On decanonising Darwin

How to Teach the Evolution Controversy

Granville Sewell June 1, 2015 12:39 PM | 

If you are a biology teacher who feels that Darwinism should not enjoy special legal protection from scientific criticism in the classroom, here is an idea for you. I suggest you distribute the news story below to your students, word for word. You then have two alternatives:

1. Identify the report as a 1980 New York Times News Servicearticle (a photocopy is here). If you identify the source, you may be safe from direct persecution, in which case you have found a way to "teach the controversy" without losing your job. But be prepared to suffer the consequences to your career in the long term.
2. Do not identify the source of the report. Then at an appropriate point during your dismissal proceedings, you can reveal that the story is actually a New York Times News Service article. I can't guess what will happen to you then, but whether the charges are dropped or not, this will be a dramatic way to bring out how badly academic freedom laws are needed around the country. Any volunteers?

Here is the news story:

Biology's understanding of how evolution works, which has long postulated a gradual process of Darwinian natural selection acting on genetic mutations, is undergoing its broadest and deepest revolution in nearly 50 years.

At the heart of the revolution is something that might seem a paradox. Recent discoveries have only strengthened Darwin's epochal conclusion that all forms of life evolved from a common ancestor. Genetic analysis, for example, has shown that every organism is governed by the same genetic code controlling the same biochemical processes. At the same time, however, many studies suggest that the origin of species was not the way Darwin suggested or even the way most evolutionists thought after the 1930s and 1940s, when Darwin's ideas were fused with the rediscovered genetics of Gregor Mendel.

Exactly how evolution happened is now a matter of great controversy among biologists. Although the debate has been under way for several years, it reached a crescendo last month, as some 150 scientists specializing in evolutionary studies met for four days in Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History to thrash out a variety of new hypotheses that are challenging older ideas.

The meeting, which was closed to all but a few observers, included nearly all the leading evolutionists in paleontology, population genetics, taxonomy and related fields.

No clear resolution of the controversies was in sight. This fact has often been exploited by religious fundamentalists who misunderstood it to suggest weakness in the fact of evolution rather than the perceived mechanism. Actually, it reflects significant progress toward a much deeper understanding of the history of life on Earth.

At issue during the Chicago meeting was macroevolution, a term that is itself a matter of debate but which generally refers to the evolution of major differences, such as those separating species or larger classifications. Most agree that macroevolution is, for example, what made crustaceans different from mollusks. It is the process by which birds and mammals evolved out of reptiles. It is also what gave rise to major evolutionary innovations shared by many groups, such as the flower in higher plants or the eye in vertebrates.

Darwin suggested that such major products of evolution were the results of very long periods of gradual natural selection, the mechanism that is widely accepted today as accounting for minor adaptations. These small variations, considered products of microevolution, account for such things as the different varieties of finches Darwin found in the Galapagos Islands. Under human control, or "artificial selection," microevolution has produced all the varieties of domestic dog, all of which remain members of a single species.

Darwin, however, knew he was on shaky ground in extending natural selection to account for differences between major groups of organisms. The fossil record of his day showed no gradual transitions between such groups but he suggested that further fossil discoveries would fill the missing links.

"The pattern that we were told to find for the last 120 years does not exist," declared Niles Eldridge, a paleontologist from the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

Eldridge reminded the meeting of what many fossil hunters have recognized as they trace the history of a species through successive layers of ancient sediments. Species simply appear at a given point in geologic time, persist largely unchanged for a few million years and then disappear. There are very few examples -- some say none -- of one species shading gradually into another.

Granville Sewell is professor of mathematics at the University of Texas El Paso, and author of a new Discovery Institute Press book, In the Beginning and Other Essays on Intelligent Design, 2nd edition.

Revelation1-3 NWT(2013 Edition)

1 A revelation* by Jesus Christ, which God gave him,+ to show his slaves+ the things that must shortly take place. And he sent his angel and presented it in signs through him to his slave John,+ 2 who bore witness to the word God gave and to the witness Jesus Christ gave, yes, to all the things he saw. 3 Happy is the one who reads aloud and those who hear the words of this prophecy and who observe the things written in it,+ for the appointed time is near.

