Three less gaps for Darwin's God.

 

Three Stunners Challenge Traditional Darwinism

Evolution News @DiscoveryCSC

Here are three unrelated but surprising discoveries that will be of interest to the intelligent design community.

Shared Code

Scientists at Flinders University in Australia found that our DNA spreads up to a meter around us without even touching anything. We’re leaving breadcrumbs of genetic code everywhere we go!

A person can leave DNA on a surface without directly touching it, a Flinders University study has found, with the longer someone spends in a room the more likely they are to leave a trace of themselves behind.

The researchers placed DNA collection plates half a meter to five meters apart in offices that had been sanitized.

Without anyone directly touching the collection plates, DNA from multiple people was present after only one day, with the DNA profiles stronger the closer the plates were to an individual and the longer they stayed out. [Emphasis added.]

They published their findings in Forensic Science International Genetics. 

This discovery will be alarming to criminals, as they learn that police can follow their trail even without fingerprints. For the rest of us, it illustrates two things: (1) Forensics is an example of intelligent design in action, and (2) Our earth is indeed a privileged planet. It is loaded with complex specified information! What other world in our solar system can boast of such a distinction? Think of it: coded information is everywhere in our world: in clouds, on rock walls, in the soil, and even under the seafloor. Code not only inhabits life; it makes the world habitable, traveling on global transportation systems.

We share our personal CSI everywhere we go, resembling the character “Pig-Pen” in the old Peanuts cartoons, who walked with a cloud of dust around him — except that our dust is the most densely packed information in the known universe. Presumably our whole genome could be reconstructed from invisible particles that float off our skin and breath, as if we are sharing copies of our biography everywhere we go — a biography so information-rich that if printed in 130 volumes would require 95 years to read (University of Leicester).

Cambrian Giant

Remember when fossil hunters found Marble Canyon, a fossil bed in Canada that surpassed the Burgess Shale in extent and species richness? Scientists have extricated another amazing fossil there: a giant predator unlike anything seen before. Named Titanokorys gainesi by the Royal Ontario Museum, it is half a meter long, almost as big as the famous Anomalocaris.

“The sheer size of this animal is absolutely mind-boggling, this is one of the biggest animals from the Cambrian period ever found,” says Jean-Bernard Caron, ROM’s Richard M. Ivey Curator of Invertebrate Palaeontology.

Like Anomalocaris, it has a toothed round mouth characteristic of radiodonts (round teeth). And like all the Cambrian animals, there is no evidence of transitional forms. Titanokorys carried a big carapace over its soft parts, including its enormous head and a suite of complex organs.

Like all radiodonts, Titanokorys had multifaceted eyes, a pineapple slice-shaped, tooth-lined mouth, a pair of spiny claws below its head to capture prey and a body with a series of flaps for swimming.

Live Science’s coverage begins with a 3D animation of the animal’s body plan. That’s a pretty big and complex animal to explode into the fossil record. Marble Canyon, remember, is thought to be earlier than the Burgess Shale. Remember, too, that a vertebrate fish called Metaspriggina was discovered there.

Calling on the DNA Cable

Proteins communicate long distance through DNA, announces the Weizmann Wonder Wander site. This may provide new theories about how proteins activate genes, contrary to the old “central dogma” that taught one-way communication from DNA to protein.

Proteins can communicate through DNA, conducting a long-distance dialogue that serves as a kind of genetic “switch,” according to Weizmann Institute of Science researchers. They found that the binding of proteins to one site of a DNA molecule can physically affect another binding site at a distant location, and that this “peer effect” activates certain genes. This effect had previously been observed in artificial systems, but the Weizmann study is the first to show it takes place in the DNA of living organisms.

The research also bears on the interesting discovery of horizontal gene transfer occurring in DNA libraries in the soil (see “Non-Mendelian Inheritance Undermines Neo-Darwinism”). A team at the Weizmann Institute of Science was looking into how some bacteria can “enrich their genomes by taking up bacterial gene segments scattered in the soil around them,” when they tapped into a long-distance “conversation” on DNA. When two copies of a transcription factor called ComK bind to DNA, they transmit a signal down the “wire” that facilitates binding by ComK at another remote binding site. The activation of all four copies surpasses a threshold, “switching on the bacterium’s gene scavenging ability.”

