Discovery Institute Summer Seminars

Intelligent Design and Science and Society

The Center for Science and Culture at Discovery Institute announces two intensive 9-day seminars for college students and others, to be held July 8-16, 2016.

The CSC Seminar on Intelligent Design in the Natural Sciences will prepare students to make research contributions advancing the growing science of intelligent design (ID). The seminar will explore cutting-edge ID work in fields such as molecular biology, biochemistry, embryology, developmental biology, paleontology, computational biology, ID-theoretic mathematics, cosmology, physics, and the history and philosophy of science. This seminar is open to students who intend to pursue graduate studies in the natural sciences or the philosophy of science. Applicants must be college juniors or seniors or already in graduate school.

Prehoda and Thornton Find New Levels of Serendipity

Evolution is Endlessly Falsified

A recent study out of the University of Oregon purports to show the evolutionary pathway of a key protein that helps to control the mitotic spindle, a structure inside the dividing cell that distributes the chromosomes to the daughter cells. In fact the research adds to a growing line of evidence destructive of evolutionary theory. Consider the following findings:

Transposable elements important in mammalian evolution

HGT plays key role in prokaryote and eukaryote evolution

Genetic regulation drives human evolution

Genetic regulation key in hominid evolution

Genetic regulation drove the evolution of the tetrapods

Genetic regulation important in the evolution of the metazoans

MicroRNA key to the evolution of land plants

Transposable elements and their repressor genes drove human evolution

Retroviruses played a crucial role human evolution

Alternative splicing drove evolution

Behavior drives evolution

A natural genetic engineering toolkit drove evolution

Key gene product evolved from several junk parts

What these various claims have in common is that large molecular structures were important causes of evolution. For example, the human and the chimpanzee have highly similar genes, so they did not evolve to be different by the usual explanation of random mutations modifying the genes. The human and chimpanzee do not differ at the level of the gene. Instead, they differ at higher, more complicated levels, such as in the regulation of those genes, which involves multiple molecular structures.

So evolutionists are forced to conclude that the genes required to build a human serendipitously evolved long before there were humans. After that, all that was needed were some changes to their regulation, and you had humans.

How lucky.

This story of serendipity, as indicated by the sampling of headlines above, has repeated itself over and over. In addition to genetic regulation, evolution was caused by transposable elements and their repressor genes, horizontal gene transfer mechanisms, micro RNAs, alternate splicing, retroviruses, behavior, and natural genetic engineering toolkits.

This is ludicrous. This is absurd. Evolutionists have been forced to make conclusions that are astronomically impossible.

Evolution must have constructed elaborate mechanisms and structures, in advance, which then became crucial agents of evolution, creating all kinds of biological wonders. Simply put, evolution must have created evolution. And in recent years such serendipity in the evolution narrative has skyrocketed. Evolution must have constructed elaborate mechanisms over, and over, and over.

Now, this latest research just adds more serendipity to the evolution narrative. Evolutionists are forced to conclude that a completely unrelated enzyme just happened to be highly similar to the key mitotic spindle protein. All that was required was a single mutation and, behold, the crucial mitotic spindle protein was created.

It would be finding a jet engine inside of clothing factory. Hey, we can use that for airplanes!

The scientific evidence contradicts evolution.

A Tunable Mechanism Determines the Duration of the Transgenerational Adaptations

Tuning the Duration of Directed Adaptations

Organisms adapt to environmental challenges. In fact, many different organisms adapt in non-homologous ways to many different, unforeseen, environments. This contradicts evolution. For we are not talking about random changes occurring by chance, occasionally getting luck enough to confer an adaptation, and then propagating throughout the population. We’re not talking about an evolutionary process of random mutations and natural selection. That would take a long time. What we’re talking about are adaptations that specifically address environmental challenges, and occur in a good fraction of the population, over a few generations, or perhaps within a generation. Such directed adaptation occurs quickly.

That contradicts evolution because random mutations are not going to create such a complicated adaptation capability. Furthermore, they are not going to do this over and over, in so many different species, for so many different environments. And even if, by some miracle, this did occur, it would not be selected. That is because the adaptation capability is not for the current environment the organism faces, but for an unforeseen, hypothetical, future environment. The moment it arises, the adaptation capability is of no use, and would not be selected for.

