Yet more on life's antidarwiwinian bias V

An Inordinate Fondness for Confounding Darwinians
Evolution News & Views August 31, 2012 12:43 PM

Write FAIL by another Darwinian prediction: there's no relationship between the length of a branch on Darwin's "tree of life" and how many leaves it has. Evolutionists find this result of a massive study surprising and disconcerting.

The question is this: Shouldn't groups of organisms that have been evolving the longest have the most species? If neo-Darwinism could make any law-like predictions, this should be it: the inexorable pressure to evolve or perish should lead to the most species in the oldest groups:

the most fundamental expectation in macroevolutionary studies is simply that species richness in extant clades should be correlated with clade age: all things being equal, older clades will have had more time for diversity to accumulate than younger clades.
So say Rabosky, Slater and Alfaro, who have just published the most exhaustive study to date of species richness as a function of time. They examined species counts for 1,397 clades, representing 1.2 million species "for taxa as diverse as ferns, fungi, and flies" (emphasis added throughout). Here's what they expected, as reported in their paper in PLoS Biology:
The most general explanatory variable of all is clade age: clades vary in age, and this age variation should lead to differences in clade diversity, particularly if all clades have identical net rates of species diversification through time. If clade diversity is generally increasing through time, there is a strong theoretical expectation that species richness should be associated with their age (Figure S1). Even if individual clades are characterized by a "balanced" random walk in diversity, such that speciation and extinction rates are exactly equal, we may still observe a positive relationship between age and richness through time if clade diversity is conditioned on survival to the present day (Figure S1). Stochastic models of clade diversification through time consistently suggest that species richness and clade age should be correlated. These expectations differ from patterns observed for extinct clades, presumably because living clades have survived to the present to be observed. The expectation that age and diversity should be correlated does not minimize the importance of evolutionary "key innovations" and other factors as determinants of clade richness. In fact, to the extent that such factors influence net diversification rates, their effects should further accentuate differences in richness attributable to age variation alone.
Well, guess what. They aren't correlated. "Clade Age and Species Richness Are Decoupled Across the Eukaryotic Tree of Life," says he paper's title. "At the largest phylogenetic scales, contemporary patterns of species richness are inconsistent with unbounded diversity increase through time," the researchers found. "These results imply that a fundamentally different interpretative paradigm may be needed in the study of phylogenetic diversity patterns in many groups of organisms." Much to their consternation, they couldn't wiggle out of this result (readers can check the open-access paper for how many ways they tried).
The three biologists certainly are aware of complicating factors that might rule out a neat, clean graph. They know that "Some groups, like beetles and flowering plants, contain nearly incomprehensible species diversity, but the overwhelming majority of groups contain far fewer species." Only one species of tuatara, for example, remains after 200 million years on the planet. Sometimes extinction rate exceeds speciation rate; sometimes the ecological niche puts constraints on the ability to diversify. Or, species counts might be artifacts of our taxonomic system or the habits of collectors. Still, even when correcting for these factors, Rabosky et al. expected some remnant of a law-like trend between clade age and species diversity. Not only was no correlation found at the large scale, it was not found at finer scales either. When they authors examined beetles in more detail, for instance, age and diversity showed an even lower correlation than for the bigger picture.

This failure of expectations left them scrambling. It's important to understand the causes for this decoupling, they point out, because most phylogenetic models rely on the implicit assumption that clades should diversify over time at some kind of predictable evolutionary rate. "If age and richness truly are decoupled, then species richness in clades should not be modeled as the outcome of a simple time-constant diversification process, as is done in the overwhelming majority of evolutionary and biogeographic studies." Note that point: the "overwhelming majority of ... evolutionary studies" is based on an assumption that is demonstrably wrong!

Commentary by Harmon

When faced with contrary data this strong, evolutionists have to be immensely creative in coming up with ways to dodge the implications. Luke J. Harmon, for instance, commenting on this paper in the same issue of PLoS Biology, tries humor. He tinkers with an irrelevant joke by J. B. S. Haldane who, noting the 400,000-some-odd species of Coleoptera, quipped that "God has an inordinate fondness for beetles." Harmon titled his paper, therefore, "An Inordinate Fondness for Eukaryotic Diversity."

The point of his commentary is that this is not really a problem; sure, the study showed that it is "difficult or impossible to predict how many species will be found in a particular clade knowing how long a clade has been diversifying from a common ancestor" -- but one thing evolutionists can take heart about, he assures us: we're slowly becoming ever wiser and more knowledgeable about Darwin's world:

This pattern suggests complex dynamics of speciation and extinction in the history of eukaryotes. Rabosky et al.'s paper represents the latest development in our efforts to understand the Earth's biodiversity at the broadest scales.
Where is the understanding exactly? Evolutionists predicted a trend, and found none. Does labeling the situation "complex " help? Does a drunken sailor's staggering suddenly make sense simply by speaking of it as reflecting a "complex dynamic"?
Harmon praises Rabosky et al. for "the most ambitious study to date" saying, "This provides a remarkably complete view of what we currently know about the species diversity of clades across a huge section of the tree of life." He imagines an escape hatch in the future, saying that their "analysis is not the final chapter" because "the tree of life is still under construction, and the total number of species in some clades is best viewed as an educated guess." Maybe somebody else will find a pattern some day. With more genomes, or with improved species counts, who knows?

"Still, the results in Rabosky et al. are intriguing and will certainly inspire further study, which I expect will be focused on testing more sophisticated mathematical models, beyond the constant-rate birth-death models prevalent today, that might be able to explain patterns in the data." Yes, falsifying evidence is indeed "intriguing." After that, Harmon wanders off into a distracting diversion about another evolutionist's quip, this one by Huxley, who joked about "Santa Rosalia as the patroness of evolutionary studies." Pay no attention; there's no falsification here. Look at this nice shrine!

