Darwin's God

Evolution Professors: Evolution is Simply Genetic Change (And a Fact)

2012-01-22T20:05:00.000-08:00

As we saw here, here, here and here Randy Moore and Sehoya Cotner, in their new book Arguing for Evolution: An Encyclopedia for Understanding Science, list altruism as an evidence for evolution, make religious arguments that prove evolution, say that evolution predicts “There will be anatomical similarities among related organisms,” begin the book with a bogus prediction claim, define science as strictly naturalistic and say it would be perverse not to accept the scientific fact of evolution.

Of course Moore and Cotner are not saying anything new. These types of arguments are standard in evolutionary thought. They can be found throughout evolutionary apologetics. After all, the book is meant to be an encyclopedia. So the book is a useful compendium of evolutionary thought.

And as the book reveals, the most serious problems in evolutionary thought lie not in the scientific details that are brought forth as evidence, but in how those details are interpreted and arranged. Everyone agrees on the scientific observations, but how are we to understand those observations? It is here that the main problems arise, and it is here where one begins to learn the essence of evolutionary thought.

The underlying religious motivation drives evolutionary thinking into several common, predictable patterns. These include the construction of bogus predictions, the ignoring of substantial scientific problems, and misrepresenting how the evidence bears on the theory.

This is all in support of the false claim that evolution is a scientific fact. Evolution may have occurred or it may not have occurred. People can argue over the this, but there is no question that evolution is not a scientific fact. That is to say, the scientific evidence, no matter how generously interpreted, does not make evolution a fact. Not even close. There are significant scientific problems with the theory.

So evolutionists have a problem. The science contradicts their theory yet they say it is a fact. One strategy evolutionists use to rationalize their claims is to make undefendable demarcation claims about what science is. Though they have made metaphysical claim after metaphysical claim, they then hypocritically say science must be strictly naturalistic. And if science is strictly naturalistic, then the species must have arisen naturalistically, at least according to science.

So evolutionists both rely on and eschew metaphysics. Not surprisingly Moore and Cotner follow in this tradition. For instance, they tell us that “Nonnatural, or supernatural explanations, are neither scientific nor evidentiary.” Yet elsewhere they approvingly quote Darwin who wrote that “nothing can be more hopeless than to attempt to explain this similarity [pentadactyl pattern] … by utility or by the doctrine of final causes.”

So when convenient, metaphysics are allowed, but when not convenient metaphysics are ruled out as “not scientific.” After all, we all know metaphysical claims are not scientific (except when we make them).

As if sensing a problem, evolutionists deploy yet another backstop. To rationalize their rationalizations, they lower the bar and reduce evolution to mere change over time. This way, no one can argue that evolution is not a fact. Change occurs over time, therefore all of biology arose spontaneously, strictly by the play of natural laws.

For instance, Isaac Asimov once wrote that mere color changes in the peppered moth prove evolution. How could such trivial change prove evolution? Of course it doesn’t—this is an equivocation on evolution.

Similarly Steve Jones wrote that the changes observed in HIV (the human immunodeficiency virus) contain Darwin’s “entire argument.” According to science writer Jonathan Weiner, the changes in the beaks of birds show us “Darwin’s process in action.”

Likewise Professor Marta Wayne tells us that “Evolution is change in gene frequency” and science writer Emily Willingham defines evolution as “a change in population over time.” Professor Pamela Bjorkman states that a mutating virus is “evolution at work” and that “In the same way, people have evolved, but over a much slower time scale.”

So it is not surprising that Moore and Cotner follow this tradition of equivocation. After approvingly quoting Stephen Jay Gould that it would be perverse not to accept the fact of evolution, they next inform the reader that “Most simply, evolution is any change in a population’s genetic composition over time.”

All of this would be laughable if it weren’t so real. The book’s promotional material states that:

The book shows how scientists have tested the predictions of evolutionary theory and created an unshakeable foundation of evidence supporting its truth. As such, it demonstrates how evolution serves as a case study for understanding the scientific method and presents a logical model for scientific inquiry.