4 John to the seven congregations+ that are in the province of Asia:

May you have undeserved kindness and peace from “the One who is and who was and who is coming,”+ and from the seven spirits+ that are before his throne, 5 and from Jesus Christ, “the Faithful Witness,”+ “the firstborn from the dead,”+ and “the Ruler of the kings of the earth.”+

To him who loves us+ and who set us free from our sins by means of his own blood+— 6 and he made us to be a kingdom,+ priests+ to his God and Father—yes, to him be the glory and the might forever. Amen.

7 Look! He is coming with the clouds,+ and every eye will see him, and those who pierced him; and all the tribes of the earth will beat themselves in grief because of him.+ Yes, Amen.

8 “I am the Al′pha and the O·me′ga,”*+ says Jehovah* God, “the One who is and who was and who is coming, the Almighty.”+

9 I John, your brother and a sharer with you in the tribulation+ and kingdom+ and endurance+ in association with Jesus,+ was on the island called Pat′mos for speaking about God and bearing witness concerning Jesus. 10 By inspiration I came to be in the Lord’s day, and I heard behind me a strong voice like that of a trumpet, 11 saying: “What you see, write in a scroll and send it to the seven congregations: in Eph′e·sus,+ in Smyr′na,+ in Per′ga·mum,+ in Thy·a·ti′ra,+ in Sar′dis,+ in Philadelphia,+ and in La·o·di·ce′a.”+

12 I turned to see who was speaking with me, and when I turned, I saw seven golden lampstands,+ 13 and in the midst of the lampstands someone like a son of man,+ clothed in a garment that reached down to the feet and wearing a golden sash around his chest. 14 Moreover, his head and his hair were white as white wool, as snow, and his eyes were like a fiery flame,+ 15 and his feet were like fine copper+ when glowing in a furnace, and his voice was like the sound of many waters. 16 And he had in his right hand seven stars,+ and out of his mouth a sharp, long, two-edged sword+ was protruding, and his countenance* was like the sun when it shines at its brightest.+ 17 When I saw him, I fell as dead at his feet.

And he laid his right hand on me and said: “Do not be afraid. I am the First+ and the Last,+ 18 and the living one,+ and I became dead,+ but look! I am living forever and ever,+ and I have the keys of death and of the Grave.*+ 19 So write down the things you saw, and the things that are, and the things that will take place after these. 20 As for the sacred secret of the seven stars that you saw in my right hand and of the seven golden lampstands: The seven stars mean the angels of the seven congregations, and the seven lampstands mean the seven congregations.+

2 “To the angel+ of the congregation in Eph′e·sus+ write: These are the things that he says who holds the seven stars in his right hand and walks among the seven golden lampstands:+ 2 ‘I know your deeds, and your labor and endurance, and that you cannot tolerate bad men, and that you put to the test those who say they are apostles,+ but they are not, and you found them to be liars. 3 You are also showing endurance, and you have persevered for the sake of my name+ and have not grown weary.+ 4 Nevertheless, I hold this against you, that you have left the love you had at first.

5 “‘Therefore remember from where you have fallen, and repent+ and do the deeds you did at first. If you do not, I will come to you, and I will remove your lampstand+ from its place, unless you repent.+ 6 Still, you do have this in your favor: that you hate the deeds of the sect of Nic·o·la′us,+ which I also hate. 7 Let the one who has an ear hear what the spirit says to the congregations:+ To the one who conquers+ I will grant to eat of the tree of life,+ which is in the paradise of God.’

8 “And to the angel of the congregation in Smyr′na write: These are the things that he says, ‘the First and the Last,’+ who became dead and came to life again:+ 9 ‘I know your tribulation and poverty—but you are rich+—and the blasphemy by those who call themselves Jews and really are not, but they are a synagogue of Satan.+ 10 Do not be afraid of the things you are about to suffer.+ Look! The Devil will keep on throwing some of you into prison so that you may be fully put to the test, and you will have tribulation for ten days. Prove yourself faithful even to death, and I will give you the crown of life.+ 11 Let the one who has an ear hear+ what the spirit says to the congregations: The one who conquers+ will by no means be harmed by the second death.’+

12 “To the angel of the congregation in Per′ga·mum write: These are the things that he says who has the sharp, long, two-edged sword:+ 13 ‘I know where you are dwelling, that is, where the throne of Satan is; and yet you keep holding fast to my name,+ and you did not deny your faith in me+ even in the days of An′ti·pas, my faithful witness,+ who was killed+ by your side, where Satan is dwelling.

