The bare bones case for design.

 Here Is What We Mean by Intelligent Design (And What We Don’t)

Ann Guager 

Intelligent design (ID) as a theory is widely misunderstood — and that is one fact that motivated me along with my co-authors in writing the new book that I edited, God’s Grandeur: The Catholic Case for Intelligent Design. Of course, Catholics are far from alone in misunderstanding ID. The problem stems largely from the fact that there is a lot of misinformation that has been advanced about ID by both critics and confused or underinformed commentators. People hear various reports about what ID is from sources such as news outlets, public commentary, social media, and finally, science journals and books. Anyone is free to write about ID, as they should be, whether they know what they are talking about or not. Often, they do not. There is no gate keeper. And some of these people have agendas against ID and may misrepresent ID deliberately. So it goes in a debate about ideas.

While all ID proponents agree that certain features of nature are best explained by an intelligent cause, on many side issues ID proponents may have different points of view, with different assumptions. For example, ID makes no claim about universal common descent. Some ID supporters agree with universal common descent, but many ID supporters argue against the idea that all life shares a common ancestor. There are also different views about the ways in which design may be instantiated, and the degree to which natural processes are involved. These different views are not necessarily a sign of something bad — in fact to a large extent they reflect a healthy diversity of models that exist and are being discussed, tested, and refined. Scientists come into it from different backgrounds, and their opinions about how things work may change as they learn more. To add to the mix, engineers, computer scientists, and mathematicians are involved, bringing their own contributions which are different from those of biologists. ID is multidisciplinary and stronger because of that. All have their part to play.

(Of course, the theory of evolution is also in flux, with debates about what portion of the genome is functional, the role of epigenetics, and more. It’s in the nature of scientists to disagree.) 

Science Through Hearsay

Thus, most science consumers have heard about intelligent design through hearsay, from scientists and others who likely suffer from misconceptions, or are narrowly focused. I have seen Internet debates about whether random mutation can create new information. The debaters often talk at cross purposes, with different meanings of information being the chief problem. Do we mean a new sequence, or a new functional sequence? What do we mean by functional? Do we mean something new, some new action, or do we mean some new action that is beneficial to the organism? 

Lastly, few of our opponents have read ID books. Don’t get me wrong, we have intelligent and fair interlocuters who are knowledgeable about ID, have read our books, and disagree. But opponents, when they read our books, have been known to change their minds. Paleontologist Günter Bechly, one of the contributors to God’s Grandeur, comes to mind.

In case you wondered, in the book we talk about God as the designer because when scientific arguments are integrated with philosophical ones, as they are in God’s Grandeur, the scope of the design in life and the cosmos, extending to the evidence of purposeful fine-tuning before the instant of the Big Bang, clearly points to a transcendent intelligence as the designer.

What Intelligent Design Is

Therefore, one of the first things we needed to do in God’s Grandeur was establish what we meant by intelligent design, and what we didn’t mean. The introduction to the book was written by Logan Gage, a professor of philosophy at Franciscan University. He lays it out in his typical lucid prose. I have set some crucial points from that chapter in bold for emphasis

Intelligent design (ID) proponents typically define intelligent design as the view that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause rather than an undirected process. Note that this doesn’t mean that no evolution has occurred, or that natural processes and forces don’t have their place. It is rather the minimal claim that it’s not natural processes and forces all the way down — a claim to which we Catholics are dogmatically committed, believing as we do that all things originate in God.

Design proponents have made arguments for real rather than apparent design at different levels. For instance, they’ve argued that the beginning of the universe requires an intelligent cause (William Lane Craig and James Sinclair), that the laws of physics are designed (Robin Collins), that our planet is uniquely designed (Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay W. Richards), that chemistry as we know it is designed for life (Michael Denton; Benjamin Wiker and Jonathan Witt), that the building blocks of living things cannot be found by blind searches but must be designed (Douglas Axe), that the first living creature and the fossil record give evidence of design (Stephen Meyer), and that both macro- and micro-features of living things give evidence of intelligent design (Michael Denton; Michael Behe).

Note three quick things about these arguments. First, contrary to ste­reotypes, these arguments are not “god-of-the-gaps” arguments. None of these arguments claims, “I don’t know what caused this, so God musta done it.” Rather, the standard mode of argumentation for design proponents is an inference to the best explanation — a common form of reasoning in general and in the historical sciences (like evolutionary biology) in particular. They argue that there are positive signs of intentional design in nature and that non-intentional explanations are weak by comparison. This is highly consonant with the Catholic [and Christian] Faith. The Scriptures (e.g., Ps. 19 and Rom. 1), the Church Fathers (e.g., St. Gregory of Nazianzen), and the councils (e.g., Vatican I) all declare that God’s handiwork in nature is detectable by human reason and not just by faith.

Second, detecting design does not entail that we have detected divine “intervention” in nature. Design can be detected whether or not there was any direct action. One can tell that a field of corn was intentionally planted even if intermediate causes such as drones were used to plant the seeds. Similarly, design arguments need not imply unmediated divine action….

Third, these arguments have clear theological implications, but ID proponents attempt to stick to the publicly available scientific evidence and do not argue from religious texts. Most intelligent design proponents are Christians,but an argument that the designer is the Christian God would require more than just the scientific evidence. ID proponentsare not being coy about their belief in God but being careful about their conclusions. Aquinas does the same thing.

What Intelligent Design Isn’t

Many Christian intellectuals seem to think that ID theorists believe either God intervenes directly, or else natural processes are entirely responsible for what we see in nature. This is a false dilemma. God Himself is the one who made the natural laws, and He is free to use natural processes as instruments of His will (as secondary causes). As Professor Gage writes

ID does not imply a zero-sum game where if God is responsible for something then He must act directly, and nature cannot be a true cause as well. Rather, the minimal claim is only that some features of our world give very good evidence of having been intelligently designed somewhere in their origin story.  What ID denies is that every feature of nature is the product of natural forces all the way down.

Indeed, every Christian — and every traditional theist — should acknowledge God’s action in the creation of the universe. God had to be involved directly in the beginning at the very least, even if it was just to make the natural laws. However, it must also be pointed out, as Logan Gage writes, that “the view that God only acts in nature through natural laws is not the view of St. Thomas Aquinas or the Church.”13

An Accusation of Interventionism

Other Christians accuse ID of requiring interventionism — the idea that God intervenes in His creation through direct divine action. But ID does not make that claim. ID simply says that we can detect design and its effects, but not necessarily how the design was instantiated. Interventions are possible but not required. Nonetheless, Christianity doesclaim God intervenes in His creation directly. We call these acts miracles, and Christians must acknowledge at least two — the Incarnation and the Resurrection — though many others are described in Scripture as well. And here we have the odd phenomenon of some Christians decrying interventionism, as if it never, ever happens, and saying God only acts through natural causes.

Dr. Gage discusses another misconception — the idea that ID is mechanistic. Once again, this is a charge that is brought by Christians, not non-believers. A materialistic scientist is mechanistic, because, by definition, she believes there is only matter and energy acting in combination to produce everything. This is vastly different from the ID view. And it springs from a misunderstanding.