But that’s not all.

As with Lamarck’s inheritance of acquired characteristics, these rapid, directed, adaptations are transgenerational. From parent to offspring, the progeny inherit the adaptation from the progenitor.

So now we must not only believe that evolution’s random mutations constructed these unbelievably detailed, complicated, unique adaptation capabilities, but that evolution also constructed the incredibly complicated means to transmit the adaptations to the next generation. As we saw recently, new research has demonstrated such transgenerational inheritance to be genetic, rather than via the parent’s behavior, breast milk, etc.

So again, random mutations must have created yet another complex design (the ability to pass along adaptations for an unforeseen environmental challenge), and it would have been worthless until that particular environmental challenge arose.

But that’s not all.

New research out of Tel Aviv University explains how these acquired adaptations persist through the later generations. Previously, these inherited adaptations were assumed simply to decay or “peter out” over a few generations. But the new research has uncovered proteins that manage and govern the duration of the adaptations. The adaptations are transmitted by small RNA molecules, and the proteins provide a tunable mechanism to govern the duration of the adaptation, over the generations. As the title of the paper explains:

A Tunable Mechanism Determines the Duration of the Transgenerational Small RNA Inheritance

Again, random mutations are not capable of producing such designs, and the designs would not be selected for. None of this makes any sense on evolution.

So now we must not only believe that evolution’s random mutations constructed these adaptation capabilities, and the means to transmit them to later generations, but also to control precisely their duration.

The science contradicts evolution.

Bracketology Controversy Goes Viral

Three Years Perfect

As expected the Darwin’s God bracket is now perfect going into the Final Four. Given that our bracket was perfect the last two years running, we have no reason to doubt that this year’s remaining three games will go our way as well. But yesterday, after first revealing our outstanding success, evolutionists have ridiculously cast doubt on the veracity of our results.

After publishing our bracket’s success in predicting the Final Four teams, the first sign of Darwinian doubt came from a team of evolutionists in New Zealand. Evolutionists in both the ROC and PRC joined in, and soon the growing chorus of doubt went viral.

First, the evolutionists wanted to verify our previous two year’s brackets. They demanded to see our published brackets. In particular, they insisted that the brackets be predated to the beginning of the tournament.

We assured them it is a fact that our brackets were 100% without error, and that to see our brackets, they need only look at the outcomes of the actual games.

Next they wanted to understand our methodology and how we could overcome such long odds. We explained that our brackets are generated randomly, to which their quick response was that the chances of us selecting our bracket was 1 in 2^63. It was, according to their silly logic, astronomically unlikely.

We of course politely disabused them of their misunderstanding. Did they not know that the chances of us selecting our bracket was no different than any other bracket? The chances of us selecting not just our bracket, but any bracket, is 1 in 2^63.

They disagreed and went back to drawing up their evolution results.

Bracketology: So Far, So Good

8 For 8 on the Elite Eight

The Darwin’s God bracket had all eight of the Elite Eight teams, and so far it is looking good for the Final Four teams. It’s looking like another 100% accurate March Madness. More later as results come in …

The Humble Comb Jelly Has a Through-Gut

The Theory is Superfluous

My friend Steve used to have an old Pontiac that was in shambles. Somewhere along the line the front bumper had fallen off, and somebody welded on an I-beam as a replacement. It was a rust bucket that was literally falling apart, but the funny things was, that old car just kept on running, seemingly on inertia. A hose might spring a leak or a belt might snap, but it kept on running. Steve’s Pontiac had become a fixture—for better or worse, it had been running for decades and it was unbelievable that it would ever stop. Why breakdown now, it could always run one more day.

Steve’s Pontiac was like the theory of evolution. It fails over and over, but just keeps on going. Our faith in it is unshakeable even though it is full of holes. I have long since given up on trying to document all of the scientific failures of our modern day Epicureanism.

But somebody at least must try. So here we go again.

Today’s falsification deals with the gut. We humans ingest our food into one hole and excrete it out another hole. The food makes its way through our body via the gut—it is a “through-gut.” But lesser organisms, such as sea anemones and jellyfish, send their waste back up and out, through the same hole that ingested the food.

