Saving Darwin?

Behe on Darwinism’s Rescue Helicopters
David Klinghoffer | @d_klinghoffer

Darwinian evolution is a 19th-century scientific theory of biological origins, from before genetics, before advanced microscopy, a time when the scientific understanding of the basis of life was foggy at best. It sounds improbable that such a theory would survive unamended into the 21st century. In fact, some Darwinists insist that Darwinism has been superseded, even killed off, by alternatives — just not anything suggestive of intelligent design. More sensibly, such “adds-ons” are understood as efforts to rescue the original theory.

On a new episode of ID the Future, biochemist Michael Behe talks with host Andrew McDiarmid about these alternatives — the rescue helicopters of the world of evolutionary biology — that seek to save the creaky relic of unguided evolution. Download the podcast or listen to it here.

Who’s Rescuing Whom?

Some favorite rescuers include, perhaps most prominently, neutral theory, along with evolutionary developmental biology, natural genetic engineering, game theory, and the multiverse. About rescue animals and their owners, you often hear that it’s hard to say who is rescuing whom. Would anyone be talking about the completely evidence-free multiverse if it weren’t for the need to save materialist theories from their own inadequacies? The big problem, though, with all of these add-ons is that none begins to explain how complex innovations in life arise. But that is what we really mean when we talk about “evolution.”

The conversation is based on Part 2 of Behe’s new book Darwin Devolves: The New Science about DNA That Challenges Evolution. The book has been the subject of intense scientific debate, most recently in the form of an exchange with colleagues Greg Lang and Amber Rice in Dr. Behe’s own department at Lehigh University. Behe responds to them here, here, and here. Without giving anything away, I can tell you that in the discussion sparked by Darwin Devolves, there is much more to come!

Where adults are still in charge?

Past Years of Hype Notwithstanding, Adult Stem Cells Are Now the “Gold Standard”
Wesley J. Smith

During the Great Embryonic Stem Cell Debate, circa 2001-2008, I watched “the scientists” blatantly lie about the supposedly low potential for adult stem cells and the CURES! CURES! CURES that were just around the corner from embryonic stem cells. You remember: Children would soon be out of their wheelchairs and Uncle Ernie’s Parkinson’s would soon be a disease of the past.

The pro-ESCR campaign was filled with so much disinformation and hype — willingly swallowed by an in-the-tank media — all in a corrupt attempt to overturn the minor federal funding restrictions over ESCR imposed by the President, and to hurt President Bush politically.

After the Bush presidency, the issue became quiescent. And now, it turns out that the clinical advances that have been made are not from embryonic stem cells.

Punished by University Administrators

During the debate, David A. Prentice — a stem-cell researcher and my good friend — took a sabbatical from his Indiana State University professorship to tout the great potential of adult stem cells (and to oppose human cloning) around the world. He became quite prominent in the debate — for which he was punished by his university’s administration. For example, despite receiving teaching awards, he was moved from graduate classes and his lab privileges were curtailed.

Prentice eventually headed for The Swamp to continue his advocacy. He is now with the Charlotte Lozier Institute, where he has continued to track and educate about stem-cell science and engage policy controversies.

Prentice just published a major peer-reviewed article in the science journal Circulation Research, in which he details the amazing successes of adult stem-cell research — demonstrating that the ESCR hypers had it wrong and he had it right.

The Hypers Had It Wrong

Prentice outlines the many problems that make embryonic stem cells “ill suited for clinical use,” including the difficulty of  “differentiating and integrating” ES cells into the body, the problem that these cells “have shown evidence of causing arrhythmia,” the potential to cause tumors, and “immunogenicity,” in real people’s language, rejection caused by triggering the body’s immune response.

In contrast, ethical stem cells have had excellent successes. For example, “induced pluripotent stem cells,” which can be made from normal skin cells, are splendid for use in cell modeling and drug testing.

Hopeful Results from Ethical Stem Cells

But Prentice’s primary focus is on adult stem cells, often taken from donor bone marrow or a patient’s own body. They have also not advanced as fast as was hoped, but they are progressing into clinical uses and human studies. From, “Adult Stem Cells”:

Not only do adult stem cells carry no ethical baggage regarding their isolation, their practical advantages over pluripotent stem cells have led to many current clinical trials, as well as some therapies approved through all phases of Food and Drug Administration testing.