ID theorists speak of molecular machines. So do evolutionary biologists. But ID theorists do not make the claim that everything is mechanism and that living organisms are machines. Far from it. So where does this idea come from? Professor Gage writes:

The problem is a kind of reductionism that emerged out of early modern mechanical philosophy. It tended to treat organisms as nothing but the sum of their parts. ID theorists do not do this. Even if ID proponents thought that certain components of organisms are literal machines, it would be fallacious to infer that they are reductionists who think that whole organisms are machines. In truth, there is no general philosophy of nature presupposed in ID arguments, let alone a mechanistic Cartesian one.

I hope Gage’s words and mine have clarified what we mean by intelligent design and what we don’t mean. This way, the reader can read God’s Granderur as it is intended. Remember, intelligent design is the view that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause rather than an undirected process. The issue for ID is not how it was done, when it was done, to what extent it was done, or even who did it. (The last question, as I said, must await illumination from other fields, such as philosophy.) It’s simply this: the origin and operation of the universe and living things display clear evidence or purposeful design.

The second horseman's ride through Sudan

Hope for Darwinism's simple beginning has perished.

 Now, with Starships, Evolutionary Origins Become Still More Difficult

Rob Sheldon 

Writing at Evolution News, David Coppedge reported this morning on “Starship Enterprise: Fungal Transposons Boldly Go.” So it appears that self-contained gene transposon “packages” permit transfer of genes from one species to another. Hybridization without sex. Horizontal gene transport. Forget universal common descent, we now have Starships. 

And as Stephen Barr says about physics in his book Modern Physics and Ancient Faith, for each new symmetry discovered, the origin explanation gets more complicated. Not only do genes have to appear de novo, but now entire Starship packages have to appear de novo. The origin explanation becomes more difficult, not less.

More on why we can't take OOL Science seriously

 

The New World Translation study bible's Commentary on Acts ch.20:28

  the blood of his own Son: Lit., “through the blood of the own (one).” Grammatically, the Greek expression could be translated “with the blood of his own” or “with his own blood,” so the context has to be taken into consideration. In Greek, the expression ho iʹdi·os (“his own”) could stand alone without a clarifying noun or pronoun, as seen by how it is rendered at Joh 1:11 (“his own home”); at Joh 13:1 (“his own”); at Ac 4:23 (“their own people”); and at Ac 24:23 (“his people”). In non-Biblical Greek papyri, the phrase is used as a term of endearment to refer to close relatives. A reader of this verse would logically understand from the context that a noun in the singular number is implied after the expression “his own” and that the noun referred to God’s only-begotten Son, Jesus Christ, whose blood was shed. Based on this, quite a number of scholars and translators acknowledge that the word “son” is to be understood here and render the phrase “with the blood of his own Son.”

Acts ch.20:28 Contemporary English Version "Look after yourselves and everyone the Holy Spirit has placed in your care. Be like shepherds to God's church. It is the flock he bought with the blood of his own Son.+"

Acts ch.20:28Good News Translation"So keep watch over yourselves and over all the flock which the Holy Spirit has placed in your care. Be shepherds of the church of God,+ which he made his own through the blood of his Son.+"

Acts ch.20:28American Standard Version,"Take heed unto yourselves, and to all the flock, in which the Holy Spirit hath made you bishops, to feed the church of the Lord which he purchased with his own blood."

Acts ch.20:28Darby Bible Translation"Take heed therefore to yourselves, and to all the flock, wherein the Holy Spirit has set you as overseers, to shepherd the assembly of God, which he has purchased with the blood of his own. "

Acts ch.20:28New English Translation"Watch out for yourselves and for all the flock of which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to shepherd the church of God that he obtained with the blood of his own Son. "

These starships have no prime directive?

 Starship Enterprise: Fungal Transposons Boldly Go

David Coppedge 

Some biochemists and molecular biologists have a Trekkie streak. Not long ago, they discovered Borgs (large libraries of genes in the soil accessed by microbes; see here and here). Now, Starships have landed in the literature. What are they, and what are they doing on our planet?

SETI enthusiasts sometimes think of space aliens as benefactors. Having evolved so many millions of years ahead of humans, and having outlived their own threats of global extinction, they would surely want to share their accumulated wisdom with us, and perhaps even come to Earth to serve man. Others fear space aliens as selfish monsters that would destroy us in a Darwinian fitness contest. Both attitudes are being expressed about the new Starships. What are they? Basically, they are “active eukaryotic transposable elements mobilized by a new family of tyrosine recombinases,” as explained in PNAS. The authors, from Sweden and Australia, are beginning to think these transposons are not all out to get us. Maybe some of them truly are here to serve man.

Converse to many transposons in prokaryotes that include within them genes providing benefits to their new hosts, transposons in eukaryotes have historically been considered selfish pieces of DNA. If Starships are indeed active host-beneficial transposons in fungi, they would closely parallel Integrative and Conjugative Elements in Bacteria and represent a major turning point in our understanding of fungal adaptation and evolution. The Starships are likely to have major impacts on human activities including the “domestication” of cheese-making fungi, increasing tolerance to anthropogenic environmental contaminants and most dramatically causing the emergence of novel plant diseases. By demonstrating the transposition of a Starship experimentally and identifying the enzyme responsible, we take an important step forward in our understanding of these elements.

A meeting with the Captain in this Starship enterprise allays some fears.

Transposable elements in eukaryotic organisms have historically been considered “selfish,” at best conferring indirect benefits to their host organisms. The Starships are a recently discovered feature in fungal genomes that are, in some cases, predicted to confer beneficial traits to their hosts and also have hallmarks of being transposable elements. Here, we provide experimental evidence that Starships are indeed autonomous transposons, using the model Paecilomyces variotii, and identify the HhpA “Captain” tyrosine recombinase as essential for their mobilization into genomic sites with a specific target site consensus sequence. Furthermore, we identify multiple recent horizontal gene transfers of Starships, implying that they jump between species.

Captain HhpA assures the biochemists that his crew is not selfish. The Starships have a mission: to explore strange new genomes, to seek out new fungi and new eukaryotes, and to boldly go where no transposon has gone before.

Information Is for Sharing

Like the Borgs, which appear to be “storage lockers” of genetic information accessible to multiple organisms in the soil, Starships bring the accumulated wisdom of the ages to eukaryotes. Bacteria were already known to benefit from their transposons, called ICEs (Integrative and Conjugative Elements). They’re not all bad.

ICEs are mobile DNA (~20 Kbp to >500 Kbp in size) that contain the genes required for genomic integration, excision, and transfer via conjugation. In addition, they contain a wide range of gene cargos conferring phenotypes such as antibiotic resistance, heavy metal resistance, nutrient utilization, and pathogenicity.

But Can We Trust Them?

The relative proportion of Starships carrying host-beneficial vs. neutral vs. deleterious cargo remains to be determined, and such contributions to fitness will depend on the environment in which the organism is growing. It has thus been proposed that Starships represent eukaryotic analogs of prokaryotic ICEs. A striking parallel between Starships and ICEs is that they often possess signatures of HGT [Horizontal Gene Transfer]. The vast number of sequenced genomes has led to the realization of recurrent HGT within fungi. Furthermore, these transfers are not limited to individual genes, but often encompass entire gene clusters. Many of these cases have since been predicted to involve Starship elements, uniting many disparate observations under a single phenomenon, and implicating Starships as vehicles of HGT in fungi. 

