Russia continues to disgrace itself re:religious liberty.

On junk science re:junk DNA.

Jonathan Wells: Zombie Science Keeps Pushing Junk DNA Myth
David Klinghoffer | @d_klinghoffer

The idea that a vast majority of our DNA is “junk,” an evolutionary relic, was just what evolutionists expected. It made sense. Darwin advocates such as Jerry Coyne and Francis Collins advanced it as proof for their claims. Alas for them, it turned out not to be true.

In a video conversation,  Zombie Science  author Jonathan Wells explains how the “Junk DNA” narrative was overturned by good science, including but far from limited to the ENCODE project. Did evolutionary diehards accept this? No! See it here:





If you follow the scientific literature, new functions for “junk” turn up on an almost weekly basis. But the diehards keep insisting on the myth. They strenuously resist a growing body of evidence. Why? Because as Dr. Wells clarifies, evolution for them is not an ordinary scientific theory. It’s a fixed idea. It is an ideology that must be true “no matter what.”

So how evidence is interpreted is wrenched into line with the ideology. And this is what we mean by “zombie science.” Watch and enjoy.

Yet more on the chasm between life and everything else.

“Life Is a Discontinuity in the Universe”
David Klinghoffer | @d_klinghoffer

In a really excellent new ID the Future episode with Todd Butterfield, Steve Laufmann puts the engineering challenge to gradualist evolutionary schemes about as powerfully as one could do. An enterprise architecture consultant, he is a most gifted and entertaining explainer.

There are 37 trillion cells in the human body, some 200 cell types, and 12,000+ specialized proteins. How does it all come together? In human ontogenesis, a 9-month process “turns a zygote into what I call a tax deduction,” says Laufmann. Building a system like this that “leaps together at the same time to create us” (as Butterfield puts it) is the most stunning engineering feat ever accomplished as far as we know.

The discussion features one memorable phrasing after another. “Life is a discontinuity in the universe,” and explaining it means explaining the property of “coherence” associated with engineered systems. Darwinian theory proposes that this was accomplished through random changes gradually accumulating. That entails maintaining “an adaptive continuum” of life where “any causal mechanism that’s proposed has to be able to produce all the changes for every discrete step within one generation.” In this way, unguided evolution could accomplish trivial changes – on the order of skin color, the shape of the nose or the earlobe – but “basics” (how a spleen functions, for example) are quite outside the range.

For the Darwin proponent, it looks hopeless. Laufmann: “Random changes only make the impossible even more impossible. It’s like the impossible squared. It just can’t happen.”

Taking all of this together, what you expect, rather than gradual change as evolutionists picture it, is sudden explosions of complexity. And this is just what the fossil record shows.

It’s a wonderful and enlightening conversation, demonstrating again the necessity of introducing the engineer’s perspective in any realistic estimation of how evolution could work. Darwin proponents almost never seem to consider these challenges. Listen to the podcast here, or download it here.