, taking the position that the astounding functional complexity of the nanotechnology of life somehow came about mindlessly and accidentally is like a jungle savage insisting the laptop he has found somehow came about mindlessly and accidentally. Jungle savages are not stupid, just uneducated. I suspect they have the common sense to assume technology vastly superior to their own is not a mindless accident.

Fodor and Piatelli-Palmerini argue that the formulation of the theory of natural selection is logically incoherent, because when its statements are broken down for their individual meaning, they are made in a form that conceptualizes "Nature" as actively making "selections". The analogy that I thought of when I read their book is the fact that explanations of human psychology tend to break down into pictures of little people operating different sectors of our brains. Even when scientists avoid using little men, they employ little artificial intelligences who act like men. Thus, in Marvin Minsky's book, The Society of Mind, he conceives of human consciousness as a collective activity of a group of collaboratiing lesser data processing agents, who have the attributes of the little men in a headache medicine advertisement.

It is well nigh impossible for humans, including atheists like Richard Dawkins, to speak coherently about Darwinian evolution without using language that assumes an active, intentional agent in nature. Certainly a number of Dawkins' arguments about how random events could generate meaningful information presuppose an anonymous agent inserting intelligence, while avoiding admitting it is there. Thus, Dawkins argues that random generation of letters can generate a phrase from Shakespeare, but he employs an unacknowledged intelligent agent to screen out each generation of random letters, and keep the "good" ones that approach the goal phrase while rejecting the "bad" ones that do not.

Materialists readily acknowledge, and in fact boast, that it requires intelligence to ferret out the way biological systems operate and appreciate their effectiveness and efficiency. Then they declare "Isn't it wonderful how random mutation and natural selection can create something that APPEARS to have been designed by an intelligent biologist?" What Michael Behe did that offended so many biologists was to challenge them to actually go beyond such declarations of faith, and actually demonstrate how their favored theory can fully explain some of these more marvelous living constructions. Actually mapping out a path for gradual, random mutation acted on by differential survivial and propagation of the mutated genes, is done rarely, if at all. I imagine that for most scientists there does not seem to be much point, since scientists accept the conclusion without proof. The fact remains that there is no simple mechanical method for cranking out a brute force answer to how a particular complex biological mechanism came into being. And Stephen Jay Gould pointed out that there is randomness in the survival as well as in the mutations, and that the course of evolution is not in any degree predetermined, so an experiment that reproduced a more primitive state of an organism would have no guarantee that it would recapitulate the path by which the new, complex feature was created.

Behe does not maintain that Darwinian evolution cannot explain MANY or even MOST of the biological mechanisms in living things. He makes the more limited claim, that there are SOME mechanisms that are just too complicated to have come into existence through random, minor mutations, in which EACH stage was useful in conferring a survival/propagation advantage. Essentially, Darwinism asserts that EVERY useful feature of living things can be traced through a succession of stages, each of which is more survival worthy than the one before. It is like a chain of words in which only one letter is modified at a time, but in each case, the modification results in a useful word, leading to the final word in the chain. Darwinism asserts this HAS BEEN DONE for every living thing in existence, which is pretty remarkable considering their large number and diversity. The challenge of reproducing a plausible chain of states in which each new link is greater than or equal to the prior link in its survival power, and each link is minor enough to be a likely mutation of the state before, is not something biologists have learned how to do. Apparently the theory itself is not much help with this, offering no way to trace the actual path of evolutionary history.

DNA analysis would seem to offer at least some information on the history of this transformative process, but it just ends up emphasizing the gaps in our knowledge about how a possible intermediate genome would have fit within the mandatory Darwinian pattern of increasing "fitness".

The strongest argument offered to support Darwinian evolution is just that, if you rule out intervention by an unknown genetic engineer, Darwinian evolution is the only viable theory. And then they insist that you MUST rule out intelligent intervention a priori in order to be a scientist. But that insistence does not work for fields that search for the effects of HUMAN action, such as archeology and forensic investigation. A more appropriate scientific attitude toward the unknown would be an admission that the most logical or likely inference to be drawn from particular evidence might be the action of an intelligent agent, but that conclusion can only stand if all other possible causes have been weighed as well.

I don't see ID as a "science" in its own right, but within the field of biology, it is asking legitimate scientific questions that test the explanatory ability of the neo-Darwinian synthesis. Newtonian Physics was unable to answer ALL of the questions put to it, but so far Special and General Relativity, and Quantum Theory, have a good track record in answering questions. Physicists and astonomers routinely ask these kinds of theory-testing questions.
Their colleagues don't tell them it is forbidden to question the popular theories, or that questions can only arise in the minds of the religious. Astrophysics has lots of unanswered questions, and survives just fine. The defenders of Darwinism need to loosen up, and accept the fact that their favorite theory may not be as all-powerful and comprehensive as they are wont to claim.

@Ray Ingles ***Joe - The problem is that the examples of irreducibly complexity that have been advanced - e.g. the bacterial flagellum, the vertebrate clotting cascade, the immune system - have been shown to be evolveable, and not 'irreducible'. But that was shown by scientists doing science, *not* by ID proponents.***


If you mean that with a lot of hand-waving, those features have been shown that they might possibly, if we stretch the definition to mean just about anything, be evolvable, then yes I guess so. But its not really convincing because these "scientists" are relying on outdated views of neo-Darwinism.

Does this mean that I support the concept of "irreducible complexity?" No, I don't necessarily think the IDers have the right answer either. In fact, I think the two groups are mostly talking past each other.

I'd highly recommend reading University of Chicago molecular biologist James A. Shapiro's book "Evolution: A View from the 21st Century." He clearly shows that the old answer (mutation + natural selection = all life forms) is an untenable, outdated view that is not consistent with modern science. But he also raises questions about the approach of ID. They may have been right about neo-Darwinism but they seem to have ended up in the wrong place.

David Berlinski, pointed out a few years back, (if my memory serves me correctly, it was in one of the many COMMENTARY magaizine pieces that he did, devoted to evolution) that he thinks that, Micheal Behe's criticism of natural selection's capacity to account fully for life's diversity, is similar to those in psychology who criticize Skinner's account as being sufficient to explain all human behavior. Interestingly, these atheistic authors are using what seems to be a similar argument.

The problem is, the evidence seems clear that ID has not been successful in refuting the neodarwinian synthesis, that nearly every biologist accepts. Chrisitians and other Theists would be wise to not jump on anything advocated by ID proponents. Not because it's based on religious premises (it's not. Irreducible complexity,for example, the finding of Behe, is entirely devoid of any religious assumptions) but because it's claims have failed to be verified scientifically.

Perhaps ID is not a science stopper. One can imagine research programs influenced by ID which advance natural science in some way. But ID is not science. It is a philosophy that claims to refute some areas of science.

I see this whole thing as a huge apologetic stumbling block that alienates people who may otherwise be drawn to faith.

As another Catholic scientist (albeit nowhere near as qualified as Dr. Barr) I vehemently agree that this post is depressing. We need to see more explanations by scientists who are also believers. I would love to see Simon Conway Morris in First Things. He is one of the most prominent paleontologists in the world, still publishes in his field, and is a Christian. He is also a very engaging communicator. I highly recommend his book Life's Solution. It's not an easy read because it covers a huge range of technical ground, but it's a fascinating tour of how amazing nature is, and its author doesn't conclude: "therefore there is no God and we should all live like animals".

@Joe Carter
"Evolution: A View from the 21st Century." looks like a very good read. I agree that it's obvious that mutation + natural selection is the primary basis for all life forms (If others need proof, look at bacteria, then imagine the same over generations in bigger life forms)

@Dave Eden ***But ID is not science. It is a philosophy that claims to refute some areas of science.***

I don’t disagree, but we should also recognize that most of what passes for neo-Darwinism is philosophy disguised as science. As Sharpiro says in the book I mentioned earlier:

“A major assertion of many traditional thinkers about evolution and mutation is that living cells cannot make specific, adaptive use of their natural genetic engineering capacities. They make this assertion to protect their view of evolution as the product of random, undirected genome changes. But their position is philosophical, not scientific, nor is it based on empirical observation. “

The assumption is often made that we have to choose between Intelligent Design and neo-Darwinism (theistic evolution is just neo-Darwinism with God as a metaphysical, undetectable force that adds nothing to the scientific equation). But neither one seems to be close to fully matching what the actual science has discovered.

The best approach, in my opinion, is to admit that most people (including scientists) who opine on these issues are simply relying on “experts” who themselves don’t seem to know much about what has actually been detected (much less proven). We are at the beginning of a scientific revolution in biology and have much to learn—and much more to unlearn. Actual scientific knowledge is being impeded by our hanging on to old concepts that we learned in high school biology that turn out to have no basis in reality.

@Stephen M. Barr: Oh, my. When I submitted this piece I started with two paragraphs indicating that I have no problem with the theory of evolution or common descent. I think the editors presumed that this would be taken for granted, and "cut to the chase." I do not think Intelligent Design can be established scientifically, but I think it is of philosophical interest; and this is my focus in my book.
As regards "the impossibility of producing certain types of 'irreducible complexity' by chance interactions," Stephen Meyer in his book, Signature in the Cell, discusses numerous recent attempts to replicate prebiotic natural selection -- all of which seem to miss the important factor of leaving everything to chance. And this of course is Behe's approach with regard to the irreducible complexity of the bacterial flagellum.
The authors of What Darwin got wrong spend several pages on Fibonacci patterns, and I just gave a brief reference to their arguments. They mention that "The presence of Fibonacci patterns is ubiquitous in nature, from galaxies to seashells, from magnetized droplets in a viscous medium to the organization of florets in plants.... Moreover, the numbers of [spirals in plants], clockwise versus counterclockwise) are typically Fibonacci numbers (21 and 34 respectively)." They quote the mathematician Peter Timothy Saunders, writing, "The primary task of the biologist is to discover the set of forms that are likely to appear... [for] only then is it worth asking which of them will be selected." So it appears mathematicians like Dembski may have some valid problems with natural selection, although they are not usually categorized as scientists.

Joe - "If you mean that with a lot of hand-waving, those features have been shown that they might possibly, if we stretch the definition to mean just about anything, be evolvable, then yes I guess so."

"Handwaving" like this? http://www.talkdesign.org/faqs/flagellum.html

Or this? http://www.amazon.com/Evolution-Vertebrate-Current-Microbiology-Immunology/dp/3540664149/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1322600466&sr=8-1

Or this? http://pandasthumb.org/archives/2008/05/behe-vs-lamprey.html

I suppose if *that's* what you mean by handwaving, then yes I guess so. But I'd hate to see what you'd call 'rigorous'...

@Ray Ingles ***I suppose if *that's* what you mean by handwaving, then yes I guess so. But I'd hate to see what you'd call 'rigorous'...***

Have you read those sources? I did, several years ago. They have a lot of verbiage but they aren't all that rigorous. But as I said, I think the issue has been overtaken by recent advances in molecular biology. Many of the things that both the neo-Darwinists and IDers would likely say isn't possible (natural genetic engineering), is likely to have actually happened.

It's pretty clear that Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini do not understand natural selection fully, as Peter Godfrey-Smith's review of their book illustrates.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v32/n13/peter-godfrey-smith/it-got-eaten

Stephen Barr's points are spot on. (Depressing indeed, especially that an emeritus philosopher like Kainz can be so ignorant of evolutionary biology.)

@John Farrell: See my reply to Barr above.

"Critics of ID, on the other hand, especially prominent militant atheists like Richard Dawkins..."

A militant tribal partisan in Africa carries an AK 47 and a machete.

A militant Christian shoots doctors who perform abortions.

A militant Muslim flies a passenger jet into a skyscraper.

A militant Atheist writes books.

Making statements like "there is no evidence for god(s)", "species evolve with no apparent intervention of divine magic", and "it is delusional to think that miracles in the Bible actually happened" is not being "militant". These are words, opinions, statements of fact - none of which are "militant."

Are you so intolerant and is your worldview so limited, Howard Kainz, that anyone who states an opposing point of view or raises an inconviently contractory fact is by definition a "militant"?

Perhaps you'd like to pick a less inflamatory (more sane) description of Richard Dawkins.

I was on staff at one the local newspapers during the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial. I recall being disappointed but not surprised when Judge Jones basically upheld materialism as the only ideology permitted in public school science class. When I wrote commentary to that effect, I was denounced online as my newsroom’s “in-house creationist troll.” Inspired by the fact that I was at least provoking creative forms of disparagement, I have since written a book dealing with intelligent design and the new atheism. You can read more about it here: http://www.halfaleagueonward.com/cms/GodImperativeBook

This post is a breath of fresh air in a time when any attempt to question neo-Darwinism or demonstrate evidence for design in nature is automatically met with "WHY DO YOU HATE SCIENCE!???"

Then if a William Dembski or a Creationist responds, "My ideas fit the science," the conversation turns into something like this:

"Darwinism is science. So obviously your ideas don't fit the science."
"How do you know that Darwinism is good science?"
"Because it's the only scientific explanation for what we observe in nature."
"Intelligence is an explanation."
"But THAT'S NOT SCIENCE you narrow-minded son of Galileo!"
"But I can show you how the science fits my position."
"Then your science is not real science. Because real science would not support your religious conclusion!"

And so the circle goes.

I published a short ebook about this issue, under the outrageous name "Flying Spaghetti Monsters and the Cosmic Infinite Monkey." Wish I would have known about these atheists' new books while I was writing it.

http://www.amazon.com/Flying-Spaghetti-Monsters-Infinite-ebook/dp/B006AKWCPK/ref=sr_1_9?ie=UTF8&qid=1322612127&sr=8-9

Kainz - See this for an explanation of where Fibonacci sequences come from: http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/02/fodor_and_piattelli-palmarini.php

"I look at the whirling squares with the eyes of a developmental biologist, and what do I see? A simple sequential pattern of induction. A patch of cells uses molecules to signal an adjacent patch of cells to differentiate into a structure, and then together they induce a larger adjacent patch, and together they induce an even larger patch…the pattern is a consequence of a mathematical property of a series expressed on a 2-dimensional sheet, but the actual explanation for why it recurs in nature is because it's what happens when patches of cells recruit adjacent cells in a temporal sequence. Abstract math won't tell you the details of how it happens; for that, you need to ask what are the signaling molecules and what are the responding genes in the sunflower or the mollusc. That's where Thompson and these new wankers of the pluralist wedge fail — they stop at the cool pictures and the mathematical formulae and regard the mechanics of implementation as non-essential details, when it's precisely those molecular details that generate the emergent property that dazzles them."

harry
I take it that your position is that ID is not science, not that the Universe and the life within it was not intelligently designed, since I understand you are a Catholic.

I think there are a couple of problems:
a) Confusing creation with evolution.
b) Confusing evolution with natural selection.
c) Confusing design with engineering.
d) Confusing the socio-political philosophy of Darwinism with the scientific theory of Darwin.
And lastly,
e) Supposing that if natural selection proves as inadequate to explain all evolution as gravity proved in explaining local motion then there cannot be an evolutionary equivalent to "electromagnetism." (That is, that a theory can explain many things without explaining everything.)
+ + +
I second or third the Shapiro. For a sample, consider the following article, written a number of years ago.
http://shapiro.bsd.uchicago.edu/Shapiro.1997.BostonReview1997.ThirdWay.pdf

If scientists cannot distinguish between intelligent design and unintelligent design, then clearly Darwin's Theory of Unintelligent Design isn't really scientific.

Imagine if I told you that I had a theory that explained not only complete opposites (some creatures will be small while others will be large, some will be fast while some will be slow, some will be colorful while others will come in various shades of gray, some will burrow while others will leap tall buildings with a single bound ...) but that every time you ran the experiment (Gould's tape of life) you would get a different result! You might as well imagine no John Lennon. You might as well imagine that the flat-earthers had discovered a purely materialistic creation story by simply using their old trick: extrapolating the micro to account for the macro. The mind boggles.

The goal of science is to most accurately describe how the cosmos functions, even if that means that it did not have a natural cause. (How would Nature have a natural cause anyway?) Even if it means that life itself is irreducibly complex. Even if it means that natural selection inhibits major evolutionary change from occurring on a gradual step-by-step basis by eliminating useless transitional stages. Maybe stasis is natural and sudden appearance (the arrival of the fittest) isn't. Maybe scientists need to develop a Theory of Conservation to explain prolonged periods of stasis and the stability of body plans.

One thing is for sure. If the Cosmos was the result of random processes then the filter of natural selection was generated randomly. It follows that the entire Darwinian mechanism collapses into pure chance: randomly generated variations sorted by a randomly generated filter. Invoking the god of chance has to be the greatest science stopper possible.

Besides, if the Cosmos has existed eternally, it follows that there has been a planet where the Chicago Cubs have won each and every World Series. I'm sorry, I just don't have that kind of faith. Nobody with any sense of reason should either.

Descartes proclaimed, "I think, therefore I am."

I imagine God replied, "I AM, therefore think!"

Based on the descriptions above, these books seem just as laden with fallacies and bogus assertions as previous attempts to refute neo-Darwinian evolution by natural selection.

First, "there is perfection everywhere." No there is not -- this statement is provably false and the examples are everywhere. It is not perfect that whales do not have gills and must surface in order to breathe. Sexual selection (peacock feathers, the antlers of American elk) is also horribly inefficient -- it causes organisms to waste perfectly good resources competing for mates.

Second, "But the major neo-Darwinist problem, they conclude, is that natural selection, in analogy to artificial selection, depends on the existence of a mythical “Mother Nature.”"

This is frankly just being silly. All natural selection means is that a given natural environment will tend to cause organisms with some characteristic to flourish and organisms with some other characteristic not to flourish (and the organisms that flourish will tend to alter the environment causing complex feedback loops over the long-run). This is a simple empirical fact.

Joe Carter quotes Shapiro: "A major assertion of many traditional thinkers about evolution and mutation is that living cells cannot make specific, adaptive use of their natural genetic engineering capacities."

What does this sentence even mean? What is a living cell's "specific, adaptive use" of something? Unless the phrase "specific, adaptive use" has some scientific definition, it seems like one of those concepts some of us are going to have to "unlearn" in the middle of this "scientific revolution."