Peer-reviewed, published successful results abound, with numerous papers now documenting therapeutic benefit in clinical trials and progress toward fully tested and approved treatments. Phase I/II trials suggest potential cardiovascular benefit from bone marrow–derived adult stem cells and umbilical cord blood–derived cells.

Striking results have been reported using adult stem cells to treat neurological conditions, including chronic stroke. Positive long-term progression-free outcomes have been seen, including some remission, for multiple sclerosis, as well as benefits in early trials for patients with type I diabetes mellitus and spinal cord injury. And adult stem cells are starting to be used as vehicles for genetic therapies, such as for epidermolysis bullosa.

If this progress had been derived from embryonic stem cells, the headlines would have been deafening. The cheering from the media would include anchors dancing with pom-poms!

Favored Ideological Agendas

But the media isn’t much interested in reporting adult stem-cell successes prominently because doing so doesn’t promote favored ideological agendas. That’s not good journalism.

Prentice concludes:

The superiority of adult stem cells in the clinic and the mounting evidence supporting their effectiveness in regeneration and repair make adult stem cells the gold standard of stem cells for patients.

That’s excellent news for everyone, and may it continue.

But as we benefit from these ethical treatments, the next time ideologically driven scientists, bioethicists, and their media water carriers seek to drive public opinion on scientific issues in a partisan direction by deploying the propaganda tools of hype, exaggeration, and castigation of those who espouse heterodox views, remember how the Great Stem Cell Debate turned out.

Nature's tiny titans v. Darwin.

Small Wonders: Scientists Reveal the Secrets of Amazing Little Insects and Crustaceans
Evolution News | @DiscoveryCSC

In biology, the most amazing designs are often found in small things. In fact, it often seems that the closer you need to look, the greater the wonder. It’s as if someone set it there to hide, waiting for us. Here are some little guys worth knowing about, from among the insects and the crustaceans.

Froghoppers

“Froghopper insects can perform explosive jumps with some of the highest accelerations known among animals,” say three scientists in PNAS. The little hemipterans can withstand 400 g’s as they accelerate at 4,000 meters/second squared. They belong in a different suborder and family from the planthoppers that Evolution News wrote about in 2013, whose nymphs have gears on their legs to store elastic energy for their leaps. 

Anything with “hopper” in its name is a good place to look for design. These scientists wanted to know how froghoppers take off from smooth plant surfaces. How do they get a grip on the slippery surface? The researchers discovered a previously unreported mechanism. It got them thinking about potential applications for engineering.

Attachment mechanisms of climbing animals provide inspiration for biomimetics, but many natural adaptations are still unexplored. Animals are known to grip by interlocking claws with rough surfaces, or engaging adhesive pads on smooth substrates. Here we report that insects can use a third, fundamentally different attachment mechanism on plant surfaces. When accelerating for jumps, froghoppers produce traction by piercing plant surfaces with sharp metal-enriched spines on their hind legs, deforming the cuticle plastically and leaving behind microscopic holes, like a biological nanoindenter. This mechanism depends on the substrate’s hardness, and requires special adaptations of the cuticle at the spine tips. Piercing may represent a widespread attachment strategy among plant-living insects, promising inspiration for novel robotic grippers and climbers. 

The researchers wanted to know why froghoppers use a different mechanism than leafhoppers, which are members of a different family of hemipterans. Leafhoppers use soft pads, but they have shorter legs, which might make piercing leaf surfaces more difficult. Froghopper spines, enriched with zinc in the cuticle to make them strong, are very effective at piercing without deforming the leaf. Yet they are also finely tuned not to pierce too deep, which would inhibit rapid removal from the surface during takeoff.  This track has potential payoffs in the grocery store:

Generally, gripping smooth and plastic materials is an engineering challenge with many potential applications. Needle grippers have been used for handling soft foodstuff such as meat and cakes, but could also be adapted for handling of plastic and cardboard packaging. Studying the detailed biomechanics of penetration-based grip in natural systems and the relevant adaptations in plants and insects may provide information for the design of new biomimetic grippers.

Click Beetles

Another remarkable insect is the click beetle, able to quickly right itself without using its limbs if it falls upside down. In a class project at the University of Illinois College of Engineering , students went into the woods to collect four species of click beetles and study this unusual mechanism, thinking the trick might help robot designers create self-righting robots. Watch the video clip of their class project (but turn off the mismatched epic music; just watch the text). One student is clearly fascinated watching the bug flip high into the air and back down onto its feet. How does it work?

The beetles have a unique hinge-like mechanism between their heads and abdomens that makes a clicking sound when initiated and allows them to flip into the air and back onto their feet when they are knocked over, Alleyne said.