Unfortunately the truth is close to the exact opposite. This new book by Moore and Cotner does not demonstrate the truth of evolution any more than previous apologetics have. Nor do Moore and Cotner help reveal anything about “the scientific method” or “scientific inquiry.”

There’s nothing wrong with exploring new or unlikely ideas, but evolution is about the manipulation and misrepresentation of science to prove a preconceived conclusion. Evolutionists do not merely explore an unlikely idea, they insist it is a fact in spite of the science.

Moore and Cotner are not demonstrating the scientific method, they show yet again how evolution abuses science. They do not reveal the truth of evolution, but rather how unfounded are its proofs. Evolutionary thought is a Trojan Horse that has infected science. This new book from Moore and Cotner is simply one more example.

Religion drives science, and it matters.

Evolution Professors: Science Must be Naturalistic and Testable (Can You Find the Fallacy?)

2012-01-21T02:33:00.000-08:00

As we saw here, here and here Randy Moore and Sehoya Cotner, in their new book Arguing for Evolution: An Encyclopedia for Understanding Science, list altruism as an evidence for evolution, make the typical religious arguments that prove evolution, say that evolution predicts “There will be anatomical similarities among related organisms,” and begin the book with a bogus prediction claim.

But this is only the beginning. In their next move Moore and Cotner attempt to precondition the reader by mandating naturalism. In a section entitled “Definitions of Science and Scientific Theory,” Moore and Cotner inform the reader that:

Nonnatural, or supernatural explanations, are neither scientific nor evidentiary (i.e., they cannot be supported by scientific evidence). Scientific hypotheses must be testable and falsifiable. Making conclusions that cannot be tested through experimentation and observation is not scientifically valid.

So if the ground rules are that science must be strictly naturalistic—if science must not stray from the naturalism paradigm—then science cannot test naturalism. Naturalism, insofar as science would be concerned, cannot be falsified. Therefore, according to the evolutionist’s logic, the naturalism ground rule is not scientifically valid.

Next Moore and Cotner explain that the theory of evolution has been, in the words of Stephen Jay Gould “confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.”

Perverse?

In fact the naturalistic origin of all of biology (and everything else for that matter) is not even testable. Of course it has been confirmed, for there is no other choice. We don’t know how the entire biosphere could have arisen spontaneously, and evolutionary predictions have fallen one after the other, but one way or another, evolution must be the answer. It would be perverse to think otherwise. That’s just the Stuff of Good Solid Scientific Research.

Religion drives science and it matters.

Professors: Evolution Predicts Unknown Moth

2012-01-21T01:32:00.000-08:00

As we saw here and here Randy Moore and Sehoya Cotner, in their new book Arguing for Evolution: An Encyclopedia for Understanding Science, list altruism as an evidence for evolution, make the typical religious arguments that prove evolution, and say that evolution predicts “There will be anatomical similarities among related organisms.” That religion is doing the heavy lifting behind the phony science is not news, but Moore and Cotner’s book gives us yet another example of this hypocrisy.

In fact the book begins with yet another silly claim that evolutionists find to be significant. In 1862 Darwin examined an orchid, originating from Madagascar, with an incredible foot-long nectary. How could an insect reach all the way down to the base of the tube where the nectar was? The logical conclusion was that there must be a moth species, somewhere in Madagascar, with a very long proboscis with which to pollinate the freak orchid. Darwin may have been an evolutionist, but he could also come to common sense conclusions.

Such a moth was eventually found, and of course evolutionists interpret the orchid-moth pair as a result of evolutionary change. But Darwin’s successful prediction was hardly an evolutionary one. One need not believe orchids and moths (and everything else) just happened to spontaneously arise due to chance in order to reason that for every orchid there must be a pollinator.

Moore and Cotner, however, tell the reader otherwise. They begin their volume with this example on arguing for evolution as though it is an example of the success of evolutionary thinking. This is not unusual. Evolutionists often claim, as successes, predictions and findings where evolution is, in fact, gratuitous. This is understandable if one begins with the assumption that evolution, one way or another, must be true.