News Coverage

How did the science news media spin this result? Michael Alfaro, senior author of the paper, works at UCLA, where a press release written by Stuart Wolpert gave the official interpretation for public consumption (for instance, on PhysOrg). "Why evolution has produced 'winners' -- including mammals and many species of birds and fish -- and 'losers' is a major question in evolutionary biology," we're told.

Scientists have often posited that because some animal and plant lineages are much older than others, they have had more time to produce new species (the dearth of crocodiles notwithstanding). This idea -- that time is an important predictor of species number -- underlies many theoretical models used by biologists. However, it fails to explain species numbers across all multi-cellular life on the planet, a team of life scientists reports Aug. 28 in the online journal PLoS Biology, a publication of the Public Library of Science.
"We found no evidence of that," said Michael Alfaro, a UCLA associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and senior author of the new study. "When we look across the tree of life, the age of the group tells us almost nothing about how many species we would expect to find. In most groups, it tells us nothing."

Another idea, that some groups are innately better or worse at producing species, similarly fails to explain differences in species number among all of the major living lineages of plants and animals, the life scientists found.

So far, this is a forthright statement of the findings. Wolpert gives significant space to Alfaro's favorite rescue strategy, that of "adaptive zone carrying capacity" -- the notion that speciation will proceed up to the point where an adaptive zone is filled to its carrying capacity, then will stop. "Most of the groups that we studied have hit their limits," Alfaro said. "Ecological limits can explain the data we see." This is, of course, not an explanation but a post-hoc rationalization.
So despite the despairing tone of the paper, Alfaro finds a little light in the darkness: "The ultimate goal in our field is to have a reconstruction of the entire evolutionary history of all species on the planet," he says. "Here we provide a piece of the puzzle. Our study sheds light on the causal factors of biodiversity across the tree of life."

But in the paper, the three authors jointly considered and rejected adaptive zone carrying capacity as a suitable explanation for the data. The idea of adaptive zones is not new; George Gaylord Simpson coined the phrase in 1953. Adaptive zone carrying capacity was one of several "diversity-dependent processes" the authors investigated that might result in the decoupling of time and diversity they found. The explanation would be that "ecological opportunity influences the tempo and mode of species diversification through time."

A fallacy in this explanation, though, is its assumption that carrying capacity is static: "We may not understand the ecological mechanisms underlying 'carrying capacity dynamics, but we must still wrestle with substantial neontological and paleontological evidence for their existence." The dynamics exist, they mean. Organisms have uncanny abilities to break out of the box and enter new niches, or to rebound after mass extinctions; the explanation, therefore, fails when considered in the long term. It certainly does not explain why one species of tuatara survives in the same adaptive zone as hundreds of species of beetles.

The authors would not have left time-richness decoupling as an unsolved problem if any number of explanations they considered were of any help: "we are not presently aware of any non-biological mechanism that can account for this lack of relationship," they conclude. Maybe in the future someone will find a law-like pattern; for now, it's a failed prediction of Darwin's tree of life that may require a "fundamentally different interpretive paradigm," as yet unknown.


Intelligent design theory holds no fixed view on common descent per se, with some in the ID camp being personally skeptical of the idea and other more accepting. Either way, from an ID perspective, there seems no reason to expect species richness to correlate with time. The data fit well with ID predictions, therefore, but represent a strong disconfirmation of neo-Darwinian predictions. Once again, nature seems to have an inordinate fondness for confounding Darwinians.

Yet more on life's antidarwinian bias.IV

Life Is Designed to Fight Darwinism

Evolution News & Views September 26, 2012 10:03 AM 

Life knows all about Darwinism. That's why it is intelligently designed to resist it.

Neo-Darwinian theory teaches that mutations are random, then a process of "selection" chooses which ones to preserve (Darwin himself was bothered by the implicit personification in "natural selection"). Some mutations are random, for sure. No cell can anticipate where a cosmic ray will hit. How, then, can cells regulate mutations, turning on a "low mutation rate phenotype" under stress? In Current Biology, McDonald and team experimented with E. coli response to mutations. Their paper featured these 4 highlights:

The evolution of low mutation rates in mutator-founded populations • Nonmutators do not only evolve due to reduced genetic load compared to mutators; they can invade • Diploidy is found to be closely associated with reduction of the impact of the mutator phenotype • Genomes may influence mutation rates by initiating more high-fidelity replication early in S phase.

The authors believe that mutations are the source of "beneficial adaptive variation," but cannot deny they also produce "deleterious genetic load." When a cell invades a novel environment, it is able to switch on a "mutator phenotype" with a 10- to 100-fold increase in mutation rate. The fact that this "mutator allele" switches on is an indication that there's a functional purpose behind it. It's risky, because mutational load is likely to drive many of the cells extinct.

We find that after ∼6,700 generations, four out of eight experimental mutator lineshad evolved a decreased mutation rate. We provide evidence that theaccumulation of deleterious mutations leads to selection for reduced mutation rate clones in populations of mutators. (Emphasis added.)

The authors did not give any examples of a beneficial mutation. All they proved is that populations tend to "evolve" a decreased mutation rate, thereby cutting off the source of "beneficial adaptive variation" while saving themselves from "deleterious genetic load."

Defensive Block and Tackle

"Researchers demonstrate how 'interfering' RNA can block bacterial evolution" is the headline of anews release from Rockefeller University. As expected, the pro-Darwin press release speaks of "evolutionary tricks" and "instant evolution," but a close reading shows a designed mechanism for surviving under stress:

Bacteria may be simple creatures, but unlike "higher" organisms they have a neat evolutionary trick. When the going gets tough, they can simply pick up and incorporate a loose bit of genetic material from their environment. It's instant evolution, no time-consuming mutations required. This process, known ashorizontal gene transfer, is an important reason why nasty bacteria like pneumococci are often able to evade immune system attacks and antibiotic drugs.