14 “‘Nevertheless, I have a few things against you, that you have there those adhering to the teaching of Ba′laam,+ who taught Ba′lak+ to put a stumbling block before the sons of Israel, to eat things sacrificed to idols and to commit sexual immorality.*+ 15 In the same way, you also have those adhering to the teaching of the sect of Nic·o·la′us.+ 16 So repent. If you do not, I am coming to you quickly, and I will war against them with the long sword of my mouth.+

17 “‘Let the one who has an ear hear what the spirit says to the congregations:+ To the one who conquers+ I will give some of the hidden manna,+ and I will give him a white pebble, and written on the pebble is a new name that no one knows except the one receiving it.’

18 “To the angel of the congregation in Thy·a·ti′ra+ write: These are the things that the Son of God says, the one who has eyes like a fiery flame+ and whose feet are like fine copper:+ 19 ‘I know your deeds, and your love and faith and ministry and endurance, and that your deeds of late are more than those you did at first.

20 “‘Nevertheless, I do hold this against you, that you tolerate that woman Jez′e·bel,+ who calls herself a prophetess, and she teaches and misleads my slaves to commit sexual immorality*+ and to eat things sacrificed to idols. 21 And I gave her time to repent, but she is not willing to repent of her sexual immorality.* 22 Look! I am about to throw her into a sickbed, and those committing adultery with her into great tribulation, unless they repent of her deeds. 23 And I will kill her children with deadly plague, so that all the congregations will know that I am the one who searches the innermost thoughts* and hearts, and I will give to you individually according to your deeds.+

24 “‘However, I say to the rest of you who are in Thy·a·ti′ra, all those who do not follow this teaching, those who did not get to know the so-called “deep things of Satan”:+ I am not putting on you any other burden. 25 Just the same, hold fast to what you have until I come.+ 26 And to the one who conquers and observes my deeds down to the end, I will give authority over the nations,+ 27 and he will shepherd the people with an iron rod+ so that they will be broken to pieces like clay vessels, just as I have received from my Father. 28 And I will give him the morning star.+ 29 Let the one who has an ear hear what the spirit says to the congregations.’

3 “To the angel of the congregation in Sar′dis write: These are the things that he says who has the seven spirits of God+ and the seven stars:+ ‘I know your deeds, that you have the name* that you are alive, but you are dead.+ 2 Become watchful,+ and strengthen the things remaining that were ready to die, for I have not found your works fully performed* before my God. 3 Therefore, continue mindful of* how you have received and how you heard, and go on keeping it, and repent.+ Certainly unless you wake up, I will come as a thief,+ and you will not know at all at what hour I will come upon you.+

4 “‘Nevertheless, you do have a few individuals* in Sar′dis who did not defile their garments,+ and they will walk with me in white ones,+ because they are worthy. 5 The one who conquers+ will thus be dressed in white garments,+ and I will by no means blot out* his name from the book of life,+ but I will acknowledge his name before my Father and before his angels.+ 6 Let the one who has an ear hear what the spirit says to the congregations.’

7 “To the angel of the congregation in Philadelphia write: These are the things he says who is holy,+ who is true,+ who has the key of David,+ who opens so that no one will shut and shuts so that no one opens: 8 ‘I know your deeds—look! I have set before you an opened door,+ which no one can shut. And I know that you have a little power, and you kept my word and did not prove false to my name. 9 Look! I will make those from the synagogue of Satan who say they are Jews yet are not,+ but are lying—look! I will make them come and bow* before your feet and make them know that I have loved you. 10 Because you kept the word about my endurance,*+ I will also keep you from the hour of test,+ which is to come upon the entire inhabited earth, to put to the test those dwelling on the earth. 11 I am coming quickly.+ Keep holding fast to what you have, so that no one may take your crown.+

12 “‘The one who conquers—I will make him a pillar in the temple of my God, and he will by no means go out from it anymore, and I will write upon him the name of my God+ and the name of the city of my God, the New Jerusalem+ that descends out of heaven from my God, and my own new name.+ 13 Let the one who has an ear hear what the spirit says to the congregations.’