Seems to me nobody really knows what evolution really is, how it began and how exactly its mechanisms operate. ID is not science but it is a scientific theory. Imagine if humans planted seeds on another planet that was then discovered by some alien race. Would these people or aliens or whatever assume that the life that they have discovered simply arose out of thin air or had just somehow "evoluted" out of the rocks and other minerals present or after much deliberate study come reluctantly to the possibility and only that, that perhaps someone or something had put it there. That is a hypothesis that is nothing if not scientific especially if all other explanations appear increasingly less likely to account for life arising out of dead matter. For the record common descent etc. are not theories but have been proven to the extent possible but Evolution is often used to support bad philosophy as much as the idea of irr. complexity or the other scientific ideas in ID are used to support bad theology. The remarkable thing is just that what really seems to me to be a clear science stopper is the assertion that we are alone in the entire universe and there is no higher intelligence of any type anywhere in any shape or form other than us...oh except ofcourse the intelligence exhibited by "mother nature" but that's not really intelligence just a roulette wheel. Even if 5,000 years from now we prove that life spontaneously emerges out of dead matter, we will be left with the question, how and more importantly why? You don't have to be win a nobel in physics to know that no matter how far science gets it will never be able to answer even the simplest questions of a child.
PS Science has become so politicized and that is really the most depressing thing about this post and comments.
Advent is here, God bless.

I hate to pile on, but philosophers and Christian apologists who do not understand evolution are a dime a dozen.


And there's about 30¢ worth of philosophy going on here.

The original article shows no sense of understanding science, particularly evolution.

Joe Carter: Please-- The Discovery Institute is to evolution as Triumph of the Will is to German nationalism.

"Stephen Meyer in his book, Signature in the Cell, discusses numerous recent attempts to replicate prebiotic natural selection -- all of which seem to miss the important factor of leaving everything to chance."

This seems to miss the important fact of statistical probability acting over long time scales.

The most convincing science is always experimental in nature because experiments can be observed and replicated within a single human lifetime. Even the most hardened skeptic can be convinced by a properly controlled scientific experiment to change his mind assuming he is interested in evidence.

When we talk about the chance mutations and conditions that characterize evolution, we are talking about low-probability events that had a chance to emerge over a time of one billion or more years.

This is just the law of large numbers at work. Something that is incredibly unlikely at any given time is paradoxically likely over a very long stretch of time. These kinds of low-probability events are not amenable to experimental science without "rigging" the experiment in a way that greatly increases the probability of what we want to happen but the law of large numbers is a pretty well-established principle of probability.

@Joe Carter: Thanks for that Shapiro book suggestion. I'm okay with your description of theistic evolution, which in a nutshell is my position. I also have an openness to new mechanisms that may be uncovered by genetics and molecular biology, as should professional evolutionary biologists. I wouldn't characterize this as a severe challenge to high school biology. It's just the continuation of the science. Natural selection still explains a lot.

Regarding experts, I suppose you're correct. I like to give a lot of weighting to experts with lifetime experience in field biology and paleontology. Unfortunately atheism seems to be quite prevalent among people in that field, which contributes a lot to the "talking past each other" that you mention. That's why I harp on about Conway Morris. He can meaningfully address evolutionary biologists and Christian philosophers on their own terms. I'd love to find other examples of such individuals, I just haven't found them yet.

I find it interesting that this report on some critics of the theory of natural selection -- just a report -- should be taken as an attack on the fact of evolution itself. The two things are separate -- or maybe not, in the minds of some. Is there an orthodoxy about natural selection that even atheists should give credence to?

"Is there an orthodoxy about natural selection that even atheists should give credence to?"

Evolution by natural selection isn't an "orthodoxy"; it's an evidence-based position. People who want to argue against it are entirely free to do so. However, people who enter the debate with armchair pseudo-philosophical pronouncements, cherry-picked facts and clear errors that demonstrate a lack of high school-level knowledge of biology can expect to be dismissed somewhat harshly. It's just a waste of other people's time.

If you are going to hunt an elephant, you need to bring the right ammunition.

How can yoiu be an atheist and believe in an intelligent designer?

A parallel argument was made by Mark Bickhard in "Teleonomic Functions and Intrinsic Intentionality: Dretske's Theory as a Test Case"

http://khu.academia.edu/ItayShani/Papers/681709/Teleonomic_functions_and_intrinsic_intentionality_Dretskes_theory_as_a_test_case

Bickhard takes aim at evolutionary explanations of intentionality. Basically, natural selection can give us extrinsic intentionality, or, as John Searle would call it, 'as if' intentionality. An example would be writing on a wall which only has intentionality derived from the meaning its author or any reader would give it. There is nothing intrinsically meaningful about scribbles of chalk on a wall. It only has meaning in so far as one gives it meaning.

Natural selection is purely an 'external agent' so anything it produces only has meaning relative to it. This would make the intentional states of our minds purely derived.

I think this is absurd. Our intentionality is intrinsic if anything is.

The bad news of this is that it equally indicts ID theory which also operates on the basis of an external agent as Bickhard argues. What we need is a system of formal and final causation which gives systems back their intrinsic functions and intentionality.

Joe - Can you point out a handwave in one of those sources? Just so I have an example to work from?

"Many of the things that both the neo-Darwinists and IDers would likely say isn't possible (natural genetic engineering), is likely to have actually happened."

Well... not that anyone's been able to actually demonstrate so far. Shapiro uses the adaptive immune system as an example - but it's a process of natural selection. If human engineering proceeded that way, we'd put out millions of screws until we found one that fit.

Mark:"What does this sentence even mean? What is a living cell's "specific, adaptive use" of something? Unless the phrase "specific, adaptive use" has some scientific definition, it seems like one of those concepts some of us are going to have to "unlearn" in the middle of this "scientific revolution." "

I think it is referring to the conventional idea that mutations are random with respect to a trait under selection. The alternative is that organisms are capable of making targeted changes to their genomes, in response to environmental cues.

The salient questions are whether Shapiro is correct that the former statement is a presupposition rather than a conclusion from data, and whether the two statements necessarily contradict, particularly if the latter can only be demonstrated in specific, rare cases.

Art Battson - "If scientists cannot distinguish between intelligent design and unintelligent design"

Well, as the Spartans said: If.

"Even if it means that natural selection inhibits major evolutionary change from occurring on a gradual step-by-step basis by eliminating useless transitional stages."

Look up 'genetic drift'.

"Maybe stasis is natural and sudden appearance (the arrival of the fittest) isn't."

Define "sudden"...

"Maybe scientists need to develop a Theory of Conservation to explain prolonged periods of stasis and the stability of body plans."

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/07/what_caused_the_cambrian_explo.php

"If the Cosmos was the result of random processes then the filter of natural selection was generated randomly."

First off, asking biology to answer questions about the origins of the Cosmos is a bit much. But secondly, who's claiming it was entirely random?

Kainz - "all of which seem to miss the important factor of leaving everything to chance."

At the nearby science museum I take my kids to from time to time, there's a tornado simulator. Push a button, it starts up some fans in a shaped chamber, and you get a vortex.

Does the fact that it required intelligence to arrange for the conditions in that case imply that all tornadoes are caused by intelligent agents? That the conditions giving rise to a tornado can't crop up naturally?

Hello, Ye Olde Statistician,

Shapiro's article was fascinating. Thanks for that.

I agree with you that there is much confusion. I think it is the result of the failure of modern science to remain utterly neutral and relentlessly objective. True science really does have to follow the evidence wherever it leads; modern science doesn't like the religious/philosophical implications of some of its discoveries. True science isn't restricted to that which affirms atheism.

It is difficult to express how absurd the proposition has become that mindless, lifeless matter mindlessly and accidentally assembled itself into the astounding functional complexity of the nanotechnology of life. Shapiro's remarks indicate this to me: “... the molecular revolution has revealed an unanticipated realm of
complexity and interaction … consistent with computer technology ...”, there is a “growing realization that cells have molecular computing networks which process information about internal operations and about the external environment to make decisions controlling growth, movement, and differentiation.”, “Given the enormous complexity of living cells and the need to coordinate literally millions of biochemical events, it would be surprising if powerful cellular capacities for information processing did not manifest themselves.”

In his concluding remarks he states that “... we are just on the threshold of a new way of thinking about living organisms and their variations. Nonetheless, these questions serve to illustrate the potential for addressing the deep issues of evolution from a radically different scientific perspective. Novel ways of looking at longstanding problems have historically been the chief motors of scientific progress. However, the potential for new science is hard to find in the Creationist-Darwinist debate. Both sides appear to have a common interest in presenting a static view of the scientific enterprise. This is to be expected from the Creationists, who naturally refuse to recognize science's remarkable record of making more and more seemingly miraculous aspects of our world comprehensible to our understanding and accessible to our technology. But the neo-Darwinian advocates claim to be scientists, and we can legitimately expect of them a more open spirit of inquiry. Instead, they assume a defensive posture of outraged orthodoxy and assert an unassailable claim to truth, which only serves to validate the Creationists' criticism that Darwinism has become more of a faith than a science. … dogmas and taboos may be suitable for religion, but they have no place in science. No theory or viewpoint should ever become sacrosanct because experience tells us that even the most elegant Laws of Nature ultimately succumb to the inexorable progress of scientific thinking and technological innovation. The present debate over Darwinism will be more productive if it takes place in recognition of the fact that scientific advances are made not by canonizing our predecessors but by creating intellectual and technical opportunities for our successors.”

He is only pretending to be objective. Science and common sense makes it clear that some phenomena can't come about without the involvement of an intelligent agent. If an alien spacecraft crashed into the Earth we would know it wasn't just an exceptionally intricate and complex meteorite. If there was a group scientists whose deepest religious/philosophical convictions were threatened by the idea that there was other intelligent life in the Universe, they would, no doubt, claim it was just a matter of time before science understood how this object came about mindlessly and naturally. They would tell the “Creationists” that they “refuse to recognize science's remarkable record of making more and more seemingly miraculous aspects of our world comprehensible to our understanding and accessible to our technology.” That would be hogwash, as is the notion that the nanotechnology of life came about mindlessly. That is not to say it didn't come about “naturally,” which the discoveries of modern science indicate doesn't mean “mindlessly.”

"Natural selection is purely an 'external agent' so anything it produces only has meaning relative to it. This would make the intentional states of our minds purely derived. "

How do you know that chimpanzees don't have intentional states of mind as well? Chimpanzees are capable of recognizing their reflections in a mirror which indicates some dim sort of self-awareness as their brains have a concept of "me" versus "you" and we certainly know they are far too sophisticated to run on pure instinct.

All this is to say that you have posed a great mystery about the nature of the mind but it's not clear how this is supposed to refute the notion that humans evolved from a common ancestor with chimpanzees as both we and quite possibly our chimpanzee cousins are capable of intentional states of mind.

Mark denies that science is an orthodoxy, but rather an evidence based position. That is correct as a statement of the way science should work. But unfortunately, many scientists are not simply methodological materialists (they have no choice about that--that's what science is) but metaphysical materialists, with a prescientific commitment to materialism to which all reality must conform.

It was a Harvard scientist who let the cat out of the bag:

Dr. Richard Lewontin, the Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology at Harvard University, put it like this: "It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door" (Richard Lewontin, "Billions and Billions of Demons," New York Review of Books, January 9, 1997, p. 28).

Unreflective Christians are not the only players in the dogmatist game.

Best,

Richard

harry - "It is difficult to express how absurd the proposition has become that mindless, lifeless matter mindlessly and accidentally assembled itself into the astounding functional complexity of the nanotechnology of life."

Ever heard the blurb that Christianity is "The belief that a cosmic Jewish zombie who was his own father can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree"?

It so misrepresents the situation such that even the parts that aren't actually false are presented in a highly misleading manner. I'd say your characterization of evolution (and abiogenesis) is equally wrong, and in the same manner.

Before I get clobbered by people who look up Lewontin's review of Carl Sagan's Demon Haunted World, I should point out that Lewontin is passionately and intelligently a materialist whose review is strongly atheistic and naturalistic. His reason for accepting a starting point like the above is to exclude the proliferation of the irrational on the theory, as he reveals in the next sentence quoting another with great approval, that people who can believe in God can believe in anything. The implication is that atheistic naturalists are constrained to accept the rational (i.e. atheistic scientific) view of reality. That is simply not consonant with my experience. One of the most brilliant atheists I know is a passionate believer in astrology who has learned Indian languages to consult the seminal texts, and many of the Christians I know are careful, critical, and even sceptical thinkers.

I am certainly a theist, but I do have a long term confidence in science to be self enlarging and self correcting and its internal mavericks will keep pushing the received wisdom, which will hold up or not. Some are working on it right now. I will not live long enough to see science turned upside down, but I may yet see some very shaken atheists scrambling to debunk the rigorous debunking of some of their dearest notions. At 69 I have serious choices to make, and I chose the very broadly held view, which science does not and cannot refute, that there is a higher power that overlooks and undergirds the being we can readily consult. Let others choose as they see fit.

Best,

Richard

Hi, Ray,

Yeah, your blurb about Christianity makes it seem preposterous. If all I knew about Christianity was basically what was in that blurb, but also knew that some of the greatest minds ever had wholeheartedly embraced it, I would have to assume there was more to Christianity than what was in your blurb. And you can insist that there is more to an atheistic explanation of the origin of life than what was in my remark, and that many great minds wholeheartedly embrace it.

Yet you are light years away from being able to demonstrate how life could have come about mindlessly and accidentally. So, even the most extensive atheistic explanation of the origin of life currently available is one that is essentially a matter of faith. Atheism at its core is a matter of faith: it can't be be proven that God isn't there; that belief must be taken on faith.

Christians readily admit their beliefs require faith. So, whose faith is reasonable and whose faith is an irrational, blind faith?

Our common experience indicates that there is a level of functional complexity that can only come about with the involvement of an intelligent agent. Our world is full of examples of functionally complex phenomena that we know could have never come about mindlessly. At the very least we can say that even if it were somehow possible given enough time, it is unreasonable to the point of irrationality to attempt to figure out how mindless, natural processes could bring such phenomena about.

With that in mind, and knowing that such phenomena are crude technology in comparison to life in that they don't have built into them the ability to reproduce themselves, and are otherwise crude technology compared to life, does it take more faith to assume the nanotechnology of life is the result of what we know is always involved in bringing about massive functional complexity -- an intelligent agent -- or does it take more faith to assume that the nanotechnology of life, even though it is light years beyond anything we know how to build from scratch, is somehow the result of mindless processes? It takes an irrational, blind faith to assume the latter. It takes only a very reasonable faith to assume the former. It can't be scientifically proven either way, but there are numerous examples of massive functional complexity that were brought about with the involvement of intelligent agents, and no examples of massive functional complexity coming about mindlessly. So, regardless of the fairness of my remark or your blurb, atheism takes a position that requires far more faith than most theists are able to muster up.

"I find it interesting that this report on some critics of the theory of natural selection -- just a report -- should be taken as an attack on the fact of evolution itself."

It wasn't "just" a report. The last sentence gives it away. This was an advocacy piece--and it does not display adequate evidence of subject matter knowledge. Both Stephen Barr and John Farrell, who have commented critically here, have written extensively on this subject and you appear to be unaware of their prior work.

I would begin by reviewing Stephen Barr's prior posts right here at First Things and any of John Farrelll's articles in a number of periodicals.

Mark

Not disputing that Chimps have some form of intentionality but it is not on a par with human intentionality witness the work of john searle donald davidson john mcdowell. But that still doesn't dissolve the problem of intentionality for natural selection.

Perhaps you'd like to pick a less inflamatory (more sane) description of Richard Dawkins.

Bumptious?

It is not perfect that whales do not have gills and must surface in order to breathe.

Why not?

Sexual selection (peacock feathers, the antlers of American elk) is also horribly inefficient

Or would be, if it were not an illusion projected onto nature by minds evolved to "see" patterns. Recall what field naturalists observe: While the males with the big racks are locking horns, the nerd deer with the pocket packs and the smaller antlers are off mating with the does. It's that old "empirical evidence" thingie versus a good-sounding "just-so" story.

This seems to miss the important fact of statistical probability acting over long time scales.

I love "then a miracle happens" arguments. Or do we believe that thousands of people die every year from asteroid impacts? That good ol' pN>0 argument impresses statisticians far less than it does laymen.

Evolution by natural selection isn't an "orthodoxy"; it's an evidence-based position.

Actually, it's a metaphysical stance, "this view of life," under whose aegis the evidence is interpreted. It cannot in fact be falsified. You can present Z and not-Z and get plausible-sounding adaptationist stories in both cases.

Shapiro uses the adaptive immune system as an example - but it's a process of natural selection.

Only if "natural selection" is redefined. "Survivors survive" has something of a tautological ring to it. Natural selection is specifically a) the species strives to the utmost to reproduce + b) the individuals compete for resources (which their numbers far exceed) = c) only the best fit of the species survive to pass on their traits. However, genetics may have far more tricks up her sleeves than that.

If human engineering proceeded that way, we'd put out millions of screws until we found one that fit.

If human engineering used the "many-eggs gambit." What if it used the "large young gambit"? But then "design" and "engineering" may not mean the same thing. I may have designs on that piece of chocolate cake without necessarily doing mechanical drawing and BoM at the drafting table.

Define "sudden"...

One might be forgiven for coming to the conclusion that evolution, by natural selection, is an a priori truth, on an epistemological level of veracity similar to mathematics, if one was relying exclusively on some atheistic biologists claims concerning it. They sometimes give the impression that it cannot be rationally questioned, because it's truth has been absolutely proven. Of course, these same scientists would acknowledge that the theory of evolution, via natural selection, is a theory, constructed on the basis of empirical data, and the deductions derived from this data, but they seem to want to give the impression that anyone who questions it is perhaps an ignoramus.

Clearly, any scientific theory, is provisional in that subsequent empirical evidence could cause it to be abandoned, and evolutionary theory is no exception. And, because some atheistic biologists seem so dogmatic about it, (although things seem to be getting better), it tends to, human nature being what it is, cause those already predisposed to rejecting it (e.g., Chrisitan Fundamentalists, Evangelicals), to seem to want to challenge it even more. It's almost as if these atheistic scientists are, deep down, really worried that the critics might be on to something, so they proclaim the secularist equivalent of ex cathedra, on the issue, and say this isn't up for debate.


But these atheistic scientists can take a huge collective, stress reducing nap, knowing that when they wake up, (after pleasant dreams of Darwin beating the pants off of some Biblical Literalist in debate) the Neodarwinian sysnthesis will be alive and flourishing.


In fact, they should welcome the criticism. It's as we all know, the only way to make any theory stronger, is for it to be ruthlessly criticized. As Popper pointed out, even if one disagrees with all of his claims vis a vis the philosophy of science, subjecting a theory to falsification, is the way to go.


And, what's remarkable, is how well evolution by natural selection has stood up. Every objection, thus far, has been adequately answered. Tellingly, nearly every objection is raised by those with no specialized training in biology, and has been ripped apart by those experts in the field.

