A dose of humility re:junk DNA?

On Junk DNA Claim, Francis Collins Walks It Back, Admitting "Hubris"

David Klinghoffer

Count on Marvin Olasky at World Magazine not to miss something like this. In The Language of God, theistic evolutionary icon Francis Collins used so-called Junk DNA as homerun evidence against intelligent design. He has since backed down on that, honorably, admitting "hubris" in the process. Olasky:

Collins claimed on page 136 that huge chunks of our genome are "littered" with ancient repetitive elements (AREs), so that "roughly 45 percent of the human genome [is] made up of such genetic flotsam and jetsam." In his talk he claimed the existence of "junk DNA" was proof that man and mice had a common ancestor, because God would not have created man with useless genes.

Last year, though, speaking at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco, Collins threw in the towel: "In terms of junk DNA, we don't use that term anymore because I think it was pretty much a case of hubris to imagine that we could dispense with any part of the genome, as if we knew enough to say it wasn't functional. ... Most of the genome that we used to think was there for spacer turns out to be doing stuff."

Good for Collins -- and maybe he'll go on to deal with other times scientists feel sorry for God as they look at His purportedly poor design. For example, evolutionists use the retina of the eye as evidence against creation, because nerve endings are at the front rather than at the back, which at first glance seems better placement. Yet, as Lee Spetner explains in The Evolution Revolution (Judaica Press, 2014), physicists now see front placement as the best one for "ingeniously designed light collectors."

The list of needed retractions should include what you probably learned in high school about apparently purposeless human vestigial organs. Robert Wiedersheim's 1895 list of 86 has shrunk, as almost all of them have proved to have functions. For example, the most famous vestigial organ -- the vermiform appendix -- is a crucial storage place for benign bacteria that repopulate the gut when diarrhea strikes. The appendix can be a life-saver.

By "hubris" perhaps he means the overweening tendency to assume that scientific opinion as constituted at the moment has got everything all figured out. The repeated need to retract and walk back previous certainties should be a lesson to all, a warning that we can't simply hand over our intellects to "science."

In briefest form, that's the message of Doug Axe's book Undeniable. When it comes to big-ticket science questions like evolution, not only do you get to think for yourself. You have a positive obligation to do so.

Why we need not idolise science for it to be of value.

Yes, There Can Be Science Without Scientism, and Without Relativism
Sarah Chaffee


In an article at Slate referring to Neil deGrasse Tyson's now famous #Rationalia tweet, sociologist Jeffery Guhin argues that "A rational nation ruled by science would be a terrible idea."

What? This, from popular media? Guhin makes his case against scientism, noting:

First, experts usually don't know nearly as much as they think they do....[T]he real problem is when we forget that scientists and experts are human too, and approach evidence and reasoned deliberation with the same prior commitments and unspoken assumptions as anyone else. Scientists: they're just like us.

Yes -- science, like any other human enterprise, is flawed.

"And second, science has no business telling people how to live," Guhin continues. Decrying scientific racism, he recalls that "Eugenics was science, as was social Darwinism and the worst justifications of the Soviet and Nazi regimes." Kudos to Guhin for recognizing that -- a point that many other commentators avoid facing squarely.

In fact, that sounds remarkably like what Discovery Institute's John G. West says in Darwin Day in America: How Our Politics and Culture Have Been Dehumanized in the Name of Science. As Dr. West summarizes in the Preface:

At the dawn of the last century, leading scientists and politicians giddily predicted that modern science -- especially Darwinian biology -- would supply solutions to all the intractable problems of American society, from crime to poverty to sexual maladjustment.

Instead, politics and culture were dehumanized as a new generation of "scientific" experts began treating human beings as little more than animals or machines:

In criminal justice, these experts denied the existence of free will and proposed replacing punishment with invasive "cures" such as the lobotomy.

In welfare, they proposed eliminating the poor by sterilizing those deemed biologically unfit.

In business, they urged the selection of workers based on racist theories of human evolution and the development of advertising methods to more effectively manipulate consumer behavior.

