Some see Dr. Moreau as an exemplary rather than a cautionary model?

 Return (Yet Again) of the Humanzee

Denyse O Leary

A few days ago, the Templeton Foundation’s mailer for its online magazine Nautilus pointed to a five-year-old article by University of Washington psychology prof (emeritus) David P. Barash, advocating the creation of a humanzee: “Doing so would be a terrific idea.”

But Why Now?

It’s not clear why Nautilus is publicizing the article now. The Soviet Union failed to produce a humanzee. Nothing much has happened since 2018 that suggests that it is imminent. We do learn something of why Barash wants one, though:

Haven’t we learned that Promethean hubris leads only to disaster, as did the efforts of the fictional Dr. Frankenstein? But there are also other disasters, currently ongoing, such as the grotesque abuse of nonhuman animals, facilitated by what might well be the most hurtful theologically-driven myth of all times: that human beings are discontinuous from the rest of the natural world, since we were specially created and endowed with souls, whereas “they” — all other creatures — were not.

DAVID P. BARASH, “IT’S TIME TO MAKE HUMAN-CHIMP HYBRIDS,” NAUTILUS, MARCH 5, 2018

So it comes down to a war on the human soul. Now, here’s the interesting part: Humans are self-evidently unique; otherwise, Barash’s interaction with his readers could not occur. The human minds that enable that interaction are clearly not material things. And no one has any idea how they came to exist. Evolutionary theory provides no significant information here. In the end, however much many thinkers don’t like that fact, everyone eventually admits it.

Yet, on cue, readers — including many with PhDs — will agree with Barash that human exceptionalism is wrongthink. They will not ask why either he or they can maintain such an absurd view — when the very act of maintaining it refutes it. Perhaps all those years of education enable them to be oblivious to contradictions that should be apparent to an alert high schooler.

Barash, although he professes concern for animal rights, is not deterred by concern for the humanzees that a successful experiment would produce:

Neither fish nor fowl, wouldn’t they find themselves intolerably unspecified and inchoate, doomed to a living hell of biological and social indeterminacy? This is possible, but it is at least arguable that the ultimate benefit of teaching human beings their true nature would be worth the sacrifice paid by a few unfortunates. It is also arguable, moreover, that such individuals might not be so unfortunate at all. For every chimphuman or humanzee frustrated by her inability to write a poem or program a computer, there could equally be one delighted by her ability to do so while swinging from a tree branch.

BARASH, “HUMAN-CHIMP HYBRIDS”

The risk of “a living hell of biological and social indeterminacy” … And this is the same David Barash who worries about whether worms feel pain?

What Makes the Suffering Worthwhile?

When claims are made about the “right to life,” invariably the referent is human life, a rigid distinction only possible because of the presumption that human life is somehow uniquely distinct from other forms of life, even though everything we know of biology demonstrates that this is simply untrue. What better, clearer, and more unambiguous way to demonstrate this than by creating viable organisms that are neither human nor animal but certifiably intermediate?

BARASH, “HUMAN-CHIMP HYBRIDS”

So the humanzee’s suffering is rendered worthwhile precisely because it enables the denigration of other human beings. Good to know.

At the time, bioethics commentator Wesley J. Smith, clearly shocked by the moral nullity on display, responded,

We are the only truly moral species in the known universe. Only we can be held morally accountable for our actions. Only we have the capacity to rationally determine issues of right and wrong, ought and ought not, etc. Indeed, if being human — in and of itself — isn’t what gives us the moral obligation to treat animals humanely, what in the world does?

And if that duty arises solely and directly from our humanity — which it indisputably does — that means, by definition, that we are exceptional. All other species are amoral and, as such, they don’t owe a duty to each other, us, or anything. Duties, and moral accountability, are simply beyond their ken.

WESLEY J. SMITH, “DARWINIST WANTS US TO CREATE ‘HUMANZEE,’” NATIONAL REVIEW, MARCH 8, 2018

Of course, that’s both true and obvious, and one needs a lot of education to be rendered unable to see it. So then why does this obviously ridiculous and clearly inhumane idea keep coming back?