@MarK: You say, "Stephen Meyer in his book, Signature in the Cell, discusses numerous recent attempts to replicate prebiotic natural selection -- all of which seem to miss the important factor of leaving everything to chance."
According to Meyer, theories of prebiotic natural selection necessarily fail because they need information which implies they have to presuppose what is to be explained in the first place. For example, in experiments to create proteins, the choice of materials or atmosphere or temperatures. He goes into quite a few such experiments in his book.
You add, "This seems to miss the important fact of statistical probability acting over long time scales."
Meyer criticizes the way that some scientists use "chance" as a catchall explanation or a cover for ignorance. He cites P.T. Mora, a biologist with NIH: "When in statistical processes, the probability is so low that for practical purposes infinite time must elapse for the occurrence of an event, statistical explanation is not helpful." For example, he cites Douglas Axe's calculations that the odds of getting even one functional protein of modest length by chance from a prebiotic soup is no better than 1 chance in 10 to the 164th.

"Meyer criticizes the way that some scientists use "chance" as a catchall explanation or a cover for ignorance."

The point I made was that it is simply an invalid argument to say that experiments concerning the origin of life "miss the important factor of leaving everything to chance." Once we recognize this as an invalid argument (for failing to take into account the operation of the law of large numbers over a time-scale of 1 billion years), that means the question is very much amenable to experimental evidence.

Now, it could well be that even under the right conditions, the odds of a protein of modest length being formed are 10^-64. I'm not sure what this number is based on but if it were true, that would pose some pretty serious problems for the theory that life arose on earth purely from natural circumstances. However, if an experiment overturns this figure, it simply won't do to say that the experiment isn't useful because it didn't leave everything to chance.

As much as I respect Mr. Carter's obvious intelligence, and integrity, that he brings to FIRST THINGS, I cannot help being stunned, at what I can only call, forgive me,what seems like arrogance on his part, concerning evolution's veracity as a theory. He claims that the neodarwinian syntheisis, is "outdated'', and that it's mostly philosophy rather than science.

As intelligent as Mr. Carter is, he's not a biologist, or even a scientist. And yet, he believes that he's so knowledgeable about this subject that he can confidently imply that nearly every biologist is wrong.


His claim that neodarwinian theory is outdated is just wrong. And his claim that it's "mostly philosophy'' is just wrong. He also asserts that many of the scientists in the field, are to a large extent basing their belief in evolution's validity on authority! If so, what is Mr. Carter, a nonscientist, basing his views on?

I'm guessing that, either Mr. Carter is just being immensely skeptical here, or he's trying to make biology fit into his, what seems to me, literal interpretation of the Bible.


I have great respect for Mr. Carter's writing. And he seems likle a decent person, and I've interacted with him on a few occasions on these issues, and he's was very cordial and respectful.

But the empirical evidence for evolution is very abundant, and the neodarwinian synthesis is therefore the best theoretical construct that we have at this time.

I'm coming late to this discussion, and I apologize if I missed this in the discussion thread, but I'd like to ask about the likely impact of such non-theistic defenses of intelligent design on classroom practice in the USA. If I recall correctly, didn't Judge Jones in the Dover trial rule on the basis of something like the Supreme Court's "Lemon" test? That is, since the writers of Of Pandas and People and the Dover school board members had a demonstrably religious interest in promoting intelligent design in public schools, their curriculum must be ruled unconstitutional?
By this logic, couldn't different criticisms of neo-Darwinism, such as Shapiro's (mentioned above), have a much bigger impact on K-12 public educational policy? I take a stab at discussing this in a little more detail here: http://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org
The problem for the pro-intelligent design community, as I see it, is that any activist promoting even non-theistic arguments in favor of intelligent design will somehow have to prove that he or she is not promoting intelligent design in order to promote religion. Yet only religiously motivated people seem interested enough to promote intelligent design in schools.

@Ye Olde Statistician:

Why is it not perfect that whales don't have gills? Simple -- almost every other sea creature has gills and for the simple reason that sea creatures are literally surrounded by perfectly usable oxygen. Ever go scuba diving before? Then you know first-hand the danger of repeatedly surfacing and sinking again.

"I love "then a miracle happens" arguments. Or do we believe that thousands of people die every year from asteroid impacts? That good ol' pN>0 argument impresses statisticians far less than it does laymen."

I already addressed this strawman above. Obviously, the actual value of "p" is an incredibly important. A success rate of p=10^-8 per year means we likely won't observe a success in this lifetime but does mean we can predict success over a time scale of 1 billion years. Just apply the exponential distribution to estimate the expected length of waiting time.

"Actually, [evolution by natural selection is] a metaphysical stance, "this view of life," under whose aegis the evidence is interpreted. It cannot in fact be falsified. You can present Z and not-Z and get plausible-sounding adaptationist stories in both cases."

Two clear cases where you do not get plausible-sounding stories are in evolutionary arms races and especially in the specific arms-race of mimicry.

YOS - "Or do we believe that thousands of people die every year from asteroid impacts? That good ol' pN>0 argument impresses statisticians far less than it does laymen."

YOS, *you* are the one completely misrepresenting the argument there.

The fact that most of the time people don't die from asteroid impacts *in no way* proves that asteroids haven't impacted the Earth in the past. The fact that 'good mutations' are rare *in no way* indicates that they are impossible. See, e.g. here: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14094-bacteria-make-major-evolutionary-shift-in-the-lab.html

YOS - ""Survivors survive" has something of a tautological ring to it. Natural selection is specifically a) the species strives to the utmost to reproduce + b) the individuals compete for resources (which their numbers far exceed) = c) only the best fit of the species survive to pass on their traits."

Are you familiar with how the adaptive immune system works? A huge number of antigen receptors are generated (which far exceed the number of pathogens any individual might encounter in their lifetime), and the ones that respond to the presence of a new pathogen are selected for activation and action. That's not 'intelligence' in the sense used in *human* design.

@Mark and Bret: The nature of "chance" is a philosophical problem from time immemorial, and insofar as natural selection in neo-Darwinism invokes chance interactions, it involves a philosophical issue. In science, the problem is an over-reliance on explanations through chance, very often ending up in "just so" narratives. Darwin in "Origin of the Species" was aware of the problem. He writes, "I have hitherto sometimes spoken as if the variations so common and multiform in organic beings under domestication, and in a lesser degree in those in a state of nature had been due to chance. This, of course, is a wholly incorrect expression, but it serves to acknowledge plainly our ignorance of the cause of each particular variation."

Hello, Bret Lythgoe,

"I'm guessing that, either Mr. Carter is just being immensely skeptical here, or he's trying to make biology fit into his, what seems to me, literal interpretation of the Bible."

Could it be that many biologists are attempting to make biology fit into atheistic dogma?

Regardless of how life evolved after it got started, science is nowhere near explaining how mindless, lifeless matter assembled itself into that first reproducing life form. That naturally occurring replication of chemical units of some kind, the copying errors of which allowed for "natural selection" to take place in these chemical units before there was life as we know it, resulting in life, is far-fetched and relies more on the atheistic hope that massive functional complexity can, in fact, come about mindlessly and accidentally than on any evidence that it does so.

There are no examples of massive functional complexity coming about mindlessly. One could say life is an example of that, but that is the phenomenon whose origin is being explained. When every other instance of massive functional complexity known to man is the result of intelligent agents, what is reasonable about assuming that the most functionally complex phenomenon known to man is a mindless accident? Nothing. That belief is based on atheistic dogma, not science. If ID is not science, atheism certainly isn't science.

Mr. Carter is not “trying to make biology fit into his … literal interpretation of the Bible." Atheists are attempting to portray their “religious” beliefs as having the certainty of science. They don't. The belief that God isn't there is a belief that must be taken on faith since it can't be proven God isn't there. Beliefs about God that must be taken on faith are, in that sense, “religious” beliefs.

There is simply no good reason to assume massive functional complexity can occur mindlessly and accidentally. It is not like there are instances of naturally occurring replication bringing about functional complexity that is 1/4 or 1/2 or 3/4 of the way to reaching the functional complexity of life. There is no scientific reason to believe massive functional complexity comes about mindlessly and accidentally.

@ Howard Kainz: The nature of "chance" is a philosophical problem from time immemorial, and insofar as natural selection in neo-Darwinism invokes chance interactions, it involves a philosophical issue.

The first part of your statement is true, but the second is not accurate. Again, I have to question just how well you understand the science when you say that natural selection "invokes chance interactions". The stochastic processes of which Darwin quite obviously could not have been aware, such as genetic mutations, recombinations, wholesale duplication of genes, etc., passed from one generation to the next, are the random component of evolution. Natural selection is not random.

But if we're going to argue that we can ignore the science and simply decide on philosophical grounds that evolution "has problems", why not just adopt Tom Bethell's knee-jerk "survival of the fittest is a tautology" line and be done with the entire discussion?

An excellent new book on the chance processes in evolution, by the way (if no one has already mentioned it), is Eugene V. Koonin's The Logic of Chance: The Nature and Origin of Biological Evolution.

Bret Lythgoe: I don't think Joe is stepping out of line here. The criticism of neo-Darwinism, understood to be selection based on random mutation, and only random mutation, is being questioned by scientists who are not creationists or IDers or perhaps even theists. I think Joe is essentially quoting Shapiro and perhaps others. I haven't read Shapiro's book yet, but I’ve read the online blurbs and the article helpfully linked by Ye Olde Statistician. Shapiro seems to be pointing out that the mechanisms of genetics are much more complex than the random-mutation-only model that is part of the neo-Darwinian model at least as it was originally stated. I can bring in again my admitted intellectual hero, Simon Conway Morris, who is listed as one of the endorser’s of Shapiro’s book on the publisher’s website. Conway Morris is hardly an ideological critic of neo-Darwinism as science. His specialty is the early Cambrian explosion, and his research concerns profound questions of the taxonomic relationships at the root of the tree of life for animals. He is as mainstream and prestigious as it gets in the world of paleobiology. Better yet, he’s not an armchair theoretician but has spent the months in remote field sites and years in the lab looking at fossils (sorry, but as geologist I put a lot of value on that – there’s something about the perspective one gets from repetitive work in the field). I don’t want to put words in his mouth, but I infer that Conway Morris sees new ideas from genetics not as challenges to organic evolution, but as supplements or new means of enhancing the science. (And, incidentally, he started out as an atheist, I think, and became a Christian at some point. He is widely criticized, nay, hated, by atheist apologists, who for example call him a “mind creationist” because he accepts that immaterial explanations may be required to fully explain the mind. But he is also an outspoken critic of Intelligent Design.)

So, by critiquing neo-Darwinism, Joe is perhaps quoting a view held by very well respected scientists, one a biochemist and molecular biologist, the other a paleontologist.

adamlaats - "By this logic, couldn't different criticisms of neo-Darwinism, such as Shapiro's (mentioned above), have a much bigger impact on K-12 public educational policy?"

If - and only if - they could be shown to have scientific merit. Evolution is part of a *science* curriculum, after all. ID, for example, hasn't shown itself to be of sufficient (any?) scientific merit (yet?). Similarly, abiogenesis isn't a topic for K-12 study as none of the hypotheses in that area gave sufficient evidential support to be considered a theory - in the scientific sense (yet?).

On a different note, to all of you talking about the implausibility of complexity arising from mindless forces. I am not a materialist. I believe that miracles happen millions of times every day, for example, whenever the mass is celebrated and bread and wine get transsubstantiated into the Body and Blood of Christ. I actually project a more majestic power on God than creationists, because I don't require him to tinker with material reality after creation to generate life, some of which will eventually coexist with eternal souls. Just because experiments trying to generate life from unliving matter have failed, doesn't mean it couldn't have happened. Who knows, maybe God did directly intervene in the world whose laws he set in the origin of life? He certainly could have. But I think it's actually more amazing if he cooked up the laws of physics and the initial conditions to eventually lead to life. And there are so many other things that we originally attributed to direct acts of creation that are now easily explained with science (the structure of the earth and it's surface features, for example). This suggests to me that even amazing biochemical computers can be explained physically. I say this because it makes sense, not because I want to look cool to atheists.

Hello, Dave Eden,

"I say this because it makes sense, not because I want to look cool to atheists."

I am glad to hear that. I don' t think that is true of all Christians who are beating up ID.

For Catholics it is a matter of dogma that the Universe and the life within it were intelligently designed by God. One has to assume that from the dogmatic statement of Vatican Council I:

"If anyone says that the one, true God, our creator and lord, cannot be known with certainty from the things that have been made by the natural light of human reason: let him be anathema."

That doesn't leave any room for orthodox Catholics to believe the Universe and the life within are mindless accidents. True science and common sense don't leave any room for that either.

@John Farrell: You say the random variations (or mutations) in evolution are the "random component," but evolution is not random? If it is not random, what is the law (or laws) governing evolution?" If you are just referring to "the random component," that's what I am referring to; but you seem to imply that there is some non-random, law-like component also, and that is what the authors of What Darwin Got Wrong are objecting to. They are looking for laws, and they believe natural selection falls seriously short of a law.
In your message, you also mention "An excellent new book on the chance processes in evolution," after criticizing me for referring to "chance interactions." That doesn't compute.

Professor Kainz,

Thank you for the article and your comments. You are indeed correct that at the bottom of this Darwinian controversy is the problem of "chance" and "randomness."

One would have to question how well Darwin understood its nature and importance. Darwin was not much of a mathematician and philosopher and he certainly wasn't exact in his usage of words like chance. Perhaps he knew to some extent, (and he was worried about releasing his theory), but then he was irresponsible, and the nasty history that followed has proven it many times over. He certainly did release a lot of demons of confusion into the world.

As far as the action of natural selection or whatever mechanisms Darwinians or evolutionists invoke these days, it has been nothing but vague fork-tongued doublespeak ever since, certainly for the last 35 years I have been following this. Their claim that they know philosophically what they are talking about is nothing but self-contradictory rubbish.

Certainly "Darwinian Christians" like Stephen M. Barr or John Farrell better clarify this, or else their belief in the magic or haphazard solution of merging Darwinism with Christianity or Catholicism, and presenting it as infallible science, is heresy (and in several aspects) considering what Catholics believe, such as:

"295 We believe that God created the world according to his wisdom.141 It is not the product of any necessity whatever, nor of blind fate or chance. We believe that it proceeds from God's free will; ..." (Catholic Catechism, 295, etc.)

http://www.vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/archive/catechism/p1s2c1p4.htm

Mark says:
Why is it not perfect that whales don't have gills? Simple -- almost every other sea creature has gills and for the simple reason that sea creatures are literally surrounded by perfectly usable oxygen.

YOS
But how does that contribute to the perfection of the whale's nature? I do not possess a fan of green skin that I can spread to all that lovely sunlight to soak up the energy with which I am bathed and convert it chemically to sugars. IOW, why would it be a perfection to the whale to be not-a-whale?

Mark says:
Obviously, the actual value of "p" is an incredibly important. A success rate of p=10^-8 per year means we likely won't observe a success in this lifetime but does mean we can predict success over a time scale of 1 billion years. Just apply the exponential distribution to estimate the expected length of waiting time.

Yes, that's the fallacy of applying some incredibly small p to some incredibly large N and assuming you have made a statement of fact. It can only be done statistically IF the N represents a statistical population. (It also assumed that p was estimated from a random sample taken from the same population N.) Even in industrial situations this is not the case. Processes are often dynamic, not static, and do not consist of a fixed proportion p of red balls in an urn. You are trying to apply this "urn" thinking
a) to a process which may not be a population in a statistical sense
b) using a p that has not been estimated by a random sample
c) and which may or may not be representative of the future.

Mark says:
Two clear cases where you do not get plausible-sounding stories are in evolutionary arms races and especially in the specific arms-race of mimicry.

Why are these stories not plausible. "X possesses trait A. X has survived. Therefore, A is an illustration of adaptation." This works for all values of X and A.

This is why Blyth, who twenty years before Darwin originated the concept of natural selection (though he did not call it that) considered it the means by which a species MAINTAINED its type. Any currently existing species is already well-adapted to its niche. Variations to its type may advance its perfection (i.e., make it better at its niche-job) but will more likely produce imperfections, which natural selection will weed out, thus preserving the original type as is, or maybe a little more fine-tuned.

This is why Darwin, although he used parts of Blyth's text almost verbatim, never acknowledged him as a predecessor. (It was Blyth who gave Darwin the heads-up on Wallace's research.)
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Ray Ingles
Define "sudden"...

Sudden =

Consider IDvolution (idvolution.org) -God “breathed” the super language of DNA into the “kinds” in the creative act.

This accounts for the diversity of life we see. The core makeup shared by all living things have the necessary complex information built in that facilitates rapid and responsive adaptation of features and variation while being able to preserve the “kind” that they began as. Life has been created with the creativity built in ready to respond to triggering events.
Since it has been demonstrated that all living organisms on Earth have the same core, it is virtually certain that living organisms have been thought of AT ONCE by the One and the same Creator endowed with the super language we know as DNA that switched on the formation of the various kinds, the cattle, the swimming creatures, the flying creatures, etc.. in a pristine harmonious state and superb adaptability and responsiveness to their environment for the purpose of populating the earth that became subject to the ravages of corruption by the sin of one man (deleterious mutations).
IDvolution considers the latest science and is consistent with the continuous teaching of the Church.

@Ye Olde Statistician: The authors of What Darwin got Wrong focused in some detail on research that had to do with biological perfection. I found this interesting, and I'll give a couple examples:
Research on non-genomic nativism by Christopher Cherniak et al: “Combining a detailed anatomo-physicological analysis of the nervous system of the nematode, all the way up to the cortex of cats and monkeys, with a long series of computational simulations, it emerged that the minimization of connection costs among interconnected components appears either perfect, or as good as can be detected with current methods....The cortex is better designed than the best industrial microchip.”
Research on invariants of animal locomotion by engineer Adrian Bejan and biologist James H. Marden: : “The parameters that characterize, for each species, the locomotion that accomplishes the most for unit of energy consumed, that is, the points at the bottom of the U-shaped curve of cost versus speed, align neatly along a straight line in a logarithmic scale.... The respiratory patterns of the highly complex and variable temporal organization of song in the canary... can be generated as solutions of a simple model describing the integration between song control and respiratory centres.... Have all sorts of suboptimal neuronal setups and of the ensuing suboptimal singing patterns been tried out at random over the aeons and natural selection made it so that only the optimal singers left descendants?”
Their point, of course, is not that ID is the way to go, but that some materialistic methodology has to be found to explain such ideal fits that one would not expect from natural selection.