“We were surprised to discover that DNA, in addition to containing the genetic code, acts like a communication cable, transmitting information over a relatively long distance from one protein binding site to another,” Rosenblum says.

What is the physical mechanism for this kind of information transmission? They suggest it might involve twisting tension in the double helix. Perhaps, though, that is just the carrier signal on which higher-level information is transmitted.

They found that the sites must be at a specific distance from each other and have the same orientation, but that the intervening sequence of DNA letters had little effect. Perhaps this finding will unveil more function in so-called “junk” DNA.

“Long-distance communication within a DNA molecule is a new type of regulatory mechanism — one that opens up previously unavailable methods for designing the genetic circuits of the future,” Hofmann says.

Their paper in Nature Communications by Rosenblum et al. dispenses with the obligatory Darwin formalities briefly. “Whether natural promoters evolved to efficiently transmit allosteric signals across many nanometres remained largely unclear,” they say. Maybe it’s unclear because Darwinism puts static on the line.

Intelligent Design Expectations

Shared code, another Cambrian giant, and DNA communication all fit within intelligent design expectations, but challenge traditional Darwinism. The more that design advocates can present better explanations for surprising discoveries like these, the faster some researchers may pay attention to the design revolution that is clearly underway.

Yet more Just so stories as darwinists tackle the origins of human psychology.

 

There Is No Such Thing as a Fossil Mind

Denyse O'Leary

This month, The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith: Exploring the Ultimate Questions About Life and the Cosmos (Harvest House 2021) appeared. The basic theme of the handbook, as described by editors William Dembski, Casey Luskin, and Joseph Holden, is how “Science and Christianity are often presented as opposites, when in fact the order of the universe and the complexity of life powerfully testify to intelligent design.”

I wrote one of the chapters, “What Is Evolutionary Psychology?” It concerns the effort to understand human psychology by appealing to a prehuman “evolutionary” past. As such, it explains a large variety of human behaviors as the unconscious enactment of a Darwinian survival scenario among not-quite humans that is wired into modules in our brains. 

Why We Do What We Do

Thus, the reasons we do things are not at all what we suppose:

Evolution explains, for example, why we shop: “Gatherers sifted the useful from things that offered them no sustenance, warmth or comfort with a skill that would eventually lead to comfortable shopping malls and credit cards.” Or gossip: “Back in the day, if you didn’t care to find out what was going on, you were more likely to die and less likely to pass on your incurious genes.” Oh, and anger over trivial matters was once key to our survival.

As the examples above illustrate, EP does not explain puzzling human behavior so much as it offers Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest explanations for conventional behavior, which supplant traditional ones.

For example, why we are sexually jealous (not fear of abandonment, but “sperm competition”); why we don’t stick to our goals (evolution gave us a kludge brain); why we developed music (to “spot the savannah with little Pavarottis”); why art exists (to recapture that lost savannah); why many women don’t know when they are ovulating (if they knew, they’d never have kids); why some people rape, kill, and sleep around (our Stone Age ancestors passed on their genes via these traits), and why big banks sometimes get away with fraud (we haven’t evolved so as to understand what is happening). 

EP also accounts for dreams (they increase reproductive fitness), false memories (there might be a tiger in that tall grass… ), menopause (men pursuing younger women), monogamy (control of females or else infanticide prevention), premenstrual syndrome (breaks up infertile relationships), romantic love (a “hardwired” drive to reproduce), rumination on hurt feelings (our brains evolved to learn quickly from bad experiences but slowly from the good ones), smiling (earlier, a cringe reaction), and wonder at the universe (explained by how early man lived).

In the chapter, I offer many more examples of the current effort to explain aspects of life or human behavior in a narrow, “Darwinian” way. These explanations satisfy a need felt by many for a “scientific” account of their behavior. But often, the science behind evo psych is nothing more than the fact that the persons offering the explanation have degrees in one or another field of psychology — and a knack for coming up with an idea that is easy to market in popular media. The output has earned considerable skepticism.

Good Conversation Starters…But “Science”?

Of course, we are free to accept these ad hoc evo psych explanations if we wish. Like astrology and palm reading, they make good conversation pieces. But the claim that they are “science” does not strengthen them and should not give them more credibility.