14 “To the angel of the congregation in La·o·di·ce′a+ write: These are the things that the Amen+ says, the faithful and true+ witness,+ the beginning of the creation by God:+ 15 ‘I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were cold or else hot. 16 So because you are lukewarm and neither hot+ nor cold,+ I am going to vomit you out of my mouth. 17 Because you say, “I am rich+ and have acquired riches and do not need anything at all,” but you do not know that you are miserable and pitiful and poor and blind and naked, 18 I advise you to buy from me gold refined by fire so that you may become rich, and white garments so that you may become dressed and that the shame of your nakedness may not be exposed,+ and eyesalve to rub in your eyes+ so that you may see.+

19 “‘All those for whom I have affection, I reprove and discipline.+ So be zealous and repent.+ 20 Look! I am standing at the door and knocking. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come into his house and take the evening meal with him and he with me. 21 To the one who conquers+ I will grant to sit down with me on my throne,+ just as I conquered and sat down+ with my Father on his throne. 22 Let the one who has an ear hear what the spirit says to the congregations.’”

Cursed until needed then cursed again.

Stone Tools Are "Most Important Discovery" in a Half Century -- and a Score for Intelligent Design

David Klinghoffer May 21, 2015 3:36 AM

The evolution-related story of the hour is the discovery of stone tools in Kenya predating, by 700,000 years, the previously known earliest such handmade tools. From Live Science:

The oldest handmade stone tools discovered yet predate any known humans and may have been wielded by an as-yet-unknown species, researchers say.

The 3.3-million-year-old stone artifacts are the first direct evidence that early human ancestors may have possessed the mental abilities needed to figure out how to make razor-sharp stone tools. The discovery also rewrites the book on the kind of environmental and evolutionary pressures that drove the emergence of toolmaking.

A team reports in Nature:

Human evolutionary scholars have long supposed that the earliest stone tools were made by the genus Homo and that this technological development was directly linked to climate change and the spread of savannah grasslands. New fieldwork in West Turkana, Kenya, has identified evidence of much earlier hominin technological behaviour. We report the discovery of Lomekwi 3, a 3.3-million-year-old archaeological site where in situ stone artefacts occur in spatiotemporal association with Pliocene hominin fossils in a wooded palaeoenvironment. The Lomekwi 3 knappers, with a developing understanding of stone's fracture properties, combined core reduction with battering activities. Given the implications of the Lomekwi 3 assemblage for models aiming to converge environmental change, hominin evolution and technological origins, we propose for it the name 'Lomekwian', which predates the Oldowan by 700,000 years and marks a new beginning to the known archaeological record.

There are the usual insistences that this rewrites the book of human evolution, as here, noted by Science Daily:

"The whole site's surprising, it just rewrites the book on a lot of things that we thought were true," said geologist Chris Lepre of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and Rutgers University, a co-author of the paper who precisely dated the artifacts.

We're told it's the "most important discovery" in a half century. From BBC News:

Dr Ignacio de la Torre, from University College London's Institute of Archaeology, described this as "a game-changing" find.

"It's the most important discovery in the last 50 years," he told BBC News.

"It suggests that species like Australopithecus might have been intelligent enough to make stone tools -- that they had the cognitive and manipulative abilities to carry tasks like this out."

Listen, let's grant them everything they say, until the next time the Book of Origins is rewritten yet again. Here's the interesting thing. The tools don't look like much -- see here for a gallery of images. If you stubbed your toe on one, wandering the badlands of West Turkana, would you look down in wonder or kick it aside?

Most likely kick it aside. This is not Paley's pocket watch we're talking about. The discrimination that they are tools was made via a design inference, and the media coverage is clear about this -- they just don't call it by that name. From the New York Times story:

Dr. [Erella] Hovers and other scientists not involved in the new research said the dating of the material appears to be solid and the objects are deliberately produced tools, not scraps of rock broken by accident or natural causes.

"Because the sediments in these layers are fine-grained, and a flake found by the authors could be fitted back onto the core from which it had been detached," Dr. Hovers said, "it is unlikely that the tools accumulated through stream activity or that substantial disturbance of the sediments occurred after the tools had been discarded."

From the article at Science Daily:

"This is a momentous and well-researched discovery," said paleoanthropologist Bernard Wood of George Washington University, who was not involved in the study. "I have seen some of these artifacts in the flesh, and I am convinced they were fashioned deliberately."