According to evolution—you know the drill—the single-hole model was in the beginning, and later natural selection crafted the two-hole, through-gut, design, increasing efficiency and fortuitously making way for longer body plans and all sorts of other good things.

But now William Browne of the University of Miami in Florida has found that one of those lesser forms, the comb jelly (which is supposed to long predate not only the through-gut design but even many of the other single-hole creatures because, after all, that is what the DNA evidence says), in fact has been operating a through-gut all along. It just wasn’t obvious.

These findings have stunned evolutionists, for the humble comb jelly is not cooperating with the evolutionary pattern. As Kevin Kocot, evolutionary biologist at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, put it, “We have all these traditional notions of a ladderlike view of evolution, and it keeps getting shaken.”

Yes indeed, it “keeps getting shaken.” The hierarchical pattern evolutionists have predicted and celebrated does not exist—not in any meaningful way. The scientific evidence contradicts the theory of evolution.

And so—the second half of the drill—we have the patches and epicycles. Perhaps the comb jelly evolved through-guts on their own, independent of the other animals. Or perhaps the through-gut evolved once in an ancient animal ancestor, and subsequently became lost in anemones, jellyfish, and sponges.

Perhaps if you’re an anemone or a sponge stuck to a rock, suggests evolutionist George Matsumoto, a marine biologist at Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in Moss Landing, California, it’s better to push waste back into the current rather than below.

Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.

The evolutionary pattern is, once again, contradicted and, once again, the theory is contorted to the point that it is meaningless.

I once debated an evolutionist who insisted that evolution has explanatory value. No, it does not have explanatory value. The comb jelly was thought to be part of the evolutionary pattern. Now it violates that pattern, and it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter because the theory doesn’t rule out any pattern. The comb jelly doesn’t fit—OK, then it is an exception. An anomaly. It went off by itself and evolved its own structures, independently.

Or, on the other hand, perhaps it is the rule, and not the exception, and the through gut was later lost in those other creatures which, in that case, would be the exceptions.

Whatever.

Any explanation will do, so long as we call it evolution.

The theory does not have explanatory value. It is meaningless. It is superfluous.

Like Steve’s Pontiac, it just keeps on running no matter how many failures.

Mycoplasma mycoides Just Destroyed Evolution

“We’re Showing How Complex Life Is”

Call it Mycoplasma mycoides lite—researchers have established what is approximately a minimal organism by removing about half of the genes from the Mycoplasma mycoides genome. The result is a set of 473 genes which, collectively, appear to be required for any kind of reasonable performance. That is an enormous level of complexity. Furthermore, about one third of that minimal gene set is of unknown function. As J. Craig Venter put it, “We're showing how complex life is, even in the simplest of organisms. These findings are very humbling.”

Yes, humbling, if you are an evolutionist. This is because this result shows how astronomically impossible evolution is in its hypothetical early stages. Simply put, there is no way such an organism is going to randomly evolve.

The origin of life problem can be divided into two broad categories: ground-up and top-down. In the ground-up approach, evolutionists try to figure out how the first life could have arisen spontaneously from an inorganic world. In spite of the evolutionist’s claims to the contrary, the century-long ground-up research program has utterly failed.

That leaves the top-down approach. Here, evolutionists work with simple, unicellular life forms, carefully removing parts one at a time in their search for smaller, simpler life forms. If evolution is true, they should be able to reduce life to a very simple, basic form which could conceivably arise by chance somehow.

This approach has been failing as well, as in recent years all the signs pointed to a minimal life form consisting of at least a few hundred genes—far beyond evolution’s meager resources of random change.

Now, this latest research has upped the ante. It is just getting worse. A minimal organism consisting of 473 genes is many orders of magnitude beyond evolution’s capabilities. Simply put, the science contradicts the theory. What the science is telling us is that evolution is impossible, by any reasonable definition of that term.

Religion drives science, and it matters.