American philosopher Subrena E. Smith recently launched a sharp attack on evo psych. She points out that neuroscience has never identified the brain modules or systems that would enable evo psych to make sense.

Read the rest at Mind Matters News, published by Discovery Institute’s Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence.

Another Darwinian just so story deconstructed.

 

Listen: Scale-to-Feather Evolution Doesn’t Fly

Evolution News @DiscoveryCSC

On a classic ID the Future episode, Casey Luskin continues his review of Karl Giberson and Francis Collins’s The Language of Science and Faith. Giberson and Collins point to the feather as a prime example of a novel feature arising via blind evolution. According to them, it evolved from elongated scales. But Luskin points to recent findings from developmental biology that have led even many evolutionists to abandon the proposal. Download the podcast or listen to it here.

Wicca: a brief history.

 Wicca is a modern Pagan religion. Scholars of religion categorise it as both a new religious movement and as part of the occultist stream of Western esotericism. It was developed in England during the first half of the 20th century and was introduced to the public in 1954 by Gerald Gardner, a retired British civil servant. Wicca draws upon a diverse set of ancient pagan and 20th-century hermetic motifs for its theological structure and ritual practices.

Wicca has no central authority figure. Its traditional core beliefs, principles, and practices were originally outlined in the 1940s and 1950s by Gardner and an early High Priestess, Doreen Valiente. The early practices were disseminated through published books and in secret written and oral teachings passed along to their initiates. There are many variations on the core structure, and the religion grows and evolves over time. It is divided into a number of diverse lineages, sects and denominations, referred to as traditions, each with its own organisational structure and level of centralisation. Due to its decentralized nature, there is some disagreement over what actually constitutes Wicca. Some traditions, collectively referred to as British Traditional Wicca, strictly follow the initiatory lineage of Gardner and consider the term Wicca to apply only to similar traditions, but not to newer, eclectic traditions.

Wicca is typically duotheistic, worshipping, and/or working with a Goddess and a God. These are traditionally viewed as the Triple Goddess and the Horned God, respectively. These deities may be regarded in a henotheistic way, as having many different divine aspects which can in turn be identified with many diverse pagan deities from different historical pantheons. For this reason, they are sometimes referred to as the "Great Goddess" and the "Great Horned God", with the adjective "great" connoting a deity that contains many other deities within their own nature. Some Wiccans refer to the goddess deity as the "Lady" and the god deity as the "Lord"; in this context, when "lord" and "lady" are used as adjectives, it is another way of referring to them as a divine figure. These two deities are sometimes viewed as facets of a greater pantheistic divinity, which is regarded as an impersonal force or process rather than a personal deity. While duotheism or bitheism is traditional in Wicca, broader Wiccan beliefs range from polytheism to pantheism or monism, even to Goddess monotheism.

Wiccan celebrations encompass both the cycles of the Moon, known as Esbats and commonly associated with the Goddess (female deity), and the cycles of the Sun, seasonally based festivals known as Sabbats and commonly associated with the Horned God (male deity). An unattributed statement known as the Wiccan Rede is a popular expression of Wiccan morality, although it is not universally accepted by Wiccans. Wicca often involves the ritual practice of magic, though it is not always necessary.

File under "well said" LXXVIII.

 "The typical citizen drops down to a lower level of mental performance as soon as he enters the political field. He argues and analyzes in a way which he would readily recognize as infantile within the sphere of his real interest. He becomes primitive again."

Joseph Schumpeter. 

I.D as heuristic?

 

Studies on Stickleback Fish Further Validate Engineering Models for Adaptation

Brian Miller

In my previous article, I described how studies of cichlid variation confirm the predictions of the engineering models for adaption (here, here). This article will describe how the models are further validated by research on stickleback fish diversity. Like cichlids, stickleback populations demonstrate constrained variation, natural genetic engineering (NGE), and phenotypic plasticity. 

Constrained Variation 

All studies of stickleback diversity demonstrate that variation is tightly constrained, and the sticklebacks’ underlying design plan or blueprint always remains intact. Hohenlohe et al. in a 2010 study documented how the same variation in traits and genetics appears repeatedly in separate populations:

Genomic regions exhibiting signatures of both balancing and divergent selection were remarkably consistent across multiple, independently derived populations, indicating that replicate parallel phenotypic evolution in stickleback may be occurring through extensive, parallel genetic evolution at a genome-wide scale.