An Underlying Cultural Trend

Experimental physicist Rob Sheldon writes to suggest that there may be an underlying cultural trend here: When ridiculous inhumane ideas are routinely aired without pushback, we become more willing to accept inhumane ideas that are in fact quite viable:

It’s like an artillery barrage before the infantry go over the wire. The intent isn’t to be taken seriously, the intent is to make the next move seem innocuous.

The basic idea is the constant exposure to “shocking” material until it stops being shocking. And this response is entirely normal. We couldn’t function as humans without a brain circuit that filters out repetitive stimuli. Anything that happens repetitively gets ignored eventually.

He offers some examples:

The hybridization of animal-human embryos allowed to develop past the 14 day “ethical threshold”. The introduction of animal genes to “improve” the human genetic stock. And of course, the Holy Grail — extending the life of humans.

Once we remove the ethical barriers between humans and animals, we can then experiment on humans with all the tools we’ve perfected for animals.

One can agree or disagree with his thesis. But we will probably find out in the next decade or so whether he is right. If he is, what to do about the relentless march of dehumanization is a huge challenge.

The resurrection is a historical fact.

 

The plagiarizing of the original technologist continues apace.

 

Convergent serendipity?

 Fossil Friday: Scansoriopterygidae, Bizarre Bird-Like Dinosaurs, Illustrate Darwinist Trickery

Gunter Bechly

This Fossil Friday is dedicated to Scansoriopterygidae, which “truly are one of the most bizarre clades of non-avian theropods” (Wang et al. 2019). These fossil animals are known only from the Middle to Late Jurassic of China with the genera Ambopteryx, Epidexipteryx, Scansoriopteryx (= Epidendrosaurus?) and the featured Yi. Scansoriopterygidae were very small (sparrow to crow sized) feathered dinosaurs, characterized by an enlarged third finger and ribbon-like tail feathers (Zhang et al. 2008).

Their phylogenetic position among dinosaurs and early birds is unclear (Turner et al. 2012, Cau 2018) and highly disputed, so that no consensus has emerged in spite of several well-preserved fossils. Czerkas & Yuan (2002) placed scanoriopterygids as close relatives to Archaeopteryx and birds, but outside of theropod dinosaurs, while most other studies consider them as theropod dinosaurs. Some studies placed them in a closer relationship with birds in Avialae (Senter 2007, Zhang et al. 2008), while other studies rejected a position in Avialae and placed them more distantly related to birds among basal paravian dinosaurs (Agnolin & Novas 2011, Godefroit et al. 2013, Brusatte et al. 2014, Lefèvre et al. 2014, Sorkin 2020). Several studies even recovered them among oviraptorid dinosaurs outside of Paraves (Agnolin & Novas 2013, O’Connor & Sullivan 2014; also see Headden 2013, Pittman & Xu 2020).

Against Darwinian Predictions

This scientific disagreement is mainly caused by the fact that the pattern of similarities does not unequivocally fall into a nested hierarchy, as would be predicted by Darwinism, but is highly incongruent. But the large degree of convergences is not restricted to similarities with different groups of dinosaurs but also includes characters of other vertebrate groups. “One of the most surprising of these is that of the scansoriopterygid (Theropoda, Maniraptora) Yi qi, which has membranous wings — a flight apparatus that was previously unknown among theropods but that is used by both the pterosaur and bat lineage” (Wang et al. 2019). The discovery by Xu et al. (2015) was so surprising that it was doubted by some experts (e.g., Padian 2015), but the discovery of a new taxon Ambopteryx longibrachium (Wang et al. 2019) strongly confirmed the findings.

The describers of Yi qi (Xu et al. 2015) concluded that “in having wings with a well-developed membranous component, Yi would differ from other volant paravians but resemble distantly related groups including pterosaurs, bats and many gliding mammals, representing a striking case of convergent evolution of the aerodynamic apparatus among tetrapods.” After the confirmation of membraneous wings in the new scansoriopterygid Ambopteryx, Milligan (2019) commented that “unlike other flying dinosaurs, namely birds, these two species have membranous wings supported by a rod-like wrist bone that is not found in any other dinosaur (but is present in pterosaurs and flying squirrels).” Consequently, “birds, it’s clear, weren’t the only flying dinosaurs — and these fossils reveal that flight itself, whether gliding or powered, evolved multiple times among them” (Gramling 2020). A new aerodynamic study by Dececchi et al. (2020) concluded that scansoriopterygids were a failed experiment in pre-bird theropod flight.