I don't doubt that the "tools" are really tools, nor do I have reason to doubt the age assigned to them. But notice the subjective quality of Bernard Wood's assurance: He's seen them "in the flesh," so you can take his word for it. Erella Hovers finds it "unlikely" that the rocks are the product of natural or random processes, like erosion through "stream activity."

The tools are recognized as tools because they triggered an inference to intelligence design. The difference between this and ID as practiced by the best-known ID advocates is that theorists like William Dembski apply a rigorous objective set of standard for declaring an object "designed." Dembski doesn't expect you'll be impressed that he's seen whatever it is "in the flesh."

So the most significant archeological find pertaining to human origins in fifty years hinges on ID. Again, I am simply taking news reports at face value. As our colleague ENV observed recently, "Many scientists claim intelligent design is not science, until they have to use it. Then they find it very helpful.

Biology as tech/Biology as art

The Giraffe as Artwork

Granville Sewell May 19, 2015 3:46 AM |

German biologist Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig studied mutations for over twenty years at the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research in Cologne. Based on that research, he wrote a two-part, 130-page scientific work, The Evolution of the Long-Necked Giraffe, that looks in great detail at the physiology, behavior, and natural history of giraffes.

When I first read it several years ago, one sentence in this technical treatise especially captured my attention. Lönnig analyzes many Darwinian attempts to explain biological features and behavior of giraffes in terms of the advantages they might convey for survival -- for example, the famous claim that the neck is long because it provides an advantage in reaching the higher leaves of the trees giraffes feed on. He shows that all are false or unsupported by the evidence. Then he concludes, on page 32 of the second part: "If, on the other hand, one views Nature as ingenious artwork that cannot be reduced to the question of utility alone, these problems disappear."

Although he quotes a zoo curator as saying "The day I find a woman with eyes as beautiful, I'll get married," Dr. Lönnig -- a well-known proponent of intelligent design -- did not intend his comparison of the giraffe to ingenious artwork as a poetic or metaphorical statement. He meant it as a serious scientific statement, an explanation for the otherwise inexplicable origin of giraffes.

Giraffes, elephants, zebras, tigers, parrots, bald eagles, whales, and rhinos as artwork, rather than just victors in the eternal struggle for survival? Now there's a revolutionary scientific point of view!

Medicine vs. Darwinism?

Doctors and Evolution

David Klinghoffer May 19, 2015 2:08 PM

In an almost charmingly naïve article, Francie Diep at Pacific Standardwonders, "Why Do Some Doctors Reject Evolution?" Her news peg is Republican presidential hopeful Ben Carson, a neurosurgeon who has expressed reservations about Darwinian accounts of evolution -- though I don't know that anyone has questioned him sharply and in an informed way about his ideas on the subject.

Miss Diep is perplexed: "We assumed such beliefs would be unusual among doctors." Not so, she discovered.

[W]hen Pacific Standard talked to doctors, many didn't find their colleagues' rejection of evolution unusual. "Nope, it's not uncommon at all," says David Gorski, a surgeon and researcher at Wayne State University. Even in the national spotlight, Carsonisn't the only high-profile politician-physician to doubt the well-established biology concept.

All of the physicians Pacific Standard talked with, both on and off the record, had the same answer to "How is it possible?": Although doctors use many insights from biology, many don't actually need to understand or believe in evolution correctly to do their jobs.

"Most physicians are not scientists. This is not a knock, but they're more akin to engineers," Gorski says. "They take science that's already known and they apply it to a problem, the problem being making patients better."

It's not a knock? It sure sounds like one. The countervailing consideration is that physicians and engineers -- and why not throw in computer scientists as well? -- do something on a daily basis that evolutionary biologists never do. The doctor or engineer's responsibility is to maintain, devise, or build complex systems, even from the ground up, systems that must operate continuously without fail. If the system does fail, then the physician, engineer, or computer scientist has flopped in his job. Not uncommonly, the results of such a flop can be fatal -- for the patient on the operating table, for example, or the passenger in the jet airplane.

Luxuriously insulated from reality, biologists theorizing about the history of life, how it arose and developed, face no such pressure to fill in what Ann Gauger calls the "white spaces" in evolutionary thinking. (For more on that, see "The Modesty Chronicles.") Vague stories and magic words typically substitute for detailed explanations of how biological systems could come into being through purposeless, unintelligent processes alone. It often seems that the only serious pressure that Darwinists do face is from us.