Needless to say, "evolution" without "time-consuming mutations" is not the neo-Darwinian way. By picking up existing genetic information from the environment through horizontal gene transfer, the bacteria give evidence of design for surviving storms of misfortune:

"Transformation is something that bacteria use as a last resort," says Luciano Marraffini, head of Rockefeller's Laboratory of Bacteriology. "In a desperate attempt to stay alive under hostile conditions, they start incorporating whatever genes they can find into their chromosome in the hopes that they can quickly evolve out of trouble."

Michael Behe described in The Edge of Evolution how a cell under stress, like a city under siege, will do whatever it can to survive, throwing whatever is available at the enemy or accepting weapons from allies. If it survives, it has not become something better. It just avoided dying. The ability of a cell to accept or reject existing foreign DNA shows evidence of design for disaster preparedness.

Epistasis and Stasis

Mutating a gene affects other genes. Genes belong to networks that can absorb shocks. That appears to be the message in a PNAS paper about epistasis, or "nonlinear genetic interactions between polymorphic loci." Do epistatic interactions promote speciation -- the kind Darwin needs -- or do they promote canalization, the ability of a genotype to vary and yet still produce the same animal?

Whatever the hope, the researchers found that "Epistasis dominates the genetic architecture ofDrosophila quantitative traits." By comparing two pools of fruit flies, they found a lot of genetic variation that the networks apparently absorbed, because both populations remain fruit flies. "Knowledge of epistatic networks will contribute to our understanding of the genetic basis of evolutionarily and clinically important traits," they said, indicating evolutionists don't have that understanding yet.

Neo-Darwinism: Reality vs. Hype

With these anti-Darwinian processes in mind, let's examine some of the recent claims in the news from the world of science.

Lenski Again

Michigan State University went over the top again in its hype about Lenski's lab with its E. colipopulation that "evolved" the ability to digest citrate. "Evolution is as complicated as 1-2-3" theMSU press release blares. We might ask why his research assistant Zachary Blount is sitting under a pyramid of petri dishes. Maybe he is meditating on new ways to blow the data out of proportion.

Casey Luskin and Michael Behe unmasked this hype last year so there is no need to repeat it, since nothing new is added by the press release.

Gain of function?

A paper claiming to find a "gain of function" was published in Science magazine, announcing, "A Gain-of-Function Polymorphism Controlling Complex Traits and Fitness in Nature." Prasad and team realize the obvious: that neo-Darwinism can't afford to lose money on every sale:

Few studies have identified the genes that underlie complex trait variation in nature and the evolutionary processes that influence these polymorphisms. Most such work has focused on loss-of-function mutations that lead to adaptive phenotypes, likely because novel gain-of-function changes occur infrequently and require persistent natural selection to be maintained in populations. Nonetheless,new functional mechanisms are crucially important for adaptive evolution. To understand the adaptive consequences of complex trait variation, we must establish a direct relationship between genetic polymorphisms and phenotypic traits, and investigate the fitness consequences of this variation in natural environments.

This is amazing: the Darwin Bicentennial was three years ago, but hardly anyone has yet tied genes to fitness! Most of the actual lab work has identified loss of information that allowed organisms to adapt. But evolutionists need to tie genes to fitness gains, they said. It's important. Neo-Darwinism must establish that relationship. Read that paragraph again and let the import of the confession sink in.

That was the build-up to their announcement of a gain-of-function mutation: the ability of a certain plant to ward off pests a little more effectively with a slightly modified chemical defense gene. Again, though, as with the citrate claim, they were talking about an existing polymorphism in one of the populations of similar plants. Despite their pride in showing how a particular gene location "affects plant chemistry and insect resistance, and thus fitness, in a quantitative manner," the fitness gain they came up with was only 1.3%. Whether a subjective notion like "fitness" can be quantified to two significant figures is highly suspect.

What's more, numerous other factors could confuse the conclusion. The populations were separated by many miles, one in Colorado and another in Montana, where ecological differences (weather, type of pests and their ratios) could be more important than the similarities. The researchers' courageous attempts to attribute this slight benefit to modest changes in existing complex pathways is overshadowed by their admission that "few studies have identified the genes that underlie complex trait variation in nature."

Finches Again

Reviving the old icon of Darwin's finches, some evolutionists at Harvard Medical School, publishing in PNAS, peeked into beaks and gleaned genes for insight into evolution. From the abstract, it appears all they found was that finches in the Caribbean and finches on the Galapagos grow bigger beaks in a slightly different order. Darwin's finches develop the prenasal cartilage first, then the premaxillary bone, whereas the Caribbean finches do both at the same time.

"Together, our results demonstrate high flexibility in the relationship between morphology and underlying developmental causes, where different developmental programs can generate identical shapes, and similar developmental programs can pattern different shapes." This appears to be just another case of canalization with not much to speak of in terms of real evolutionary change. In fact, since the beaks of Darwin's finches have been shown to oscillate between big and small depending on the climate, this flexibility in developmental programs (note that word "programs") is arguably a good design feature, providing robustness to perturbations, not a pathway to better things.

Summary

In short, the claims by evolutionists for neo-Darwinian progress are modest at best and unsupported at worst, while evidence mounts that life is designed to resist neo-Darwinian mechanisms in its requirement to survive stress and adapt to change.

@ Kepler438b;Don't call us we'll call you.

Fare Thee Well, Kepler 438b
David Klinghoffer November 19, 2015 11:08 AM



That was fast. Excitement about the "most Earth-like planet ever," the potentially habitable and therefore hypothetically inhabited Kepler 438b, launched in January with an announcement at the American Astronomical Society meeting here in Seattle. Researchers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics bore the good news.

From the story in The Guardian:

An alien world that orbits a distant star in the constellation of Lyra may be the most Earth-like planet ever found outside the solar system.

The planet, named Kepler 438b, is slightly larger than Earth and circles an orange dwarf star that bathes it in 40% more heat than our home planet receives from the sun.

The small size of Kepler 438b makes it likely to be a rocky world, while its proximity to its star puts it in the "Goldilocks" or habitable zone where the temperature is just right for liquid water to flow.