The students made a robotic prototype based on the hinge-snapping design. It won second place at “the international BIOMinnovate Challenge, in Paris, France — a research expo that showcases biologically-inspired design in engineering, medicine and architecture.” 

Termites

Another paper in  PNAS about the “Morphogenesis of termite mounds” finds inspiration for architectural design. Termites exhibit impressive social organization, acting almost like a distributed organism. There’s an uncanny feedback between animal and environment

Termite mounds are the result of the collective behavior of termites working to modify their physical environment, which in turn affects their behavior. During mound construction, environmental factors such as heat flow and gas exchange affect the building behavior of termites, and the resulting change in mound geometry in turn modifies the response of the internal mound environment to external thermal oscillations. Our study highlights the principles of self-organized animal architecture driven by the coupling of environmental physics to organismal behavior and might serve as a natural inspiration for the design of sustainable human architectures.

The mounds of different species “display varied yet distinctive morphologies that range widely in size and shape,” possibly due to adaptation to different environments. All of them, however, excel in the ability to “regulate mound temperature, humidity, and gas concentrations” — and they do it using natural resources, without electric thermostats or sensors. 

So-called “compass termites” always orient their mounds north/south, indicating a magnetic sense as found in salmon, sea turtles, and other very different animals. “Termite mounds are one of the most remarkable examples of self-organized animal architectures,” the authors say, “and the range of shapes and sizes that they exhibit have excited the imagination of scientists for a long time.”

Krill

These tiny crustaceans control the world, in a way. Found in all the world’s oceans, they migrate upward at night to feed, and downward in the daytime. A video by the National Science Foundation, posted by Phys.org, shows how vast numbers of krill add up to a mighty force to mix up ocean water, perhaps as significant as winds and tides. 

Stanford researcher John Dabiri and team studied them in the lab. Because krill are phototactic (moving toward light), the team could control the direction of their motions, and measure the forces they produce in a water column. The individual swimmers generate eddies that are much larger than their body sizes, and those currents add up. They concluded that millions “or trillions” of these tiny organisms, swimming together, “are playing a significant role in ocean mixing, that should impact future calculations about ocean circulation and the global climate.” 

ID proponents might look into this, and consider whether a watery exoplanet would be less habitable without this living stirring machine.

Ostracods

You could call them “sea fireflies.” Scientists at UC Santa Barbara, wanting to understand the “dazzling light displays” of ostracods, found two mechanisms at work.

Ostracods are peculiar animals. No larger than a sesame seed, these crustaceans have a clam-like shell and often lack gills. Like many sea creatures, a number of ostracods take advantage of bioluminescence to avoid predation and to attract mates….

To create their entrancing light displays, cypridinid ostracods expel a bit of mucus injected with an enzyme and a reactant, and then swim away from the glowing orb to repeat the act again. The result is a trail of fading ellipses, or will-o’-the-wisps hanging in the water column. And the length of each of these pulses is a major component of the courtship display. Some are quick like an old-fashioned flashbulb, said Hensley, while others linger in the water.

Reporter Harrison Tasoff remarks, “Evolution is a rich and dynamic process.” Yes, indeed. Since Darwin Devolves, as Michael Behe shows in his new book with that title, the ancestors of these animals must have been even better designed!

Conclusions

These are just a few among hundreds of examples of biological designs that are inspiring research at labs and universities. Complex, efficient design is found throughout the biosphere, from the tallest mammals and largest whales down to these miniature insects and crustaceans, and all the way down to the molecules in cellular nanomachines. Biomimetics is a cross-disciplinary windfall of an opportunity for mammalogists, marine biologists, botanists, entomologists, ornithologists, cell biologists, and engineers, to name a few.

As usual, evolutionary speculation in these reports varied inversely with detailed analysis into the mechanisms behind these little animals’ capabilities. Biomimetic research is also attracting funding and winning awards. So is design thinking good for science? It seems so.

Flat tires notwithstanding, OOL science's clown car rolls on?

Error Catastrophe: Manfred Eigen’s Show-Stopper Is Still Stopping the Origin-of-Life Show
Evolution News | @DiscoveryCSC

NASA recently put out another over-hyped announcement that makes it sound like they have actually solved the riddle of life’s origin by unguided natural processes. Actually, Manfred Eigen (1927-2019) pointed out a hurdle that shouts, like Gandalf, “You shall not pass!”