Miss Diep rolls out the usual line about how evolution is vital to biology which is vital to medicine, ergo medicine needs evolution or ought to do so. But even some hardline Darwinists admit that the practical benefits of their cherished theory are scarce.

Coincidentally, a correspondent today sends across my desk this from biologist Jerry Coyne, of Why Evolution Is True fame. Writing in Nature("Selling Darwin"), Coyne has conceded:

[T]ruth be told, evolution hasn't yielded many practical or commercial benefits. Yes, bacteria evolve drug resistance, and yes, we must take countermeasures, but beyond that there is not much to say. Evolution cannot help us predict what new vaccines to manufacture because microbes evolve unpredictyuably. But hasn't evolution helped guide animal and plant breeding? Not very much. Most improvement in crop plants and animals occurred long before we knew anything about evolution, and came about by people following the genetic principle of 'like begets like'. Even now, as its practitioners admit, the field of quantitative genetics has been of little value in helping improve varieties. Future advances will almost certainly come from transgenics, which is not based on evolution at all.

He wrote that in 2006 -- maybe he'd be more circumspect now. But I'm not aware that anything has changed in medicine or other fields to shift a reasonable person from such a view.

Coyne, of course, believes that the importance of evolution lies in its power to explain, or explain away, not to heal or otherwise improve the quality of our lives. It's precisely that explanatory power, as we know, that is most urgently in need of critical examination.

And now for our next trick.

Any Sufficiently Vacuous Evolutionary Explanation Is Indistinguishable from Magic

Evolution News & Views May 18, 2015 3:09 AM

Intelligent-design theorists including William Dembski and Stephen Meyer have produced rigorous mathematical, logical, and empirical arguments showing that the mechanism described by the "chance hypothesis" is woefully inadequate to bring about the complex genetic information found in even the simplest life. Yet that has not stopped many a Darwinian from invoking chance as a cause of biological complexity. Information, they believe, "emerges" by accident.

Magic Mutations

One example is this from Yale University likening evolution to a "house of cards." Yes, you read that right. As Bill Hathaway says in the headline, "In evolution, 'house of cards' model wins." How can this be?

Using sophisticated modeling of genomic data from diverse species, Yale researchers have answered a longstanding question about which competing model of evolution works best.

Their research suggests that the "house of cards" model -- which holds that mutations with large effects effectively reshuffle the genomic deck -- explains evolutionary processes better than the theory that species undergo the accumulation of many mutations with small effects. [Emphasis added.]

Their reasoning seems to rely on the assumption that since evolution is an accepted fact, and intelligence is disallowed, it must have happened. But mutations, being random genetic changes, offer nothing better causally than the chance hypothesis.

Darwin, of course, knew nothing about genes [i.e., geneticinformation] when he formulated his theory of how natural selection preserves traits that benefit the survival of organisms.Once the crucial role of genes was discovered, most evolutionary biologists conjectured that random mutations in genes were preserved in populations when they helped an organism survive or reproduce. Since mutations that have large effects are almost always fatal to the organism, one classical model holds that most must have small effects and that many would have toaccumulate in order to create new traits and forms.

Another theory hypothesizes the opposite: that mutations do not cause small changes in fitness, but trigger a cascade of changes -- the evolutionary "house of cards." A third theory is even simpler: that mutations have no effect on fitness whatsoever. Recent discoveries of how small bits of genetic material regulate expression of large networks of genes bolstered interest in the "house of cards" model, but only now has the theory been successfully demonstrated to be applicable to diverse organisms on a genomic scale.

Hathaway claims that the Yale scientists have demonstrated this for yeast, worms, and flies. But can a house of cards in a mutational breeze account for such large amounts of genetic information in organisms that have supposedly been stable for hundreds of millions of years?

Let's recall the high level of information we're talking about. Recently, apaper in Nature reported that "simple" yeast cells possess the most advanced rotary motors known in life:

The eukaryotic V-ATPase is the most complex rotary ATPase: it has three peripheral stalks, a hetero-oligomeric proton-conducting proteolipid ring, several subunits not found in other rotary ATPases, and is regulated by reversible dissociation of its catalytic and proton-conducting regions.