A rocky surface and flowing water are two of the most important factors scientists look for when assessing a planet's chances of being hospitable to life.

Kepler 438b, which is 470 light years away, completes an orbit around its star every 35 days, making a year on the planet pass 10 times as fast as on Earth. Small planets are more likely to be rocky than huge ones, and at only 12% larger than our home planet, the odds of Kepler 438b being rocky are about 70%, researchers said.

That's over, it seems, just ten months later. As we learn now, it seems more probable that this "most Earth-like planet [is] uninhabitable due to radiation." From the announcement by scientists at the University of Warwick:

The most Earth-like planet could have been made uninhabitable by vast quantities of radiation, new research led by the University of Warwick has found.

The atmosphere of the planet, Kepler-438b, is thought to have been stripped away as a result of radiation emitted from a superflaring Red Dwarf star, Kepler-438.

Regularly occurring every few hundred days, the superflares are approximately ten times more powerful than those ever recorded on the Sun and equivalent to the same energy as 100 billion megatons of TNT.

While superflares themselves are unlikely to have a significant impact on Kepler-438b's atmosphere, a dangerous phenomenon associated with powerful flares, known as a coronal mass ejection (CME), has the potential to strip away any atmosphere and render it uninhabitable.

The planet Kepler-438b, to date the exoplanet with the highest recorded Earth Similarity Index, is both similar in size and temperature to the Earth but is in closer proximity to the Red Dwarf than the Earth is to the Sun.

I note this with no malice toward the likely sterile and desolate exoplanet. A habitable or, even more so, an inhabited planet elsewhere in the cosmos would be very exciting news. We neither need it nor fear it. If life were seeded across the stars, though that certainly seems not to be the case, it would be neither here nor there for those who recognize the evidence for design in biology and cosmology.


Presumably, life driven by biological information on another planet would call for an inference to design just as it does on Earth. Tell me how the logic would differ because of a transfer of venues across some number of light years? See our video, "The Information Enigma":Materialists, on the other hand, need extraterrestrial life. They need it very badly. Life cannot be uncommon. It must spring up easily. Just add sunshine! For them, the demise of this most hopeful of exoplanets is sorry news.

On Darwinism's broken compass.

Family Size in Affluent Cultures: Another Failed Prediction of Darwinian Theory
David Klinghoffer August 30, 2012 5:08 AM


If natural selection really is the creative driving force behind the evolutionary development of species, you ought to find it programming creatures to maximize the number of their descendants. But this prediction of Darwinian theory is foiled by research newly reported in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Scientists in Sweden and the UK studied a cohort of 14,000 Swedes born between 1915 and 1929, plotting the relationship between family size, social and biological success ("Low fertility increases descendant socioeconomic position but reduces long-term fitness in a modern post-industrial society").

I take this subject personally since, with five kids, my wife and I consider ourselves as having a packed house. However, that's only relative to the culture around us -- Seattle -- which competes with San Francisco for the title of America's most childless city. In other places our family would be considered modest in size. My brother-in-law and his wife in Jerusalem, for example, have 18 (eighteen) kids.

The so-called demographic transition describes the way that as societies become more affluent, people have fewer kids. In Seattle, instead of children, people have dogs. The seeming evolutionary anomaly -- as folks find they can afford to support a larger family, they in fact curtail their reproduction -- has traditionally been explained as a longterm strategy of natural selection. You have fewer kids but you can care for them better so that in the long run you in fact ensure the spread of your genes to future generations. It's a tradeoff, quantity for quality.

That rationalization turns out to be wrong. Smaller families and their descendants are wealthier and more successful in social and educational terms. Measured for "descendant reproductive success," though, the strategy is at best a wash and at worst a flat contradiction of what natural selection is supposed to be selecting for.

From the Abstract:

Adaptive accounts of modern low human fertility argue that small family size maximizes the inheritance of socioeconomic resources across generations and may consequently increase long-term fitness. This study explores the long-term impacts of fertility and socioeconomic position (SEP) on multiple dimensions of descendant success in a unique Swedish cohort of 14,000 individuals born during 1915-1929. We show that low fertility and high SEP predict increased descendant socioeconomic success across four generations. Furthermore, these effects are multiplicative, with the greatest benefits of low fertility observed when SEP is high. Low fertility and high SEP do not, however, predict increased descendant reproductive success. Our results are therefore consistent with the idea that modern fertility limitation represents a strategic response to the local costs of rearing socioeconomically competitive offspring, but contradict adaptive models suggesting that it maximizes long-term fitness. This indicates a conflict in modern societies between behaviours promoting socioeconomic versus biological success.
The study's lead author, Anna Goodman of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, puts the difficulty for Darwinian theory in these terms:
Under natural selection, you would expect organisms to use their resources to produce more genetic descendants, and so increase their Darwinian fitness. The demographic transition is a puzzle because at first sight it doesn't look like people are doing this. One adaptive explanation for the puzzle is that there exists a quantity-quality trade-off, such that having more children leads to those children being less able to reproduce in turn -- i.e. higher "quantity" leads to lower biological "quality." However our study found this quantity-quality trade off only applied to descendants' socioeconomic success, not their reproductive success.
Given natural selection, you would expect one thing. What you get is the opposite. That's called a failed prediction and Darwinists have a variety of strategies for dealing with those, as Cornelius Hunter writes at Darwin's Predictions:
Evolutionists argue that evolution is a fact, and that we ought to focus on evolution's successful predictions rather than its false predictions. The tendency to seek confirming evidence over contrary evidence is known as confirmation bias. One consequence of confirmation bias can be that confirming evidence is viewed as correct and typical whereas disconfirming evidence is viewed as anomalous and rare. Not surprisingly the confirming evidence is more often retained and documented. Rarely are the many false predictions found in evolution texts. Confirmation bias can hinder scientific research, particularly when researchers believe they know the truth, as do evolutionists. They view the important predictions of evolution as predominantly true. False predictions, on the other hand, are usually not viewed as legitimate falsifications. Instead, these are interpreted, more positively, as open research questions which are yet to be resolved. Indeed, evolutionists often make the remarkable claim that there is no evidence that is contrary to evolution.