Religion drives science and it matters.

Evolution Professors: There Will be Anatomical Similarities Among Related Organisms

2012-01-20T13:55:00.000-08:00

What exactly is a scientific prediction? Philosophers have long since pointed out that many so-called scientific predictions do not qualify. For instance, sometimes a prediction is made after the fact. Other times the prediction is too broad or vague. In some cases a failure of the prediction can be too easily accommodated, using minor adjustments to the theory. In fact sometimes the prediction is not even required by the theory. It is simply used to make the theory look good. These textbook examples from the philosophy of science can be found in abundance in evolutionary theory. Consider, for example, Randy Moore and Sehoya Cotner who, in their new book Arguing for Evolution: An Encyclopedia for Understanding Science, state that evolution predicts “There will be anatomical similarities among related organisms.” It is a typical example of how evolutionists commit even obvious fallacies in their apologetics.

The evolutionary prediction that “There will be anatomical similarities among related organisms” is, for starters, an after-the-fact prediction. It has been known since antiquity that species are not simply randomly designed, but instead share at least some patterns. And the prediction is incredibly vague. It could mean just about anything. But this is only the beginning.

The prediction that “There will be anatomical similarities among related organisms” is not even binding. Biology is full of falsifications of this prediction. We humans and squids, yes squids, share similar vision systems. It is an incredible anatomical similarity among very different species. On the other hand, different frog species have completely different development pathways to form their vision systems. These are just two of biology’s many examples of unrelated organisms with striking similarities and related organisms with striking differences. When confronted with such falsifications, evolutionists respond that “evolution does that too.” As the philosopher warned, sometimes prediction failure can be too easily accommodated.

In fact, evolution’s ability to accommodate such massive contradictions to the prediction shows that the prediction was not even required by the theory in the first place. Evolutionists have no problem explaining violations of their expected pattern. Evolution, they say, can temporarily speed up, thus creating big change and erasing the expected similarities. This and other just-so explanations reveal that this prediction never really was a genuine prediction in the first place. It is just there to make the theory look good.

Religion drives science, and it matters.

Is Evolution an Enabler of All Kinds of Absurdities?

2012-01-20T11:03:00.000-08:00

New Book on Arguing for Evolution

2012-01-19T13:06:00.000-08:00

Did you know that helping is evidence for evolution? As Randy Moore and Sehoya Cotner explain in their new book Arguing for Evolution: An Encyclopedia for Understanding Science, this and most everything else in biology proves evolution to be an undeniable fact. Altruism, they explain, may seem to be a “problem” for evolution. (They put “problem” in quotes because, of course, there are no real problems for evolution. All those false predictions are simply explained by adjusting the theory.) In this case, most acts of so-called altruism are “anything but.” If an individual sounds an alarm to warn the others or dies to save the group, it is really just another evolutionary calculation. Does not such risky behavior maximize the chances that the all important genes will be propagated to the next generation? And so falling on hand grenades may seem to be a noble, heroic act, but actually it is simply a product of natural selection. As John Haldane once put it, “I would lay down my life for two brothers or eight cousins.”

But how did such complex behaviors evolve in the first place? How do we decide which behaviors maximize gene propagation versus simply terminating such propagation? Even something as seemingly simple as bacteria suicide is enormously intricate and complex. It is an elaborate molecular choreograph that isn’t going to arise by a few chance mutations.

Remember that selection cannot induce such designs. It can only select them once they have been randomly produced by those epicurean veering atoms. But chance mutations can’t create real-life complexities. There is no gradual path of tiny changes that morphs a tricycle into a jet airliner. Even simple molecular machines don’t show signs of gradual buildup.

There is also the “problem” of the many altruistic behaviors that don’t fit the evolutionary model. Such non reciprocal altruism hardly helps get one’s gene into future generations. Why does Mother Theresa help the needy in far away countries?

These and other thorny “problems” are not seriously addressed. Instead, Moore and Cotner present the usual non scientific, metaphysical proofs that mandate evolution. As philosopher Elliott Sober has pointed out, the strong evidences for evolution come from metaphysical rebukes of creationism.