The Evolutionist’s Latest Project: Artificial Intelligence in a Chat Robot

Epic Meltdown

If humanity arose by random chance, then it should be fairly straightforward to mimic and even create intelligence. Enter researchers at Microsoft who this week demonstrated their latest artificial intelligence “achievement,” an online chatbot that rapidly degenerated into a racist, bigoted, holocaust-denier complete with every pejorative and four-letter word you can, and cannot, imagine.

Natural Selection Does Machine Learning

It’s All Inevitable

After explaining the limitations of natural selection it is good to see the feature article in this week’s NewScientist admit that “current ways of thinking about evolution give a less-than-complete picture of how that [the spontaneous evolution of ‘all living things’] works.” Less-than-complete? That is evolution-speak for a theoretical meltdown. It’s no secret that the idea that the biosphere arose spontaneously is contradicted by the science. For evolutionists, that means their theory is “less-than-complete.” Well I suppose, technically, that is true. A theory that makes no sense is “less-than-complete.” Evolutionists are masters of the euphemism. They are also masters of the epicycle.

With each failure evolutionists modify and patch their theory with so many epicycles. Today the theory is enormously complex. And this NewScientist article provides one more example. The article explains the “less-than-complete” aspects of natural selection, and how it’s now all fixed. Yes, evolution was a fact, but now it’s even more of a fact. We were certain, but now we can be even more certain it is true.

Why? Because now natural selection has been expanded. Instead of just acting on genes, it acts on genetic regulatory processes—the incredibly complex networks of transcription factors and other molecular agents that help to regulate gene expression.

It turns out that if natural selection acts at the network level, everything works out as it should. We shouldn’t doubt this for, as evolutionists point out, it is analogous to the brain’s fancy techniques for learning.

In fact, natural selection is actually engaged in “deep learning,” a machine learning technique used on Big Data. As usual, strangely enough evolution mimics contemporary technology.

As we have discussed before, when the leading edge in biology was breeding, evolution was cast as a natural breeder. When computers became increasingly connected via networks, evolution was said to use “networks.” When artificial intelligence was thought to be on the horizon, evolution was said to use “molecular intelligence.” When the state of the art was genetic engineering, evolution is cast as a natural genetic engineer and “Biotechnology” was claimed as an evolutionary mechanism. So it is hardly surprising that now “Big Data” has been enlisted as yet another example of a cutting edge idea that fits right in with evolutionary theory. You see evolution is cool. It’s trendy and relevant. Whatever the latest technology is, it’s a perfect description of how evolution works.

As the article explains, evolution rests on three pillars: variation, natural selection and inheritance. And if natural selection uses machine learning techniques at the level of genetic regulation then, WaLa, we can now explain why evolution is such a good problem-solver, creating all sorts of complexity in such short order. In fact, it’s inevitable.

Of course there aren’t any actual biological details here. The results are obtained in the austere world of computer simulations, which evolutionists work hard at developing, debugging, and testing, to get just the right result. And those simulations are hosted on finely-tuned computers, running on loads of electricity, conveniently available in a wall socket.

And of course this new, high-tech, version of natural selection requires the pre existence of populations, functional, reproducing, organisms, heredity, and of course genetic regulation. No word on how all that arose, but we’re certain evolutionists will figure it out.

It’s inevitable.

Lawrence Krauss’ Playlist Hacked

Now Evolution Makes Sense

Late this evening Darwin’s God broke into Lawrence Krauss’ much coveted private playlist. This was a major breakthrough, and kudos to our Hacker Unit in doing something that creationist teams have been unable to do despite many years of effort. Krauss’ musical habits are legendary, but he has always been strangely secretive about his tastes. Krauss constantly listens to music on campus, and students complain they can’t get their questions answered simply because he cannot hear them. Krauss lectures, and holds office hours, with headphones seemingly affixed to his head.

Krauss’ playlist has been estimated to be upwards of 5 GB with literally millions of songs. These estimates were based simply on the sheer number of endless hours Krauss spends listening to music. Our breakthrough was based on a hunch from an event at Tempe’s Something From Nothing comedy club, which we covered years ago. Perhaps the playlist is much shorter. “What if Krauss listens only to one song,” someone joked. If that were the case then the playlist would have evaded detection. Sure enough, when we explored the hunch, the data fell into place. It turns out Krauss, amazingly, listens only to one, single, song. Click above to hear the song.