A leading physical chemist and Nobel laureate, Manfred Eigen died last month. He often had evolution on his mind. An obituary in  Nature honored him as “a creator of the new field of evolutionary biotechnology.”

From the early 1980s, he developed these concepts into evolutionary biotechnology at the MPI. His colleagues built ‘evolution reactors’ that drove the evolution of viruses and other replicating molecules under controlled conditions to investigate how pathogens evade the immune system, or to search for new drugs. Eigen helped to found two companies to exploit this technology.

What Molecules Wish For

Controlled conditions, needless to say, were not available to molecules on the early Earth before life. Molecules are incapable of wishing to evolve into living organisms, and nothing will “drive” their chemical evolution toward that lofty goal. It appears that Eigen was a staunch believer in chemical evolution anyway, having written popular books about how it might have happened. The summary of his book Steps Toward Life (1992) on Amazon says:

This fascinating work, co-authored by a Nobel Prize winning scientist, extends Darwin’s ideas on natural selection back into evolutionary time and applies them to the molecular “fossil record” that preceded the origin of life. Using the techniques of molecular biology, the book demonstrates that life on Earth is the inevitable result of certain chance events that took place in the unique history of our planet. Furthermore, researchers can not only precisely formulate the laws governing the emergence of life, but also test them under controlled laboratory conditions. In fact, the authors show how it is perfectly possible to construct evolutionary accelerators that optimize the conditions for certain events and which can be used to demonstrate their theoretical conclusions in laboratory experiments.

The Problem of “Error Catastrophe”

We are nearing a half-century since Eigen wrote about that paradox, and it “still challenges theoretical biologists.” Often called the problem of “error catastrophe,” it’s the show-stopper that stops the Evolution Show before it starts. Stated succinctly above, molecules cannot gain enough information by chance until accurate replication starts. The reason is that errors inevitably creep in, destroying whatever genetic information an emerging replicator stores. You can grant a chemical evolutionist all the RNA molecules he or she wants, but error catastrophe will stop the show. Darwin’s house of cards collapses before it’s built

Natural selection is no help, because natural selection presupposes accurate replication. Before you have error-correcting enzymes, there is no natural selection. It’s all chance. Illustra Media’s film Origin, co-narrated by Discovery Institute biologist Ann Gauger, shows what chance is like.Eigen was certainly aware of the “paradox” but concocted theoretical schemes, like “hypercycles,” to dodge it. He claimed that feedback loops between interacting RNA molecules might accelerate the production of information by chance. Meyer holds his feet to the fire of his own paradox, though, showing that without “an error-free mechanism of self-replication,” all such models are doomed. “As a result, his proposed mechanism would succumb to various ‘error catastrophes’ that would diminish, rather than increase, the specified information content of the system over time.” 

Stephen Meyer discussed this problem on pages 279-280 of Signature in the Cell (2009). Eigen was certainly aware of the “paradox” but concocted theoretical schemes, like “hypercycles,” to dodge it. He claimed that feedback loops between interacting RNA molecules might accelerate the production of information by chance. Meyer holds his feet to the fire of his own paradox, though, showing that without “an error-free mechanism of self-replication,” all such models are doomed. “As a result, his proposed mechanism would succumb to various ‘error catastrophes’ that would diminish, rather than increase, the specified information content of the system over time.” 

Meyer Wasn’t the First

Meyer was not the first to point this out. He shows that notable scientists like Freeman Dyson, John Maynard Smith, and Robert Shapiro have also criticized Eigen’s model, pointing out that his theoretical cycles “are more likely to lose or degrade information over time” (p. 280). William Dembski also dealt with this paradox at length in No Free Lunch (2002), as had A.E. Wilder-Smith in The Natural Sciences Know Nothing of Evolution (1981, ten years after Eigen proposed the paradox). Now Eigen has passed on, never seeing a resolution to the show-stopping chasm he found. His “paradox still challenges theoretical biologists,” Nature admitted after his death. (Note: Leslie Orgel, Stanley Miller’s colleague, had also thought about the problem; sometimes it is called “Orgel’s Paradox.”)

You wouldn’t know this by reading the effervescent announcements bubbling over in NASA press releases and popular media. Reporters leap over the Error Catastrophe Chasm with flights of fancy, like magicians in

The Origin of Life Circus (Susan Mazur’s book title). How do they leap over it? Well, actually, they don’t. They ignore it. They imagine ways across, because “After all, we’re here, aren’t we?” Somehow, life must have found a way. Case in point is NASA/JPL’s press release, “NASA Study Reproduces Origins of Life on Ocean Floor.” A casual reader might think, “It’s not only possible; it’s been done in the lab!” Not only that, “It must be happening all over the universe!”