Those British and Swedish researchers ought to have a chat with our friend Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education, who advises Darwin advocates to avoid giving the impression that evolutionary theory has any serious weaknesses at all.

An unmistakable signature II

Denying the Signature: Was My Argument Subjective?
Stephen C. Meyer November 20, 2015 3:36 AM


Editor's note: Readers of Evolution News likely know the central thesis of Stephen Meyer's bestseller, Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design. Meyer argues that the functional biological information necessary to build the Cambrian animals is best explained by the activity of a designing intelligence, rather than an undirected, materialistic evolutionary process. Most reviews of Darwin's Doubt curiously omitted to address or even to accurately report this central claim. However, a review by philosophers Robert Bishop and Robert O'Connor in Books & Culture was a welcome exception. In this series, adapted from Debating Darwin's Doubt, edited by ENV's David Klinghoffer, Dr. Meyer responds to their critiques. This is Part 3 of the series. 

In the last installment in this series, I addressed two objections that Robert Bishop and Robert O'Connor made to my description of living organisms as systems in which functional information is present. Bishop and O'Connor have a further objection to that description, which will take more space to address. They contend that my characterization betrays an "objectionable" subjective element. In order to illuminate this problem as they see it, Bishop and O'Connor first attempt to distinguish between the objective and subjective aspects of my argument. They acknowledge first that some objective facts are clear:

Biologists agree: The structure of DNA, however contingent, serves well to produce a functional outcome. There is nothing subjective in this. In spite of the complexity inherent in the coding regions of DNA, the specific arrangement "hits a functional target." That is, from among the vast array of possibilities, a DNA sequence that renders possible or enhances the life of an organism betokens the intentional activity of intelligent agency.

Somewhat surprisingly, Bishop and O'Connor sound there as if they accept the heart of my argument. They concede that complex sequences in the coding regions of DNA hit a "functional target" -- that is, those sequences code for functional proteins (among a vast array of possible non-functional peptide sequences) and, thus, aid in the survival of living organisms. They even sound as if they are conceding that the presence of complex sequences containing functional information would reliably indicate intelligent design.

So what is the problem? They claim there is no objective, scientific basis for privileging, or focusing on, "life" in my analysis and that absent the assumption that life represents "a distinguished outcome," I have no objective criteria for deciding whether DNA or other bio-macromolecules represent functional outcomes, and thus, presumably that they contain functional information.

As they put it, "inherent in the notion of a functional outcome is the presumption that life constitutes a distinguished outcome." To them, interest in life as a significant outcome reflects an objectionable and subjective value judgment. "Since life has value -- to us -- we naturally insist that any means conducive to life has distinctive value. But that's an interpretation we supply." (emphasis in the original). By contrast, they argue, "An objective observer will realize that, if life is the goal, then that arrangement [of bases in a coding sequence of DNA], however improbable, functions magnificently. If some other outcome were the goal, however -- say the more modest goal of replication -- then that outcome would have no particular value."

Bishop and O'Connor repeatedly claim that my argument depends upon a subjective value judgment about the importance of life. But their claim is not quite accurate. My argument does not depend upon a judgment, whether subjective or objective, about the value of life. Instead, it simply treats life as a phenomenon in need of explanation. It presupposes, as all biologists do, based upon a whole host of observations and comparisons, that life and non-life are different modes of existence and that the nature and origin of living things, therefore, requires explication and explanation.

Bishop and O'Connor are right, of course, if what they really mean is that all such observationally based judgments in science are made by human subjects -- by the scientists whose subjective interests guide scientific investigations. Scientists are, after all, human beings who make judgments about which of the things they observe in the natural world seem important or unexpected or unusual or interesting and, consequently, are worth studying. In that sense, judgments about which observations and phenomena warrant special interest, or require explanation, are indeed subjective.

"A Serious, Incurable Case of the Humans"

But all scientific endeavors are motivated by subjective human interest and are guided by the perceptions humans have, and the judgments and observations they make, about natural phenomena. All scientific investigations depend upon what human investigators think interesting, and thus, upon that kind of subjectivity. But this is inescapable in the practice of science for the simple reason that it is humans interested in the natural world who do science (and, indeed, humans showing interest in the living world who do biological science). As philosopher of science Del Ratzsch has quipped, "Science has a serious, incurable case of the humans."1 And one thing human scientific investigators do is try to explain phenomena that, for one reason or another, seem unusual, special, curious, or unexpected to them. For almost all biologists life is one such phenomenon, "a distinguished outcome" as Bishop and O'Connor put it.

It is also true, of course, that biologists determine whether a DNA sequence performs a function by assessing whether that string will code for a protein (or an RNA) that will in turn help an organism stay alive. So the criterion "helps sustain life" does ultimately underlie judgments about the functionality of information-rich sequences in DNA, RNA, and proteins.

But, so what? To deny the relevance of this criterion is to treat life as something insignificant and not in need of explanation; and no scientist, especially one interested in the origin of life, does that. In any case, neither my argument, nor the validity of science itself, depends upon insisting that our collective human interest in life is entirely objective if by "objective" we mean somehow independent of our own interest, judgment, observations, or perceptions.

The choice about whether or not to regard life as significant and in need of explanation may well reflect a subjective (i.e., human) interest in living things, and a similar recognition or perception that living things are different than inanimate rocks or chemical compounds. But that perception only renders the concept of functionalinformation meaningless ifthe distinction between life and non-life is also meaningless and, again, no scientist interested in the origin of life (on any side of the debate about it) holds that view.

Bishop and O'Connor may as well object to the whole field of origin-of-life research, or the entirety of the discipline of evolutionary biology, or all of biology itself, as well as to my arguments for intelligent design, since all practitioners of those fields make the same objectionable assumptions about life as "a distinguished outcome."