Evo-Babble and Convergence

Don’t let the evo-babble of convergent evolution fool you. Convergence is not evidence for evolution but conflicting evidence against evolution. It is incongruent data that do not fit with the Darwinian prediction of a nested hierarchy. Therefore, such incongruences have to be explained away with ad hoc hypotheses like homoplasy (convergence and/or secondary reduction), incomplete lineage sorting, hydridization, or horizontal gene transfer. Instead of admitting incongruent similarities as conflicting evidence, Darwinists hide this dirty secret with deceptive doublespeak like “convergent evolution.” Even though there are some similarities that are revealed as non-homologous by irreconcilable structural and/or genetic differences, most assumed convergences are just interpretations or rather rationalisations after the fact. It is not like the structure has a label that says “I am a convergence” but rather it is a corollary of the assumed correct tree of life and the optimization of characters on this tree. The latter procedure means that the principle of parsimony is used to minimize the number of gains and losses of a character that have to be assumed to plot its distribution on a given tree. If the distribution of the similarities is not congruent with the nested hierarchy of the tree, then multiple gains (convergence) or multiple losses (reduction) of the character have to be postulated. This is crucial and cannot be emphasized enough: Convergences are not observed, they are postulated (compare Kluge 1999 who defined homoplasy nominally as an operational error)!

Here is a thought experiment to expose the trickery: you’ve probably heard about the example of bat wings and bird wings as a paradigmatic showcase of convergent evolution. This is because both groups have transformed the tetrapod foreleg into wings, but are not closely related. Each is nested deeply within different non-volant tetrapod groups with normally developed legs, so that the wings cannot be interpreted as homologous and inherited from an assumed winged common ancestor. Now imagine the counterfactual case that the majority of evidence (e.g., from comparative morphology and phylogenomics) would rather suggest that birds and bats were closest relatives (so-called sister groups). Suddenly the assumed convergence would of course be interpreted as a shared derived character that was inherited from a winged bat+bird ancestor as a homology (synapomorphy). The differences between both wing constructions would be explained away as autapomorphic specializations from a common ground plan, and biologists would emphasize that birds don’t just have feathered wings, but that beneath the feathers you can find small wing membranes (so-called patagia) that would be considered as homologous to the wing membrane of bats. With the discovery of the membraneous scanosoriopterygid wings, evolutionists would have celebrated the discovery of a predicted transitional form that proves the reconstructed ground plan and provides an indisputable confirmation of the evolutionary scenario linking bats and birds. Only science deniers would doubt such an obvious established fact of evolution, right?

How Darwinists Reason (or don't)

However, since birds and bats are not considered as closely related in the actual world, because birds cluster with dinosaurs and bats within mammals, their wings are interpreted as convergent. Likewise, the membraneous wings of scansoriopterygids are interpreted as another convergence, which would make vertebrate wings originate four times independently in pterosaurs, scansoriopterygids, birds, and bats. Darwinists do not really reason from the evidence to a hypothesis, as all good science should do, but only (re)interpret the evidence on the basis of their hypothesis, which therefore is immune to any challenge by conflicting data. When critics of intelligent design claim that it is not falsifiable, they are not only wrong (ID does make very specific testable predictions), but miss the inconvenient truth that it is Darwinism that is not falsifiable and thus of questionable scientific status.

The eminent philosopher of science Karl Popper explicitly recognized this until he was silenced and pushed to recant (Popper 1978: 345) by the Darwinist thought police. Here is what Popper (1976: 151 and 168) had said: “… because I intend to argue that the theory of natural selection is not a testable scientific theory, but a metaphysical research programme; … I have come to the conclusion that Darwinism is not a testable scientific theory, but a metaphysical research programme …” But even more interesting is what Popper (1957: 106) had said: “What we call the evolutionary hypothesis is an explanation of a host of biological and paleontological observations — for instance, of certain similarities between various species and genera — by the assumption of common ancestry of related forms.” (Emphasis added.) Read that carefully again. Did the penny drop? Common descent is assumed and the evidence interpreted accordingly, rather than common descent being deduced from the evidence. Common descent is the only conceivable materialistic option and thus considered as an unquestionable axiom. It may well be true, but it is hardly proven by this kind of dubious science.