YOS: "But how does that contribute to the perfection of the whale's nature?"

You are simply taking the issue out of its original context. In the post above, Kainz speaks of nature seemingly solving complex problems of maximizing energy efficiency, or solving complex problems that computer science PhDs work on (such as connecting network nodes together in a way to optimize the trade-off between number of connections and speed of signal). Now you are talking about "the perfection of the [organism's] nature" which is a statement far removed from any scientific or empirical principles and appears to be rather tautological the way you set it up.

YOS: "Yes, that's the fallacy of applying some incredibly small p to some incredibly large N and assuming you have made a statement of fact."

I didn't assume anything and have been extremely clear in my comments.

YOS: "Why are these stories not plausible. "X possesses trait A. X has survived. Therefore, A is an illustration of adaptation." This works for all values of X and A. "

I don't know what this statement has to do with the subject of natural selection and whether or not it can be falsified. The statement is incomplete because evolution by natural selection is not concerned with the survival of individual organisms but rather with the propagation and changing of traits in a gene pool. Moreover, evolutionary biologists spend quite a bit of time formulating theories on which traits interacted with a given environment will be more likely to be propagated. These theories can then be tested against the data and potentially falsified. The fact that you are seemingly unaware of this line of research does not mean it does not exist.

"The nature of "chance" is a philosophical problem from time immemorial, and insofar as natural selection in neo-Darwinism invokes chance interactions, it involves a philosophical issue. In science, the problem is an over-reliance on explanations through chance, very often ending up in "just so" narratives."

Chance or probability is surely a philosophical problem. It is also involved in quantum mechanics, meteorology, geology, medicine, biology and some branches of engineering.

So lots of fields rely on the concept of probability in order to generate results that are of practical and highly beneficial use to us. An "over-reliance" as opposed to a mere reliance on probability would be a bad thing but it has to be proven rather than asserted.

"[God did it.] This accounts for the diversity of life we see."

Anyone can invoke an imaginary supreme being, give it whatever traits are necessary to making it unfalsifiable, and assert that it is responsible for whatever you want it to be responsible for.

Doing actual science is much harder.

"Darwin was not much of a mathematician and philosopher and he certainly wasn't exact in his usage of words like chance. Perhaps he knew to some extent, (and he was worried about releasing his theory), but then he was irresponsible, and the nasty history that followed has proven it many times over."

This is an anachronistic criticism of Darwin. Darwin did not understand genetics and it is widely believed he had not even heard of Gregor Mendel's experiments. Darwin drew on less scientific observations and principles in his day but wound up getting a lot right. He realized, for instance, that individuals inherit traits not just from parents but also from grandparents, great-grandparents, etc. He also understood the importance of what he called "monstrosities" to his theory: genetic abnormalities have a tendency to creep up in any group of animals but the crucial fact is that these are inherited by the children should the original animal be able to reproduce.

As for whether chance can create beneficial mutations, see the Lenski experiment for a very rigorous confirmation of this principle using E. Coli bacteria in a long-term observational experiment. That mutations do occur and can be beneficial to an organism is simply a fact at this point.

Hi harry & Dave Eden:

Thank you for your perceptive and intelligent comments. I think that there's a risk of us talking past each other, here, and so I want to state at the start that, the notion that the universe arose from unintelligent causes is nonsensical. I believe that God created the universe, and everything in it, but HOW He chose to do so, may suprise us. Certainly, if there's no God, or any other intelligent agents in the universe, there would be no life on earth (indeed there would be no universe!) and there would be no evolution. So I'm not in any way buying the notion that evolution can happen "by itself''. And I don't buy the notion that planets revolving around their stars happen "by themselves'', if this means no God is ultimately necessary.

So I agree with you, harry that, in order to get complicated organisms, one needs an intelligent creator. However, for whatever reason or reasons, God has chosen to not be involved, or at least not empirically detectable, in the contingent evolutionary process. But this is only because He chose to do it this way. He chose to allow natural selection, acting on contingently existing genetic material, to develop all life. True, many atheistc scientists have seemed rather pleased with natural selection, in that it gives intellectual justifcation for their atheism (an amusing example of this, is Richard Dawkins, the Oxford evolutionary biologist, stating to fellow atheist, the analytical philosopher A.J. Ayer, that Darwin made it so one could be intellectually fullfilled, or justified. I'm paraphrasing. This is interesting, though. One wonders why Darwin, a highly intellectually honest person, from what I can gather, was an agnostic, and not an atheist.).

Dave Eden, I too, have great respect for Dr. Morris. He's certainly done a lot of great work, showing how Chrisitanity is compatable with evolution. But, and it seems like you agree with this, he seems to accept full the neodarwinian acccount. He doesn't, from what I can tell, believe that it's "mostly philosophy''. Clearly, the nature of science is that, unless the methodology has produced a correct account, we can expect changes, even radical ones, as the beginning of the 1900's did for physics. So this may happen in biology too, after all, Darwin himself created radical change. But there's no reason to believe this, now. My point was/is, Joe Carter is not justified in claiming that the science of evolutionary biology is "mostly philosophy.'' He's certainly entitled to his opinion, obviously, but I see no reason to beleve this. There seems to be a tremendous amount of empirical data for evolution. And, if Mr. Carter is correct, then most biologists must be either incompetent, in missing that their science should be reclassified as mostly philosophy, or dishonest. I'm not saying that Mr. Carter thinks this way of biologists, but I'm saying that these two options are what seem to me to be the logical ramifications of his claim. And, if the scientists are relying on the work of others, at least to some extent, for their beliefs concerning evolution, then, a fortiori, someone who is not even a scientist would have to rely on others even more, which seems to undermine the point that Mr. Carter was trying to make here, namely that, from what I can gather, if the biologists and other scientists were doing the original research themselves, they would be at least more skeptical, or even reject completely, the current evolutionary account.

Howard Kainz,

Sorry, I missed your comment, on my first reading. Certainly we have to be careful with the explanation of "chance''. But this is from our perspective. As the evangelical Christian Francis Collins stated, God, being outside of space and time, knows exactly what will happen and when. I agree with this. And there's certainly a lot of speculation out there, especially in the area of sociobiology, or evolutionary pscychology, which has not in any way reached the level of scientific respectability as evolutionary biology proper, has.

@ Howard Kainz, You say the random variations (or mutations) in evolution are the "random component," but evolution is not random?

No. I said Natural Selection is not random. Genetic variation is. My mistake for thinking you could see the distinction.

Bret Lythgoe: I don't recall exactly from Conway Morris' books, but I do recall from a podcast (search his name in iTunes and some great free material turns up) that he has said things such as, and I'm just paraphrasing from memory, "the basic outline of the neo-Darwinian account is true". But he is also quoted on the publisher's website for Shapiro's book, and here I'm copying and pasting text: "Shapiro’s new evolutionary synthesis reveals life to possess an immense subtlety of integration and embedded sentience. No evolutionary biologist can afford to ignore Shapiro’s message.”

There is a distinction between neo-Darwinism as philosophy and as science. As science, Conway Morris supports it but interprets it liberally, open to mechanisms beyond random mutation only as understood a few decades ago, but he vigorously rejects the IDers inference that the mechanism must have been direct intervention by God to make DNA or whatever. As philosophy, neo-Darwinism is used to back up materialism and atheism as you've mentioned, and Conway Morris rejects that as philosophy.

If Joe Carter meant to claim that evolutionary biology is "mostly philosophy", I would be with you in disputing that. Perhaps what Joe is getting at, and this I agree with, is that many evolutionary biologists make philosophical claims supporting materialism and claim that it is science. Other scientists also make this elementary error, such as Hawking in his recent publicized leaps of logic.

Hello, Bret Lythgoe,

Thanks for your thoughtful remarks.

“... for whatever reason or reasons, God has chosen to not be involved, or at least not empirically detectable, in the contingent evolutionary process. But this is only because He chose to do it this way. He chose to allow natural selection, acting on contingently existing genetic material, to develop all life.”

Any contingency is from our perspective only. God, being omniscient, is never surprised by what takes place within His creation. If one begins a process and knows in every detail exactly what is going to happen along the way and what the final result will be, there is no contingency from his perspective. (See my previous remarks to Stephen M. Barr regarding Catholic belief in “God's absolute sovereignty over the course of events.”)

My perspective on functional complexity was formed at least in part by my having written a programming language compiler and interpreter, and software that emulates the instruction set of a CPU, among other technical projects involving things like telephony and communicating with robotic equipment on the factory floor. From my perspective, that massive functional complexity does not come about mindlessly and accidentally is so painfully obvious that the notion that it can come about that way would be hysterically funny if it weren't for the lethal ramifications of that ridiculous atheistic belief being commonly held.

You summed up Mr. Carter's thought as follows: “... if the biologists and other scientists were doing the original research themselves, they would be at least more skeptical, or even reject completely, the current evolutionary account.” I think Mr. Carter may be on to something there, just as I think those who flippantly insist that massive functional complexity can come about mindlessly and accidentally need to first build something that requires massive functional complexity that actually works, then they need to consider how crude whatever it is they built really is compared to the nanotechnology of life and see if they are still certain that life came about mindlessly and accidentally.

There is a big difference between theorizing about massive functional complexity and creating it. It is very easy to say it comes about accidentally and very difficult to make it happen. There are no examples of it happening accidentally, so there is no scientific basis for the assumption that it did so in the case of life. This fact should be huge clue to all but the most devout atheists, whose “religious” beliefs prohibit them from considering it and its implications. It is atheism, not theism, that is inhibiting true scientific progress. Maybe we should start filing lawsuits to prevent atheistic religious instruction masquerading as science from being imposed on students; it destroys in them the relentless objectivity and neutrality that is required by genuine science. ;o)

Re: Mark 12.1.2011 11:20pm, Mark says: "This is an anachronistic criticism of Darwin..."

The "true" satisfactory history of Darwinism has not been written yet, there is a lot more that ought to be said and added to the official biographies, science histories, etc. (And the undeniable fact is that Darwinism caused a lot of grief & confusion — "By their fruit you shall know them...")

Scientifically, while the Czech monk did real science experiments and demonstrations, and based his theory on real repeatable scientific facts, Darwin only speculated and hypothesized proposing his theory of "species change", (and based on his pigeon experiments that did not warrant Darwin's theory) — that is a huge difference between them.

The term mutation is another of those long scientific terms behind which Darwinists and the "creation by chance" proponents hide, and at the bottom of it is again — the meaning of words and the correct understanding of philosophy & chance. No one denies that organisms adapt to changing environment, (that was never denied even by literal 6-day creationists), but adaptation is not the "evolution" Darwinists are arguing for. Lenski's 50,000 generations did not prove a new species of organism evolving, and neither have experiments with fruit flies or any other organisms so far. And the real kicker is that all this adaptation actually works both ways, as the later research into Darwin's finches proves — when the environment changes back, the adaptation happens backwards, towards the original "species."

But I can extend my "anachronistic" view into the present — it is a well known fact, noted even by the experts in the field of mathematics and philosophy of chance, that even today most scientists, and especially biologists, have a rather cavalier attitude (to say it politely), towards the precise definitions and understanding of underlying mathematical and philosophical concepts behind chance and randomness.

harry - "From my perspective, that massive functional complexity does not come about mindlessly and accidentally is so painfully obvious that the notion that it can come about that way would be hysterically funny if it weren't for the lethal ramifications of that ridiculous atheistic belief being commonly held."

Did you ever really look into Tierra, Avida, or even my little variation on their theme? It only takes a couple changes to how machine codes work to make software evolution suddenly possible. (Specifically 'address by template' and what you might call 'extreme RISC' where opcodes don't take operands.)

Galapagos Pete said:"[God did it.] This accounts for the diversity of life we see."

Anyone can invoke an imaginary supreme being, give it whatever traits are necessary to making it unfalsifiable, and assert that it is responsible for whatever you want it to be responsible for.

Doing actual science is much harder.
-------------------------------------

Science by its own definition is limited and provisional. It has a limited say about the universe. In addition the observations are reasoned by fallible humans.

To have faith that materialism is all there is, is irrational.

Revelation can help illuminate our reasoning.

harry: I understand and agree about nothing being truly random from the perspective of God. But I think you are making a huge leap in extrapolating, from your personal experience with designing complex systems, that such things cannot arise following natural laws under completely different conditions and over an unimaginably longer time period. I'm not saying it's "mindless", but the inference that a Mind is there as per classical philosophy or Romans 1:20 is metaphysical, not a proof in the sense understood by modern natural science.

Monkeyville: your comment on Darwin reflects a common bias that experimental science is the only "real" science. There are historical, observation based areas of geology and biology where controlled experiments are not possible, but nonetheless the scientific method can be applied. I respectfully argue that to use this biased tactic against Darwin is a cheap shot. I agree that Darwinism as a philosophy has been used to justify bad things. It is incorrect to extend the argument to say that Darwinism as science, as an explanation of organic evolution, has led to bad fruit. I admit the correlation is unpleasant. E.g., among Darwinists (either sense of the term) a good number are pro-choice, whereas I imagine that virtually all IDers and creationists are pro-life. But correlation is not causality. There are other cultural and spiritual forces at work here.

Hi, Ray,

"Did you ever really look into Tierra, Avida, or even my little variation on their theme? It only takes a couple changes to how machine codes work to make software evolution suddenly possible. (Specifically 'address by template' and what you might call 'extreme RISC' where opcodes don't take operands.)"

Intelligently designed software running within the context of an intelligently designed operating system on an intelligently designed computer powered by an intelligently designed utility company, cannot and does not demonstrate what can happen mindlessly and accidentally. It demonstrates the reverse: significant functional complexity coming about requires the involvement of an intelligent agent.

An environment that enabled life to come about via natural processes would have to meet much more stringent requirements in order for such processes to execute than that which is required for software to execute that purportedly demonstrates mindless engineering taking place. For such software to prove anything it would have to mindlessly and accidentally come about and start running withing the context of an operating system and computer hardware that mindlessly and accidentally came about. Before insisting that isn't fair, remember that that actually happening isn't nearly as far-fetched as what atheism is asking us to believe: That functional complexity vastly beyond our crude hardware and software, and the environment that made it possible for such astounding nanotechnology to come about, all happened mindlessly and accidentally.

@John Farrell: I see what you mean, and it doesn't further discussion to insult the intelligence of those you disagree with. But keep in mind that the question that the authors of What Darwin got Wrong posed still is important: Natural selection is analogous to artificial selection, but the analogy falls apart if there is no agent like Mother Nature directing the show.

YOS: "But how does that contribute to the perfection of the whale's nature?"

Mark
In the post above, Kainz speaks of nature seemingly solving complex problems of maximizing energy efficiency, or solving complex problems that computer science PhDs work on etc.

YOS
But what has it to do with whales having gills? Maximizing energy efficiency only makes sense with respect to using the energy to do something. I'll bet dollars to doughnuts that a critter the size of a whale could not be kept oxygenated by gills. A design solution is a design solution; and one wishes more people on all sides of this debate had actual experience with engineering design.

Mark
Now you are talking about "the perfection of the [organism's] nature" which is a statement far removed from any scientific or empirical principles and appears to be rather tautological the way you set it up.

YOS
It goes to the nature of perfection, which can only be perfection with respect to some goal, just as defection is a falling short of those goals. An opera singer uses more energy than the audience; but it is not an imperfection =of the opera singer= to be more profligate of energy. Of course, this is "far removed" from scientific principles (though not from empirical ones); but not everything in reality is accounted for by the metrical properties of material bodies.
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YOS: "Yes, that's the fallacy of applying some incredibly small p to some incredibly large N and assuming you have made a statement of fact."

Mark
I didn't assume anything and have been extremely clear in my comments.

YOS
No, you claimed that if something happens with probability p and there is a sufficient population N (requiring a sufficient time for N elements to happen) then one may expect to see pN actual events over that time frame. This is not even especially true of tossing a coin, and for the reasons cited. There is no assurance that we actually know the value of p, no assurance that p is constant, no assurance that N represents a statistical population. In particular, all mathematical models are wrong, though some are useful (to quote George E.P. Box), and it is precisely in the low-prob tails of the distribution where the mismatch between the number-crunching and the physical universe will appear. The normal distribution might predict a very rare adult Frenchman who is one foot tall; but that ain't gonna happen, because the normal distribution is only an approximation to the reality.
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Mark
evolution by natural selection is not concerned with the survival of individual organisms but rather with the propagation and changing of traits in a gene pool.

YOS
Which happens because....? Ooh, I know. Because INDIVIDUAL organisms "strive to the utmost" to reproduce and, faced with limited resources, INDIVIDUAL organisms that are less apt at the job of (say) gray squirreling or African lionizing fail to reproduce as successfully. This is why we say "ad-apt," meaning "toward being apt," which is the telos of natural selection.

The problem with this, as others have noted, is that it is essentially tautological. The more apt are reproductively more successful. How do we know the members of the species are more apt? Because they are reproductively more successful.

When evolutionary biologists formulate theories on which traits in a given environment will more likely be propagated they are reasoning ex post facto. That is, they are looking at a species that is *already in a niche and is already making its living in a certain way.* A longer beak will be advantageous, shazaam. But that only ensures maintenance of the type by weeding out the less apt. At best it drives a perfection of the species *given* the niche. The big jumps -- which is why I linked to the Mediterranean wall lizard -- occur when the critters by guess and by golly figure out a new way of making a living, defining a new niche, and making irrelevant a posteriori assessments of "what makes a species "fit" for an environment.

Mark
Darwin did not understand genetics and it is widely believed he had not even heard of Gregor Mendel's experiments. ... He realized, for instance, that individuals inherit traits not just from parents but also from grandparents, great-grandparents, etc.

YOS
People have known since ancient times that the kid resembled the grandmother, or had traits much like pop-pop. Darwin was aware that it falsified his theory. That is why he set it out as a major problem for his theory that had to be solved. At the time, the dominant theory of inheritance was that the paternal and maternal contributions were mixed and blended. (It's why we still speak of "blood lines.") But then a mutation must happen simultaneously to a large number of individuals, otherwise it would be diluted out within a generation, since most matings would be with others who did not possess the mutation. That's why the period around the turn of the century was called "the Twilight of Darwinism." It was losing favor as an explanatory principle.

Fortunately for Darwin (and modern biology) neither falsification nor Karl Popper was around at the time; and sometime around 1910 or so, Mendel's work was rediscovered and saved the Darwinian bacon by putting evolution on a scientific basis. Darwin did not know of Mendel's work, because if he had he would have used genetics to solve the otherwise fatal problem in his theory.
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John Farrell
I said Natural Selection is not random. Genetic variation is.