Since fungi are ubiquitous in the world, their accumulated knowledge bases can spread to higher organisms. Perhaps they work together with Borgs, checking out library books and putting them in an organism’s personal library. The authors give several examples of Starships with their own Captain proteins that appear to benefit their hosts. 

The First Starships Land

The term Starship for eukaryotic transposable elements (TE) stems from a paper in Molecular Biology and Evolution in which the authors suggested that they are analogs of bacterial TE’s with the following functions:

We propose that Starships are eukaryotic analogs of bacterial integrative and conjugative elements based on parallels between their conserved components and may therefore represent the first dedicated agents of active gene transfer in eukaryotes. Our results suggest that Starships have shaped the content and structure of fungal genomes for millions of years and reveal a new concerted route for evolution throughout an entire eukaryotic phylum.

One of the co-authors of that paper also appears in the new PNAS Paper, which began as a preprint on bioRxiv last August. Two years ago, Aaron A. Vogan of Uppsala University met the familiar Captain of a Starship:

Vogan et al. showed that the Captain protein KIRC has some similarity to YRs, but sequence identity between KIRC and HhpA is low (~14%). To investigate the Captain proteins further we computationally predicted structures using AlphaFold. The predictions showed considerable similarity for KIRC and HhpA (HhpA aa 8 to 671, KIRC aa 1 to aa 584, TM-score 0.71) as well as between HhpA and Cre recombinase (HhpA aa 39 to 431, KIRC aa 33 to aa 341, TM-score 0.59) (Fig. 2G). This strengthens the evidence that these two Captain proteins share a common function and that they both represent tyrosine recombinases.

Vogan has been busy drawing parallels to Star Trek. His 2021 paper referenced above is titled, “The Enterprise: a massive transposon carrying Spok meiotic gene drives.”

Some twenty Starship sites have been identified, according to the paper, but hundreds more may await discovery. The authors believe that Starship families (fleets?) are at work transferring genes horizontally between species of fungi. 

How Starships Perform Their Prime Mission

The Captain proteins in Starships open up sites in fungal genomes for insertion of genetic information, which can range from 27 to 393 kilobases in size. Genomes have defenses against transposable elements, suggesting a conflict of forces requiring terms of peace. One subsection of the paper is entitled, “Benefits Carried by Starship Transposons Are in Tension with Host Genome Defenses That Protect Against Mobile DNA.” 

Starships such as Hφ embody an inherent tension between their selfish properties; i.e., their mobility which is something that fungi typically employ defenses against and their cooperative properties, i.e., the host-beneficial genes they may contain…. We hypothesize that the resolution to this apparent paradox lies in consideringhorizontal transfer not as an oddity but as a fundamental feature in the lifecycle of host-beneficial Starships.

Accustomed as they are to thinking in Darwinian terms, the authors speak of selfishness, fitness, selective advantages, and survival in one paragraph, saying little else about those things for most of the paper. But of attempts to incorporate them into evolution, they admit that “Such hypotheses provide another frontier for further exploration.” Many of these Starshipelements show strong conservation even though presumed to have been around for hundreds of millions of years.

Serving Fungi Serves the Biosphere

Just as Borgs opened the possibility that large genetic libraries are being shared between organisms outside of cells, Starships now create a new paradigm for transposable elements within and between genomes. As with bacterial TEs, Starships acquire and disperse accessory genes as cargo. Some of the Starships are huge; they carry information on a variety of functional benefits to organisms. The 2022 paper suggests that Starships:

Provide accessory genes from one species to another

Offer standing genetic variation in structure and content for adaptation

Add virulence factors for parasitic and saprophytic growth

Confer protection from antibiotics, chemicals and pathogens

The authors summarize what studies have found so far:

Large DNA regions, dubbed “Starships,” have recently been hypothesized to act as host-beneficial eukaryotic transposons. Previously, we have demonstrated a beneficial effect of Hφ in increasing metal ion tolerance. Now we demonstrate the mobility of Starship elements and show that this movement is mediated by the Captain tyrosine recombinase. Furthermore, the identification of a near-identical Starship in the genomes of two different fungal species is compelling evidence that these elements move not only within a genome but also between species.

The authors believe that they have “only scratched the surface of the role of Starship-mediated HGT in fungi, i.e., by examining the most obvious cases in a single Starship family — Hφ.” And as beneficial TEs in prokaryotes had started dissolving the old “selfish gene” notion, now they are seeing similar host-beneficial operations in eukaryotes. “Bioinformatic exploration of genome sequences indicates that Starships are a pervasive phenomenon” in fungi so far, but who knows what other surprises lie ahead? The “study of Starships represents an exciting avenue toward increasing our understanding of how fungi rapidly evolve numerous traits that impact upon human activities.” Since higher organisms are increasingly known to engage in HGT, will scientists find Starships: The Next Generation at work throughout the biosphere?

Implications for Intelligent Design

This is not your grandfather’s neo-Darwinism. Where are the random mutations? Where is the natural selection? The sharing of information is not evolution in the Darwinian sense. By taking the Darwin glasses off, one might see systems at work allowing for prefabricated adaptation to new surroundings. Instead of Darwin’s meaningless world, it looks increasingly like a world engineered for adaptability by an intelligent cause exercising foresight. With that worldview in mind, ID scientists could take the lead on this exciting endeavor.

The singularity is a thing?

Richard Nixon: a brief history.

The death of higher ed?

God of the gaps no more?

 Michael Behe, Stephen Meyer, John Lennox: The Evidence for Design Is Growing

Evolution News 

On a new episode of ID the Future, Uncommon Knowledge’s Peter Robinson sits down with Michael Behe, John Lennox, and Stephen Meyer, three of the leading voices in science and academia on the case for an intelligent designer of life and the universe. In this wide-ranging conversation in Fiesole, Italy, they explore the growing problems with modern evolutionary theory and the increasing evidence, uncovered by a rigorous application of the scientific method, that points to intentional design of the physical world.

Download the podcast or listen to it here

Being offended in the climate's behalf

 <iframe width="932" height="524" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/K_fxt9SHH9E" title="The Kids Will See You in Court: Climate on Trial in Montana" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Marketing companies are hacking our brains?

The rise(and fall?) Of the dragon.

Pseudo no more?

 Here’s That Study That Found Pseudo-Pseudogenes.

Cornelius G Hunter

Evolution is Getting Demolished 

It is one of the strongest arguments for evolution: dysteleology, the apparent lack of design in the biological world. And the most obvious and compelling examples of such dysteleology are in the genome. And the most celebrated examples of dysteleology in the genome are the pseudogenes—genes which are broken. They are the long since abandoned junk of the genome. And the most obvious example of such brokenness is a stop codon that has accidentally arisen somewhere in the middle of the gene. These so-called premature termination codons (PTCs) halt the production of proteins in mid-stream. And the most abundant source of pseudogenes is the olfactory receptor families—genes involved in detecting odors. All those pseudogenes are a sure sign that no designer worth his salt would have constructed such a world. Evolution must be true, as evolutionists from Charles Darwin to Jerry Coyne have proclaimed. There’s only one problem—such examples of junk always turn out to be false.