As for worms, our new video "How to Build a Worm" illustrates the high degree of functional specification in that humble organismAnd flies -- well, they fly! Powered flight demands numerous interdependent specifications requiring high levels of genetic information. Claiming that chance mutations in a genetic "house of cards" explains these complex creatures is magic talk.

Magic DNA

News from NASA via Astrobiology Magazine speaks of the "Spontaneous Appearance of Primordial DNA." Any evidence for that miracle?

The self-organization properties of DNA-like molecular fragments four billion years ago may have guided their own growth into repeating chemical chains long enough to act as a basis for primitive life, says a new study by the University of Colorado Boulder and the University of Milan.

While studies of ancient mineral formations contain evidence for the evolution of bacteria from 3.5 to 3.8 billion years ago -- just half a billion years after the stabilization of Earth's crust -- what might have preceded the formation of such unicellular organisms is still a mystery. The new findings suggest a novel scenario for the non-biological origins of nucleic acids, which are the building blocks of living organisms, said CU-Boulder physics Professor Noel Clark, a study co-author....

While there now is consensus among origin-of-life researchers that RNA chains are too specialized to have been created as a product of random chemical reactions, the new findings suggest a viable alternative, said Clark.

Yet the "viable alternative" is just as random: liquid crystals with "the ability to drive the formation of chemical bonds that connect short DNA chains to form long ones, without the aid of biological mechanisms" contain no genetic information. They are silent on the origin of the functional, specific information that can turn crystals into functional machines:

For several years the research group has been exploring the hypothesis that the way in which DNA emerged in the early Earthlies in its structural properties and its ability to self-organize. In the pre-RNA world, the spontaneous self-assembly of fragmentsof nucleic acids (DNA and RNA) may have acted as a template for their chemical joining into polymers, which are substances composed of a large number of repeating units.

"The new findings show that in the presence of appropriate chemical conditions, the spontaneous self assembly of small DNA fragments into stacks of short duplexes greatly favors theirbinding into longer polymers, thereby providing a pre-RNA route to the RNA world," said Clark.

This explanation completely misses the point. There are other molecules that can spontaneously grow into longer chains, or into intricate structures like snowflakes. What sets DNA apart is its capacity to store coded information. The article glosses over that vital trait as if waving a magic wand of "emergence" will provide the information, once the molecular substrate is present.

Given that science's job is to explain the mysterious in terms of scientific laws and evidence, it's astonishing how governments will throw money at magical explanations. Intelligent design advocates, by contrast, have to work independently or raise private donations. This study "was funded by the Grant PRIN Program of the Italian Ministries of Education, Universities and Research and by the U.S. National Science Foundation."

Magic Motion

Meanwhile a press release from the Institute for Basic Science, entitled "The Stupidly Effective Genius of Nature," describes how many organisms employ randomness on purpose when foraging for food.

A Lévy walk or flight, named after a French mathematician Paul Lévy, is a mix of long trajectories and short random movements. Numerous short movements are made within a small area, and occasionally a long stride to a distant area, where the action is repeated. This particular motion pattern is observed in humans and animals.

While scientists had previously studied the pattern in humans and animals of inherent intelligence, this research is the first to identify this pattern of movement in molecular motors.

The Lévy walk strategy is employed by jellyfish, birds, sharks, and people. Since there is a purposeful function for the movements, they are not truly random. Finding this motile strategy in cell motors like kinesins, which move on microtubules, it seems the logical deduction should be that they were purposefully designed for it.

Refreshingly, this press release does not attribute the strategy to blind evolution or the magic of emergence! Here's how they express the proper (non-magical) inference:

The rule they discovered is this. When molecular motors carry cargo, their purpose is to find a destination. They thoroughly explore their immediate environment. If a destination is not found, they travel further, repeating the action until a destination is found. "Nature is more clever than we are. It finds this efficient way to engineer this marvelous result without being smart, without (using any pre-existing) memory, and it saves them energy" added Director Granick.

"The findings of our study may help us to better understand our cells and how our body is engineered" he went on. "At the IBS Center for Soft and Living Matter in Korea, the rule we discoveredholds promise to engineer new kinds of artificial active materials."

This research was funded by South Korea and the U.S. Department of Energy, which allows us to end on a happy note. Engineering, after all, relies not on magic but on intelligent design..