YOS
One aspect of Shapiro's work is that the mutations may not be as random as we previously thought. Genetic repair mechanisms and other molecular machinery can result in change (mutation, kinesis) that is "massive and non-random." Again, the Mediterranean wall lizard switching niches from carnivorous to vegetarian and developing a new organ in less than 30 years would seem to support a non-random element to change. IMHO, this throws all "probabilistic" objections to evolution into a cocked hat.
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GalapagosPete says:
Anyone can invoke an imaginary supreme being... Doing actual science is much harder.

YOS
Making all the more wonderful that actual science only developed in the culture with that imaginary "supreme being." Cultures that did not regard the universe as an artifact, like a great clock, made by a rational artist, had no expectation that there was any rational order to be found and so, with a few individuals excepted, made no effort to find it.

BTW, there's a reason Thomists avoid the term "supreme being," a topic perhaps for another day.

Monkeyville: "Scientifically, while the Czech monk did real science experiments and demonstrations, and based his theory on real repeatable scientific facts, Darwin only speculated and hypothesized proposing his theory of "species change", (and based on his pigeon experiments that did not warrant Darwin's theory) — that is a huge difference between them."

This is not correct. Darwin's "On the Origin of Species" is full of descriptions of experiments Darwin himself ran testing various hypotheses, descriptions of experiments other scientists had ran, and also of natural or unintentional experiments run by others. People who want a definitive history of Darwin should start by consulting the primary sources -- Darwin's own writing.

Howard Kainz: "But keep in mind that the question that the authors of What Darwin got Wrong posed still is important: Natural selection is analogous to artificial selection, but the analogy falls apart if there is no agent like Mother Nature directing the show."

This argument is fallacious for the simple reason that the analogy is just that -- an analogy. The reason why Darwin refers to artificial selection in chapter 1 of "On the Origin of Species" is to make a point about the inheritance of traits and the "plasticity" of species. In the Aristotlean view, the species are fixed. This is a very powerful intuition and was the dominant view in Darwin's time so Darwin seeks to weaken this view by using the example of artificial selection. If it is the case that breeders can change a wild species into something that looks and acts completely differently and even can eventually lose the ability to generate fertile off-spring with its wild cousins, that is a very important consideration against the Aristotlean intuition. He further weakens it by pointing to widespread disagreement about the exact definition of a species and the fact that the precise dividing line between a species and a subspecies is a constant source of controversy and debate with the acrimony never quite being resolved with any satisfying answer.

@ Howard Kainz. But keep in mind that the question that the authors of What Darwin got Wrong posed still is important: Natural selection is analogous to artificial selection, but the analogy falls apart if there is no agent like Mother Nature directing the show.

I agree. But as Godfrey-Smith showed in his review, it isn't necessary for there to be 'an agent' in order for natural selection to be scientifically intelligible and scientifically fruitful. That scientists often use the language of intentionality to describe natural selection doesn't mean they *have* to--that's the mistake the authors--and you--make. That's why their book isn't as important as you think it is.

YOS: "Maximizing energy efficiency only makes sense with respect to using the energy to do something. I'll bet dollars to doughnuts that a critter the size of a whale could not be kept oxygenated by gills."

You lose the bet -- great white sharks are about the same size and weight as pilot whales yet sharks oxygenate through gills while whales must surface to breathe. Whales share this trait with their smaller mammalian cousins dolphins and manatees. There is no "design" here: what there is is clear evidence of descent from land-based mammals who breathed through lungs, just as we do.

Monkeyville: "Lenski's 50,000 generations did not prove a new species of organism evolving, and neither have experiments with fruit flies or any other organisms so far. "

I missed this comment in my previous response. Of course, I never said that Lenski's experiment proved a new species evolving. That would likely be impossible within a single human lifetime. Nobody alive has ever personally observed the cycle of glaciers growing and withdrawing in the northern hemisphere over thousands of years. Nobody ever personally witnessed the movement of tectonic plates creating the Himalayas. That doesn't mean there are not pretty good reasons for thinking both things actually happened just as there are pretty good reasons for thinking current species are the products of evolution by natural selection acting over a period of hundreds of thousands or millions of years on older species.

What I did say is that Lenski's experiment shows that beneficial genetic mutations can happen at random -- one particular mutation was neither expected nor intended by the researchers yet it happened in one line of cells and became dominant in that particular gene pool.

Hi Dave Eden & harry:

Thanks so much for your thoughtful and important remarks.

Dave Eden, I certainly agree that some biologists, and other scientists make philosophical claims, concerning evolution. Jerry Coyne, I believe is, next to Richard Dawkins, the most prominent atheist to argue that evolution is inherently incompatable with Christianity. Certainly nothing in evolutionary biology would stipulate that Christianity is false. Dawkins, Coyne, and other biologists don't profit evolutionary biology in any way, by muddying the waters. If they really want people to be scientifically literate, it might be just a tad helpful for them not to argue that the religion of the vast majority of americans, is delusional. If they're really bothered by many, or even most, americans acceptance of special creation, or literalism, concerning the Bible, then they ought to not argue that they cannot be consistently Christian and believe in evolution. Given what seems to constitute an ultimatum, any serious Christian will pick her Christianity every time, (and she should). Thankfully, no such chioce is necessary. The sure science, i.e., the empirical evidence, and the rational deductions derived from this, that constitutes modern evolutionary biology, in no way implies anything about the metaphysics of reality. Dawkins, Coyne, Sam Harris, amony others, believe that there's philosophical extrapolations, for atheism, that should be derived from evolutionary biology, and they're, of course, entitled to their opinions here, but rational people can rationally disagree, as Francis Collins, M.D., Ph.D, an evangelical Chrisitian, and brilliant scientist, among many others, show.

The late Harvard biologist Stephen Jay Gould, an agnostic concerning religion, asserted that one could be either religious or atheistic, and accept evolution; that acceptance of evolution did not necessitate being either a religious believer or an atheist. He's right.


We have a wheat and chaff problem here. The wheat that is the science of evolution must be distinguished from the chaff that is the philosophy of atheism. Coyne and others, think it's all wheat, but, not only are they wrong, they're ironically, if they're successful in their, well, apologetic efforts, going to turn more Christians and others into literalists, as I mentioned above. If people accept that one can be either a Christian or evolutionist, but not both, as Coyne seems to want people to accept, then, most likely they'll reject evolution.


harry, I see what you're saying, and, certainly complexity cannot arise entirely by itself. Natural selection and random mutation, one could argue, is not really random at all, in the larger scheme of things; God planned exactly how it will work out. it appears random to us. So, one could accept evolution as God's method of creating life, just as he allows weather patterns to go their own way, for example.

I have two views on ID. My initial view and the view that developed after being repeatedly attacked for expressing the first view.

The first view is that if the factual evidence leads outside of the natural matrix to an intelligent source of design, then that's what science does, follow the evidence. It's not the job of science to invent natural explanations any more than it is the job of science to invent supernatural explanations. The key word being "invent." The job is to follow the evidence. Theists and atheists can certainly get together on that point if they want to do science as opposed to confirming their beliefs.

My second view is that ID will likely become the paradigm in biology within a generation or two. It will happen gradually without anyone willing to explicitly announce it, but around 2050 the New York Times will run a story with a headline that reads something like, "Biologists Credit Discredited Design Theorists of 60 Years Ago."

@ Howard Kainz: I apologize, by the way, for my earlier snarkiness, Prof. Kainz. I have enormous respect for Stephen Barr and his work; and I found your response to him a little condescending. That's why I was a little flip with you, and I shouldn't have been.

John
That scientists often use the language of intentionality to describe natural selection doesn't mean they *have* to

YOS
John, then it would behoove them to seriously try not to use it. Even words like "adaptation" and "evolution" reek of telos. Of course, the real problem is the confusion of finality with intention and intention with conscious and deliberate intention. Or for that matter, the supposition that an agent is necessarily a being of intellect and will. If a hammer slips off a roof and brains a passerby, the hammer was the agent of the death. But we don't dig up Newton's bones and put him on trial.

The Fodor thesis -- found in more condensed form here: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n20/jerry-fodor/why-pigs-dont-have-wings together with responses and re-responses -- has been misunderstood by biologists, who are not after all professional philosophers. Fodor's atheist motivations behind his critique are what makes it especially unpalatable. He writes:
"Getting minds in general, and God’s mind in particular, out of biological explanations is a main goal of the adaptationist programme. I am, myself, all in favour of that; since I’m pretty sure that neither exists, I see nothing much to choose between God and Mother Nature."
And it says something of Coyne and others that they think Fodor is pushing a theistic agenda. (I do wonder, if Fodor genuinely believes minds do not exist, where he thought his article came from.)

harry - "Intelligently designed software running within the context of an intelligently designed operating system on an intelligently designed computer powered by an intelligently designed utility company, cannot and does not demonstrate what can happen mindlessly and accidentally."

As I've pointed out before, it takes a lot of intelligence to experiment with tornadoes. It takes even more to experiment with lightning: http://techzwn.com/2011/11/largest-tesla-coils-ever-will-recreate-natural-lightning/

Does that therefore mean that tornadoes and lightning are intelligently designed? That when insurance companies call them 'acts of God', there's an element of criminal responsibility there?

Hello, Bret Lythgoe,

"So, one could accept evolution as God's method of creating life, just as he allows weather patterns to go their own way, for example."

Exactly how God created life, whether He used biological processes over time or not, is not important to me. It is painfully obvious to those capable of objectivity that neither life nor any other instance of massive functional complexity can come about mindlessly and accidentally.

There is an inherent contradiction in Catholics believing purely on faith that God is responsible for life in one way or another, yet insisting that there is an entirely reasonable natural explanation for life having come about mindlessly and accidentally. The contradiction here for Catholics is that that can't be reconciled with Catholic dogma. As I pointed out previously, Vatican Council I dogmatically asserts that "If anyone says that the one, true God, our creator and lord, cannot be known with certainty from the things that have been made by the natural light of human reason: let him be anathema." God can't be known with certainty from "the things that have been made by the natural light of human reason" if the natural light of human reason tells us that what was the most inexplicable phenomenon in nature has been finally explained and did in fact come about mindlessly and accidentally.

Yet the natural light of human reason definitely does not tell us that at all. It tells us the opposite, that massive functional complexity does not come about mindlessly and accidentally. It tells us that there are limits to the ways mindless, lifeless matter can be reasonably expected to configure itself. That is why we can tell man-made objects from natural phenomena; they are exceptions to the ways in which mindless, lifeless matter can be reasonably expected to configure itself. The most spectacular exception to this is life.

We find an image of a man etched in hardened clay and conclude immediately that is the work of an intelligent agent; we would laugh at anyone who claimed otherwise, and then we insist actual, living instances of men – not simple etchings of them – are mindless accidents. Future generations will be laughing at us.

Hi, Dave Eden,

“I understand and agree about nothing being truly random from the perspective of God. But I think you are making a huge leap in extrapolating, from your personal experience with designing complex systems, that such things cannot arise following natural laws under completely different conditions and over an unimaginably longer time period. I'm not saying it's "mindless", but the inference that a Mind is there as per classical philosophy or Romans 1:20 is metaphysical, not a proof in the sense understood by modern natural science.”

The math doesn't work out for the complexity of life having come about in the period of time we have to work with. From Stephen Meyer's *Signature in the Cell*:

“Recall that the probability of producing a single 150-amino-acid functional protein by chance stands at about 1 in 10^164. Thus, for each functional sequence of 150 amino acids, there are at least 10^164 other possible nonfunctional sequences of the same length. Therefore, to have a good (i.e., better than 50-50) chance of producing a single functional protein of this length by chance, a random process would have to generate (or sample) more than one-half of the 10^164 nonfunctional sequences corresponding to each functional sequence of that length. Unfortunately, that number vastly exceeds the most optimistic estimate of the probabilistic resources of the entire universe – that is, the number of events that could have occurred since the beginning of its existence.”

Even if Meyer is way, way off in his calculations, and the calculations of those he cites in his book are as well, it is still obvious there is a huge problem with life having come about mindlessly and accidentally. This is so because he is talking about a *single* 150-amino-acid functional protein. Life is vastly more than just that. If in actuality it only takes a tenth of the probabilistic resources of the entire Universe to get ten different 150-amino-acid functional proteins we are still never going to come up with the nanotechnology of life accidentally. I can't believe Meyer is so far off in his calculations that in reality it is reasonable to assume that life came about accidentally.

Meyer is by no means original or unique in his saying it just isn't mathematically feasible for life to have come about mindlessly and accidentally. For some information on this:

http://www.evolutionnews.org/2006/07/mathematicians_and_evolution002387.html

"Critics of ID, on the other hand, especially prominent militant atheists like Richard Dawkins, have been ridiculing ID theorists for years as unscientific, and extolling 'natural selection' as a kind of 'blind watchmaker' accomplishing something that just 'seems' like design through random developments over billions of years."

Especially prominent militant atheists?

It would be more honest to say "especially the entire scientific community" rejects magical intelligent design creationism because it's a childish religious fantasy.

Also, there's nothing random about natural selection.

darwinkilledgod dot blogspot dot com

@John Farrell: Apology accepted. I don't feel I have the stature to be "condescending" to Stephen Barr. A few years ago Cardinal Schönborg wrote an article in First Things discussing some problems he had with natural selection, and Barr wrote a column in disagreement. He disclaimed allegations of "scientism," but his article seemed to me to indicate a "hard liner" in science. In other words, he seemed to consider science completely in a different compartment from theology and philosophy, but as some have mentioned here natural selection has philosophical implications. For example, if you believe Richard Dawkins, the problem of creation has been solved.

"Surprisingly, two recent books by atheist philosophers of science have joined with ID theorists in the criticism of neo-Darwinism."

Yes, well, being an atheist doesn't make one right ... and they aren't. You defer to these atheists for no reason other than that they confirm your biases, while ignoring the arguments of a very large number of scientists, atheist and otherwise, whom you disagree with.

"You say the random variations (or mutations) in evolution are the "random component," but evolution is not random?"

Indeed it is not, any more than who wins backgammon or Texas Hold'Em tournaments is random just because the dice or the cards are random.

This assertion, that mutations are random but evolution not, has been made, and explained and justified, thousands of times by biologists; it behooves anyone seriously interested in this issue to be aware of such basic, fundamental positions and arguments.

"Natural selection is analogous to artificial selection, but the analogy falls apart if there is no agent like Mother Nature directing the show. "

So what if the *analogy* falls apart? That just means that the analogy is flawed, not that evolution needs an agent ... to argue otherwise is to argue circularly. Again, it is important for anyone seriously interested in discussing these issues to be familiar with such basic points of logic.

"From my perspective, that massive functional complexity does not come about mindlessly and accidentally is so painfully obvious that the notion that it can come about that way would be hysterically funny"

Historically, many things have been "painfully obvious" and have seemed absurd to people and yet they were wrong ... they were wrong because they were unaware of various things, and so their certainty of being correct was surely arrogant. I too have designed complex systems of the sorts you describe but I don't make the mistake of thinking that complex systems must be designed that way ... especially since I am aware of complex systems that have been the products of software systems that employ evolutionary mechanisms.

"if it weren't for the lethal ramifications of that ridiculous atheistic belief being commonly held"

I suspect that your view that evolution by natural selection is "atheistic" and that it has lethal ramifications colors your view that it is "ridiculous" and "painfully obvious"ly wrong. But do keep in mind that the Jesuits teach evolution, that the Catholic Church and many other theists accept it, so it's being an "atheistic belief" and having "lethal ramifications" is not obvious to everyone.

Hi Howard Kainz:

Certainly all of reality, and our knowledge of it, are intermingled, and sometimes it's easy for all of us to allow our linguistic constructions to prevent us from seeing connections that exist. when we say that something is "theological'' and something else is "scientific'', this may be because there's a genuine ontological distinction between the two, or it may be that, by convention we've demarcated them, when there really isn't a rational basis for the demarcation. Creation is perhaps a good example. Some on the atheistic side, as well as the religious side, have argued that, we must adopt "methodological naturalism'', when dealing with scientific issues, and therefore assume that any questions dealing with the natural world must be answered without theology, or God. As Phillip E. Johnson (even though I disagree with his assessment of evolution) has asserted, this is not the way to approach science; if one bases science on the evidence, one goes wherever the evidence leads, even if it leads to God.


So we certainly should be open to evidence of God'd involvement in the natural world. To not be, on methodological grounds, seems to me, analogous to a judge ruling that, because a litigant didn't fill out the proper paperwork, his case is dismissed, even though he has a rational basis for his case. Or, not convicting someone of murder, merely because the police failed to warn the defendant of his rights prior to his confession. In other words, the search for truth demands that we be open to all possibilities.


The distinction between theology, philosophy and the empirical sciences, has a rational basis. They're different, yet interwoven. The empirical aspect, is the essential difference between the sciences and the others. If God is detected empirically, then God must be accepted as part of a scientific theory. However, this does not appear to be the case. To understand God, we turn to philosophy and theology.


Why should natural selection have "bad'' philosophical implications for religion? Only if we presuppose that God must not have created using natural selection/random mutation of genes, is this bad, but why should we assume this? Dawkins seems to have no theological imagination, when we claims that the problem of how life emerged has been solved in the sense that no creator is needed.


One word, if I may, about "condescension''. Certainly no one should condescend to anyone. We all have important points to contribute, regardless of what credentials we have. And although naturally those who have certain credentials may be more equipped to address certain issues than others (e.g, Dr. Barr, concerning physics), we're all God's children, and are equally important. For anyone to not consider others worthy of addressing, to to condescend to those who one does address, is a sign of insecurity, and pettiness, that has no place here. I don't think that anyone here has condescended to anyone. I'm grateful to you, and everyone else, who has written here, and I've learned from everyone here.

“Combining a detailed anatomo-physicological analysis of the nervous system of the nematode, all the way up to the cortex of cats and monkeys, with a long series of computational simulations, it emerged that the minimization of connection costs among interconnected components appears either perfect, or as good as can be detected with current methods....The cortex is better designed than the best industrial microchip.”

This is not at all surprising for natural evolution, as we have programs that solve optimization problems via genetic programming, and natural evolution has run for much longer. We even design primitive circuits with genetic programming: http://www.genetic-programming.com/published/eetimes060396.html

Anyone who bases their metaphysics on the supposed impossibility or implausibility of such unintelligent design is on very shaky ground.