Scientists have reproduced in the lab how the ingredients for life could have formed deep in the ocean 4 billion years ago. The results of the new study offer clues to how life started on Earth and where else in the cosmos we might find it.

Cooking Up “Green Rust”

Basically, they created an artificial hydrothermal vent, and cooked up “green rust” that contained some alanine and lactate. That’s it. Alanine is one of the simplest of the amino acids. But researcher Laura Barge boasted, “We’ve shown that in geological conditions similar to early Earth, and maybe to other planets, we can form amino acids and alpha hydroxy acids from a simple reaction under mild conditions that would have existed on the seafloor.” The show resembles Stanley Miller’s spark-discharge play. Maybe even red-rusty Mars has some green rust!

Readers will look in vain for the important concepts that collapse all their hopes: complex specified information, accurate replication, and error catastrophe. Nor will they find these concepts in the PNAS paper on which the hype is based: “Redox and pH gradients drive amino acid synthesis in iron oxyhydroxide mineral systems.” Lead author Laura Barge is a follower of Michael Russell, one of the leading proponents of chemical evolution in hydrothermal vents. He doesn’t talk about error correction, either. But does ignoring the problem make it go away? Only in one’s imagination.

Barge, Russell and the other chemical-evolution magicians who fly over the chasm of error catastrophe get rewarded by funds from NASA’s Astrobiology Institute. Affirming the impossible is a ticket to stardom at JPL. Michael Russell occasionally speaks to the employees at the famous NASA lab, making life look easy. All you need is energy flow, he says, and life happens. But if promoting the show is a ticket to stardom, critiquing the show is a ticket to expulsion. Anyone pointing out the show-stopper is likely to get frowned on. And anyone arguing that complex specified information and error correction provide evidence of intelligent design is at risk of a career-ending move, as indicated by the fate of David Coppedge. 

The show must go on! And it does — in the Theater of the Imagination.

To save the planet:Who you gonna call?

Darwinsplainin'? II

Insect Evolution: Another Illustration of How Darwinism “Explains Away”
David Klinghoffer | @d_klinghoffer

As Evolution News put it concisely the other day, “Where Design Explains, Darwinism Explains Away.” An illustration from paleontologist Günter Bechly: the evolution of insects, which he describes in a fascinating new ID the Future episode with host Andrew McDiarmid.

Download the podcast or listen to it here.

Dr. Bechly notes three contradictions at odds with Darwinian gradualism: Insects pop into existence at one blow, as do insect wings, as does the phenomenon of metamorphosis. None of these is led up to by the expected gradual evolutionary process. As with the Cambrian explosion, Darwinians have theories to explain away the problems.

Meanwhile the completeness of the fossil record grows more evident, and so the reliance on theories and excuses grows with it. But only a design inference explains such abrupt transitions. That’s how new ideas, in our own daily experience, get instantiated in physical reality — abruptly.

Iconoclast v. gatekeeper?

Bullet Points for Jerry Coyne
Michael Behe

As noted here earlier, University of Chicago evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne reviewed Darwin Devolves for this past Sunday’s  Washington Post.  As you might expect, it’s written in the venerable style of Richard Dawkins’s review of The Edge of Evolution for the New York Times back in 2007: long on sneering, smearing, and assertion; short to nonexistent on telling readers what the book’s actual arguments are. Alas, Coyne’s piece has too little intellectual content to sustain any real engagement. So I’ll simply proceed from its beginning to its end, with lines from his review in bullet points and italics. My comments follow directly after each. 

“intelligent design” arose after opponents of evolution repeatedly failed on First Amendment grounds to get Bible-based creationism taught in the public schools. … : intelligent design, which scientists have dubbed “creationism in a cheap tuxedo.”

Good idea — let’s link the author to a scorned group right at the start and smear his motives.

Milk that Epithet

Behe does not rely on the Bible as a science textbook. Rather, he admits that evolution occurs by natural selection sifting new mutations and that all species are related via common ancestors.

But we’ll call him a “creationist” anyway, to milk that epithet for all it’s worth.

Scientists … pointed out numerous scenarios in which a system fitting Behe’s definition of “irreducible complexity” could evolve in a step-by-step manner (one is the hormone pathway studied by my Chicago colleague Joe Thornton).