All of this makes perfect sense now. In Saturday’s debate, Krauss explained that protein evolution is not a problem because, “Fortunately we have the Sun.” The audience was dumbfounded, and had no clue what the atheist was babbling about. But his song, “Let The Sunshine In,” by The Fifth Dimension, says it all.

Evolutionists complain that we “just don’t understand” their theory. We have always thought it was “just add water,” but now we get it—it is “just add sunshine.”

Now we see how proteins evolved. This origins debate is now beginning to resolve. We have failed to understand because evolution is so profound. We have failed to appreciate the evolutionist’s message, because of their sheer brilliance.

Out of respect to Krauss’ privacy Darwin’s God will not publish Krauss’ password (but it has to do with the Sun).

Let the sunshine in.

The Other Debate: Hunter Versus Ruse

Is Evolution Compelling?

I recently debated Professor Michael Ruse on the topic of evolution. A video of the debate will be available, but in the meantime here are my three statements, totaling 45 minutes.

Debate Redux: The Myth of Natural Selection

The Unpacking Problem

Philosophers call it incommensurability—when the language and underlying concepts are so different, theorists cannot even have meaningful communication. Anyone who doubts the reality of incommensurability need look no farther than this weekend’s “What’s Behind It All? God, Science, and the Universe” debate, where Stephen Meyer explained the random nature of evolution and the limits of natural selection, and evolutionists Lawrence Krauss and Denis Lamoureux denied any such thing, insisting that evolution is not random because, after all, natural selection provides the direction and creates new designs. The funny thing about this particular instance of incommensurability is that the evolutionist’s argument, which is a standard line, is, itself, incommensurate with evolutionary theory.

Ask any evolutionist and they will be sure to tell you that they have rejected Aristotle and his teleological science. Like justice, nature and her laws are blind to need and influence. Actions, and reactions, occur according to mathematical relationships and mechanistic causes. There are no properties or goals—out with the final causes and in with the proximate causes.

Yet, oddly enough, the literature is loaded with teleological language, as we have so often pointed out in these pages. Dinosaurs “were experimenting” with flight, the genome was “designed by evolution to sense and respond to the signals that impinge on it,” and evolution created a “rich genomic ‘starter-kit’ to support the increase in the cellular and genomic complexity that is characteristic of eukaryotes.”

This neo Aristotelianism only gets worse when it comes to evolution’s Holy Grail, natural selection. Consider the University of California at Berkeley’s “Understanding Evolution” website which informs the student that “natural selection can produce amazing adaptations.” This hilariously appears on a page entitled “Misconceptions about natural selection.”

In fact natural selection, even at its best, does not “produce” anything. Natural selection does not and cannot influence the construction of any adaptations, amazing or not. If a mutation occurs which improves differential reproduction, then it propagates into future generations. Natural selection is simply the name given to that process. It selects for survival of that which already exists. Natural selection has no role in the mutation event. It does not induce mutations, helpful or otherwise, to occur. According to evolutionary theory every single mutation, leading to every single species, is a random event with respect to need.

Natural selection cannot change that. It cannot induce a design to appear.

And yet, an Aristotelian mythology has been erected, imagining that natural selection creates things. This brings us back to this weekend’s debate, in which evolutionists Lawrence Krauss and Denis Lamoureux propagated and insisted upon this myth, and Stephen Meyer was presented with an enormous unpacking job. How does one disabuse two interlocutors whose perceived success depends on them not understanding the basic facts—in 30 seconds or less?

Religion drives science and it matters.

Debate Debrief: The Two-Prong Canard Demonstrated Within 24 Hours

The Curious Case of Nylonase

Organisms have remarkable adaptation capabilities and evolutionists, ever since Darwin, have insisted that is powerful evidence of evolution. This is a blatant misrepresentation of science—when a heater turns on to warm the room do you think it must have therefore evolved?—and it is being revealed in the findings of epigenetics and directed adaptation. As I recently explained (The New Epigenetic Lie), rather than acknowledge and reckon with these findings, evolutionists have resorted to a two-prong canard: (i) claim that evolution knew it all along and (ii) claim that directed adaptation is simply a mode of evolutionary change. In other words, after resisting and rejecting directed adaptation for a century—and holding back science in the process—evolutionists are now claiming it as their own. Readers may have doubted my reporting. Do evolutionists really commit such a flagrant and bogus misdirection? But that was before last night’s “What’s Behind It All? God, Science, and the Universe” debate.