@Marcel Kinkaid: "Do keep in mind that the Jesuits teach evolution, that the Catholic Church and many other theists accept it, so it's being an "atheistic belief" and having "lethal ramifications" is not obvious to everyone."
Who has said anything denying the fact of evolution?? I find it interesting that my account of a book that finds difficulties with the theory of natural selection should be taken as an attack on evolution. The most famous Jesuit proponent of evolution is Teilhard de Chardin, who maintained that evolution is certain, but offered an alternative non-Darwinian explanation of how it takes place.

Indeed, the natural matrix -- the realm of matter and energy and biological forms -- is intelligible, scientism-ists insist, not even because it designed itself but because it randomly obeys its own highly specific laws. In fact, it can take many directions within that legal framework, and only happens to be on its current path via the metarandomness implied by its specific random acts. The natural matrix is, in fact, all that there is, right down to its theoretical particles that come in and out of existence, perhaps from one of those several other dimensions predicted by string theory, where the ninety percent of the matter and energy that cannot be found might also be. (Numbers, which do not actually exist anywhere, never lie.)

So get the heck out of here with all that intelligent design stuff, you wacky theists.

"There is an inherent contradiction in Catholics believing purely on faith that God is responsible for life in one way or another, yet insisting that there is an entirely reasonable natural explanation for life having come about mindlessly and accidentally."

YOS
But the belief that a natural explanation is "mindless and accidental" is incoherent. If there are laws of nature, the outcome is hardly accidental. And nature, especially evolution, is replete with mindfulness. Otherwise, organisms would not "strive to the utmost" to reproduce, to secure resources, and so forth. Even plants have tropisms by which they seek sunlight and water. A mindless, accidental world would be chaotic, possess no natural "laws" and exhibit patterns of mere correlation always in mutual contradiction with one another.

There is no inherent contradiction. It is entirely possible to believe that the Moonlight Sonata is explicable by the physics of vibrating strings, etc. and still believe in a pianist (or even in a Beethoven). It might could be that the metrical properties of material bodies does not even exhaust the whole of nature, let alone the whole of reality.

“Historically, many things have been 'painfully obvious' and have seemed absurd to people and yet they were wrong ... they were wrong because they were unaware of various things, and so their certainty of being correct was surely arrogant”

Yup. The Earth isn't really flat. The sun isn't revolving around the Earth. What seemed “painfully obvious” turned out to be incorrect. Yet that is the exception, not the rule. Most of the time what seems to be the obvious conclusion to draw is the correct one, like the fact that things fall down, not up, and that airplanes created in Kansas are made in factories, not by Kansas tornadoes going through junk yards. Because what was “painfully obvious” has turned out to be incorrect in some instances is no reason to think that the next time I drop something it will land on the ceiling, or to think it is possible, given enough tornadoes going through a junkyard, that a functioning business jet might be assembled. Although it is painfully obvious that that actually happening is far more likely than life coming about mindlessly and accidentally, since the functional complexity of life is light years beyond that of a business jet.

Naturally occurring replication of chemical units doesn't make life coming about mindlessly and accidentally any less unlikely. A “replication of the gaps “ is often resorted to by some folks who post on this forum as though it resolves every problem that arises in the theory that the nanotechnology of life came about mindlessly and accidentally. It doesn't. That given enough time and some naturally occurring replication with occasional copying errors becoming advantageous “mutations”, lifeless matter could have mindlessly and accidentally “evolved” into life just doesn't work. If massive functional complexity can come about that way we should find other instances of it in nature besides life – but we don't. Life is single, spectacular exception. Its functional complexity is light years beyond that of any other natural phenomenon as well as that of anything modern science knows how to build from scratch. That should be a huge clue for us, as should the fact that we don't find any naturally occurring replication of chemical units, much less any instances of that the chemical units of which are increasing in functional complexity.

It is much less likely that an environment would mindlessly and accidentally come about and be sustained long enough to allow for replication of chemical units to “evolve” into life than it is that an environment would accidentally come about that would allow computer software that “simulates evolution” to execute. This is because the requirements such an environment would have to meet would be far more precise and exacting than that required by computer software. And it is so unlikely that an environment allowing computer software to execute would accidentally come about that it is simply irrational to propose it could happen. And the very stringent requirements an environment would have to meet that would allow for the execution of software that merely prints out the word “LIFE” aren't nearly as stringent as the requirements that would have to be met by an environment that would assemble it.

Naturally occurring replication, even it it ever happened, wouldn't begin to solve the technical issues. For example, the coding regions of DNA memory contain information. That information directs the execution of cellular processes such that they instantiate intricate protein machines that have useful functionality. I will assume for my purposes here that the DNA molecule has become a component in an as yet lifeless replicating chemical unit but its memory does not yet contain useful information. Every possible state of DNA memory, if copying errors eventually established each of those states at one time or another, would be gibberish, not useful information, until cellular processes existed to which the data can correspond. Yet there cannot be a process directed by the contents of DNA memory until it contains information, not gibberish. With mindlessness doing the engineering, both the useful information and a process directed by it would be kept from coming about by the absence of the other. Yet, somehow, they both came about. How do you suppose that happened?

Even if there was a miraculous “accidental” correspondence between the contents of DNA memory and a cellular process that came about that could be directed in its execution by those contents – which would be a miracle in itself – still another miracle is required. This is because a “process” – the operation of a computer CPU, for example – being directed by instructions read in from memory, does not mean it is being directed to do anything useful. The other miracle we need is for the information in DNA memory to be such that it can not only direct the execution of our miraculous cellular process, but that it also directs it such that it instantiates *useful* protein machines – not non-functional complexity, or useless intricacy.

There is nothing advantageous about expending energy creating that which is useless, so how would such a cellular process “evolve,” since its very existence would be a disadvantage until useful information in DNA memory was mindlessly and accidentally arrived at, the likelihood of which is comparable to that of dumping out a box of jigsaw puzzle pieces and having them land such that they correctly assemble the puzzle. And if such a cellular process does miraculously come about, how does replication create DNA data that is “intelligent” information in the sense that it not only can direct the cellular process, but that it directs it to build *useful* protein machines, and arrives at that “intelligent” information quickly enough that the whole exercise isn't tossed out as an expensive, harmful mistake by the mindless “evolutionary” process long before anything advantageous comes about? Furthermore, there is the problem that our cellular process would begin without there being any useful information in DNA memory yet, so there is a very good chance that what it instantiates will not be merely useless, but instead would bring about destructive functionality. Computer processes attempting to execute “instructions” that are not “intelligently designed” are going to cause the application or a simple operating system to crash. This is true of mindless, accidental modifications of correct “instructions” as well, which is the only kind of modification of DNA memory our mindless evolutionary process can make. How can it ever arrive at massive amounts of correct information? How could the mindless “evolution” of such a cellular process continue in spite of all these difficulties? How did data-driven cellular processes that instantiate useful, functionally complex protein machines ever come about mindlessly?

Mindless engineering is a really very far-fetched concept. Replication doesn't come anywhere near explaining how very real, practical difficulties can be overcome by a mindless “evolutionary” process such that it could have assembled lifeless matter into life. As anyone knows who has created massive functional complexity that actually works, the tiniest modifications, even those that have been well thought out beforehand, often have large, destructive ramifications in terms of continued functionality if they aren't exactly right. Mindlessness, of course, doesn't ever put any thought into modifications at all, so more often than not its modifications will be destructive. This is why mindless processes can never arrive at massive functional complexity.

This has been an extremely over-simplified statement of the problems with mindless, accidental engineering actually taking place. The more you look at the difficulties the worse it gets. If it is irrational to attempt to explain how phenomena exhibiting significant functional complexity we know how to bring about, like computers and television sets, might come about mindlessly and accidentally, it shouldn't surprise us if it difficult to explain how nanotechnology light years beyond our own, which we have no idea how to build from scratch, came about mindlessly and accidentally. It is irrational to assume it did.

Currently there is no explanation for the massive functional complexity of life other than the involvement of an intelligent agent. True science will continue to seek out natural explanations for life as it should. The day it finds them, if that day ever comes at all, will be far, far in the future. For now, contemporary science needs to acknowledge the fact that some phenomena are best explained by the involvement of an intelligent agent. Modern science does this in some instances, but not in regards to the origin of life due to its very unscientific imposition of atheistic “religious” dogma on science. It is ironic that it does this while it accuses “creationists” of being unscientific. The relentless objectivity and neutrality required by true science is easier for theists to maintain because they know that ultimately there can be no genuine conflict between true science and true religion, since both the natural and the supernatural have the same Author. Atheists, it seems to me, panic when the implications of the discoveries of modern science, like the discovery of the astounding functional complexity of the nanotechnology of life, undermine their “religious” beliefs. Rather than providing substantive answers to the objections to their “scientific” theories they file lawsuits to prevent students from being informed of the problems with their theories.

Martin McPhillips - "Indeed, the natural matrix -- the realm of matter and energy and biological forms -- is intelligible, scientism-ists insist, not even because it designed itself but because it randomly obeys its own highly specific laws."

Call it a hunch, but I suspect that's your paraphrase and not something anyone's actually said.

Hello, YOS,

"But the belief that a natural explanation is 'mindless and accidental' is incoherent. If there are laws of nature, the outcome is hardly accidental. And nature, especially evolution, is replete with mindfulness. Otherwise, organisms would not 'strive to the utmost' to reproduce, to secure resources, and so forth. Even plants have tropisms by which they seek sunlight and water. A mindless, accidental world would be chaotic, possess no natural 'laws' and exhibit patterns of mere correlation always in mutual contradiction with one another."

As I said previously regarding the notion that the nanotechnology of life came about mindlessly: "That is not to say it didn't come about 'naturally,' which the discoveries of modern science indicate doesn't mean 'mindlessly.'"

You and I see that, but that modern science perverted by atheistic "religious" beliefs doesn't see it that way. It is determined to continue in its hopeless quest to explain how massive functional complexity can come about "mindlessly." True science will learn how it came about 'naturally' with the understanding that 'naturally' doesn't mean mindlessly. Where I see the conflict with Catholic dogma is in a Catholic's belief in the atheistic understanding of "naturally," which does in fact mean mindlessly. If I am wrong about that feel free to explain to me why I am wrong. ;o)

12.2.2011 | 12:20pm Dave Eden says: "Monkeyville: your comment on Darwin reflects a common bias that experimental science is the only "real" science. ... I respectfully argue that to use this biased tactic against Darwin is a cheap shot."

12.2.2011 | 4:19pm Mark says: "This is not correct. Darwin's "On the Origin of Species" is full of descriptions of experiments Darwin himself ran testing various hypotheses... People who want a definitive history of Darwin should start by consulting the primary sources -- Darwin's own writing."

Everybody has biases, (and so should Christians and Catholics), and unlike many today who believe & argue for Darwinism, I have read pretty much all available Darwin's writing, some of it several times.

But I respectfully argue that if you actually read Darwin biographies and science histories, the bottom line in this argument is that Darwin was very uneasy about publishing his theory, he knew that there were crucial problems, that his hypothesis was only a hypothesis, and the opposition would hack his theory to pieces in no time. Darwin was finally persuaded when Wallace proposed the same thing, (but with a much different mechanism of natural selection, if you actually read Wallace's works), but the people behind Darwin, who had finally forced him to publish, had ulterior motives. And Darwin suffered doubts for the rest of his life.


12.2.2011 | 5:19pm Mark says: "Of course, I never said that Lenski's experiment proved a new species evolving. That would likely be impossible within a single human lifetime. Nobody alive has ever personally observed the cycle of glaciers growing and withdrawing in the northern hemisphere over thousands of years. Nobody ever personally witnessed the movement of tectonic plates creating the Himalayas. That doesn't mean there are not pretty good reasons for thinking both things actually happened..."


Precisely! The plain fact is that the speciation proposed by Darwin has not been proven by hard science for 150 years, and it is doubtful if it ever will be. A "pretty good reason" is not hard science, it is still just an unproven hypothesis, or wishful thinking, and as you may know, hypotheses in science, many of them quite mind-boggling even stupid, come and go.

Any rational scientifically inclined person requires solid science, and haven't rational science minded people mocked religions and faith since Francis Bacon stressed such precise empirical methods?

Yes, there are two kinds of science, empirical and hypothetical, but look where has the latter has brought us — to totally unfounded ridiculous speculations in all branches of science, be it astrobiology (really?, science without a single shred of evidence that life outside earth exists?), ridiculous evolutionary psychology and sociology, time travel, aliens, and now the Large Hadron Collider has supposedly proven infinite multiverses? You may want to check out this book that nicely summarized what I am trying to say:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0465092756

If you have faith in the "scientific methods" of speculative science, you better rethink such concept philosophically & scientifically.

If you critically look at the Theory of Evolution — it was and still is full of wind, wishful thinking, inconsequentiality, empty words and hypotheses, and of plain contradictory fallacies. Historically, and scientifically, Darwinism was such an empty speculative hypothesis from the beginning, otherwise why would Darwinian evolutionists later had a critical need to revamp it with up with Neo-Darwinism, which, as it has now turned out is still not good enough to justify even that original hypothesis. So where is the latest theory that would allow scientists to finally prove Darwin's speciation? You still have a vague and meaningless and confusing theory, and I am arguing that the culprit or the devil at the bottom of all this confusion is poor understanding of chance & randomness by scientists.

12.4.2011 | 7:46am Howard Kainz says: "Who has said anything denying the fact of evolution?? I find it interesting that my account of a book that finds difficulties with the theory of natural selection should be taken as an attack on evolution. The most famous Jesuit proponent of evolution is Teilhard de Chardin, who maintained that evolution is certain, but offered an alternative non-Darwinian explanation of how it takes place."

Actually, professor Kainz, Teilhard de Chardin was influenced by Darwin, and it is a fact that de Chardin has a long outstanding quarrel & falling out with the Vatican. At one time the Holy Office requested that his books be placed on the Index of Prohibited books, and an official Monitum or warning was issued about the mistakes found in de Chardin's books:

"The above-mentioned works abound in such ambiguities and indeed even serious errors, as to offend Catholic doctrine... For this reason, the most eminent and most revered Fathers of the Holy Office exhort all Ordinaries as well as the superiors of Religious institutes, rectors of seminaries and presidents of universities, effectively to protect the minds, particularly of the youth, against the dangers presented by the works of Fr. Teilhard de Chardin and of his followers." etc.

See the details here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Teilhard_de_Chardin

Many Jesuits defended de Chardin, but it was a partisan action to defend their fellow-brother with whose theory they were sympathetic. But I think many learned Jesuits may have toned down their zeal and rhetoric. It would be interesting to find out where the Jesuits are on this issue today.

harry - "What seemed “painfully obvious” turned out to be incorrect. Yet that is the exception, not the rule."

It seems to me that practically everything we've learned about the universe since leaving the savanna has been counterintuitive, actually. Round Earth, heliocentrism, continental drift, the age of the Earth in general, atomic theory, germ theory of disease, relativity, quantum mechanics, etc. Any process that takes place where humans can't easily see, or spans more than a couple generations (at most) doesn't seem to fit with our expectations very well.

"A “replication of the gaps “ is often resorted to by some folks who post on this forum as though it resolves every problem that arises in the theory that the nanotechnology of life came about mindlessly and accidentally."

As one of those "folks", I object. I think I've been very clear on what's established, what's reasonable extrapolation, and what's speculative. I definitely *don't* think "every problem" is resolved, and I've said so explicitly.

"If massive functional complexity can come about [by naturally occurring replication with occasional copying errors] we should find other instances of it in nature besides life – but we don't."

What other things in nature *replicate*, though? Crystals are about the only thing I can think of... and we actually do see rather impressive complexity there, on occasion (think snowflakes, or naturally-occurring quasicrystals).

"It is much less likely that an environment would mindlessly and accidentally come about and be sustained long enough to allow for replication of chemical units to “evolve” into life than it is that an environment would accidentally come about that would allow computer software that “simulates evolution” to execute."

You can assert that, but it's not the same thing as establishing it.

"I will assume for my purposes here that the DNA molecule has become a component in an as yet lifeless replicating chemical unit but its memory does not yet contain useful information."

I've explicitly directed your attention to the 'RNA world' hypothesis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RNA_world_hypothesis) which you rule out by assumption above. RNA can both replicate by template, *and* catalyze reactions. It can carry information *and* construct other RNA as well as proteins. If this model is correct, DNA was a later development, forming a more stable information-storage system. This hasn't been proven (yet?) but there is plenty of suggestive evidence. For example, to this day transcription of DNA is carried out by a ribozyme - an RNA catalyst - and we'd expect such a fundamental system to be highly conserved. This also potentially resolves the 'chicken and egg' problem, as it allows gradual specialization of parts for information storage or metabolism from a simpler system where the boundaries between the functions were more blurry.

"Computer processes attempting to execute “instructions” that are not “intelligently designed” are going to cause the application or a simple operating system to crash."

Not always. Again - Tierra, Avida, etc.

"As anyone knows who has created massive functional complexity that actually works, the tiniest modifications, even those that have been well thought out beforehand, often have large, destructive ramifications in terms of continued functionality if they aren't exactly right."

Humans don't tend to produce vast numbers of prototypes with small variations, though. I'll go out on a limb and bet that, in any system you've created, the number of prototypes you've ever worked on simultaneously has been in the low single digits, amirite?

"This has been an extremely over-simplified statement of the problems with mindless, accidental engineering actually taking place."

As Einstein's supposed to have put it, "A model should be as simple as possible, but no simpler." :) In the simple model of condensation, rain is impossible. Water droplets banging together would result in maybe one raindrop every few million years. Add some microscopic dust particles to catalyze the process, though...

"Who has said anything denying the fact of evolution?? "

Harry, the person I responded to, among others.

"Who has said anything denying the fact of evolution?? "

"Harry, the person I responded to, among others."

The "fact of evolution" after life began is not the same as the "fact of evolution" in terms of lifeless matter "evolving" into that first primitive life form.

"I've explicitly directed your attention to the 'RNA world' hypothesis ..."

Nonetheless, the fundamental problems with "mindless engineering" remain ...

@Monkeyville: Yes, Teilhard had great respect for Darwin, and the trees showing common descent in his book, Phenomenon of Man are similar to then-common Darwinian explanations. But of course he goes beyond Darwin. He maintained that the movement towards greater complexity, centricity, and consciousness, could not be explained by ordinary energy; so he hypothesized a special type of energy, radial energy, operating alongside ordinary energy, i.e. tangential energy. His problems with the Church were mostly related to theological extrapolations that he made, trying to show evolutionary approaches to original sin, the problem of evil, the Incarnation, the Parousia, etc. And he had quite a bit to say about the future of evolution, directed by Christ and assisted by humankind. So it is understandable that he was tagged as heterodox, although he was always obedient to the Church regarding non-publication of his theory. After his death, Julian Huxley wrote the Preface to Le Phénomene Humain, proposing it as worthy of scientific consideration.