I showed in the Appendix that no evidence beyond handwaving has been published since Darwin’s Black Box. Again, not even a mention by Coyne that I dispute his claim.

Jerry Coyne, Theologian

these systems … embody an absurd, Rube Goldberg-like complexity that makes no sense as the handiwork of an engineer but makes perfect sense as a product of a long and unguided historical process.

Wow, the great theologian Jerry Coyne has determined that God wouldn’t have done it that way — no need for actual evidence that Darwin’s mechanism can do the job. We all anxiously await the unveiling of Coyne’s superior designs for a clotting cascade and a flagellum.

Behe’s rationale for designed mutations is circular. He claims that biochemical pathways are designed rather than evolved because they’re based on the “purposeful arrangement of parts.” But which arrangements are those designed with a purpose? They’re simply the pathways that Behe sees as too complex to have evolved.

    So Coyne can’t think of a purpose for an eye? Or for the leg gears of the planthopper? Or for the supercharged flagellum of the magnetotatic bacterium MO-1? That’s funny — the authors of the science papers on those systems that I cite in the book seem to have had no trouble identifying their purpose.

Perhaps Behe’s most ludicrous claim is this: Evolution within the lowest levels of biological classification — genera and species — might be purely Darwinian, but the origin of higher level groups — families, orders and so on — requires designed mutations. Yet as every biologist knows, groupings above the level of species are purely subjective.

                 Can Coyne tell the difference between a plant and an animal? Between a bird and a fish? A cat and a dog? Sure, as I discuss in the book, a classification system is a human invention and so it inevitably has uncertainties, ambiguities, and mistakes. But implying that biological classification reflects nothing real is disingenuous at best.

                     Behe selectively gives a handful of examples in which mutations have produced broken genes that are nevertheless useful, but he simply ignores the large number of adaptive mutations that do not inactivate genes. These include duplications, in which a gene is accidentally copied twice, with the copies diverging in useful ways (this is how primates acquired our three-color vision, as well as different forms of hemoglobin).

                          

I wrote a section in Chapter 8 titled “Evolution by Gene Duplication Revisited” in which I explain why duplication and diversification by Darwinian processes may account for some things but not for others. I specifically explain why I changed my mind about sophisticated hemoglobin, which would require much more modification starting from a simple myoglobin-like gene than would mere duplication of opsin (color-vision) genes. Coyne doesn’t even let readers know I discuss it.

Separating What from How

Behe also argues that evolution is self-limiting because natural selection “adjust[s] a biological system to its current function” and thus “works to block the system from taking up a significantly different function.” But … Think of how feathers, which probably evolved to conserve body heat in dinosaurs, opened up the possibility of flight — leading to all the diverse birds on Earth.

              It never ceases to amaze me that Darwinists like Coyne are unable to separate the question of what happened from the question of how it happened. Okay, flightless dinosaurs had feathers and birds can now fly. So what exactly is the evidence that it happened by a Darwinian process? What is the evidence that a Darwinian process could even, say, differentiate owls and crows from a common ancestor? I argue at length in the book that unintelligent processes aren’t remotely up to those tasks. Without any substantive counter-argument, Coyne simply responds like a kid on a playground: “Yes they can too do that!”

A Terrible Thing to Waste

Like his creationist kin, Behe devotes his time not to giving evidence for intelligent design but to attacking evolutionary biology.

Gee, Coyne must have missed Chapter 10 in Darwin Devolves, “A Terrible Thing to Waste,” as well as Chapters 8 and 9 in Darwin’s Black Box (“Intelligent Design” and “Questions About Design”) and Chapter 11 in The Edge of Evolution (“All the World’s a Stage”). I explain at length in those chapters and elsewhere that the work of a mind — design — is evinced precisely by the purposeful arrangement of parts, such as is found in abundance in life. For pretty much the entirety of recorded history until Darwin almost everyone thought life was designed exactly for that reason — the arrangement of parts for a purpose — as I discuss in the Preface to the book. Contrary to Coyne, it is Darwin’s audacious assertion — that complex interactive functional structures could be produced by random variation and natural selection — that has gone unsupported by pertinent evidence. Coyne’s unwillingness or inability to grasp the argument for design does not mean the argument hasn’t been made.

Since humans are placed in the same family as other great apes (Hominidae), Behe’s theory predicts that we arose without a designer’s intervention. But here he backpedals, asserting that there are “excellent reasons to suspect those differences [between humans and other apes] are well beyond Darwinian processes.” Sadly, he doesn’t give these reasons, but I’d guess they stem from the Christian belief that Homo sapiens is a special creation of God.