References

Agnolín FL & Novas FE 2011. Unenlagiid theropods: are they members of the Dromaeosauridae (Theropoda, Maniraptora)? Anais da Academia Brasileira de Ciências 83(1), 117–162. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1590/S0001-37652011000100008

Agnolín FL & Novas FE 2013. Chapter 3 Systematic Paleontology. pp. 9–36 in: Avian Ancestors: A Review of the Phylogenetic Relationships of the Theropods Unenlagiidae, Microraptoria, Anchiornis and Scansoriopterygidae. SpringerBriefs in Earth System Sciences. Springer: Dordrecht (NL), ix+96 pp. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5637-3

Brusatte SL, Lloyd GT, Wang SC & Norell MA 2014. Gradual assembly of avian body plan culminated in rapid rates of evolution across the dinosaur-bird transition. Current Biology 24(20), 2386–2392. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2014.08.034

Cau A 2018. The assembly of the avian body plan : a 160-million-year long process. Bollettino della Societa Paleontologica Italiana 57(1), 1–25. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4435/BSPI.2018.01 (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/324941372)

Czerkas SA & Yuan C 2002. An arboreal maniraptoran from northeast China. pp. 63–95 in: Czerkas SJ (ed.). Feathered Dinosaurs and the Origin of Flight. The Dinosaur Museum Journal 1. The Dinosaur Museum: Blanding (UT). http://dinosaur-museum.org/featheredinosaurs/arboreal_maniraptoran.pdf

Dececchi TA, Roy A, Pittman M, Kaye TG, Xu X, Habib MB, Larsson HCE, Wang X & Zheng X 2020. Aerodynamics Show Membrane-Winged Theropods Were a Poor Gliding Dead-end. iScience 23(12), 101574, 1–17. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2020.101574

Godefroit P, Demuynck H, Dyke G, Hu D, Escuillié F & Claeys P 2013. Reduced plumage and flight ability of a new Jurassic paravian theropod from China. Nature Communications 4: 1394, 1–6. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms2389

Gramling C 2020. Bat-winged dinosaurs were clumsy fliers. ScienceNews October 22, 2020. https://www.sciencenews.org/article/dinosaurs-bat-wings-clumsy-evolution-flying-gliding

Headden JA 2013. Are Scansoriopterygids Oviraptorosaurs? TheBiteStuff March 4, 2013. https://qilong.wordpress.com/2013/03/04/are-scansoriopterygids-oviraptorosaurs/

Kluge AG 1999. The Science of Phylogenetic Systematics: Explanation, Prediction, and Test. Cladistics 15(4), 429–436. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1006/clad.1999.0123

Lefèvre U, Hu D, Escuillié FO, Dyke G & Godefroit P 2014. A new long-tailed basal bird from the Lower Cretaceous of north-eastern China. Biological Journal of the Linnean Society 113(3), 790–804. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/bij.12343

Milligan M 2019. New Jurassic non-avian theropod dinosaur sheds light on origin of flight in Dinosauria. Heritage Daily May 8, 2019. https://www.heritagedaily.com/2019/05/new-jurassic-non-avian-theropod-dinosaur-sheds-light-on-origin-of-flight-in-dinosauria/123670

     O’Connor JK & Sullivan C 2014. Reinterpretation of the Early Cretaceous maniraptoran (Dinosauria: Theropoda) Zhongornis haoae as a scansoriopterygid-like non-avian, and morphological resemblances between scansoriopterygids and basal oviraptorosaurs. Vertebrata Palasiatica 52, 3–30. http://www.ivpp.cas.cn/cbw/gjzdwxb/xbwzxz/201401/P020140121386966325113.pdf

Padian K 2015. Dinosaur up in the air. Nature 521, 40–41. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14392

Pittman M & Xu X 2020. Pennaraptoran Theropod Dinosaurs Past Progress and New Frontiers. Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 440(1), 1–355. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1206/0003-0090.440.1.1

Popper K 1957. The Poverty of Historicism. Routledge. London (UK), 166 pp.

Popper K 1976. Unended Quest: An Intellectual Autobiography. Fontana/Collins: Glasgow (UK), iii+316 pp.