At evolution’s foundation is the claim of lack of function, and that is a terrible argument. First of all, it is metaphysical rather than scientific. It is not a positivist argument—evolutionists have no idea how genes, or anything else for that matter—actually evolved. The argument is that such nonfunctional structures would never have been designed or created. That conclusion does not come from science, and cannot be tested by science. It is a religious argument.

But in addition to the metaphysics, showing that a structure has no function makes no sense to begin with. For one would have to watch the structure, in the organism, for the entire life of the organism. And one would have to be able to measure function—all possible functions. Needless to say, no evolutionist has ever done that.

But it gets worse.

Not only is the dysteleology argument religious and nonsensical, it is also false. At least in the cases that have been investigated. Over and over, the long lists evolutionists make of nonfunctional structures just get shorter and shorter.

That brings us to pseudogenes.

For sometime it has been known that not all pseudogenes are pseudogenes. That is, not all pseudogenes are junk. Some pseudogenes have been found to be performing useful functions. But typically these are onesies, twosies.

Now, a new Study has found something more interesting—a PTC in an olfactory receptor pseudogene that, in certain contexts, is not actually a termination codon after all. The gene has a stop codon, and yet the gene is successfully used to create a protein. The translation process somehow can read-through what normally would be a stop codon. The paper suggests this is accomplished with a near-cognate tRNA, which inserts an amino acid rather than causing a halt:

                      We suggest that read-through is due to PTC recognition by a near-cognate tRNA that allows insertion of an amino acid instead of translation termination.

                          What appeared to be a pseudogenes is actually functional. It is a pseudo pseudogene.

Furthermore, and importantly, this is not an isolated case. They found other examples, and conclude this could be a “widespread phenomenon.”

                         Pseudogenes are generally considered to be non-functional DNA sequences that arise through nonsense or frame-shift mutations of protein-coding genes. … We identify functional PTC-containing loci within different olfactory receptor repertoires and species, suggesting that such “pseudo-pseudogenes” could represent a widespread phenomenon.

                        Widespread phenomenon? This adds yet more support to the Project Encode suggestion, which evolutionists immediately pushed back on, that most of the genome is functional rather than junk as evolutionists had insisted (for example, see here, here, and here).

Pseudogenes comprise only a small fraction of the genome, but they have served as the poster child of junk DNA, and proof of evolution.

Instead, once again history appears to be reliable guide as pseudogenes appear to be going down the same path as those other supposedly “nonfunctional” structures. Instead of nonfunctional, pseudogenes are beginning to look like they may have a rather sophisticated function that was not apparent to evolutionists.

Of course function is often not apparent to evolutionists because they view biology as an accident. Organisms are built on a vast number of chance events so of course they will be found to be full of mistakes.

But in its inexorable march of progress, science always seems to find function. Evolution seeks lack of function, which makes no sense, and science just keeps on finding more function. Evolution and science, it seems, are in an eternal conflict.

Don’t expect contriteness anytime soon though. For evolutionists, the finding of function was never a problem. It simply is an example of evolution finding function for what was nonfunctional. The junk was repaired and took on some new function. In fact, it remains powerful evidence for evolution because it is obviously so quirky. When the supposedly “backward” retina of the mammalian eye was found to be incredibly sophisticated, evolutionists didn’t miss a beat. After all, it was still a kludge of a design. As Richard Dawkins put it, “it is the principle of the thing that would offend any tidy-minded engineer!”

So it really doesn’t matter how much function is found, and how optimal a design is. For man has found nature to be wanting, and so it must have formed by chance. This, in a nutshell, is Epicureanism. 

                 

Green energy is just as dirty?

The theory of everything?

The right question?

 Tim Ingold’s Question For Andy Gardner Says It All

Cornelius G Hunter 

A Not So Hidden Agenda

Anthropologist Tim Ingold’s question for Andy Gardner at last week’s “New trends in evolutionary biology” Scientific meeting at The Royal Society should disabuse those who still don’t get it. Gardner had finished his talk, “Anthropomorphism in evolutionary biology,” in which he acknowledged the design in biology. But if Gardner's organisms are actually designed, an agitated Ingold demanded, then how would Gardner’s explanation for their origin be any different from William Paley’s natural theology which invoked design?

Anyone who has interacted with evolutionists knows this moment all too well. The metaphysics and religion are always there for evolutionists, crouching at the door and ready to strike at any moment. Whether in lecture, seminar, or writings, the agenda is painfully obvious. As Eva Jablonka put it, “Not God—we’re excluding God.”

Evolution isn’t about the science—it never was. It doesn’t matter what the science shows, evolution must be true. 

Definitions re:the design inference.

Understanding Design Arguments: An Introduction for Catholics

 Logan Paul Cage 

Editor’s note: We are delighted to present this excerpt from the new book edited by biologist Ann Gauger, God’s Grandeur: The Catholic Case for Intelligent Design. You can download a full chapter and purchase the book at God'sgrandeur.org. 

In my experience, Catholics face many challenges when it comes to thinking about evolution and intelligent design. Many of us somewhere along the way had a priest or teacher tell us not to trouble ourselves about this issue; whatever “science” says is fine. In addition, there is even some confusion over the very meaning of the terms evolution and intelligent design.

In my introductory chapter to the new book God’s Grandeur, I aim to help readers think more carefully and critically about these ideas. Without worrying yet about whether design arguments are sound, we must first figure out what these arguments claim — and, just as importantly, what they do not claim. To this end, I provide some background, attempt to define our terms, discuss the form of such arguments, and consider common Catholic misconceptions. My hope is that we will then be in a better place to evaluate the success of such arguments in the chapters that follow.

                     

An Ancient Dialectic

For many American Catholics, discussions of evolution and intelligent design dredge up images of the “Scopes Monkey Trial” or Fundamentalist Christians attempting to have literal six-day creationism taught in public schools. While most of us Catholics are uncomfortable with the aggressive evolutionary atheism of Richard Dawkins and the New Atheists, we don’t feel that we have much of a dog in such fights. Yet we can be too hasty in this regard. The fundamental debate is not of recent vintage. The West has long had two dominant narratives about where our world’s astonishing and beautiful creatures come from: accidental events or intelligent foresight. These narratives predate not only Fundamentalist Christianity but Christianity itself. This issue pushes all the way down to fundamental metaphysics: What is the self-existent ultimate reality — impersonal matter or a personal Creator?

As far back as Socrates in the fifth century BC, we see the father of Western philosophy making an explicit design argument. His student Xenophon records Socrates’s view that we have been most favored by the supreme deity. We are uniquely arranged in body and mind. All other things appear to be here for our benefit. And nature itself seems consistently arranged in the best or finest way. All of this, Socrates argues, bears witness to divine providence. Variations on this basic theme appear in his successors Plato and Aristotle and beyond.