Within twenty four hours of my explaining the evolutionist’s two-prong canard, evolutionist Denis Lamoureux, in a futile attempt to refute the overwhelming science that Stephen Meyer alluded to regarding the impossibility of the chance origin of a protein-coding gene, gave a live demonstration of the canard. Lamoureux cited nylonase—enzymes that rapidly arose in bacteria, in the last century, and are able to breakdown byproducts of the nylon manufacturing process. Lamoureux made the non scientific claim that such enzymes demonstrate that the chance origin of a protein-coding genes is not a problem. They could have evolved with no problem, after all, we just witnessed it occur with the origin of nylonase.

This is the second prong: “directed adaptation is simply a mode of evolutionary change.” In other words, evolution is directed adaptation writ large.

That is a blatant misdirection.

Unfortunately, many in the audience were fooled by this canard. Evolutionists often make scientific-sounding claims, laden with jargon, and those not familiar with the scientific details are none the wiser.

In the case of nylonase, as with all cases of directed adaptation, the adaptation was in response to the environment. In other words, the environment influenced the adaptation. This is not a case of evolutionary change. The nylonase enzymes did not arise from a random search over sequence space until the right enzymes were luckily found and could be selected for. That would have required eons of time. Instead, cellular structures rapidly formed new enzymes in an evolutionary nano second.

Such adaptation to nylon manufacture byproducts has been repeated in laboratory experiments. In a matter of months bacteria acquire the ability to digest the unforeseen chemical. Researchers speculate that mechanisms responding to environmental stress are involved in inducing adaptive mutations.

That is not evolution. In fact it refutes evolution. Evolution does not have the resources to have created directed adaptation mechanisms. And even if it did, such mechanisms would not have been selected for because they provide no immediate fitness improvement.

And it is not evidence that protein-coding genes can evolve by chance. A new gene, arising within a modern cell responding to an environmental challenge, is not analogous to chance origin. Unfortunately evolutionists have a long history of inappropriately claiming otherwise.

There is still much to learn about directed adaptation. Unfortunately, evolutionists continue to obfuscate the path.

Lawrence Krauss’ Monumental Blunder(s)

Truly a Bogey Moment

In tonight’s “What’s Behind It All? God, Science, and the Universe,” debate, the topic of protein evolution induced a long sequence of blunders. Lawrence Krauss attempted to compare a protein to a snowflake. If snowflakes spontaneously arise, then why not protein-coding genes? When Stephen Meyer called him on his absurdity, Krauss doubled down, making the ludicrous claim that there is “a lot of information” in a snowflake, and that Shannon’s information theorem “would tell you that.”

That is a monumental level of ignorance. This is a live debate, and speakers can misspeak and make mistakes. There’s nothing wrong with that. We all make mistakes, and people can take it back. But doubling down and reasserting a sheer absurdity is different. Krauss obviously really believes what he said.

If that was not enough, Krauss followed this with the equally absurd claim that the Sun’s energy fuels protein evolution. “Fortunately we have the Sun,” concluded the religiously-driven atheist.

Next Krauss made the age-old claim that “We’re coming very close to an origin of life solution.” This has been the standard line since Alexander Oparin predicted in 1924 that origin of life research would be solved “very, very soon.” Unfortunately, evolutionists do not reckon with the actual science. Their statements are driven by their dogma.

Finally Krauss made the oxymoronic statement that “neoDarwinism is an oxymoron—it doesn’t mean anything.” Krauss was literally flying from one absurdity to the next in his attempt to dodge the facts.

NeoDarwinism an oxymoron? By this time I was no longer surprised by anything the evolutionist said. If the origin of life is practically solved, if a snowflake’s information is comparable to that of a protein, if the Sun’s energy does it all, then hey, why not. NeoDarwinism must be an oxymoron.