Popper K 1978. Natural selection and the emergence of mind. Dialectica 32(3/4), 339–355. https://www.jstor.org/stable/42970324

Senter P 2007. A new look at the phylogeny of Coelurosauria (Dinosauria: Theropoda). Journal of Systematic Palaeontology 5(4), 429–463. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1477201907002143

Sorkin B 2021. Scansorial and aerial ability in Scansoriopterygidae and basal Oviraptorosauria. Historical Biology 33(12), 3202–3214. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/08912963.2020.1855158

Turner AH, Makovicky PJ & Norell M 2012. A Review of Dromaeosaurid Systematics and Paravian Phylogeny. Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 371, 1–206. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1206/748.1

Wang M, O’Connor J, Xu X & Zhou Z 2019. A new Jurassic scansoriopterygid and the loss of membranous wings in theropod dinosaurs. Nature 569, 256–259. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1137-z

Xu X, Zheng X, Sullivan C, Wang X, Xing L, Wang Y, Zhang X, O’Connor JK, Zhang F & Pan Y 2015. A bizarre Jurassic maniraptoran theropod with preserved evidence of membranous wings. Nature 521, 70–73. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14423

Zhang F, Zhou Z, Xu X, Wang X & Sullivan C 2008. A bizarre Jurassic maniraptoran from China with elongate ribbon-like feathers. Nature 455(7216), 1105–1108. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/npre.2008.2326.1

On explaining (away?) Complexity.

 

ID is the science driver?

 It’s Intelligent Design, Not Darwinism, that Drives Scientific Progress

Casey Luskin

There’s a common objection to intelligent design that the positive case for ID helps us to answer. In his Kitzmiller v. Dover testimony, biologist Kenneth Miller referred to intelligent design as a “science stopper.”1 Similarly, in his book Only a Theory, Miller stated, “The hypothesis of design is compatible with any conceivable data, makes no testable predictions, and suggests no new avenues for research. As such, it’s a literal dead end…”2

Yet in fact, ID makes a variety of testable and successful predictions. This allows ID to serve as a paradigm guiding scientific research to make new discoveries. The list below shows various fields where ID is helping science to generate knowledge. For each field, multiple ID-friendly scientific publications are cited as examples.

How ID Inspires the Progress of Science

Protein science: ID encourages scientists to do research to test for high levels of complex and specified information in biology in the form of the fine-tuning of protein sequences.3 This has practical implications not just for explaining biological origins, but also for engineering enzymes and anticipating and fighting the future evolution of diseases.

Physics and cosmology: ID has inspired scientists to seek and find instances of fine-tuning of the laws and constants of physics to allow for life, leading to new fine-tuning arguments such as the Galactic Habitable Zone. This has implications for proper cosmological models of the universe, hinting at avenues for successful “theories of everything” that must accommodate fine-tuning, and other implications for theoretical physics.4

Information theory: ID leads scientists to understand intelligence as a cause of biological complexity, capable of being scientifically studied, and to understand the types of information it generates.5

Pharmacology: ID directs both experimental and theoretical research to investigate the limitations of Darwinian evolution to produce traits that require multiple mutations in order to function. This has practical implications for fighting problems like antibiotic resistance or engineering bacteria.6

Evolutionary computation: ID produces theoretical research into the information-generative powers of Darwinian searches, leading to the discovery that the search abilities of Darwinian processes are limited, which has practical implications for the viability of using genetic algorithms to solve problems.7

Anatomy and physiology: ID predicts function for allegedly “vestigial” organs, structures, or systems whereas evolution has made many faulty predictions of nonfunction.8

Bioinformatics: ID has helped scientists develop proper measures of biological information, leading to concepts like complex and specified information or functional sequence complexity. This allows us to better quantify complexity and understand what features are, or are not, within the reach of Darwinian evolution.9

Molecular machines: ID encourages scientists to reverse-engineer molecular machines — like the bacterial flagellum — to understand their function like machines, and to understand how the machine-like properties of life allow biological systems to function.10

Cell biology: ID causes scientists to view cellular components as “designed structures rather than accidental by-products of neo-Darwinian evolution,” allowing scientists to propose testable hypotheses about cellular function and causes of cancer.11