Miller et al. in a 2019 study came to the same conclusion after analyzing the genetic differences between populations that inhabited lakes in the presence and absence of prickly sculpin, a fish that is a stickleback predator. Sticklebacks that interacted with prickly sculpin rapidly acquired similar alterations to hundreds of the same genes. 

Parallel differentiation of genomes between stickleback from the different lake types involved ~1.8% of the genome, overlapping 587 genes with a wide diversity of biological functions. Widespread adaptation is implicated because genetic drift is unlikely to cause repeated, parallel evolution in multiple evolving populations in association with a specific environmental feature. These extensive changes underscore the rapid and profound effects of a seemingly simple biotic interaction on stickleback evolution.

Natural Genetic Engineering

The two studies demonstrate that sticklebacks adapt genetically to environmental changes predictably and rapidly. These observations suggest that NGE might be driving targeted genetic alterations. 

Other research has identified NGE more explicitly. Ishikawa et al. in a 2019 study discovered that multiple stickleback species duplicated the Fads2 enzyme allowing the species to better synthesize the essential fatty acid DHA. This enhanced ability allowed them to colonize DHA-deficient freshwater environments. The authors suggest that the duplications were facilitated by NGE, possibly the relocation of transposable elements. 

Future research will almost certainly uncover additional examples of variation resulting not from random mutations but from targeted genetic rewriting.

Phenotypic Plasticity

Other investigators identified examples of phenotypic plasticity. McCairns and Bernatchez in a 2010 study discovered that sticklebacks inhabiting freshwater and saltwater zones of a large estuary measure the salinity of the water. They use this information to optimally regulate the expression of genes controlling the transport of salt ions, so the fish can quickly adapt to salinity changes. 

Baker et al. in a 2015 study demonstrated that stickleback females track internal physiological information (e.g., lipid supply and liver glycogen level) and environmental cues such as availability of food and population density. Different cues initiate adjustments to such reproductive parameters as time of breeding, egg size, and clutch or brood size. The alterations improve the likelihood for the population’s continued survival. The researchers also discovered that individual fish coordinate the fine-tuning of multiple traits to ensure optimal reproductive success:

…traits are linked both genetically and functionally, and thus expressed plasticity in one trait would seem to require simultaneous plastic expression in at least one other trait, and perhaps more.

As a final example, Tibblin et al. in a 2020 study raised sticklebacks in an aquarium with different color backgrounds. The investigators also mimicked the presence of predators by chasing fish with a dip-net and introducing chemical cues mimicking the presence of Pike, which is a natural predator. Both color and predatorial stimuli triggered changes in the dorsal coloration that assisted the fish in avoiding detection. 

The Toppling of Evolutionary Icons

Cichlid and stickleback fish are two of the most iconic examples of adaption that biologists present as evidence for the plausibility of evolutionary processes driving large-scale transformations. Yet research over the past few decades supports the opposite conclusion. Evolutionary and adaptive processes are constrained in cichlids and sticklebacks, as in all complex organisms, to only minor alterations to existing traits or to the loss or duplication of an existing structure. Most adaptation results from engineered processes that leave little to chance. The belief in the limitless creative capacity of evolutionary processes now rests on little more than blind faith in the philosophy of scientific materialism.  

A theory in crisis?

 

Is Darwinism a Theory in Crisis?

Evolution News @DiscoveryCSC

A new ID the Future episode spotlights The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith, and specifically, an essay in the new anthology by biologist Jonathan Wells, “Is Darwinism a Theory in Crisis?” As Wells and host Casey Luskin note, the essay title alludes to philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn’s influential 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn argued there that if one studies the history of scientific revolutions, one finds that when the scientific evidence has begun to turn against a dominant scientific paradigm — when its days are numbered — its adherents do not simply concede defeat. Instead they use all their institutional power to suppress dissent and punish proponents of any competing paradigm.

This is the period of crisis, which can last for years and even decades. Wells contends that modern evolutionary theory is a current instance of a dominant paradigm in crisis. He briefly makes the case in this episode, and at greater length in his essay, which appears in the newly released anthology from Harvest House, edited by William Dembski, Casey Luskin, and Joseph Holden. Download the podcast or listen to it here.