Monkeyville - What's the best evidence of common descent you're aware of?

Professor Kainz,

Some time ago I read and I tried to understand what Teilhard de Chardin was trying to say. Arguably, de Chardin's works are the most frustrating text ever written, since, as the Holy Office philosophers and theologians have stated, the degree of vagueness and ambiguity is staggering. This in itself is an argument enough against any such work, because, (even if it could one day be proven correct), it can never be distilled into some common sense meaning for ordinary people and believers to understand. One could inquire why that is, and at the bottom of it is again the Darwinian notion of evolution which de Chardin adopted, and which he tried to turn into Catholic theology, resulting in mindboggling doublespeak & contradictions. For pretty much everybody who reads de Chardin's works they make no sense at all, and are nothing like Christianity, which is built on opposing concepts and metaphors.

Besides, the quazi-scientific underpinning of de Chardin's theology is also in doubt, because evolution, and especially the Darwinian evolution, (based on "order out chaos & randomness"), has not been proven, and is in fact being contradicted by the newer findings in biology, mathematics, and physics. So it is a hypothesis at best, and more likely a wishful ideologically motivated speculation that will never be proven to any rationally believable degree. Really what de Chardin's works amount to is nothing but waxing poetic in most ambiguous term, his theology has very little to do with logic, science and rational explanations.

Yes, it is hard to deny that some kind of "evolution" has taken place, and many intellectuals of the highest order, like Lonergan or Étienne Gilson, will not deny it. What that evolution was and what its mechanism was is not known, and it may never be known with certainty using solid science, only by hypothesizing, (because it would amount to the "proof of God"), but any rational person can ascertain from nature, logic and science that the "order out chaos" mechanism is utter nonsense. (Like what St. Paul or Leibnitz says, it is possible to convince oneself based on the orderliness of the world that God exists, one does not even need Pascal's wager.)

So, to conclude, I will repeat what I already said — if any of these Christian or Catholic scientists and theologians who claim that this "evolution" is based on some Darwinian mechanism, if they try to mix apples and oranges (or rather apples with poisoned apples), they better start explaining rationally what they mean by such merger of Christianity or God with chaos & disorder.

Ray Ingles — The best evidence for common descent is uncommon descent.

Monkeyville - "The best evidence for common descent is uncommon descent."

Look, if you don't intend to be taken seriously, that's fine. But if you can't even express any of the arguments of the opposition, that's a strong indication you don't understand them.

I'm not asking you to accept common descent. I'm asking if you're aware of reasons others give for accepting it.

@Monkeyville: Teilhard himself was very complex -- as a child, fascinated with his experience of matter, and as a Jesuit mystic/paleontologist, convinced of the absolute synergy of science and Christianity. His work is speculative, but I think no more so that physicists who discuss string theory or multiverses. Regarding his distinction between tangential and radial energy, I came across an interesting article in Zygon recently (vol. 40, no. 3, Sept. 2005) in which the authors, a biologist, a chemist and a theologian, argue that "Analysis of developments in thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, and information theory show that Gibbs' free energy contains both calorimetric and noetic components, thus validating Teilhard's intuition." They see Teilhard's "radial energy" as a noetic, informational component. (Their reference is to the "free energy" theory of Josiah Gibbs, and some modern views supporting the existence of two additive components in Gibbs free energy.)

Professor Kainz,

I was also curious about de Chardin's childhood expriences and visions, (not unlike the mysterious visions other "revolutionary" scientists and thinkers had), although such phantasms could be interpreted differently, they could mean the opposite of what you are implying.

I hope it is clear from what I wrote earlier — but I don't think it is a compliment to classify de Chardins theory as "speculative", considering what such speculative quazi-science means today.

As far as trying to justify de Chardin's theory by some esoteric thermodynamic implications, I will wait and see whether such parallels actually mean anything. My father was a scientist specializing in thermodynamics, and I know how thick his books were and how complex and confusing such thermodynamic analogies can be.

Ray Ingles,

A lot of time and effort has been wasted trying to prove or disprove Darwin's central hypothetical claim, his common descent. Darwin himself goes on waxing poetic about this, like here at the very end of his Origin of Species:

"Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."


I don't intent to get bogged down here with the intricate minutiae and lengthy arguments of the last 150 years for or against the common descent. If you want those, you can easily find them for yourself. Ultimately, the common descent is a philosophical dead-end, another dualism in science and philosophy if you like, and had Darwin been better educated, or a better philosopher, he might have realized why the concept of species is a rather dangerous minefield, or why it is futile to look for the "origin of species."

If you want some common sense resolution of the problem, here is a good answer by G. K. Chesterton from his Orthodoxy:

"Evolution is a good example of that modern intelligence which, if it destroys anything, destroys itself. Evolution is either an innocent scientific description of how certain earthly things came about; or, if it is anything more than this, it is an attack upon thought itself. If evolution destroys anything, it does not destroy religion but rationalism. If evolution simply means that a positive thing called an ape turned very slowly into a positive thing called a man, then it is stingless for the most orthodox; for a personal God might just as well do things slowly as quickly, especially if, like the Christian God, he were outside time. But if it means anything more, it means that there is no such thing as an ape to change, and no such thing as a man for him to change into. It means that there is no such thing as a thing. At best, there is only one thing, and that is a flux of everything and anything. This is an attack not upon the faith, but upon the mind; you cannot think if there are no things to think about. You cannot think if you are not separate from the subject of thought. Descartes said, "I think; therefore I am." The philosophic evolutionist reverses and negatives the epigram. He says, "I am not; therefore I cannot think." "

@Monkeyville: I didn't mean anything pejorative by "speculative." A scientist might wonder about the causes of something and speculate that it could be this or that. But "hypothesize" might be less subject to misconstrual. Teilhard's "radial energy" might be categorized as an admittedly daring hypothesis, still in need of verification.

Since I'm nowhere near being the intellectual equivalent of those on this blog, who've contributed their input re: Professor Kainz's article, and since we'd all have to agree that "science" itself has historically been a "notoriously self-correcting discipline," perhaps someone would be kind enough to explain, just why, or how, the mere mention of those scholars who'd dare question the supposed all-sufficient omnipotence? of unguided, unintelligent natural selection/random mutations etc., as being primarily responsible for what one presently witnesses throughout this biosphere (Dr. Lynn Margulis et al., the very first staggeringly-complex "self-replicating bacterium," 21st century molecular "proteomics"/"epigenetics," and the "Cambrian Explosion" notwithstanding), could possibly evoke such seemingly visceral responses from said evolutionary proponents - theistic or otherwise, and scientists included - that one normally finds in debates, or dialogue, of the purely ideological kind?

I recall a penetratingly relevant, and still scientifically-unanswered observation, made quite some time ago, by the brilliant Crafoord Prize-winning cosmologist, Allan Sandage, of which I'll simply paraphrase, as the exact quotation is presently unavailable:

"Just how is it, that non-living, or inanimate matter-and-energy in motion, has somehow organized itself, to contemplate itself?"

It should be quite clear, even to the "Catholic scientist," Dr. Stephen Barr, that the scientific "jury" is still "out," or far-from (perhaps light-years?) providing an adequate empirical database, from which to wield its curiously unassailable dogmatic a priori philosophy of materialistic cultural supremacy; (neuroscientist Dr. Raymond Tallis refers to this as "biologism," and "neuroscientism") namely, that "mind" has somehow emerged, epiphenomenally?, from what has been widely, and presuppositionally assumed to constitute ultimate reality - matter and/or mass itself - without a shred of empirical evidence to support said "scientific" assmption? Hmmm.

Surely, in light of the inherent limitations of the scientific method itself (certainly not the self-referentially incoherent "scientism" of our day), and its wholesale inability to answer those ubiquitously pesky, transcultural "why?" questions, so uniquely evident amongst the transcendently-wired species Homo Sapiens, wouldn't greater tentativity, of the supremely humble sort, be a far-more appropriate approach to science's continuing efforts to answer those questions, whose metaphysical implications, more often than not, impinge on matters of ultimate significance?

Monkeyville - "I don't intent to get bogged down here with the intricate minutiae and lengthy arguments of the last 150 years for or against the common descent. If you want those, you can easily find them for yourself."

I wasn't asking to get bogged down in them. I was just asking for some evidence that *you* had ever actually tried to "find them for yourself".

In lieu of that, perhaps you can explain how evolution can be "an attack upon thought itself". I've seen, e.g. Plantinga's argument and not been impressed. Is something like that what Chesterton was on about?

Sad to see a criticism of evolution termed a support of ID by a philosopher.

Fodor argues that selection requires an agent, but there is no 'Mother Nature'. Wrong. 'The Universe' exists, and selects against people jumping off of tall buildings very effectively. Peacocks suffer the selection of pea hens. Is this news in philosophy departments?

Monton forgets that science is about evidence and explanation, finding causes, not just correlates. Yes, a scientific (methodologically natural) investigation of the supernatural is possible. A study of prayer and recovery can be a scientifically conducted study.

On the other hand, someone who says "I prayed to God to tell me if the Higgs Boson exists, and He told me yes!" is not operating scientifically. That personal experience of prayer is not a reproducible experiment. This is where ID fails, because the ultimate appeal is to the idea "it looks designed". There is no calculable design metric.

@David vun Kannon: If, while driving through the U.S. on summer vacation, your direct itinerary upon leaving the Grand Canyon, takes you to the Black Hills of S.D., where your desire is to spend some time at Mount Rushmore; could, or would you, reliably and/or logically infer upon departing Mt. Rushmore, that the topography you'd observed in both Arizona/Black Hills locations, was simply a result of strictly "natural" processes in action, or, in true "Dawkinspeak," that the appearance of design re: the facial-features of those four presidential faces which appear on Mt. Rushmore - was merely "illusory?"

If so, how could, or would you derive this notion "empirically," from the unfortunately, and oftentimes myopic form of scientific inquiry to which you'd alluded, called "Methodological Naturalism?" It would simply be both irrational, and not to mention impossible, to expect such scientific confirmation of "MN."

It appears as though (and please correct me if I'm wrong) you're unwittingly, or unintentionally, comparing "apples-with-oranges," by declaring that "ID fails," from the perspective of the "experimental sciences," when in fact, the science of ID has been rigorously formulated, and thus soundly anchored in the "historical sciences," or more accurately, "the inference to the best explanation" or IBE - meaning, that "ID" is based upon the very same "...uniformitarian method of scientific reasoning that Darwin himself used in formulating his argument in "On the Origin of Species."

(Partial quotation: Cambridge-trained philosopher of science & a leading "ID" theorist, Dr. Stephen Meyer, "Signature In The Cell," ('09), p. 348.)

Sadly, this all-too-common mischaracterization, or misrepresentation of "ID" in the West (as I've witnessed for almost a decade now), especially through America's media-crazed/sound-bite pop-culture, is primarily responsible for this country's abysmally-low "IQ" when it comes to comprehending, that the valid "historical science" of ID, is anything BUT - "creationism in a cheap tuxedo"; or, in keeping with the crassly mischaracterized, or highly-politicized/conflated title bestowed upon the science of ID, at the hands of our very own National Center for Science Education (NCSE) - "Intelligent Design Creationism."

Since I'm ONLY a layperson ("ignorant and technically unsophisticated," more precisely), I humbly recommend for your perusal, should you decide to buttress your present understanding in this very important area, the following small-sampling of "facts" on ID ("from-the-horse's-mouth") so-to-speak, whose contentious issues, are nonetheless well-documented, and clearly understood by distinguished scholars within the philosophy of science itself:

"The Center for Science and Culture" (Discovery Institute)

"A Positive, Testable Case for Intelligent Design," by Casey Luskin, March 30, 2011. Found@
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2011/03/a_closer_look_at_one_scientist045311.html

"Signature In The Cell: DNA And The Evidence For Intelligent Design," ('09), Dr. Stephen C. Meyer, (609 pages), including notes, bibliography and index sections.

The Blog: Evolution News and Views

(All of the above-mentioned links etc., should suffice in opening-up a brand-new area of cutting-edge research (websites, books, articles, essays, peer-reviewed/published work in all the respective disciplines of ID's scientists, scholars et al. to dat, thus enabling you to weigh and/or assess the evidence for yourself.)

Since we common-people aren't sufficiently apprised by the media, as to all the critically-relevant nuances that've orbited about the creation/evolution debate for so long now (e.g., typical "God of the gaps" and/or "evolution of the gaps" accusations one normally encounters), I thought I'd leave you with with an extremely objective, and highly-relevant observation made by Nobel laureate biophysicist, Robert Laughlin, in his '05 book entitled, "A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down:

"Much of present day biological knowledge is ideological. A key symptom of ideological thinking is the explanation that it has no implications and cannot be tested. I call such logical dead ends anti-theories because they have exactly the opposite effect of real theories: they stóp thinking rather than stimulate it. Evolution by natural selection, for instance, which Darwin conceived as a great theory has lately come to function as an anti-theory called upon to cover up embarrassing experimental shortcomings and legitimize findings that are at best questionable and at worst not even wrong. Your protein defies the laws of mass action--evolution did it! Your complicated mess of chemical reactions turns into a chicken--evolution! The human brain works on logical principles no computer can emulate? Evolution is the cause!" (R. Laughlin, "A Different Universe," p. 168-69.)

I do hope you'll consider responding to my post at some point, especially if I've misunderstood your position in any way? Thank you so much!

@David Huston - I've never yet had the pleasure of visiting either the Grand Canyon or Mt Rushmore, but I'm pretty clear on how each came to be the way it is today. It is the job of the ID theorist to come up with a metric that can distinguish Mt Rushmore from New Hampshire's (sadly deceased) Old Man of the Mountain, or the Face on Mars. As was pointed out above, if that metric could be applied to distinguish a naturally occurring virus from an engineered bio-weapon, ID would be solidly established in many more peoples minds. Alas, it is not so.

I'm also familiar with the resources you recommend. I came to this article from the link on the front page of the DI's website, discovery.org. My review of Signature in the Cell is rated one of the most helpful on Amazon. I'm a reader of EN&V whenever I need a laugh.

I'm sure Dr Laughlin deserved his Nobel, but in speaking about biology he is outside his area of expertise. Exactly how he thinks an equilibrium law such as the Law of Mass Action is relevant to far from equilibrium processes such as evolution is unclear. Similarly, the assertion that the human brain works on logical principles that no computer can emulate is terrifically amusing.

Far from being the science-stopper that Dr Laughlin supposes, evolutionary theory gives us the tools to answer these questions. Is it possible to approach an optimum condition through iterations of variation and selection in a population? Yes, it is. That is one of the easiest things to demonstrate with genetic algorithms. That helps answer questions such as "If an antibiotic kills 99% of bacteria X, leaving 10 million live bacteria, and the bacteria mutate at rate Y, and reproduce every Z hours, how long before we can expect that population to become resistant to that antibiotic?" When will the "Goddidit" of ID ever be as helpful?

@David vun Kannon: Thanks for the response, and those curious areas in my post, of which you seemed to blithely ignore.

No big deal though, as I've grown accustomed over the last several years to reading those sorts of replies, especially when said replies come from highly reputable scientists seemingly afflicted with the "Goddidit" mentality, to which you've referred, as though the science of ID has been ostensibly premised, then wrenched out of context? from some holy book here on planet earth, or something?

Also, though I've not encountered the term "design metric" before, to which you keep alluding, is it possible that you haven't had the opportunity to review the rigorously formulated mathematical aspects of ID yet, as accomplished through such scholars as William Dembski, Robert Marks II, et al?

If not, since you sound as though your intellect exceeds that of min by leaps-and-bounds, perhaps you should consider spending a great deal of time perusing their "Evolutionary Informatics" website (www.evoinfo.org - click-on "publications"), whereby I'm sure you'll find plenty of information which clearly suggests, that the work on the science of ID represents anything but the work of theological "monks" in virtual isolation - fasting, praying, meditating, and poring meticuously over holy scripture - then subsequently publishing their findings!

Thanks again for the kind response, and hopefully, I was able to direct your attention to some new areas of study, heretofore overlooked by yourself at this juncture?

One more thing too: Perhaps you'd be kind enough to explain to me how Nobel laureate biophysicist, Robert Laughlin, whose very research expertise lies in the area of "the properties of matter that mk life possible," could possibly be "outside his area of expertise" in assessing the validity of scientific arguments unique to evolutionary biology? Am I just completely missing something here?

@David Huston Sorry if I seemed to blithely ignore parts of your post. I tried to hit the high points, while ignoring parts that put words in my mouth ("ID fails") which seemed to be there just so you could exercise your own opinions.

Yes, I am familiar with the work of Dembski and Marks. It is far from rigorous, having been characterized as 'written in Jello' by people smarter than myself. Dembski and Marks have tried to propose a 'Law' of conservation of information, with little success.

I'm not sure why you've twice referred to Dr Laughlin as a biophysicist. Read his bio on Wikipedia. His Nobel is for work on "the fractional quantum Hall effect". I suppose the fractional quantum Hall effect makes life possible, in the same sense that gravity makes life possible. But that doesn't make physicists who study gravity or the fractional quantum Hall effect biophysicists. The fractional quantum Hall effect certainly does not effect evolution, which is an abstract process that can happen in any circumstance where certain attributes occur, such a population reproducing with variation and being selected, over and over again. Evolution can happen in a computer program, no gravity or fractional quantum Hall effect needed.

@David Huston My apologies, I've reread my first comment and see where you are picking up the 'ID fails'.

I'm not sure where I've seen that ID proponents in general restrict design detection to the historical vs. the experimental sciences. If you take ID as a critique of evolution, this is not a useful distinction. Evolution is not something which happened in the past, and cannot be test experimentally. It happens continuously in the biosphere, and can be made to happen in computer experiments.

@David vun Kannon: Thanks for the response again! I thought I'd provide a thorough reply to your most recent statement above, re: ID, and its relationship to the historical and/or experimental sciences, written very recently by Steve Meyer, during an exchange he had with another "scholarly reviewer" of Meyer's "SITC."

(This is highly relevant, seeing as though you already described yourself above, as having provided "one of the most helpful reviews of Meyer's SITC on Amazon"; and especially germane, given the fact that this very issue of ID's purported grounding in the historical sciences, is comprehensively explicated - not to mention the historicity of "abductive reasoning/IBE argumentation etc." provided - within the pages of SITC, something to which I can readily attest, since I'm someone clearly lacking the formidable intellect of those, such as yourself, so I found it almost necessary to por over much of its contents - some 100-pages of endnote citations as well - nearly twice!)