In sex education, they advocated creating a new sexual morality based on "normal mammalian behavior," without regard to longstanding ethical or religious imperatives.

But here Guhin abruptly changes direction with a weird foray into bashing creationism. He says that "creationism has a lot more in common with scientism than people such as Tyson or Richard Dawkins would ever admit." Where did that come from? My guess is it's tactical. At Slate, to get away with saying anything that could be seen as critical of materialism, you need to demonstrate your credibility by attacking the creationists.

He has no strong conclusion to his article; rather Guhin's last section is entitled "The elusive truth." Once creationism and scientism are gone, it turns out, what's left is relativism. He says, "Science may give us data, but it doesn't mean that data points to truth -- it's just what we currently understand as truth."

True, there's no science without faith, as Douglas Axe notes in Undeniable:

Science can't even conceivably give us anything more certain than the faith we place in the essential propositions undergirding science, which means science will never be the primary path to knowing, much less the only path to knowing.

But is there a third way? Can we reject the confines of pure materialism without rejecting the information-value of data? Can there be science without scientism?

Historically, science existed in a non-materialist framework. Intelligent design, unlike Darwinian evolution, provides a basis for believing that we are able to ascertain truth about the world while recognizing that some things may be beyond science's reach. ID aligns wells with a view affirming that humans are unique and it is consonant with the existence of ultimate meaning. At the same time, it affirms the importance of rationality and science -- which can help us to improve our quality of life through healthcare, technology, and more.


Accepting reality does not mean throwing away rationality -- just #Rationalia.

Scientists comment on "undeniable."

More Scientists Praise Douglas Axe's Undeniable
David Klinghoffer 

One of the refreshing things about Doug Axe's new book  Undeniable: How Biology Confirms Our Intuition That Life Is Designed is his confession that you don't have to take his word for it. Or anyone else's, for that matter.Despite being a molecular biologist who has done the lab research to confirm the impossibility of unguided nature chancing upon functional proteins, he shows how, even without that, the design intuition most of us share embodies sound science.

We don't need to rely slavishly on what scientists say because, in an important sense, we are all scientists, capable of judging a big scientific idea like evolution, if not necessarily the technical details, for ourselves. Evolution's defenders in the world of science love to overawe the public with those details, but we can look past and through them. Its defenders in the media tend toward a precious, almost worshipful regard for scientists, but as Dr. Axe reminds us, professionals in the sciences are human just like us.

All that having been said, it's interesting to hear from those professionals -- biologists especially -- who agree with Dr. Axe on his main point. And indeed endorsements for the book have continued to come in.

From Russell W. Carlson, Professor Emeritus, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, University of Georgia:

Many say we must accept that life is ultimately due to a grand cosmic accident, that evolution is an unguided purposeless process, and that we must deny our experience. Axe describes why the design we see in nature fits with scientific observation as well as with our "undeniable" experience.

From Matti Leisola, D.Sc., Professor Emeritus of Bioprocess Engineering, Aalto University, Finland:

Douglas Axe is one of the very few experimental scientists who has used his skills to test the validity of evolutionary mechanisms as a source of inventions. Here, he concludes that we can trust our common (universal) design intuition; it is supported by science, whereas evolutionary stories are anti-science.

From Mark C. Biedebach, Professor Emeritus, Department of Biological Sciences, California State University, Long Beach:

In Undeniable, Dr. Axe has carefully crafted a case that strongly favors our human intuition that life was designed. As a protein chemist, he gives numerous examples and reasons why unguided evolution (even of a cell's protein molecules) is improbable in the extreme. As I understand his case, its power to convince surpasses that of anything else I have ever read (on origins science) during my 65 years as an engineer, biophysicist, and physiologist.

Whoa. Frankly, those endorsements would be impressive from any scholar, or any thoughtful adult. They're all the more so from scientists who, you would have to agree even against your will (if you're a Darwinist), know what they're talking about.