For example, Moore and Cotner point to the pentadactyl pattern which is:

difficult to explain if the organisms originated independently of (and were therefore unrelated to) each other, for such an origin would not require pentadactyl limbs or, any other shared traits.

Why are such similarities difficult to explain if the organisms are not related by common descent? Because the organisms should not share any similarities. And how do evolutionists know that the organisms should not share any similarities? Because such similarities are not required. And what is the basis for these requirements? Evolutionary fitness, of course. But the pentadactyl pattern is presented as evidence for evolution and as such, it needs to be interpreted objectively. Otherwise the argument is circular.

Of course what is lurking behind all this is the usual evolutionary metaphysics. It is what Sober calls Darwin’s Principle. And if there was any doubt that evolution is a religious theory the authors dig deeper into the metaphysics:

Creationists have explained these developmental and structural similarities as the handiwork of a Creator who saved time and work by varying a basic theme. Darwin, however, considered such explanations to be useless, noting that “nothing can be more hopeless than to attempt to explain this similarity … by utility or by the doctrine of final causes,” and that the similarities are “inexplicable” by traditional views of creationism.

Final causes is hopeless? Creationism is inexplicable? Well then yes, evolution is a fact. So while the evidence is unlikely on evolution, as Sober points out, it ironically makes evolution a fact:

This last result provides a reminder of how important the contrastive framework is for evaluating evidence. It seems to offend against common sense to say that E is stronger evidence for the common-ancestry hypothesis the lower the value is of [the probability of E given the common-ancestry hypothesis]. This seems tantamount to saying that the evidence better supports a hypothesis the more miraculous the evidence would be if the hypothesis were true. Have we entered a Lewis Carroll world in which down is up? No, the point is that, in the models we have examined, the ratio [the probability of E given the common-ancestry hypothesis divided by the probability of E given the separate-ancestry hypothesis] goes up as [the probability of E given the common-ancestry hypothesis] goes down. … When the likelihoods of the two hypotheses are linked in this way, it is a point in favor of the common-ancestry hypothesis that it says that the evidence is very improbable. [Evidence and Evolution, p. 314]

No matter that the evidence doesn’t fit evolution very well. Creationism is inexplicable, so evolution is a fact.

Religion drives science, and it matters.

This Just In: Everything Came From Nothing and if You Don’t Agree You Know Nothing

2012-01-10T13:36:00.000-08:00

Evolution professor Lawrence Krauss is now saying that the universe, and everything in it, came from nothing. Not only that, but there are probably billions and billions of universes that have spontaneously arisen. Occasionally a universe happens to have all the right properties for life to arise spontaneously within it, and that would be us.

Krauss, a theoretical physicist and head of The Origins Project at Arizona State University, is not the first evolutionist to defy the age-old wisdom that something does not come from nothing. World-famous physicist Stephen Hawking popularized the idea in a recent book he co-authored entitled The Grand Design.

Krauss and Hawking use gravitational theory and quantum mechanics to argue that, in fact, such spontaneous creation is all but inevitable. Their narratives appeal to graduate-level physics which most people do not understand, but the basic idea of a strictly naturalistic creation story goes back centuries.

The intellectual necessity of naturalism

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with the rise of modern science and the Enlightenment, the urge for strict naturalism was promoted by various Christian traditions. Both in England and on the continent, Christians were refining a range of theological views that required science to describe the world’s origins strictly in terms of natural law. The dozen or so views that emerged fell into two broad categories. One category dealt with the divine attributes while the other dealt with epistemology and man’s knowledge. For short, we may refer to them as the “greater god mandate” and the “intellectual necessity” for naturalism.

In each category a foundational theological view supported various specific arguments for naturalism. One argument from the intellectual necessity view, which became more clear in the eighteenth century, was that special divine action (or primary causation) interfered with scientific progress, or even made science impossible.