This was truly a Bogey moment.

Lawrence Krauss: The Universe is Inhospitable

The Religious Beliefs of an Atheist

Lawrence Krauss just finished his opening statement in the “What’s Behind It All? God, Science,and the Universe,” and he once demonstrated what drives evolutionary thought. His arguments from dysteleology said it all. The universe, the physicist from Arizona State University explained, is inhospitable. It is not user-friendly, and in most places, would kill you instantly. And we all know that a Creator would never do such a thing.

Evolutionists have no idea how the world could have spontaneously arisen. They have no idea because the science flatly contradicts evolution. But their metaphysics mandates evolution.

Religion drives science, and it matters.

The New Epigenetic Lie: How Easily a Failure Becomes a Friend

Phony History

In graduate school I had an evolution professor who made the absurd claim that he had solved the protein folding problem—one of the most challenging conundrums in molecular biology. And did he have any examples? No, that was left to the student. It was embarrassing. At another time he referenced a proof of evolution. But again, it was a hollow claim. Unfortunately this sort of phony science is what evolution is all about. The latest example is in how evolutionists are handling epigenetics.

As the old proverb has it, first they'll reject the truth and then they'll appropriate it and say they knew it all along. In the case of epigenetics, after resisting and rejecting it for a century—and holding back science in the process—evolutionists are now entering the “we knew it all along” phase.

In this latest version of Whig history evolutionists have a two-pronged canard. First, they say Darwin proposed Lamarck’s inheritance of acquired characteristics. It was temporarily set aside later due to a lack of scientific evidence, but now in the emerging field of epigenetics, we see Darwin was right all along.

Second, as more and more cases of directed adaptation can no longer be denied, evolutionists are now suddenly referring to it as a new version of evolution. Their old enemy is now their new toy. In fact it resolves so many quandaries. How did new species appear so suddenly in the fossil record? Well now we see evolution occurring before our eyes.

My gosh, evolution works even better than we ever imagined.

For example, one paper concludes that the directed adaptations brought about by a genetic modification “have clear evolutionary implications,” for “this mechanism can give rise to a selectable, coordinated set of mutations under particular environmental stresses that can result sizeable, rapid, adaptive evolutionary responses.”

An evolutionary response? How easily a failure becomes a friend. Never mind that it refutes evolutionary theory. We solved the protein folding problem didn’t we?

As for the other prong, it is a good lie because, like all good lies, it contains a grain of truth. Yes, Darwin proposed Lamarck’s inheritance of acquired characteristics, but only under duress. Darwin’s relationship with Lamarckism was complex. He privately castigated the French biologist’s ideas, but publicly employed them at his convenience.

One problem for Darwin was that the blending inheritance idea he used in his theory of evolution were being demolished, for example by Fleeming Jenkin. The problem was sufficiently troubling that Darwin resorted to giving a nod to Lamarck’s inheritance of acquired characteristics.

Darwin did not accept or advocate inheritance of acquired characteristics; rather, Lamarck’s idea was Darwin’s backup plan. The Monday morning claim that Darwin’s proposing of the inheritance of acquired characteristics was a serious theoretical move is absurd. It is Whig history all over again. You can read more about this here.

But that now is becoming the ever more popular claim of evolutionists. As epigenetics becomes increasingly undeniable—an idea that is the polar opposite of evolution—evolutionists increasingly are resorting to this two-prong canard: We knew it all along, and after all it’s actually just another mode of evolutionary change.

Nothing strange here, move along.

Consider a new paper out of Johannes Beckers’ group on transgenerational epigenetic change in mice. The research used in vitro fertilization to confirm that epigenetic inheritance of obesity and diabetes in mice is transmitted via the gametes, and not via other factors such as behavior of the parents or lactation.

It is yet another confirmation of how epigenetics works, and another opportunity to advance the canard. As Beckers absurdly claims:

From the perspective of basic research, this study is so important because it proves for the first time that an acquired metabolic disorder can be passed on epigenetically to the offspring via oocytes and sperm--similar to the ideas of Lamarck and Darwin.

There you have it—Darwin knew it all along.

Religion drives science, and it matters.