Superhuman tech v. Darwin.

 

Studies on Labrid Fish Confirm Operational Gravity Well Model for Adaptation

Brian Miller

In my previous article, I described how studies on insect wings validate engineering models for adaptation. Now I will further demonstrate the predictive power of the operational gravity well model (OGWM) from studies on labrid fishes (wrasses). 

Predictions of the Model 

OGWM presupposes that an organism’s design plan demonstrates a coherent logic based on engineering principles. That plan is founded on an underlying architecture or blueprint that is immutable. Any mutational or environmental perturbation that alters the core framework will debilitate the organism. 

The design plan will also include parameters that can vary to help a population to adapt to changing circumstances. For instance, a finch’s beak will always maintain the same basic structure, but predetermined variables associated with that structure can hold a bounded range of values. Examples include a beak’s width, length, thickness, sharpness, and material content. 

The model also predicts that anytime a new design plan is identified, it will appear in the fossil record suddenly without a series of ancestors leading back to a common ancestor shared with other species whose body plans are based upon different architectures. During an organism’s tenure on earth, only the adjustable variables can change; the underlying design logic will always remain intact. Studies of labrid fishes (wrasses) confirm all these predictions.

Four-Bar Linkages

The jaws of wrasses conform to a clearly identifiable design logic. Westneat et al. in a 2005 study identified the underling design of the jaws as the four-bar linkage motif commonly implemented in human engineering:

In addition to the jaw lever, a linkage system in the jaws (figure 3i–k) transmits lower jaw rotation to the maxilla and the sliding upper jaw, the premaxilla (Westneat 1994). This is a four-bar linkage, an engineering design that is used in bolt cutters, typewriter keys, heavy construction equipment and many other human-engineered machines that precisely transfer force or motion.

The investigators catalogued multiple versions of the four-bar linkage in different labrid species. Each version is based on a different design architecture that is subject to tight “physical constraints.” Any fundamental change to any of the underlying designs must correspond to another “engineering system” replacing the original: 

These taxa with additional joints and links in the transmission system represent engineering breakthroughs in cranial design…

Skull mechanisms such as levers and linkages are subject to physical constraints (Westneat 2003), which may only be broken when a fundamentally new engineering system for feeding arises.

The constraints do not solely correspond to the architecture of the bones and their connective tissues. Westneat’s 2003 article demonstrated how each version of the linkage system also requires tailored jaw muscles:

Adductor jaw muscles with different mechanical designs must have different contractile properties and/or different muscle activity patterns to coordinate jaw closing.

Taking the investigators’ statements at face value, they seem to acknowledge that one feeding system cannot fundamentally change into another gradually. Instead, any transformation requires multiple coordinated modifications at once. The extent to which the authors recognize the implications of their conclusions is difficult to say. 

Fossil Record and Common Ancestry

In addition, species with new jaw designs always appear in the fossil record suddenly (aka punctuated appearances). And the same design often occurs multiple times independently (aka convergence). Westneat et al. commented:

The macroevolutionary history of labrid fishes on global reefs has involved species divergence in skull structure within a range of mechanically feasible forms, creating an unparalleled higher-level pattern of convergence that is occasionally punctuated by major transitions in engineering design.

Not only do these observations perfectly match OGWM’s predictions, but they demonstrate how the assumption of common ancestry directly conflicts with the fossil record and taxonomy. The distribution of the different jaw designs does not fit into a consistent evolutionary tree. Nor could the different jaws have gradually evolved even once, let alone multiple times. Instead, the same jaw design was independently implemented in different species to achieve the same goals, such as eating similar types of food. The distribution pattern does not conform to the predictions of an undirected evolutionary process, but it demonstrates the foresight and creative power of an intelligent designer.  

Why Darwin's God is the God of the gaps.

 

Francis Collins’s The Language of God 15 Years On

Jonathan Witt@JonathanRWitt

Francis Collins’s bestselling The Language of God turned 15 this year, and with the author back in the news, it’s a good time to review his case for theistic Darwinism and consider what 15 years of subsequent research have done to strengthen or undermine those arguments. 

He became a household name in 2000 when he and Craig Venter announced that their teams had together successfully mapped the 3.1 billion letters of the human genetic code. The Language of God appeared six years later, making a case for both Darwinian evolution and a transcendent Creator.