As Baden Powell had insisted, all of science depends on the principles of uniformitarianism. Darwin’s confidant J. D. Hooker was more direct. Though he found special creation and evolution at an empirical standoff, neither theory with a clear advantage, he opted for the latter for its “great organizing potential.” It was not that evolutionary theories were “the truest,” he wrote to William H. Harvey in 1859, “but because they do give you room to reason and reflect at present, and hopes for the future, whereas the old stick-in-the-mud doctrines … are all used up. They are so many stops to further inquiry; if they are admitted as truths, why there is an end of the whole matter, and it is no use hoping ever to get any rational explanation of origin or dispersion of species—so I hate them.”

A law-like origins of the world, on the other hand, supported the accrual of knowledge. Darwin enunciated this view when he explained that acceptance of his theory of evolution was less important than the rejection of special divine action:

Whether the naturalist believes in the views given by Lamarck, by Geoffroy St. Hilaire, by the author of the ‘Vestiges,’ by Mr. Wallace or by myself, signifies extremely little in comparison with the admission that species have descended from other species, and have not been created immutable: for he who admits this as a great truth has a wide field open to him for further inquiry.

The rejection of special divine action was equated with scientific progress. Here Darwin extrapolated his metaphysical argument to arrive at the ultimate proof against creation. His main point, that no creator ever would have intended for this world, was now protected against counter arguments because such counter arguments would be unscientific.

Darwin repeatedly used metaphysical arguments against creation to prop up evolution, but now he declared that counter arguments would be out-of-bounds since they were unscientific. Darwin correctly observed that creation and its supporting arguments hinge on one’s concept of God, but he conveniently forgot that arguments against creation equally hinge on one’s concept of God. For Darwin, it was fair game to argue against creation but not for it. Thus, evolution was the correct scientific conclusion. In fact, what good science required was a naturalistic explanation, regardless of what particular explanation was used.

Since Darwin this theological argument has gained strength. For Niles Eldredge, the key responsibility of science—to predict—becomes impossible when a capricious Creator is entertained:

But the Creator obviously could have fashioned each species in any way imaginable. There is no basis for us to make predictions about what we should find when we study animals and plants if we accept the basic creationist position. … the creator could have fashioned each organ system or physiological process (such as digestion) in whatever fashion the Creator pleased.

In his text Paul Moody explains that without strict naturalism one does not have an explanation at all:

it amounts to saying, ‘Things are this way because they are this way.’ Furthermore, it removes the subject from scientific inquiry. One can do no more than speculate as to why the Creator chose to follow one pattern in creating diverse animals rather than to use differing patterns.

Likewise Tim Berra warns that we must not be led astray by the apparent design in biological systems, for it “is not the sudden brainstorm of a creator, but an expression of the operation of impersonal natural laws, of water seeking its level. An appeal to a supernatural explanation is unscientific and unnecessary—and certain to stifle intellectual curiosity and leave important questions unasked and unanswered. ” In fact, “Creationism has no explanatory powers, no application for future investigation, no way to advance knowledge, no way to lead to new discoveries. As far as science is concerned, creationism is a sterile concept.”

Lawrence Krauss and the intellectual necessity

And so it is not surprising to hear Lawrence Krauss, at the 3:14 mark in the above lecture, rehearse the same, centuries-old, intellectual necessity theology in support of his conviction that something, in fact the entire universe, just happened to spontaneously arise from nothing:

I am going to a talk about our modern picture of cosmology and how it has changed our view of the universe—the past and the future, and in some sense how that picture is clearly remarkable. And far more remarkable than the fairly tales that are made up in most religious situations.

But the key point is mystery. That is one of the things that makes science so special I think. It is that scientists love mysteries. They love not knowing. That’s a key part of science. The excitement of learning about the universe. And that again is so different than the sterile aspect of religion where the excitement is apparently knowing everything, although clearly knowing nothing.

There you have it. Without naturalism there is not only no excitement, there is no knowledge. We are left “apparently knowing everything” but “clearly knowing nothing.” Given this truth, then of course, we must have evolution.

Everything came from nothing and if you don’t agree, then you know nothing. Religion drives science, and it matters.