So, if you'd be so kind (and patient with me as well) as to read Meyer's recent article carefully, perhaps that would help in our attempt to communicate WITH one another - re: this typically venomous "dialogue," of which I've been witnessing for almost a decade now - that has exemplified, time-and-again, such an abysmally deficient grasp of the true essence of its actual contents, and which, rather curiously, seems to evoke more-often-than-not, such an abnormally visceral response of RELIGION! from those scientifically-minded individuals, who are otherwise committed to that perennially elusive "holy grail" standard - of "white-coated scientific objectivity.

http://www.evolutionnews.org/2011/10/of_molecules_and_straw_men_a_r051601.html

I do look forward to your response of Meyer's laser-like explanation, of what represents much of his life's work.

If we get beyond this one, I intend to address the current falsifiability of those long-held, computer-simulated cherished assumptions & statement(s), so vigorously advanced by the likes of Dawkins, Kenneth Miller, noted skeptic, Michael Shermer, Sean Carroll, Francisco Ayala, Jerry Coyne, Columbia's distinguished philosopher of science, Phillip Kitcher et al., to which you'd alluded, perhaps twice now, by making the statement that "evolution...can be made to happen in computer experiments."

This long-held assumption of textbook Darwinian evolution's breathtakingly omnipotent? "algorithmic creativity" (meaning, the strictly materialistic processes of "unguided" law & chance in "purposeless motion," virtually "lacking in any foresight," aka Dawkins' "Blind Watchmaker" hypothesis), was first examined quite thoroughly, way back in 1966, during a rather tumultuous gathering of some of this planet's most distinguished mathematicians & evolutionary scientists of the time, in what was called the "Wistar Symposium," (in Philadelphia I believe), and was chaired by Nobel laureate, Sir Peter Medawar.

Additionally, and more recently, the brilliant secular Jewish mathematician/philosopher of science, David Berliski, has conclusively demonstrated for several years now (as well as Dembski, Marks et al.), the "fact" that "INFORMATION is always smuggled-in these computer simulation experiments, in some fashion or another." (My emphasis) See link below for current confirmation.

http://www.evolutionnews.org/2010/12/bio-complexity_paper_co-author042141.html

This "fact" has been made crystal-clear through peer-reviewed/published papers conspicuously on display at Dembski & Marks "Evolutionary Informatics" website as well, that I mentioned yesterday.

You, and those to whom you regard as being "so much smarter than yourself," of whom you'd mentioned had spoken so belittingly and disparagingly of their conclusions, just need to soundly refute their findings in the process of peer review; otherwise, their scientifically-imagined pontifications on this entire body of
work, simply sounds like the proverbial "sour grapes."

As it stands right now in peer-reviewed scientific "circles," and as Dr. Dembski has been prolifically demonstrating (mathematically) for well-over a decade now - "There's No Free Lunch" to be had in naturalistic scenarios, thus far!

One last item to which I find myself irresistibly drawn, is that the rigorous scholarly work accomplished by those, since the fledging science of ID was being formulated in earnest, at the outset of the 90's - especially in the area of "abiogenesis," and "DNA's small library of roughly 3.5 billion-bits of digitally-encoded 'CSI' contained within the very first self-replicating bacterium," or "life" itself, clearly upstream from the onset of "evolution," as hypothesized in all "origin of life" scenarios - has continued to vindicate a marvelously relevant observation, made by the "ultra-brilliant" late mathematician, physicist and astronomer, Sir Fred Hoyle, whose atheism, he later acknowledged in his later years, had been "so profoundly shaken" as a result of his scientific research, and his quotations are legendary:

"Imagine 10 (to the 50th) blind persons each with a scrambled Rubik's cube, and try to conceive of the chance of them all simultaneously arriving at the solved form. You then have the chance of arriving by random shuffling, of just one of the many biopolymers on which life depends. The notion that not only the biopolymers but the operating program of a living cell could be arrived at by chance in a primordial organic soup here on the earth is evidently nonsense of a high order."

-- Sir Fred Hoyle, "New Scientist," Nov., 1981

The more things change, in "origin of life" research, the more they stay the same. Hmmm. Just think astrobiology...and thanks so much for your time David!

@David Huston - Meyer's defense of his book is an important step forward in the conversation. I would agree with him that if Venema's review focused on arguments Meyer did not make that that portion of the review should be discounted. However, Meyer's dismissal of Venema's criticism is less compelling.

Venema points out, as have I and others, that Meyer's treatment of the RNA Wolrd Hypothesis in Signature in the Cell is out of date. In specific, it did not treat the work of Michael Yarus' lab on direct templating and the stereochemical hypothesis for the origin of the genetic code. The coverage gap is obvious if you actually look at the dates on the cited articles at the bottom of that essay. Many of Yarus et al's publications were available well before Signature in the Cell was written. Meyer tries to hide behind the idea that this research was published after his book - that doesn't work in this case.

Meyer can only waffle on the implications. Yarus is showing that there is a plausible, naturalistic hypothesis for the origin of the genetic code - the 'signature in the cell' of the title. Therefore, ID is not the best or simplest explanation. Meyer tries to shift the focus of his argument to the source of sequences that are functional (in some context). This isn't going to work either, since random assemblages of nucleotide sequences turn up functional sequences easily. Even 5 nucleotides can have function, and trillions upon trillions of sequences can be held in a spoon of water.

Meyer does focus on ID in the context of a 'historical' science, but not to the exclusion of experimental sciences. As your references to Berlinski show, there are other leading voics in the ID movement who attempt to show the validity of the ID program through experiment.

Dembski and Marks have not demonstrated their arguments in the peer-reviewed literature. Some of their work has been published in non-peer reviewed IEEE publications, other has been self published in journals they control. Neither Dembski nor Marks has the stature in the field of mathematics of computation of their critics. So the call for peer reviewed critique is premature.

Nor does Berlinski have such stature, whose secularism and Jewish background are irrelevant (unless of course ID really is creationism in a cheap tuxedo). Your use of "scare quotes" around "fact" is appropriate. There is no such fact. If information were smuggled in by researchers, Dembski and Marks would be able to testify to how they did it, since they use the same algorithms that Berlinski was criticizing. In fact, Dembski invented a genetic algorithm program called MESA, which was intended to answer Dawkins. How could that be an effective criticism if all GAs suffered from information being smuggled in? It isn't, because it isn't. But MESA was forgotten by Dembski when it became obvious that it just reinforced the truth that evolution could demonstrated using computer programs.

Sir Fred Hoyle falls into the same bucket as Dr Laughlin, speaking outside the area of his expertise. Further, he attacks a strawman (though a favorite strawman of the ID community) since no one argues that a large number of non-iterative trials is how life began or evolution works. I would also caution against quoting Hoyle from 1981, or Wistar from 1966, as if nothing important has happened in OOL research in the meantime. Hoyle was great for making up snarky phrases ("Big Bang", "tornado in a junkyard") for ideas he didn't agree with. Luckily, science proceeds by evidence, not snark.

I think you will find that most people think that evolution began far before bacteria came on the scene. This is because some modern definitions of life directly relate it to evolution - life is that which can evolve. Others would go further and say that some restricted forms of molecular competition deserve to be called evolution of a sort. In any case, if you have a good worked out calculation that a bacterial genome has 3.5 gigabits of CSI, please share it. Getting an ID peson like Dembski to "show his workings" on calcualting the CSI of anything is difficult (read impossible). What is the CSI of a royal flush?

ps - I'm now on vacation and will not be able to respond quickly.

@David vun Kannon:

"A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably."

-- The incomporable Ludwig Wittgenstein, "Philosophical Investigations," para., 115.

David, would you be kind enough to cite to the "empirical" (or otherwise) database in the professional/technical literature of evolutionary thought - across the scientific disciplines no less - conclusively affirming that the four mindless and/or unintelligent, lifeless forces of physics in operation since the origin of the universe, as well as on this roughly 4.5 billion year-old planet, "...would rearrange those basic particles of physics into spaceships, nuclear power plants, battleships, computers and the Internet" - conscious observers included - all without violating the Second Law of Thermodynamics?

(See the still unrefuted work of ID mathematician, Professor Granville Sewell, for at least the last decade.)

http://www.evolutionnews.org/2011/10/more_philosophical_than_scient052441.html

Also, in your last post, you seemingly overlooked Meyer's mentioning in his fina response to Craig Venema, that a solid refutation of Yarus' most recent research was forthcoming in a peer-review article, in collaboration with ID philosopher of biology, Paul Nelson. The following link, once again (should you actually read it), provides more factual evidence that "information is habitually smuggled-in," in ALL computer simulation experiments to dat.

(If you'd simply consider reading "Evolution News & Views" for its scientifically-informed value, as opposed to reading it "just when you need a laugh," perhaps you could add to your present understanding?)

http://www.evolutionnews.org/2011/12/me_thinks_hes_like_a_dawkins053651.html

As you'll clearly discern from above Dec. 2012 article, to dat - Yarus' research included - the "smuggling-in of information" in these computer simulation scenarios, is simply an irrefutable fact David; thus William Dembski's long-demonstrated "No Free Lunch" principle, is still clearly valid.

Maybe if you'd digest the facts for yourself, instead of allowing those ideologically-motivated a priori philosophical materialists throughout the blogosphere, to potentially cloud your understanding, you might be able to connect-some-dots in this debate?

A perfect example, would be your deriding my usage of Hoyle's "outdated," ostensibly bush-league assessment demonstrating the astronomical improbabilities involved in 1980's "OOL" thought, now firmly established in ("Dr. Dumbski's"?) "No Free Lunch" premise; yet, as you'll see, the brilliant Yarus himself finds it necessary in his 2010 "RNA world-first" book (chap. 7 title), to employ Hoyle's still applicable "Boeing 747-in-a-junkyard" scenario, in hopes of bridging that heretofore unbridgeable abiotic, chasm-like boundary in the origin of life's first "self-replicating bacterium," or CSI "life" as we know it.

Just why do you suppose Yarus would resort to Hoyle's bush-league analysis some 30 years later David?

"While chemists have succeeded in making the molecules of life - or their components - in the lab out of simpler molecules...the tightly controlled processes in a chemistry lab can't be mistaken for what would have happened on the early Earth. Any abiotically prepared replicator before the start of life is a fantasy." (Can you say "geochemical relevance" on primordial
earth, when it comes to synthetic biology?)

-- Leading RNA-world "OOL" scientist, Robert Shapiro, lecture delivered at "Harvard Origins of Life Initiative," (2008).

"In a living organism we see the power of software, or information processing, refined to an incredible degree...the problem of the origin of life reduces to one of understanding how encoded software emerged spontaneously from hardware. How did it happen? How did natur go digital?" (Remember, "information cannot be reduced to materialistic explication," because it's a purely transcendent property.)

-- Renowned astrobiologist, Paul Davies, "The Fifth Miracle," (2000), p. 115.

"The origin and early development of life, whether specifically on earth, or possibly elsewhere in the universe, remains one of the great unsolved scientific problems."

-- From the description of "The Origin of Life Gordon Research Conference," Jan. 10-15, 2010, Galveston, TX.
(www.grc.org/programs.aspx?year=2010&program=origin)

David, I'm looking at a 2010 book right now, that's loaded with such quotations, from the top "OOL" scientists on this planet, astrobiologists included, and not one of them would agree with your quixotic statement that, "I think you'll find that most people think that evolution began far before bacteria came on the scene."

If that's an empirical fact, would you please cite the scientists who've made such pronouncements, and where those citations can be located in the technical/professional journals? Evolution is STILL a vacuous concept to origin of life research, and always has been...literally irrelevant.

"Although some people confuse the origin of life with evolution the two are conceptually separate. Biological evolution is defined as the descent of living things from ancestors from which they differ. Life had to precede evolution!...We know much more about evolution than the origin of life."

-- "Evolution vs. Creationism - An Introduction," Paperback Edition, Dr. Eugenie Scott, Exec. Dir., National Center for Science Education, (2005), p. 27.

"The difference between a mixture of simple chemicals and a bacterium is much more profound than the gulf between a bacterium and an elephant."

-- Robert Shapiro, www.pandasthumb.org/archives/2005/10/robert-shapiro.html

I wanted to leave you with a cutting-edge link on 21st century evolutionary molecular biology (epigenetics, proteomics, alternative splicing, etc.), whose author, Stephen Talbott, has been scouring all of the most relevant prestigious journals & studies in evo./bio. for several years, and began writing a series (I think 7-parts now, most recent Nov., 2011, with prodigious ref. citations) on just where the evidence is taking them.

The revelations are absolutely "mind-boggling!"
Yet what's equally mind-boggling is the fact that all of this scientific evidence is virtually unknown outside of professional scientific circles? Why do you suppose that is the factual case David?

Why is the "dumbed-down" anachronistic evidence for evolution, as found in biology textbooks etc., throughout our public education system, diametrically opposed to what one finds in the 21st century professional/technical journals of evolutionary biology...absolutely night-and-day difference too David?

Study what's on Talbott's website for yourself - beginning with "Getting Over the Code Delusion" - and see if it comports with the all-too-common assurances we typically hear from our left-leaning libera media outlets (TV, radio, newspapers, magazines etc), and other scientific experts who possess the "cultural microphone."

(Did you ever hear about, or read, the 2010 book, "The Altenberg 16: An Expose of the Evolution Industry," by European journalist Suzan Mazur? She couldn't get one single newspaper in this country, from the NY Times, to the LA Times, to cover this groundbreaking, and almost secret historical meeting July '08, in Altenberg, Austria, of 16 of this planet's most distinguished evolutionary scientists, and philosophers of science. The neoDarwinian synthesis and/or evolution is dead David! I have the book; and to this day there hasn't been so much as a whisper of Darwin's demise heard throughout this country - only some carefully orchestrated damage-control - except on ENV, and a Jan. '09 cover story in New Scientist magazine entitled, "Darwin Was Wrong," re: the falsification, and "polite burial" of his all-encompassing conceptual explanatory hypothesis called the "Tree of Life." Are you aware of any of this?)

Why the collective silence from those committed to "white-coated scientific objectivity?" Why the wholesale, unmitigated indoctrination of countless millions of unsuspecting young minds throughout the schools in America, with the materialist "philosophy" of scientific materialism - and Darwinian macroevolutionary philosophy as its certifiable "cornerstone?"

http://www.natureinstitute.org/txt/st/mqual/index.htm (This is Stephen Talbott's link on molecular biology to which I referenced above.)

As a bible-believing follower of the Lord Jesus, Israel's Messiah, or better yet, a "simpleton, flat-earth believing creationist rube," I've been doing my homework in this particular area for almost a decade now, and I know the factual answers to every question I've asked you, as I've literally gone through boxes of books, reams of essays/articles, and several excellent DVD's during the last nine years - some of which, several times over, because, as I already told you...I ain't so smart!

This is a "spiritual" war of worldviews taking pace in the West...a battle of ideas for cultural supremacy. "God is dead! And we've killed him!" in true Nietzschean fashion, and man has since become "the measure of all things," in post-Enlightenment philosophy.

You see, and you may not be aware of this fact either, but Carl Sagan's revered mantra that "natur is all there is, ever was, or ever will be" (the bedrock faith-based ideological "plank" of scientific materialism, whose "empirical" evidence in support of such claim is vacuously irrelevant at best), is the philosophical equivalent of "In the beginning God..."

But what about all those pesky transcultural "why?" questions, of which "scientism" is wholly inadequate in providing rational answers, questions unique to those transcendently-wired conscious observers, called Homo sapiens?

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/24/opinion/24davies.html?pagewanted=all
(Very insightful link by Paul Davies about "white-coated scientific objectivity.")

Hmmm...and they tell we "religious" folk to sit-down, and shut-up, and stóp trying to impose our imaginary, delusional, irrational "beliefs" on everyone else, 'cause the self-referentially incoherent religion of "scientism" has ALL the answers. By the way, just who is the "god" of scientism, or materialist philosophy anyway? Do tell.

I hope you and yours are enjoying a great deal of R & R this holiday season, and Merry Christmas to you David!

@David Huston - You'd think that if Granville Sewell is right in his SLoT arguments, folks like Sir Fred Hoyle and Nobel winning Dr Laughlin would have noticed it also. Why do you think they haven't, David? Why does even Answers in Genesis tell people NOT to use SLoT arguments? Because they are silly! If Sewell was right, once you shook up a mixture of oil and water, it would never separate out again. Have you thought about that David?

Nothing peer-reviewed is forthcoming from Stephen Meyer and Paul Nelson that refutes Yarus' work. Unless 'peer' means 'also on the payroll of the Discovery Institute'. Yes, Yarus' own non-technical book references Hoyle's 'in a junkyard' quote, nit because he agrees with it, or because it has scientific standing, but because it is a well known quote.

My remarks of evolution and bacteria relate to the idea that bacteria as we know them today are not very likely to be anything like first life. There could easily be a billion years separating what we can recognize as a bacteria and OOL.

I'm not sure why you are happy to quote Robert Shapiro. Sure, he's got an alternate theory of OOL, and is happy to criticize RNA World work to push his own. But the enemy of your enemy is not your friend, David. Shapiro is just as much materialist on OOL as Yarus or Szostak or Jefferey Bada or Sutherland or... you get the idea, David, don't you?

Nor is epigenetics somehow a nail in the coffin of Darwiniest materialism. All epigenetics means is that there are chemicals attached to the DNA in a cell, and the physical structure of the DNA, as mediated by these chemicals, is important to the function of the DNA. In addition, the pattern of these chemical attachments and structure is copied when DNA replicates. Hmmm, purely physical, chemical determinants of function that are copied. Sounds pretty materialistic to me. No transcendent information being smuggled into the genome here.

Thank goodness for the white coated elite that are discovering all of this! I agree that it would be better if we could get some of these amazing discoveries into the public science education curriculum. If there are controversies about genetically modified food and crops, bird flu, etc, we need our children to be scientifically educated to discuss and decide these issues as citizen participants. It really is too bad so many people are against teaching how life works and varies over time. You think it is bad, too, don't you David?

(BTW, yes, I am aware of Mazur and her attempts to sensationalize a theoretical biology conference. Since it was covered in Nature and Science, I'm not too worried that the New York Times or LA Times missed it. I'd love to see more theoretical biology in the Times, personally.)

Thank you for your holiday wishes. I'm in the Czech Republic with my wife's family. We're happy to be together, but the whole country is saddened by the passing of Vaclav Havel. My wife and I participated in the funeral procession Wednesday that brought his body to Prague Castle. It was quite moving.

All the best to you.