Actually, they stem from our personal awareness that we can reason, speak, think abstractly, and so on — in other words, that we have minds — which arguably is the most profound attribute in the world. By the way, I also wrote in the book that there are good reasons to doubt that giraffes could arise from a shorter-necked relative like the okapi, even though they are in the same biological family. For some reason Coyne doesn’t ascribe my skepticism there to Christian belief.

A Horrible Threat

In 1998, the Discovery Institute drafted the “Wedge Document,” a secret plan (leaked in 1999) to spread Christianity in America by teaching intelligent design and fighting materialism. … Well, now it’s 20 years on, and despite the efforts of Behe and other neo-creationists, intelligent design has been discredited as science and outed as disguised religion.

Yes, the horrible threat of a group trying to persuade people of its ideas by writing books and articles has so far been countered by brave folks like Jerry Coyne, who use the kind of overwhelming evidence and impeccable logic showcased in his book review.

Coyne is quite the prominent evolutionary biologist, and has been antagonistic to intelligent design arguments for decades. If Darwin’s theory were actually the powerful idea it’s claimed to be, Coyne should have been able to counter design easily, simply by summarizing its arguments and showing how Darwin deals with them. Yet he can’t even bring himself to mention what those arguments are. Instead he tries to whip up hysteria against a book that argues for what most people already believe. That speaks volumes about the actual strength of Darwin’s theory.

The Future's so bright?

The future's So bright? II

File under "well said." LXI

“Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.” The lame and the blind excepted, who could object?” 
― David Berlinski, The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions.

In Russia:A ray of light re: religious liberty?

Court Overturns Sentence Against Brother Akopyan in Russia

On March 1, 2019, the Supreme Court of the Republic of Kabardino-Balkaria overturned a lower court’s conviction of Brother Arkadya Akopyan. He had been on trial for over a year, wrongfully accused of distributing “extremist” literature and ‘inciting religious hatred.’

Previously, a lower court sentenced 70-year-old Brother Akopyan to perform community service. This recent Supreme Court ruling dismissed the lower court’s sentence.

We thank Jehovah for this victory as we rejoice with Brother Akopyan. We continue to pray that our brothers will faithfully endure.—2 Thessalonians 1:4.

Chance:King of the new gods?

Crying “Chance, Chance” When There Is No Chance
Evolution News | @DiscoveryCSC

“Biology is the study of complex things that appear to have been designed for a purpose,” Richard Dawkins famously asserted. But if design is only apparent and not real, what else is there to create the appearance of design? Natural law might be the answer, but if nobody is guiding that, the results are still matters of chance. 

No Power of Agency

When it comes to biology, life as we know it involves more than just repetitive patterns wrought by natural law, beautiful as they might be. It involves operations based on coded instructions. During the origin of life, before there were coded instructions able to accurately replicate, sequences were purely matters of chance, even if molecules interacted by natural law. Nothing about natural law will sequentially organize building blocks with semantic information and syntax, and then translate that coded information into another code with the power to cause functional information. Natural law doesn’t care about trying to do that. It has no power of agency in the materialist conception.

 “Random mutation” might be the answer, but that is pure chance embedded in a fancy phrase. In short, they can only invoke chance for sequential information, and they can only invoke chance for random mutations. Chance plus chance equals chance. And yet life does appear designed for a purpose. Everyone acknowledges that. The only way out of this dilemma is to believe in fake chance: random processes mystically imbued with agency. Evolutionists imagine a personified chance wanting to evolve upward in complexity. Or they can invoke the post-hoc fallacy, saying, “We’re here, therefore we evolved.” This absolves them of having to explain how chance could create a coded information system. Any gambler watching  Illustra’s film clip from Origin on the improbability of a single protein self-organizing would agree, “Not a chance!” In Darwinland, the vast improbabilities are swept away by philosophical bias. They cry “Chance, chance,” but there is no chance. There is only fake chance, endowed with purpose and choice.

Demon Lingo

To see how this is done, consider a book review by Timo Hannay in Nature, where he comments on Paul Davies’s recent book, The Demon in the Machine: How Hidden Webs of Information Are Finally Solving the Mystery of Life (Allen Lane, 2019). Hannay’s review, titled “Maxwell’s Demon and the Hunt for Alien Life,” echoes the demon lingo. It sounds like agency, but we know neither writer is talking about real mind-directed design. How will they imbue chance with agency in this case?