Regardless, determining whether cells contain functional or specified information does not require anyone to make a judgment about the value of life, but instead only a factual judgment about whether sequences of chemicals (functioning as digital characters) build protein or RNA molecules that aid in the survival of living cells. Indeed, once one has decided to regard life as a phenomenon of interest (as all evolutionary biologists do), it is objectively true that only certain arrangements of nucleotide bases, and not others, will produce proteins that perform tasks that allow cells to stay alive -- a fact that Bishop and O'Connor themselves concede.

Instead of rendering the concept of functional information meaningless, Bishop and O'Connor's observation (in essence) that humans make scientific judgments about what needs explanation only makes clear that the notion of functional information depends upon a wider context of inquiry and interest that human scientists necessarily help to define. Bishop and O'Connor themselves recognize this but regard it as problematic for my argument, asserting that the assumption that life requires special explanation begs the question in favor of the design hypothesis from the start. As they put it: "[C]an one assign a function, an intended role, to a natural phenomenon without first supposing that the broader context has a specific function? To speak of the function of particular phenomena is already to have provided an answer to this global question in favor of design."

A Case of Bias?

But is this really true? Does describing a biological system -- a polymerase or DNA molecule, a beak or a wing, a fin or a gill -- by reference to its function bias the discussion of biological origins in favor of intelligent design? Does presupposing a distinction between a functioning organism, on the one hand, and its non-functioning remains or an inanimate object, on the other, do the same? I doubt many evolutionary biologists, all of whom accept these same distinctions and functional descriptions that I do, would accept that judgment.

To describe the functional information in a living system, and to treat it as something in need of explanation, is not to say anything about how that system originated one way or another. There is no a priori or logically necessary reason that an explanation either involving, or precluding, agency must be true simply because the description of the thing to be explained includes functional language (or simply because it presupposes that life is a "distinguished outcome").

Since 1859, Darwinism and neo-Darwinism have attempted precisely to show that the appearance of design (apparent teleology) could be explained as the result of an undirected process that merely mimics the powers of a designing intelligence. Thus, it does not follow that even if some of the functional features of living organisms appear designed that they necessarily are designed -- as our Darwinian colleagues have long insisted.

Instead, it is at least logically possiblethat a materialistic evolutionary explanation, or some purely natural process, can account for the functional features of living organisms, including their functional digital information, without recourse to a designing intelligence. If not, what has evolutionary theory been about since 1859? Most evolutionary theorists are committed to the idea that some materialistic process with sufficient creative power to generate the complex functional features of livings systems does exist or will eventually be found.

Clearly, describing the cell as system rich in functional information, or assuming that life as a phenomenon warrants explanation and scientific interest, does not logically entail the conclusion of design. Instead, the conclusion of design arises from a thorough search for, and evaluation of, the causal powers of competing possible causes and processes and the a posteriori discovery based upon such an examination (which my books undertake) that only one such cause, namely, intelligent agency, has the demonstrated power to produce the key effect in question: functional digital information.

Since every evolutionary biologist believes that life represents a "distinguished outcome" in need of explanation, and that living organisms have functional features produced in part as the result of genetic information, it hardly seems question begging to make the same assumption in the process of arguing for a particular theory (intelligent design) as the best explanation of those features. All theoretical contenders must do the same. Moreover, since all known forms of life require genetic (and epigenetic) information as a condition of their existence, origin, and maintenance, leading evolutionary theorists have increasingly defined the problem facing evolutionary theory, just as I do, in functional and informational terms. As Bernd-Olaf Küppers, the distinguished origin-of-life theorist, has explained, "The problem of the origin of life is clearly basically equivalent to the problem of explaining the origin of biological information."

In a subsequent installment, I will turn to the "evolutionary creationist" approach that Bishop and O'Connor advocate in their review

References:

(1) Del Ratzsch, Nature, Design, and Science: The Status of Design in Natural Science (State University of New York Press, 2001), 90.


(2) Bernd-Olaf Küppers, Information and the Origin of Life (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), 170-172.

Whither the true faith?

A reproduction of ch.1 of Marley Cole's Book

Has Christianity Failed?

ON A SPRING DAY in 1956 the world was suffering

from a bad case of jitters. It was one of those times

when it seemed as if the news were all black. People in half

the world shook their heads over bleak headlines. The

American dollar nose-dived on the Paris stock exchange.

The peace of mind and the fortune of millions hung in

the balance. All this because

a lump of muscle the size of

your fist got fouled up inside one man’s chest. It made sense:

the muscle happened to be the heart of the President of the

United States.

This was the second time within nine months that the

President had gone to the hospital. Happily after

11 3 suspenseful

minutes of surgery the world could be assured.

This time it was not a heart attack. Just an intestinal

obstruction.

The President soon was able to grin ruefully,

“What a bellyache!”

Presidential elections were in the offing. The future

looked befogged. Would Mr. Eisenhower be able to run

for

a second term? His personal popularity was tremendous; it

cut across party lines.

If there was such a thing as the indispensable

man, a lot of people felt, Mr. Eisenhower was

it.

Aggravating the international picture, Egypt and Israel

were on the verge of a war that threatened to embroil the

world. Communist satellites Poland and Hungary growled

with revolt. In America, Catholic Action was lauding Cardinal

Mindzsenty as the symbol of the struggle for freedom in

Hungary. They hoped to see him head a new liberated

Hungarian government. Other Americans, while wishing

Hungary all the freedom in the world, looked upon

the

Cardinal

as the symbol of a thousand-year-old clerical totalita

rianism from which Communism had “liberated” Hungary

in 1949. Why, many asked, did either evil have to

exist? Why totalitarianism in any form-in the name

of

God, or in defiance of God?

It was a period when the ecclesiastical heavens were undergoing

a

soul searching and a shaking. An American

church worker returned from Europe to announce that in

West Germany only about five per cent of the people were

going to church.

A conclave of East and West German

Protestants was preparing to meet. Soon the world would

overhear one churchman telling the conclave that Communism

was the child, not of Pagandom, but

of Christendom.