The evolution Collins argues for involves no direct intelligent input after the origin of the universe until the origin of humans, and yet he also makes a case for a specifically Christian theism, arguing not only for a Creator but also for the possibility of miracles, the deity of Christ, and a literal resurrection. He insists that a scientist can believe these articles of Christian doctrine without checking his brain at the door.

The mainstream media emphasized the book’s insistence that Darwinism is no threat to Christianity and that Darwinism explains a range of physical evidence better than does either creationism or intelligent design. But what has gone begging for ink is a feature of the work hidden in plain sight: Francis Collins makes a scientific case for intelligent design.

According to the theory of intelligent design, which extends from the origin of matter to the origin of mind, an intelligent cause is the best explanation for certain features of the natural world. In chapter nine Collins argues against intelligent design in biology, a point the media duly emphasized; but elsewhere he argues that an intelligent cause is the best explanation for certain other features of the natural world.

Collins’s Case for Cosmic Design

He begins Chapter 3, “The Origins of the Universe,” by reviewing 20th century discoveries in physics and cosmology, many of which reinforce Christian teaching. For example, whereas scientists of the 19th century generally believed that the universe was eternal, a growing body of evidence in the 20th century convinced them that the universe began about 14 billion years ago, a theory, Collins notes, nicely in harmony with the biblical doctrine of creation ex nihilo — that is, creation out of nothing.

The chapter then summarizes the fine-tuning problem. This is the growing body of evidence suggesting that the physical constants of nature (including gravity, electromagnetism, and the mass of the universe) are exquisitely calibrated to allow for complex and even advanced life. A very tiny difference in any of these and life in the universe would be impossible.

Collins lists the three live explanations for fine tuning: (1) There are a multitude of universes in addition to our own, perhaps an infinite number, and at least one, ours, was bound to have the right physical constants for advanced life; (2) We’re just incredibly lucky; and (3) The physical constants look fine tuned because they were fine tuned. That is, they were designed.

He put his money on the third one, the design hypothesis, and he supports that conclusion by appeals to physical evidence and standard methods of scientific reasoning. Regarding the two non-design options, 1 and 2, he says, “On the basis of probability, option 2 is the least plausible. That then leaves us with option 1 and option 3. The first is logically defensible, but this near-infinite number of unobservable universes strains credulity. It certainly fails Occam’s Razor.”

Lest his guarded language obscure the fact that he’s chosen door number three, he adds, “It could be argued … that the Big Bang itself seems to point strongly toward a Creator.”

His appeal to the Big Bang and the fine-tuned cosmos serves as one of his main design arguments in the book. We should pause and register the significance of this. In our present intellectual climate, where scientists have been harassed and even fired for advocating intelligent design, and the idea is routinely attacked in news stories and popular books by “new atheists” such as Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, it’s no small matter that a bestselling book by the former head of the Human Genome Project, and subsequently the head of the National Institutes of Health, makes a scientific case for intelligent design.

Collins’s Flaw

Why hasn’t this garnered more media attention? In part because Collins accepts the misleading description of ID that many of its critics employ. According to them, intelligent design is a purely negative argument aimed primarily against biological evolution, and is coupled to a fallacious God-of-the-gaps theology.

These ID critics insist that design theorists poke holes in Darwinism and then, in a rush to judgment, insist that the holes prove that God designed life. More broadly, they claim that ID proponents supposedly argue from our present ignorance of any adequate material cause of certain natural phenomena directly to intelligent design.

But this isn’t so. Design theorists in biology do offer an extensive critique of Darwinian theory, including various contemporary variations on it, but they also offer positive evidence for intelligent design. They argue from our growing knowledge of the natural world (in biology, chemistry, physics, and cosmology), and from our knowledge of the only kind of cause known produce information or irreducibly complex machines (both found at the cellular level): intelligent agents.

Collins accuses design theorists of making arguments from ignorance, but actually it is Collins and other critics of intelligent design who do so when they make certain bad-design argument for blind evolution over against intelligent design. Collins does so, for instance, when he argues that the presence of “junk DNA” strongly suggests a blind evolutionary process rather than anything a divine engineer would have created. That argument rested on scientists’ ignorance of what purpose might be served by DNA that doesn’t code for proteins. But in the intervening years researchers have discovered numerous functional roles for this non-coding DNA. 