Rib Development Interdependencies: More Complicated Than We Would Have Imagined

2012-01-09T01:32:00.000-08:00

Research published last year out of Portugal shows that the development of ribs is more complicated than evolutionists imagined. It turns out that in the developing embryo, rib growth is promoted by one pathway and inhibited by another. The end result is a delicate balancing act between the two to construct the proper design.

And on top of that, the balancing act is further complicated by its coordination with muscle development. As one writer explained:

The researchers went on to unpick the genes involved in this process, and came up with yet another surprising finding: that the whole process relies on first hitting so-called muscle genes in the embryo, which then provide signals to switch on the 'rib' genes to make both ribs and muscle, in a coordinated process.

Did evolution get lucky again by randomly constructing another complex, interdependent process that needs all the major components? Who knows but who cares. After all, evolution is a fact. As the lead researcher assures us, the perplexing result “makes perfect sense” from an evolutionary perspective. And why is that true? Because:

it is no good to make ribs without muscle, so, in the embryo, the production of both ribs and their associated muscles is under the control of a single and coordinated mechanism.

Of course. It is all so clear now. Evolution constructed incredible complexity because ribs are no good without muscles. That’s just the Stuff of Good Solid Scientific Research.

Religion drives science, and it matters.

Evolution Professor: I Wrote a Thoughtful Response

2012-01-07T12:48:00.000-08:00

An evolution professor who wrote a profanity-laced diatribe in response to a question about evolution is now saying it was a “thoughtful response.” He writes:

I wrote, what I thought, was a thoughtful response to a question I was asked regarding math and evolution and creationists.

But as I pointed out here, here and here, aside from the foul language the professor’s response contained several scientific blunders. And now those blunders are being amplified in the professor’s next response. But as usual a straightforward discussion about the science won’t be easy.

Evolution is a religiously driven theory that is weak on the science, so you can guess where the discussion goes. Here is how the professor begins his next “thoughtful” response:

In my original post, I pointed out one creationist argument against the theory of evolution misuses probability. The argument goes like this: using these assumptions, the odds of life originating is infinitesimally small therefore god and Jesus and homosexuals can not visit each other in the hospital.

Aside from the usual mocking that evolutionists rely on, the misuse of probability is not a “creationist argument.” Again, this is typical. Evolutionists think they can cover over the problems with their theory by raising the “Creationist” alarm and turning to ridicule.

The professor’s first mistake was his misuse of probability. They say there are lies, damn lies, and then there are statistics. We might now add probability to the list. A problem with evolution, and the origin of life, is that they are astronomically unlikely. They have low probability.

The professor attempted to explain this away by arguing that all outcomes are equiprobable. Incredibly complex cellular life arising on its own is no different than a blob of mud. After all, all possible outcomes have a probability of 1/#Outcomes. This is an old, and frankly pathetic, trick. Laplace explained the problem centuries ago and I elaborated on it here.

Using the professor’s rationale, we would credulously accept all manner of bizarre events. If all our roulette wheel bets turned out winners, if our poker hands always gave a royal flush, if random letters spelled out CONSTANTINOPLE, it all would be just another equiprobable event.

But not surprisingly all of this was lost on the professor. He writes:

Instead of dealing with the fact that creationist assumptions are pure fiction …

That would be difficult to do since the professor gave no specifics to deal with. The professor gave no references, no citations, no links, not even any names. In fact the professor’s characterization of “creationist assumptions” was a convenient strawman rather than a serious criticism.

For instance, the professor characterizes creationists as assuming evolution occurs instantaneously. I’m not up on the creationist literature so perhaps they do say this. But if so, this hardly addresses the serious problems with evolution. (More on this below). The professor continues:

Cornelius takes a different tact. Poker and scrabble. See the odds of three players each getting an amazing poker hand at the same time is a really small number therefore evolution can not be true or the odds of pulling out scrabble tiles in order that spell out CONSTANTINOPLE is a really small number therefore evolution can not be true.