Systematics: ID helps scientists explain the cause of the widespread features of conflicting phylogenetic trees and “convergent evolution” by producing models where parts can be reused in non-treelike patterns.12 ID has spawned ideas about life being front-loaded with information such that it is designed to evolve, and has led scientists to expect (and now find!) previously unanticipated “out-of-place” genes in various taxa.13

Paleontology: ID allows scientists to understand and predict patterns in the fossil record, showing explosions of biodiversity (as well as mass extinction) in the history of life.14Genetics: ID has inspired scientists to investigate the computer-like properties of DNA and the genome in the hopes of better understanding genetics and the origin of biological systems.15 ID has also inspired scientists to seek function for noncoding junk-DNA, allowing us to understand development and cellular biology.16

Avenues of Discovery

Critics wrongly charge that ID is just a negative argument against evolution, that ID makes no predictions, that it is a “god of the gaps” argument from ignorance, or that appealing to an intelligent cause means “giving up” or “stopping science.” These charges are misguided. 

Ironically, when critics claim that research is not permitted to detect design because that would stop science, it is they who hold science back by preventing scientists from investigating the scientific theory of intelligent design. When researchers are allowed to infer intelligent agency as the best explanation for information-rich structures in nature, this opens up many avenues of discovery that are bearing good fruit in the scientific community.

Notes

Kenneth R. Miller, Kitzmiller v. Dover, Day 2 AM Testimony (September 27, 2005).

Kenneth R. Miller, Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America’s Soul (New York: Viking Penguin, 2008), 87.

Axe, “Extreme Functional Sensitivity to Conservative Amino Acid Changes on Enzyme Exteriors”; Axe, “Estimating the Prevalence of Protein Sequences Adopting Functional Enzyme Folds”; Behe and Snoke, “Simulating Evolution by Gene Duplication of Protein Features That Require Multiple Amino Acid Residues”; Axe, “The Case Against a Darwinian Origin of Protein Folds”; Gauger and Axe, “The Evolutionary Accessibility of New Enzyme Functions: A Case Study from the Biotin Pathway”; Reeves et al., “Enzyme Families-Shared Evolutionary History or Shared Design? A Study of the GABA-Aminotransferase Family”; Thorvaldsen and Hössjer, “Using statistical methods to model the fine-tuning of molecular machines and systems.”

Guillermo Gonzalez and Donald Brownlee, “The Galactic Habitable Zone: Galactic Chemical Evolution,” Icarus 152 (2001), 185-200; Guillermo Gonzalez, Donald Brownlee, and Peter D. Ward, “Refuges for Life in a Hostile Universe,” Scientific American (2001), 62-67; Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay Wesley Richards, The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos Is Designed for Discovery (Washington, DC, Regnery, 2004); Guillermo Gonzalez, “Setting the Stage for Habitable Planets,” Life 4 (2014), 34-65; D. Halsmer, J. Asper, N. Roman, and T. Todd, “The Coherence of an Engineered World,” International Journal of Design & Nature and Ecodynamics 4 (2009), 47-65.

William A. Dembski, The Design Inference; William A. Dembski and Robert J. Marks II, “Bernoulli’s Principle of Insufficient Reason and Conservation of Information in Computer Search,” Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics(October 2009), 2647-2652; William A. Dembski and Robert J. Marks II, “The Search for a Search: Measuring the Information Cost of Higher Level Search,” Journal of Advanced Computational Intelligence and Intelligent Informatics 14 (2010), 475-486; Øyvind Albert Voie, “Biological function and the genetic code are interdependent,” Chaos, Solitons and Fractals 28 (2006), 1000-1004; McIntosh, “Information and Entropy —Top-Down or Bottom-Up Development in Living Systems?”

Behe and Snoke, “Simulating evolution by gene duplication of protein features that require multiple amino acid residues”; Ann K. Gauger, Stephanie Ebnet, Pamela F. Fahey, and Ralph Seelke, “Reductive Evolution Can Prevent Populations from Taking Simple Adaptive Paths to High Fitness,” BIO-Complexity 2010 (2).