To his credit Collins eventually conceded that his use of the term “junk DNA” was misguided. “I’ve stopped using the term,” he told Wired magazine. And as biologist Jonathan Wells notes, “Since then, the evidence for function in non-protein-coding DNA has vastly increased. The first line of one recent article in a scientific journal is, “The days of ‘junk DNA’ are over.”

Chapter 3 of The Language of God contains another argument from ignorance. Collins refers to the “backward wiring” of the vertebrate eye, characterizing it as flawed from an engineering perspective because it forces light to pass through the nerves and blood vessels on its way to the eye’s light sensors. He says this bungled design is evidence for neo-Darwinism’s catch-as-catch-can evolutionary process, and evidence against the idea that a wise designer optimally engineered this organ. “The design of the eye does not appear on close inspection to be completely ideal,” he writes, and its imperfection seems “to many anatomists to defy the existence of truly intelligent planning of the human form.”

This is a favorite argument of Dawkins’s, and of Darwinists generally. However, geneticist Michael Denton and others have shown that the wiring improves oxygen flow, an important advantage not achievable by the tidier approach demanded by Dawkins. They have called attention to this point repeatedly, but The Language of God shows no evidence that Collins is aware of it. He neither addresses it nor so much as mentions it. (Dawkins and other Darwinists generally avoid discussing it.) In this case, then, it’s an argument from ignorance of why the vertebrate eye might benefit from “backward wiring,” and the ignorance appears almost willful.

Collins’s Flagellum

Collins also betrays unfamiliarity with the work of leading design theorists in the way he handles the scientific controversy surrounding a microscopic rotary engine called the bacterial flagellum. The flagellum is a favorite of design theorists because they are convinced that attempts to explain its origin apart from design are manifestly inadequate, and because images of the flagellum practically scream design.

In his book Darwin’s Black Box, Lehigh University biochemist Michael Behe made this sophisticated molecular machine famous by arguing that it was “irreducibly complex” and therefore evidence of design. He used the simple mechanism of a mousetrap as an example of irreducible complexity. If any part of the mousetrap is missing (the base, spring, hammer, holding bar, or catch), the trap cannot work. The mousetrap, then, is irreducibly complex. It is either complete, or it is not a functioning mousetrap.

In the same way, the bacterial flagellum, composed of dozens of protein machines, needs every one of them in place or it doesn’t work.

Here is how irreducible complexity relates to evolutionary theory: A conscious designer can pull together several non-functioning parts and assemble them into a functional whole, but blind evolution — which excludes intelligent guidance — must progress by one slight, random functional mutational improvement at a time. So how could such a process build an irreducibly complex motor one part at a time if the motor cannot propel at all until all its parts are in place?

Using the arguments of leading evolution apologist Kenneth Miller and others, Collins suggests that nature could have co-opted simpler molecular machines to create the bacterial flagellum, and he points to the “type three secretory apparatus” as evidence of such an indirect pathway (p. 192). But as it turns out, and as design theorists have emphasized, there are three crucial problems with this explanation.

One, the micro-syringe at best accounts for only ten proteins, leaving thirty or more unaccounted for; and these other thirty proteins are not found in any other living system. Second, as a wider body of literature suggests, the system probably developed after the more complicated flagellum, not the other way around.

Third, even if nature had on hand all the right protein parts to make a bacterial flagellum, something or someone would still need to assemble them in the precise temporal order the way cars are assembled in factories. How are such tasks presently accomplished? As biologist Scott Minnich and philosopher of science Stephen Meyer explain, “To choreograph the assembly of the parts of the flagellar motor, present-day bacteria need an elaborate system of genetic instructions as well as many other protein machines to time the expression of those assembly instructions.”

Collins never mentions any of this. In these and other instances, he comes across as having never engaged the best arguments for intelligent design in biology. To briefly note one other example, he muffs the issue of testability, mistakenly asserting that ID arguments are not testable.

These constitute significant weaknesses in Collins’s case against intelligent design, but as I will show tomorrow, perhaps the most glaring one is this: he flatly contradicts himself at crucial points.

Editor’s note: This essay is a substantially revised and updated version of a book review that first appeared in Touchstone Magazine.