The opposing narrative came from the Greek atomists like Democritus, Leucippus, and Epicurus. Humans, they claimed, are intelligent of course. But this intelligence is a late arrival on the scene. Ultimate reality isn’t intelligent. What fundamentally exists are atoms and empty space in which the atoms collide. Just as you hear many today saying silly things like, “Love is just a chemical reaction in the brain,” so too did the atomists believe that all phenomena really reduce down to the properties of material bodies. For the atomists, highly organized beings like ourselves self-organize by accident. There are an infinite number of worlds. So with an infinite amount of time, every combination of atoms must manifest itself somewhere! Sure, organisms look intelligently designed, but poor accidental designs disappeared while good accidental designs survived.

                   There is truly nothing new under the sun. There are differences, to be sure, but the atomist narrative clearly anticipates not only Darwin’s theory but multiverse scenarios as well. The fundamental issue, all the way back, is whether the apparently designed features of our world are truly intelligently designed or whether they can be accounted for by lucky accidents with no intelligence involved. As even Richard Dawkins recognizes, “Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.” Like the atomists before him, of course, he thinks this design is only apparent and not real.

What Intelligent Design Is

With this classical dialectic in view, intelligent design (ID) proponents typically define intelligent design as the view that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause rather than an undirected process. Note that this doesn’t mean that no evolution has occurred, or that natural processes and forces don’t have their place. It is rather the minimal claim that it’s not natural processes and forces all the way down — a claim to which we Catholics are dogmatically committed, believing as we do that all things originate in God.

Design proponents have made arguments for real rather than apparent design at different levels. For instance, they’ve argued that the beginning of the universe requires an intelligent cause (William Lane Craig and James Sinclair), that the laws of physics are designed (Robin Collins), that our planet is uniquely designed (Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay W. Richards), that chemistry as we know it is designed for life (Michael Denton; Benjamin Wiker and Jonathan Witt), that the building blocks of living things cannot be found by blind searches but must be designed (Douglas Axe), that the first living creature and the fossil record give evidence of design (Stephen Meyer), and that both macro- and micro-features of living things give evidence of intelligent design (Michael Denton; Michael Behe).

Note three quick things about these arguments. First, contrary to stereotypes, these arguments are not “god-of-the-gaps” arguments. None of these arguments claims, “I don’t know what caused this, so God musta done it.” Rather, the standard mode of argumentation for design proponents is an inference to the best explanation — a common form of reasoning in general and in the historical sciences (like evolutionary biology) in particular. They argue that there are positive signs of intentional design in nature and that non-intentional explanations are weak by comparison. This is highly consonant with the Catholic faith. The Scriptures (e.g., Ps. 19 and Rom. 1), the Church Fathers (e.g., St. Gregory of Nazianzen), and the councils (e.g., Vatican I) all declare that God’s handiwork in nature is detectable by human reason and not just by faith.

                 Second, detecting design does not entail that we have detected divine “intervention” in nature. Design can be detected whether or not there was any direct action. One can tell that a field of corn was intentionally planted even if intermediate causes such as drones were used to plant the seeds. Similarly, design arguments need not imply unmediated divine action. 

Third, these arguments have clear theological implications, but ID proponents attempt to stick to the publicly available scientific evidence and do not argue from religious texts. Most intelligent design proponents are Christians, but an argument that the designer is the Christian God would require more than just the scientific evidence. ID proponents are not being coy about their belief in God but being careful about their conclusions. Aquinas does the same thing.

What Intelligent Design Isn’t

Many Catholic intellectuals labor under the false impression that intelligent design theorists propose a false dilemma: either there is an intelligent designer or else natural laws are responsible for these designed looking features of our world — as though God cannot be responsible for the natural laws themselves or that natural causes cannot be instruments of God (i.e., secondary causes). This would indeed be an unfortunate dilemma. Fortunately, this is a misunderstanding. ID does not imply a zero-sum game where if God is responsible for something then He must act directly and nature cannot be a true cause as well. Rather, the minimal claim is only that some features of our world give very good evidence of having been intelligently designed somewhere in their origin story. What ID denies is that every feature of nature is the product of natural forces all the way down. Given that this commitment is necessarily shared by Catholics, Catholic hostility to ID on this point is surprising, to put it mildly.

Florida's state government's white bear problem?

Cleaning house?

There isn't enough money in the world to top up on happiness?

There isn't enough money in the world to buy higher standards in public education?

A closer look at the Jovian moons

The fossil record's bombardment of Darwinian gradualism continues apace.

 Fossil Friday: The Explosive Origin of Complex Eyes in Trilobites

Gunter Bechly 

This Fossil Friday features a fossil from my own collection, a phacopid trilobite from the Devonian of Morocco. Note the remarkable preservation of the prominent compound eyes.

A recent work by Schoenemann (2021) provided a “comprehensive overview about what is known about trilobite eyes and their functioning after more than 120 years of intense research on this topic.” The author mentioned that trilobites “appeared close to the very beginning of the Cambrian Explosion” and “formed an important component of the Great Ordovician Diversification Event,” two events that have both been called ‘Big Bangs‘ of life. Schoenemann found that “the trilobite has no physical predecessor here” and “they are equipped from the very beginning of their appearance in the fossil record with elaborate compound eyes.” This confirms exactly what ID proponents like Stephen Meyer and myself have emphasized all the time. Schoenemann also describes how “the diversity of the morphology of trilobite eyes ‘explodes’ with the Ordovician”, which does not really sound like a gradual development in a Darwinian way. While some of the different types of trilobite eyes could at least theoretically be “achieved by modifications of the common principle of an original holochroal eyes,” the highly specialized schizochroal eyes of phacopids “show up as not being apposition eyes,” which requires a major re-engineering that certainly involved multiple coordinated mutations that imply a waiting time problem. Therefore, the abrupt origin of such biological innovations defies a Darwinian explanation, because the numbers do not add up. Another new study by Schoenemann et al. (2021) even reinforced this problem. They could show that phacopid eyes indeed represent a unique type of hyper compound eyes, where tens to hundreds of small compound eyes are each covered with a single lens. Nothing remotely similar is found among any of the other millions of arthropods or anywhere else in the animal realm.

            

A Phylogenetic Scenario

In a supplementary file the authors suggested a phylogenetic scenario for the origin of the different eyes in arthropods, but their figure rather emphasizes the anatomical gulf between the different constructions. The authors can offer no plausible explanation how such transitions could have been achieved, beyond embarrassingly superficial speculations that there could be genetic programs that “simply produced” these structures. It is a general pattern in evolutionary biology that so-called explanations follow the pattern ‘because evolution is true there may have been an imagined process X that made it happen’. That‘s hardly better than explaining the phenomenon that opium makes sleepy with an imagined dormitive power, which was already ridiculed by French playwright Molière (1673). Exercises in begging the question and fancy just-so storytelling dominate the field of evolutionary biology, while any rigorous hypotheses are conspicuously lacking, which is why I as a former evolutionary biologist have come to the conclusion that this discipline does not qualify as true science.