Hannay is mostly kind to Davies, though we know that the book’s author often thinks outside the box. Hannay is glad that Davies is “certainly no believer in a vital force distinct from physics or chemistry” (emphasis added), but he worries that Davies tiptoes at the edges of real design, not just apparent design. 

Davies claims that life’s defining characteristics are better understood in terms of information. This is not as absurd as it may seem. Energy is abstract, yet we have little trouble accepting it as a causal factor. Indeed, energy and information are closely related through entropy.

    

Turning Chance into an Agent

Information “is not as absurd as it may seem,” he says. That’s an interesting way to put it, given that intelligent design theory relies substantially on the concept of information. ID proponents do not compare information to raw, unguided energy, though. Information is superior, because it can commandeer energy. It can take energy and force material to decrease entropy by organizing it in ways natural law alone would never do (i.e., natural law cannot arrange building blocks with sufficiently improbable complex specified information). But can unguided chance use energy to do it? Watch how both writers make chance into an agent:

Davies explains this connection by referring to Maxwell’s demon. Victorian physicist James Clerk Maxwell’s celebrated thought experiment features a hypothetical miniature beast perching at an aperture between two containers of gas, where it allows only certain molecules to pass, depending on their kinetic energy. The demon can thus create a temperature gradient between the containers: a reduction in overall entropy, apparently breaking the second law of thermodynamics. The resolution to this paradox seems to lie in the fact that the demon must gather information about the properties of each molecule, and for this it requires a recording device, such as a brain or a miniature notebook. When its storage space eventually runs out, the information must be deleted, a process that necessarily produces an increase in total entropy.

From this perspective, living systems can be seen as composed of countless such ‘demons’ (proteins and other cellular machinery) that maintain local order by pumping disorder (often in the form of heat) into their surroundings. Davies adroitly brings Schrödinger’s account up to date by way of Claude Shannon’s information theory, Turing machines (universal computers), von Neumann machines (self-replicating universal constructors), molecular biology, epigenetics, information-integration theories of consciousness and quantum biology (which concerns quantum effects in processes from photosynthesis to insect coloration and bird navigation).

Notice, though, how this account dodges the issue by appealing to virtual agents (Maxwell demons) as well as real agents, like Turing. To the materialist, all these agents emerge by a long series of chance events, direct things for a while, then delete themselves. How did that happen?

Cheating with Fake Chance

Sure, the Second Law is not violated, but Davies and Hannay have cheated with fake chance. They speak as if Maxwell’s demon emerges by chance, uses purposeful intelligence for a goal, then vanishes by chance. Now watch them dig a deeper hole:

What practical difference does it make to see life as informational? We don’t yet know, but can speculate. For one thing, if the essential characteristics of life are entropic, extraterrestrial searches based on chemistry could be misguided. It might be more useful to look for phenomena such as ‘anti-accretion’ — in which matter is regularly transferred from a planet’s surface into space. Earth has experienced this since the 1950s, when the one-way traffic in asteroids and meteorites plunging into the globe was finally counteracted by the launch of the first artificial satellites. Arguably, such situations are not merely consistent with the presence of life, but almost impossible to explain in any other way

Note the artfully deployed passive voice. One-way traffic “was finally counteracted by the launch of the first artificial satellites.” Who counteracted it? Did not intelligent engineers use design to launch satellites? It’s hard to exaggerate how ludicrous the thought could be that satellites are mirror images of the same chance processes that pockmarked the Earth with craters. This is fake chance, endowed with purposeful agency, but like Hannay said, to the materialist, “such situations are not merely consistent with the presence of life, but almost impossible to explain in any other way.”

Iconoclasm and Vitalism

Hannay takes issues with a few of Davies’ “iconoclastic” ideas in the book, but since Davies doesn’t cross the line into “vitalism” (a favorite epithet some Darwinians use to describe intelligent design), he ends with a compliment: “On the contrary, if only more of us were wrong in such thought-provoking ways, we might more readily uncover the truth.”

And so Hannay, with Nature’s pulpit, preaches about thoughts and truths. Those are ponderous demons to have to emerge from bouncing molecules, only to disappear after temporary violations of the Second Law. Presumably the truths that emerge on another planet would be quite different. Maybe, even, the truths that emerged here on the materialists’ unguided, naturalistic Earth are the real falsehoods. “Who” could ever judge the difference?