Here the professor avoids the problem and instead distorts what I said. The problem is not that “evolution cannot be true,” which of course I never said. The problem is that evolution is unlikely, and his equiprobable argument doesn’t help. After failing to address the problem, the remainder of the professor’s response degrades further:

So if flipping a coin or the lottery are not sufficient evidence, then poker and scrabble will be? Poker and scrabble did not even exist 10,000 years ago, therefore the world can not be that old (if I understand Cornelius' way of thinking). The problem isn't getting small numbers. That's easy, I brought up two ways and now we have two more. The problem is the assumptions creationists make, they are not reality.

10,000 years ago? The world can not be that old? The assumptions creationists make? Where did that come from? Later the professor contrived more opponents to attack:

He is stuck on the idea that scientists think a cell just poofed into existence, regardless of what we say, he refuses to accept it and keeps harping the same lie over and over. … Cornelius' world-view is that the Bible (as he interprets it) is correct and the universe must fit into that tiny little corpuscle of his imagination.

Poofed into existence? Of course I never said any such thing. The professor is simply contriving strawmen to knock down. Unfortunately this is typical. Try discussing the science with evolutionists and too often they attack imagined motives. The irony is that while they promote the religiously-driven theory of evolution, they criticize everyone else for the same. Sorry, but misrepresenting science and resorting to various fallacies is not “thoughtful.”

Religion drives science, and it matters.

Evolution Professor: You’re Quote-Mining Elliott Sober

2012-01-04T22:22:00.000-08:00

It is well known that evolution is a religious theory except, that is, to evolutionists. Amazingly, they make their religious claims but then immediately turn around and deny ever having done any such thing. And those who are in a position to expose this denial, professional philosophers, too often are of little help. Evolutionists literally deny their religious premises right after making them and philosophers fail to point out the problem. That is why a peer-reviewed paper on this topic by leading philosopher Elliott Sober, in a leading journal, was helpful. Sober analyzes arguments in great detail and in the paper he points out how evolutionary reasoning entails metaphysical premises. According to evolutionists the scientific evidence falsifies creation and so evolution, of one sort or another, is the only alternative. As Sober has pointed out elsewhere, this contrastive logic works even though evolution itself fares so poorly on the scientific evidence:

This last result provides a reminder of how important the contrastive framework is for evaluating evidence. It seems to offend against common sense to say that E is stronger evidence for the common-ancestry hypothesis the lower the value is of [the probability of E given the common-ancestry hypothesis]. This seems tantamount to saying that the evidence better supports a hypothesis the more miraculous the evidence would be if the hypothesis were true. Have we entered a Lewis Carroll world in which down is up? No, the point is that, in the models we have examined, the ratio [the probability of E given the common-ancestry hypothesis divided by the probability of E given the separate-ancestry hypothesis] goes up as [the probability of E given the common-ancestry hypothesis] goes down. … When the likelihoods of the two hypotheses are linked in this way, it is a point in favor of the common-ancestry hypothesis that it says that the evidence is very improbable. [Evidence and Evolution, p. 314]

But the contrastive logic entails religious assumptions. This is not about science. In the journal paper Sober explains how this argument works and how Darwin used it to rebuke creationists. The paper is a valuable contribution to our understanding of how religion has penetrated science, and of the evolutionist’s denials.

But, not surprisingly, evolutionists are not only in denial of the religion in evolution, they are even in denial of Sober’s assessment. One evolutionist professor, for example, criticized me for quote-mining and mis reading Sober’s paper. He explained that Sober was merely pointing out the failure of creationism as a sidebar:

It's ridiculous to say that the mere mention of creationists necessarily implies something about a creator. Sober's just saying that creationists hold the idea that species don't differentiate beyond certain fixed boundaries, and that that idea was shown wrong. There's no statement about any creator there.

But how could Darwin show that creationism had become untenable if he hadn’t assumed something about the creator? Not a problem, the professor explained. For Darwin used two models, adaptation for common ancestry and chance for separate ancestry:

[Darwin] considers the possible causes for unrelated organisms to share certain character. These would be adaptation and pure chance.