The masses were following Karl Marx in “throwing

off enslavement” from age-old Christendom’s false, fraudulent

religion of exploitation. (Her doctrine of the “divine

right

of kings” now discredited, what was Christendom to

do

with her vestigial teaching that God ordains worldly governments-

did Germans have God to thank for the fantastic

Has

Christianity Failed?

13

twice in this generation?).

If this were not enough, a smalltown

pastor would bring

up the question whether Christians

should submit to or resist Communist judicial injustice.

Evangelical official Dr. Guenther Jacob replied that,

according to diehard church doctrine, civil authority-

Communist included-“is established to carry out God’s

will,” and that there was nothing to do but submit.

World Communism,

as usual, lay at the root of everyone’s

headaches. Twenty years earlier it had been Nazism. Former

United States President Herbert Hoover was still contending

that America should have stayed out of World War

I1

and let Hitler and Stalin knock each other out.

As it was, he

maintained, the world could thank America for rescuing

World Communism. The 175 million people living under

Communist rule at the end of World War

I1 had more than

quadrupled to 800 million during the next ten years. One

out of every three persons, one out of every five acres of land,

had been claimed by Communism. From 1945 to 1955 Communism

gained domination over half

a billion people-as

many people as Christendom claimed after almost two thousand

years. What was this frightful plague welling within

the bosom of Christendom? Americans were spending

35

billion dollars a year for defense against-exactly what?

People ran to their churches frantically, demanding a faith

to live by, a faith strong enough to repel the Red Religion

engulfing Christendom and the world.

Where was the needed faith? Was

it Orthodox Catholicism?

If

so, why had Communism sprung into power in

Russia, the heart of Orthodoxy? Why had the Orthodox

Church become the servile lackey

of Communism?

Was the needed invincible faith Roman Catholicism?

If

so, why had Communism succeeded in carving out a satellite
governments that had ruined her and the rest of the world

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A NEW WORLD TO COME

empire from the predominantly Roman Catholic countries

of Europe? Worse still, why had Communism found its second

happiest hunting ground in Italy, the heart of Catholicism’s

domain?

If an Italian Pope and an Italian hierarchy

could not wield the Church’s most formidable weapon, excommunication,

to keep one out of three Italian Catholics

from voting Communist, what power could they wield

against worldwide Communism? Take from Communism

her Orthodox and Roman Catholic heartland and what

would she have left?

So people wondered.

If not openly, still they wondered.

Many wondered if the faith to conquer all things was to be

found in Protestantism.

If so, which among the hundreds of

Protestant schismatic sects was the right one? People who

scratched a little beneath the surface had been dismayed

ever since 1949 when American Methodist emissary Dr. Garland

E. Hopkins reported on his tour of Communist satellites

Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Austria,

and East Germany. “The fact

so frequently overlooked in

Western countries is that Roman Catholic, Orthodox, Lutheran,

and Reformed churches as well as Jewish synagogues

are each still supported by the state in one or more of the

Communist countries,” reported Dr. Hopkins, uneasily.

“There is no real separation of church and state in most

of

the European countries. Rather, the churches have been, or

are in process of being, integrated into the program of the

state.” Church people in America, to whom the news struck

home, looked at each other in horror. “What is

our church

doing in the

pay of Communism?” they demanded. Joseph

C. Harsch in

The Christian Science Monitor intimated that

the European churches thought more of their belly than

they did of their God. “None of the big church institutions

Has

Christianity Failed?

15

could maintain itself in the style to which it has been accustomed

if it had to depend on private contributions. The big

churches do not support themselves. Their cathedrals are

maintained by the state. In varying degrees and by varying

sys tems their schools, hospitals, and educational systems are

all state subsidized.” Did it not amount to spiritual prostitution

with God’s avowed enemy, Communism?

“Of

course,” Mr. Harsch added, “it does mean ultimate compromise,

for no state ever subsidizes an unfriendly organization

indefinitely.” In short, Communism would use the

churches, any churches, as long as they gratified its purposes;

but at any time their usefulness was over, Communism

would cast them off like worn-out harlots. Americans who

saw the significance of it asked each other: “If the European

example is anything to go by, how can we expect our

churches to provide us with the faith we need to combat

Communism?”

Good news? By the middle of June, 1956, Americans were

trying to cheer themselves with the National Council

of

Churches’ announcement that finally one hundred million

Americans were church members. In Colonial days (that

produced Washingtons, Jeff ersons, and the men who formulated

the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution

of the United States) only five per cent of the population belonged

to churches. In 1890 the percentage was

22.5; in 1944

it

was 52.5, and now it has become a big, fat 60 per cent.

But while the news was still warm in their mouths it

curdled sourly when the killjoys pointed out that the more

people went to church, the higher the crime rate mountedevery

time church membership rose eight per cent, crime

rose 62 per cent. Prisons reported that the percentage of

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criminal inmates who professed some religion was higher

than the percentage of people outside who professed some

religion.

In a series on “youth crimes,” the New York Times

came out with the shocking news that while on week days

youth-gang members woke up about noon, on Sundays

it

was different. “They rise much earlier than usual on Sundays,

for the 10 a.m. mass.”

F.B.I. Director

J. Edgar Hoover warned that the United

States was invaded internally by an army of five million

criminals. Crime was costing 400 times as much as education.

As far back as

1954, said Director of Federal Prisons

James

C. Bennett, federal penitentiaries were crowded 25

per cent beyond normal capacity. In the face

of all this,

Scripps-Howard newspaper columnist

Mrs. Walter Ferguson

threw

up her hands.

“I

am in a state of confusion,” she sighed. “First off,

I

read that the greatest religious revival ever seen is

now on in the

U.S. Religion is becoming a part of everyday

life, they say, and is no longer a cloistered mystery.

“We believe it when we look at all the new churches

being built. The air is clamorous with the voices of

evangelists exhorting the world to turn from its evil

ways and be saved. Newspapers carry many columns

written by ministers and priests.