Another Interesting Fact

But there is another interesting fact that is worth mentioning: Even though there are gazillions of perfectly preserved trilobite fossils, which provide detailed information about their complete anatomy, including soft tissues and the intricate internal construction of their compound eyes, Schoenemann (2021) admitted that “still today the phylogenetic position is vigorously debated” with hardly any consensus beyond the trivial fact that they are (eu)arthropods. Darwinists should expect that with sufficient anatomical information any organism can be easily placed in the tree of life because homologous similarities should be a reliable guide to reconstruct common ancestry and phylogenetic relationship. The enormous controversies among biologists about conflicting phylogenetic evidence and incompatible tree reconstructions show that the Darwinian expectation commonly fails the litmus test of reality. Luckily the theory has been made immune to empirical falsification because it is simply assumed to be true by default as the only viable option for materialists. This kind of immunization against falsification combined with the demonization of any skeptics is another hallmark of pseudoscience.

      

When the abyss stares back?

 NYT Pushes Suicide for the Mentally Ill

Wesley Smith 

The phony argument that legalized assisted suicide will permanently be limited to the terminally ill took a big hit with a New York Times op-ed in which an oft-suicidal Canadian philosophy professor, Clancy Martin, argues that mentally ill people who are suicidal should receive help from doctors to die.

Martin’s first paragraph makes clear why his thesis should be rejected out of hand:

                 My first attempt to kill myself was when I was a child. I tried again as a teenager; as an adult, I’ve attempted suicide repeatedly and in a variety of ways. And yet, as a 55-year-old white man (a member of one of the groups at the highest risk for suicide in America) and the happily married father of five children, I am thankful that I am incompetent at killing myself.

                      If a doctor had helped Martin, he wouldn’t be alive today to be happily married, a father of five, and published in the “newspaper of record.” When a doctor helps a patient die, either by prescription or lethal injection, the job gets done.

                    

The Gift of Life

Rather than appreciate the gift of life he received as a result of doctors’ being prohibited from helping him die, Martin wants mentally ill patients to qualify for lethal overdoses — an act that doctors foreswear in the Hippocratic Oath:

                       One might expect that as someone who has repeatedly attempted suicide and yet is happy to be alive, I am opposed to euthanasia on psychiatric grounds. But it is because of my intimacy with suicide that I believe people must have this right.

It’s true that policymakers, psychiatrists and medical ethicists must treat requests for euthanasia on psychiatric grounds with particular care, because we don’t understand mental illness as well as we do physical illness. However, the difficulty of understanding extreme psychological suffering is in fact a reason to endorse a prudent policy of assisted suicide for at least some psychiatric cases. When people are desperate for relief from torment that we do not understand well enough to effectively treat, giving them the right and the expert medical assistance to end that misery is caring for them.

                       

Between the Patient and the Grave

             But that’s precisely when a compassionate psychiatrist may be able to stand between the despairing patient and the grave. And, as he apparently did, these despairing people often rally and find the strength to go on.

<iframe width="460" height="259" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/gbDhTKxLq_Y" title="825. Clancy Martin" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Martin does the “strict-guidelines-can-prevent-abuse” soft-shoe, but as we have seen over and over — in Canada, the Netherlands, Belgium, and even the U.S. — guidelines offer a veneer of assurance and are liberalized and expanded as soon as the political paradigm allows. Indeed, in recent weeks, that is precisely what happened in Vermont, Oregon, Canada, and the Netherlands.

He concludes:

                       Suicidal people suffering from psychological torture should have the right to consult a medical expert about medical assistance in taking their own lives and be given that assistance if their need is justified. Having terrified or anguished people in acute mental suffering ending their pain by the many means available to them, often resulting not in death but terrible physical injury, is much worse, and it’s happening every day.

        Who will be the “expert” to judge whether someone else has suffered enough? The patient’s doctor? If the doctor refuses, a suicidal person can go doctor-shopping with the help of euthanasia-advocacy organizations to find one who will say yes. Indeed, wherever euthanasia is legal, doctors participate in the assisted-suicide deaths of patients outside their own medical specialties.

             

Anything Else Is Abandonment

We should never make suicide easy — the West is experiencing a suicide crisis, after all — and we should always strive to engage in interventions, whether the patient is suicidal because of cancer, a mental illness, or a calamity such as the death of a child. To do anything else is abandonment.

The question is whether we still care enough about each other for that to matter. At least Martin’s advocacy has the virtue of being an honest recitation of what euthanasia advocacy is really about.

Ps. The difference between JEHOVAH'S approach to addressing these types of issues and the approaches preferred by the thought leaders of the present age, is that JEHOVAH is  addressing the disease and thought leaders on both sides of this issue are dealing with the symptoms.

In search of Darwinism's "simple beginning"

 <iframe width="932" height="524" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Eefw0Dnv_Ic" title="The Mystery of Life&#39;s Origin -- Dr. Stephen Meyer" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe>

A maximum wage?

On the boundaries of science

 Physicist Eric Hedin Probes the Limits of Science

Evolution News 

Are we free to look beyond materialism for answers to important scientific questions? On a classic episode of ID the Future, Canceled Science author and physicist Eric Hedin sits down with host Eric Anderson to discuss what does and doesn’t constitute science, what nature can and can’t accomplish, and the use and abuse of consensus claims in determining scientific truth. It’s all material explored in Hedin’s book, Canceled Science: What Some Atheists Don’t Want You to See. This is Part 1 of a conversation. Download the podcast or listen to it Here. And be sure to read Dr. Hedin’s latest at Evolution News, “Evolutionist Claims ChatGPT ‘Lies About Junk DNA.’”

The technology of breathing vs. Darwinism.

 In Breath-Holding, Kate Winslet and a Croc Are Champions

Howard Glicksman 

Recently, the Wall Street Journal reported that Kate Winslet, and other actors, for the sake of “the newest frontier in blockbuster moviemaking” are learning how to hold their breath underwater for several minutes.

Around the same time the website Science Daily highlighted an article from Current Biology that expounded on “how crocs can go hours without air,” thus blowing Miss Winslet’s impressive feat — seven and a quarter minutes holding her breath — right out of the water. The article attributes this croc ability to evolution. 

But things are not as simple as they look. This is especially true once you understand how life works to survive, and the causal hurdles that would have had to have been surmounted to build life from the ground up. 

That’s what my recent book, co-authored with Steve Laufmann, Your Designed Body, accomplishes for the reader. Read the book and you’ll be prepared to analyze the validity of Darwinism, ask evolutionists better questions, and expect better answers rather than just accepting their “just so” stories.  

As Steve and I demonstrate, with each lesson learned about the complexity of life and survival and the built-in engineering that makes that possible, the explanatory power of Darwinism fades away until all that is left is the narrative gloss.

Reviewing the Basics

The fundamental building block for all life is the cell. One of the cell’s most important needs is energy. The cell, whether it lives and works in Kate or the croc, mostly gets this energy from cellular respiration. Cellular respiration involves the cell, in the presence of oxygen, releasing the energy from within the glucose molecule (while producing carbon dioxide) and storing it as ATP (the cell’s energy currency). The cell does also have a much less efficient way of getting a lot less energy from glucose, called glycolysis, a process that is anaerobic in that it does not require oxygen. 

A one-celled organism, such as an amoeba, is like an “island of life.” That’s because it can get what it needs from its watery environment, while getting rid of what it doesn’t need as well. When it comes to energy, the amoeba gets its glucose and oxygen from its surroundings and releases carbon dioxide. 