William A. Dembski and Robert J. Marks II, “Conservation of Information in Search: Measuring the Cost of Success,” IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics-Part A: Systems and Humans 39 (September 2009), 1051-1061; Winston Ewert, William A. Dembski, and Robert J. Marks II, “Evolutionary Synthesis of Nand Logic: Dissecting a Digital Organism,” Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (October 2009); Dembski and Marks, “Bernoulli’s Principle of Insufficient Reason and Conservation of Information in Computer Search”; Winston Ewert, George Montanez, William Dembski and Robert J. Marks II, “Efficient Per Query Information Extraction from a Hamming Oracle,” 42nd South Eastern Symposium on System Theory (March 2010), 290-297; Douglas D. Axe, Brendan W. Dixon, and Philip Lu, “Stylus: A System for Evolutionary Experimentation Based on a Protein/Proteome Model with Non-Arbitrary Functional Constraints,” Plos One 3 (June 2008), e2246.

       Jonathan Wells, “Using Intelligent Design Theory to Guide Scientific Research”; William Dembski and Jonathan Wells, The Design of Life: Discovering Signs of Intelligence in Living Systems (Dallas, TX: Foundation for Thought and Ethics, 2008).

Meyer, “The origin of biological information and the higher taxonomic categories”; Kirk K. Durston, David K.Y. Chiu, David L. Abel, Jack T. Trevors, “Measuring the functional sequence complexity of proteins,” Theoretical Biology and Medical Modelling 4 (2007), 47; David K.Y. Chiu and Thomas W.H. Lui, “Integrated Use of Multiple Interdependent Patterns for Biomolecular Sequence Analysis,” International Journal of Fuzzy Systems4 (September 2002), 766-775.

Minnich and Meyer. “Genetic Analysis of Coordinate Flagellar and Type III Regulatory Circuits in Pathogenic Bacteria”; McIntosh, “Information and Entropy—Top-Down or Bottom-Up Development in Living Systems?” 

Jonathan Wells, “Do Centrioles Generate a Polar Ejection Force?,” Rivista di Biologia / Biology Forum, 98 (2005), 71-96; Scott A. Minnich and Stephen C. Meyer, “Genetic analysis of coordinate flagellar and type III regulatory circuits in pathogenic bacteria,” Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Design & Nature Rhodes Greece (2004); Behe, Darwin’s Black Box; Lönnig, “Dynamic genomes, morphological stasis, and the origin of irreducible complexity.”

Lönnig, “Dynamic genomes, morphological stasis, and the origin of irreducible complexity”; Nelson and Jonathan Wells, “Homology in Biology”; Ewert, “The Dependency Graph of Life”; John A. Davison, “A Prescribed Evolutionary Hypothesis,” Rivista di Biologia/Biology Forum 98 (2005), 155-166; Ewert, “The Dependency Graph of Life.”

Sherman, “Universal Genome in the Origin of Metazoa: Thoughts About Evolution”; Albert D.G. de Roos, “Origins of introns based on the definition of exon modules and their conserved interfaces,” Bioinformatics 21 (2005), 2-9; Albert D.G. de Roos, “Conserved intron positions in ancient protein modules,” Biology Direct 2 (2007), 7; Albert D.G. de Roos, “The Origin of the Eukaryotic Cell Based on Conservation of Existing Interfaces,” Artificial Life 12 (2006), 513-523.

Meyer et al., “The Cambrian Explosion: Biology’s Big Bang”; Meyer, “The Cambrian Information Explosion”; Meyer, “The origin of biological information and the higher taxonomic categories”; Lönnig, “Dynamic genomes, morphological stasis, and the origin of irreducible complexity.”

Richard v. Sternberg, “DNA Codes and Information: Formal Structures and Relational Causes,” Acta Biotheoretica 56 (September 2008), 205-232; Voie, “Biological function and the genetic code are interdependent”; David L. Abel and Jack T. Trevors, “Self-organization vs. self-ordering events in life-origin models,” Physics of Life Reviews 3 (2006), 211-228.

Richard v. Sternberg, “On the Roles of Repetitive DNA Elements in the Context of a Unified Genomic– Epigenetic System”; Jonathan Wells, “Using Intelligent Design Theory to Guide Scientific Research”; Josiah D. Seaman and John C. Sanford, “Skittle: A 2-Dimensional Genome Visualization Tool,” BMC Informatics 10 (2009), 451.

This article is a modified excerpt from the recent book The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith: Exploring the Ultimate Questions About Life and the Cosmos. 

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