Few things these days

are more popular than the opinions of those who deal

with religious subjects. The country has turned to serious

thoughts. And what is more serious than the soul’s

welfare?

“Just

as I fall into this placid ‘All’s-well-with-theworld’

mood, here comes

J. Edgar Hoover saying our

crime rate is a national disgrace. And this isn’t the

Has

Christianity Failed?

17

American people, are not concerned with these facts.

They fail to stir us. We seem to have lost our desire to

battle with crime. Why bother when your car and

TV

set are working all right? The confusing thing is that

in

the same year, in the same country, church interest and

crime statistics should both be at an all-time high.

“When religion has truly become

a part of everyday

life, we can expect its influence to wipe out our ‘national

disgrace.’

”

An army of Jehovah’s Witnesses, as well as swarms of small

fundamentalist sects, were warning that the moral breakdown

was positive indication that the world had reached its

foretold “last days.” “But know this,” quoted the Witnesses

on millions of doorsteps, “that in the last days critical

times hard to deal with will be here. For men will be lovers

. . . of money, self-assuming, haughty, blasphemers, disobedient

to parents, without gratitude, with no loving-kindness,

having no natural affection,

not open to any agreement,

slanderers, without self-control, fierce, without love

of goodness, betrayers, headstrong, puffed up with selfesteem,

lovers of pleasures rather than lovers of God, having

a form of godly devotion but proving false to its power

. . .

always learning and yet never able to come to an accurate

knowledge of truth”

(2 Timothy 3: 1-7 NW).

Staid old cults and denominations cupped a hand over

their brow and peered at a murky tomorrow but could discern

no Bible Armageddon impending. In our day to take

the Bible too literally is unsophisticated. Church is

a place

where people come to be lulled, not alarmed. Nevertheless

it was high time the “established” creeds rediscovered

a

“Bible theology” and acknowledged that what they were

founded upon was not “early Christian church teachingworst. The most terrifying implication is that we, the

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OF A NEW WORLD TO COME

but “ecclesiastical traditions,” warned Episcopalian theologian

Walter C. Klein. “If we reject ecclesiastical tradition

we shall have to fall back upon learning, intelligence, intuition,

conscience and the like.”

Baptist John

S. Wimbish reasoned that the Communist

Manifesto was proving a more powerful doctrine in the lives

of men than the Bible because the church had coiled itself

about the Bible and died there, submerging its meaning out

of sight. “The church has become so precise

it is prissy; so

nice it is nauseating. If we are to snatch the banner from the

hands of the Communists, we must be willing to soil our

hands with noble toil. This

is an excellent time to shake the

dust of lethargy from our feet and emulate Jesus by manifesting

a genuine interest in our fellow man.” But how was

the church to shed its “dead orthodoxy”? About all that Dr.

Wimbish could say on that was that “Methodism needs

another John Wesley; Congregationalism needs another

Dwight Moody; Presbyterianism needs another John Knox,

and we Baptists need another Roger Williams!”

When

it came to extricating the churches from their dilemma

over the Negro, an even greater prophet was needed.

During the Civil War, American Protestantism split right

down the Mason and Dixon line. Southerners had called

God down on their side in support of the myth of the black

curse-the fable that God consigned black people to a position

of subhumanity and perpetual slavery, never

fit to belong

in the same lily-white society with Caucasians. In 1956,

after the Supreme Court outlawed segregation, the race

problem became the most explosive domestic issue in the

land. Historically the churches had followed their political

sides into splitting. Now they must follow the judicial order

to integrate-for conscience’s sake at least. It was humiliat

ing. Many churches were found to be following old unworkable

systems. “It is with deep humility that we face the

situation existing today and confess that as Christian leaders

we have not done what we should have in preparing our

people for this hour,” Presbyterian moderator Dr. L. Mc-

Dowel1 Richards lamented. Southern Protestantism, he declared,

was up against its “most difficult” crisis since the

“dark days” of the Civil War.

This was only local, national gloom. The world gloom

was darker. The tragedy of the world was that “worldwide

Christianity has failed to win the working classes,” as a

Methodist leader moaned. “There is no more serious development

in worldwide Christianity than its failure to win

the working-class masses,” said Dr. Alan Walker.

But was it Christianity that had failed? Or was

it the failure

of its

custodians? Had the clergy failed to preserve it

and instill its principles and hopes in the breasts of the.

derelict masses? Who was to blame?

Some clergymen blamed the people. By the middle of

June,

1956, people were still rushing to book counters to

buy

T h e Power of Positive Thinking. They devoured paragraphs

and pages seeking some “peace-of-mind” formula

that would really work. The clergy scolded them for trying

to use God as “one of a number of resources to enable us to

get what we want and enjoy life as we would.” Some people,

declared Episcopalian Dean James

A. Pike, were trying to

use God

“to help them sleep better, to calm their anxieties,

and

to make them more attractive and successful.” National

Council of Churches president Dr. Eugene C. Blake said it

was becoming fashionable to “make an instrument of God”

by using religion for selfish ends such as job security, health,

and peace of mind. “Everybody seems to be interested in 

religion. But many people with new religious interest are

attempting to turn that interest into magic-to use God for

their own purposes rather than

to serve God and find His

purposes.”

We have

a world full of atrophied morals and hungerbitten

religion, declared Lutheran Glen

A. Pierson, because

the rank-and-file believers do not hold their faith seriously

enough to preach it, much less to live it seven days a week.

“Our conception of the priesthood

is that every man is a

priest with the privilege of direct access to God. That also

means he has the responsibility to propagate the faith. But

we Protestants today are prone to say

‘Get a preacher. Let

him do the work.’

’’

If

Protestants were falling down on the job, Catholics

were even more sluggish. People were still talking about the

Catholic Digest

survey that showed that 59 per cent of all

Protestants tried to win converts, and

43 per cent were succeeding.

But only

28 out of 100 Catholics tried, and only 17

succeeded.