In contrast, a multi-cellular organism, like Kate or the croc, is like “a deep dark continent of life” since almost all of its trillions of cells are not near its surroundings. That’s why the organism needs to have a respiratory system to bring in oxygen (and release carbon dioxide), a gastrointestinal system to bring in glucose, and a cardiovascular system to carry these chemicals in the blood to or from all of the cells. 

Not having enough oxygen (or for that matter, glucose) for your cells, especially the ones in the brain, which affords consciousness and controls breathing and the cardiovascular system, is a quick path to death. So, understanding how a creature can perform these breath-holding feats, while staying alive, is not an exercise in abstraction.

Physicians and engineers, unlike evolutionary theorists, work in the real world of science. The end point that proves any of their thought or practical experiments to be wrong is death — whether it’s that of the body or of a machine. That’s why understanding why an organism has to have enough oxygen (and anything else it needs to survive) and what happens when it doesn’t (death) must be plugged into any theory of life. Without this grounding in real “life and death” science, evolutionists are just letting their imaginations run wild.

Trillions of Cells 

By hyperventilating beforehand, Kate Winslet maximized her blood level of oxygen and minimized her blood level of carbon dioxide. While holding her breath, as her carbon dioxide level rose and her oxygen level dropped, she would have had to resist the urge to breathe and also deal with symptoms like “tingling limbs, impaired vision, feelings of freakout” while being at risk of becoming unconscious and drowning. That’s why she always did this under the supervision of a trainer. Do not try this at home or alone!

The Cardiovascular System 

Besides her respiratory system, putting oxygen into her blood to get it to all the cells in her body, Kate has a cardiovascular system. This consists of the heart with its right and left sides, and the pulmonary and systemic circulations. The right ventricle pumps deoxygenated blood through the pulmonary arteries to the lungs where it enters the capillaries surrounding the alveoli to pick up oxygen and then returns to the left side of the heart through the pulmonary veins. The left ventricle pumps oxygenated blood through the systemic arteries to the capillaries in the tissues. There, the cells get the oxygen (and glucose) they need and download the carbon dioxide. The blood then returns to the right side of the heart through the systemic veins. 

One final problem remains, though. It turns out that oxygen doesn’t dissolve well in water. That’s why Kate Winslet has hemoglobin that’s made in her red blood cells, which are made in her bone marrow. Hemoglobin is a complex molecule, containing iron, that locks onto oxygen when it enters the blood from the lungs and so allows the blood in the body to have enough oxygen-carrying capacity.  

With maximum exercise, Kate’s body needs a 14-fold increase in oxygen consumption compared to when she’s at rest. This means that her blood has to have enough red blood cells with enough hemoglobin to carry enough oxygen to meet the metabolic needs of her body, no matter what she’s doing. So, that means that her body has to control her hemoglobin.

As noted, every control system needs at least three parts and the one that controls the hemoglobin is no different. Kate has specialized cells in her kidneys that sense her blood level of oxygen and in response, the cell as the integrator sends out a certain amount of a hormone called erythropoietin. Erythropoietin travels in the blood and attaches to specific receptors on immature 

stem cells in the bone marrow and tells them to develop into red blood cells, which produce hemoglobin. So, if the oxygen level goes down the kidney cells send out more erythropoietin which tells the bone marrow to make more red blood cells which gives the body more hemoglobin. 

Given her impressive feat, it’s safe to say that Kate Winslet’s respiratory, cardiovascular, and hematological systems were all working at maximum efficiency. But the croc can easily beat her. Now, remember, the croc needs this functional capacity for survival. He’s not worrying about performing well enough to meet the needs of “the newest frontier in blockbuster moviemaking.” Nor is he trying to impress his friends by showing them how long he can hold his breath underwater while risking death by drowning. No, when the croc grabs the hindquarters of an antelope, he instinctively dives down deep into the water, where he knows he can survive for an hour or two without drowning, but the antelope can’t. 

Since this involves the respiratory, cardiovascular, and hematological systems, they would seem to be the right places to start in comparing Kate and the croc. But before we do, we have to take into account that Kate is warm-blooded, while the croc is cold-blooded.

Hot and Cold

This difference means that Kate has to use a lot more energy (oxygen) than the croc to maintain her core temperature, which is between 97o and 99o F. She needs to do this so that all of her organ systems, especially her brain, can work properly. Remember, the croc only has to worry about surviving and reproducing. It would seem that being cold-blooded doesn’t bother his self-esteem one bit. However, being warm-blooded allows us to have the biggest brains in the animal kingdom, a fact that affords us numerous abilities, like intelligence, reasoning, creativity, self-reflection, and free will, going far beyond mere survival and reproduction.  

In contrast to Kate Winslet, the croc can usually maintain its core temperature, between 82o and 92o F, with little effort simply by making sure it lives in a warm climate. In fact, at rest the croc only uses about 15 percent of the energy that a human does. And when it dives down deeper where the temperature is lower, because it is cold-blooded, it is able to reduce its metabolic rate even further. 

So, for a given ambient temperature and level of activity, the croc requires much less oxygen (energy) than a human does to survive. This is so even if the human and the croc have the same amount of oxygen available for use. In fact, it means that as compared with Kate, the croc can get by on the anaerobic process of glycolysis to obtain the limited amount of extra energy it provides because he only needs 15 percent of what Kate needs. 

From the start we can see that since the croc uses much less oxygen per minute than does Kate, this would at least partially explain why it is able to hold its breath under water so much longer. But there’s more. On Monday we’ll ask, “How Does the Crocodile Hold His Breath So Long?” Stay tuned.

Common sense re:Darwinism

 Uncommon Descent — A Farewell and Remembrance

William A Dembski 

Editor’s note: As of April 2023, the news and commentary site Uncommon Descent has been archived Here for historical and research purposes. To stay informed about the latest news and research in the sciences and about intelligent design, stay tuned for coverage here at Evolution News.

Uncommon Descent began in the summer of 2005 as my personal blog. Before that, I had a personal website, Designinference.com. The latter site began in 2002 and was a place for my longer writings. But by 2005, blogging was the rage, and I jumped in with both feet at Uncommon Descent.

The very name was at once a play on Darwin’s idea of common descent, but also a play on descent being a homophone of dissent. In 2004, I had edited an anthology for the Intercollegiate Studies Institute titled Uncommon Dissent, so the name Uncommon Descent tied in with my then current interests and activities. And it clearly called to mind that living organisms have an origin beyond the naturalistic causes of Darwinism, indeed, an origin stemming from a higher intelligence.

                       

A Forum and Springboard

I didn’t know what to expect from the blog when it started, but it quickly developed a following that was gratifying to see, both from commenters and from contributors. In the first months, I seem to recall publishing around four blog posts a day. Soon enough, however, I tired of excessive posting (which is also why I never took to Twitter). I’ve always thought that my best contributions would be in sustained pieces of writing, so it was good to see others using UD as a forum and springboard. 

Around 2008, Barry Arrington came on board to lead UD, organizing it as a non-profit corporation. This allowed it to take donations, and donations (along with a lot of free volunteer labor) kept it afloat from then to the present. Barry was not just an administrator. With a keen mind about the law and the role of evidence, he had many insightful posts of his own about ID to share with UD’s readers. 

For the first few years of its existence, UD was the premier blog for ID. Eventually, it would be overtaken by Evolution News. But it was a place where key members of the ID community could go to post their views. It was also a prime target against which critics of ID would respond with criticisms, such as at Panda’s Thumb.

Even to this day, I’ll search UD for posts that I remember. For instance, in responding to ID critic Jason Rosenhouse in the summer of 2022 at Evolution News, I vaguely recalled a post by Mike Behe responding to Ken Miller. Sure enough, a Google search located Behe’s post at UD (from 2007).

The ID Blog to Beat

Over the years, UD provided valuable news and insights to the ID movement. The indefatigable Denyse O’Leary was crucial in this regard. Yet over time, the center of mass for ID blogging shifted elsewhere. Evolution News became the ID blog to beat. Also, YouTube videos and social media became much more influential. 

Even so, UD provides a crucial window into the history of the ID movement. It therefore seemed important to archive it. So I was delighted when Discovery Institute agreed to fold an archived version of UD into its web properties, keeping as well as repurposing valuable content created on the UD site. In saying farewell to UD, we are thus not saying that we’ll never see UD again. It will be there, in archival form, ready to be accessed. 

In closing this farewell, I want to say special thanks to Jack Cole, who was the webmaster all these years and put in so many unremunerated hours; to Denyse O’Leary, whose quick pen and sharp insights supplied a never-ending stream of fruitful content; and to Barry Arrington, whose work in administering the site and writing for it kept the trains running. And finally, thanks to all the contributors and commenters over the years who, in supporting ID, have been on the right side of truth and will ultimately be vindicated for being on the right side of history. 

The Mediterranean's demographic time bomb?

Budding AI overlord stumbles over "junk DNA"?

 Evolutionist Claims ChatGPT “Lies About Junk DNA”

Eric Heidin 

Biochemist Laurence Moran has related his frustrating interaction with ChatGPT, claiming that the responses included fabrications and misquotes about “junk DNA.” Does the AI bot “lie,” as Moran maintains? Let’s take a look.

He begins, “We have finally restored the Junk DNA article on Wikipedia. (It was deleted about ten years ago when Wikipedians decided that junk DNA doesn’t exist.)” So now you know his own perspective on the subject, if you didn’t already. Moran says that he’s been trying to figure out how far the misunderstandings of junk DNA have spread, so he’s been querying ChatGPT about this. His findings reveal ChatGPT’s ability to cite “quotes” that don’t really exist (referring to Francis Crick’s 1970 article, “Central Dogma of Molecular Biology”), but the irony is that Moran’s criticism of ChatGPT for misunderstanding junk DNA seems to be rooted in his own opinions on the issue.

In Search of Function

Philosopher of biology Paul Nelson notes that Moran has become entrenched in his assertion that the majority of other biologists misunderstand the finding that what used to be called junk DNA has increasingly shown regulatory function. After all, evolution is blind and driven by random events, isn’t it? Consistent with this idea, Moran complains about geneticists including John Mattick who are curious about possible function in what was previously thought to be junk DNA. They keep looking for function and refuse to stop at what Moran thinks is the obvious “null hypothesis.”

A null or default hypothesis, such as expecting the absence of function in non-coding segments of DNA, reveals a presupposition that biases one’s interpretation of available scientific evidence. 

That Moran’s views are steeped in evolutionary thinking is clear. “[W]hat the heck,” he says, “nothing in all of biology makes sense if you don’t know about evolution.” I would amend his assertion to clarify the role of his worldview, as follows: Indeed, “nothing in all of biology makes sense if you don’t know about evolution,” and if you presuppose a closed, materialistic universe. On the other hand, most everything in biology makes sense if you accept an open universe in which a purposeful intellect designed living organisms in a manner consistent with maintaining Earth’s habitability over the past 3.8 billion years or so and culminating in a thriving humanity on the leading edge of Earth’s history.

Moran’s Notably Isolated Thoughts

Moran contends that “ChatGPT is probably spewing back the common misunderstanding of junk DNA.” Is the arguable “misunderstanding” real, or is it just that ChatGPT presented a summary of web content that failed to align with Moran’s notably isolated thoughts on junk DNA? Indeed, Moran’s latest book title claims that “90% of Your Genome Is Junk.”

Moran’s singular views are at odds with the progression of scientific investigation on the human genome, including results of the ENCODE project, as Casey Luskin reported in a 2013 Evolution News article:

                   A groundbreaking paper in Nature reports the results of the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE) project, which has detected evidence of function for the “vast majority” of the human genome. Titled “An integrated encyclopedia of DNA elements in the human genome,” the paper finds an “unprecedented number of functional elements,” where “a surprisingly large amount of the human genome” appears functional.

Based upon current knowledge, the paper concludes that at least 80% of the human genome is now known to be functional.

How does Moran defend his view that most of DNA is junk? The first in a list of five arguments that he gives for junk DNA is referred to as genetic load:

Every newborn human baby has about 100 mutations not found in either parent. If most of our genome contained functional sequence information, then this would be an intolerable genetic load. Only a small percentage of our genome can contain important sequence information suggesting strongly that most of our genome is junk.

A comment on a post at Uncommon Descent regarding Moran’s new book and his argument about junk DNA offers this response: “First off, it is important to note that Moran’s claim that 90% of our genome must be junk is not derived from any direct empirical observation, but [rather] Moran’s belief that 90% of the genome must be junk is forced upon Moran because of the mathematics of population genetics.”

Though not a geneticist, I would suggest that within the design paradigm, the “100 mutations not found in either parent” might not accumulate to “an intolerable genetic load” if the genome was designed to include a sufficient level of redundancy and flexibility. Not much would be needed, when considering the mutations as a fraction of the entire genome (100/3.5×109 base pairs = 2.9×10-8), or 1 part in 35 million. An intelligent designer would recognize the probability of mutations in the genome and would with foresight incorporate coding principles to ameliorate their effects. It seems rather unimaginative to contend that the only way to handle natural mutations is to front-load the genome with 90 percent junk. But dogmatic assertions based on stubborn presuppositions have a way of making their adherents stumble over the obvious.

So, Does ChatGPT “Lie” About Junk DNA?

Moran’s post on his interaction with ChatGPT drew some comments contending that ChatGPT, though sophisticated compared to past technology, still suffers from “GIGO,” or “garbage in, garbage out.” Or, as Moran laments, “ChatGPT is probably spewing back the common misunderstanding of junk DNA.” Whether the common view is true or false, it’s probably just what a web-based AI chatbot will give you. Real knowledge can only derive from reality, and a summary majority view from online sources remains a poor substitute.

In reading about ChatGPT on Digital Trends, we learn that the public version has “limited knowledge of world events after 2021.” Can we conclude that AI chatbots are “going to make everyone stupid”? To me as a university professor, it’s obvious that the temptation students face to find a way to quickly complete an assignment such as writing a research paper or essay, without doing original work, has just exploded. At what cost? Most likely the outcome will be a reduced ability for critical thinking and for effective writing, and in the end, greater apathy about why it all even matters.