But if the separate ancestry model doesn’t represent creationism, then how can this show creationism to be so improbable? Again, the professor answered that religious assumptions were incidental to Darwin’s logic:

Sober mentioned creationists because they postulated separate ancestry. Whatever else they'd have thought is irrelevant. If we remove the reference to them, the logic of the paper remains the same.

The professor was clearly in denial of the religious premises Sober had pointed out in the paper. One cannot rebuke creationism without modeling creationism. I tried again to explain this:

the evolutionists cannot evaluate Pr(O|separate ancestry) without a model of separate ancestry. Unless that model is based on creationism, they cannot refute creationism. If that model is based on some other notion of separate ancestry, then it carries no force against creationism.

At this point the professor’s denialism became more obvious as he simply rewrote Sober’s explanation of the evolutionary argument, saying it has nothing to do with divine intent:

There's no relationship of necessity between [separate ancestry] and divine intervention. One can consider the former separately. …

it refutes [separate ancestry], not divine intent. The argument explained by Sober in the paper cannot conclude that divine intervention is unlikely. It cannot do that, though you wish Sober said it does. … nobody's interested in your precious creationism in that paper.

But if there is no relationship between separate ancestry and divine intervention, and if Darwin’s logic refuted separate ancestry but not divine intent then, I reminded the professor, Darwin could not rebuke creationism as Sober had explained.

At this point the evolutionist’s denial of his own religious premises were exposed as he simply refused to acknowledge the Sober paper. Sober explained that Darwin had shown to be a myth the creationist notion that species or “kinds” are separated from each other by walls. But one cannot show this creationist notion to be a myth without assuming something about that creationist notion.

The evolution professor had accused me of quote-mining the Sober paper and interpreting it according to personal biases, but in fact this is what the professor was doing.

At this point the professor changed his tack with a new argument and again blamed the problem on me:

What it rebukes is the "species separated by walls" thesis of creationism, but not "creation theory" as a whole, nor the most important claim of creationism: divine intervention in the origin of species. Again, you're equivocating a single creationist thesis with "creation theory" with all of its postulates.

But of course whether the evolutionary logic rebukes a particular thesis of creationism or creationism as a whole is irrelevant, as I explained:

If Darwin rebukes even just some creation theories using religious assumptions, that still amounts to the use of religious assumptions. You’re raising red herrings.

Of course none of this is new. It is just another example of the denialism that comes with evolution. You can see more examples here and here (from Jerry Coyne), here (from PZ Myers) and here (from Douglas Theobald).

Evolutionists say the world arose spontaneously, by itself, they claim this is a scientific fact beyond any shadow of a doubt in spite of massive empirical problems, they make religious arguments to prove their claim, and then they deny it. Evolution is a truly amazing movement in the history of thought. If this wasn’t fully documented by the evolutionists themselves one would never believe it.

Religion drives science, and it matters.

University of Toronto Conference: The Wise Scientist

2012-01-03T21:35:00.000-08:00

The Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Toronto is hosting a conference this summer entitled “The Wise Scientist: Historical and Philosophical Reflections on the Place of Wisdom in Science” and their first suggested topic is: “Case studies which highlight particularly wise (or spectacularly unwise) scientists.” I think I have an idea. Here is my abstract:

In 1859 Charles Darwin presented his theory of evolution which stated that the species originated spontaneously. From whatever initial conditions existed in the early earth, millions upon millions of species arose by themselves. Indeed, from biochemistry to anatomy, the entire biological world arose on its own. Not surprisingly the theory was met with a degree of skepticism from some scientists. But Darwin’s idea was greeted by theologians and soon was hailed as an undisputable fact. In spite of its heroic claims and a long series of failed predictions, the theory of evolution became entrenched orthodoxy in the twentieth century. As evolutionist Ernst Mayr explained, the fact of evolution is so overwhelmingly established that it would be irrational to call it a theory. Even consciousness, evolutionists insist, is merely an emergent result of the seemingly limitless complexity which spontaneously arose.

But evolutionary thinking did not begin with Darwin and is not limited to biology. The theory that the world arose by itself traces back to antiquity, and in modern times was promoted by cosmologists centuries before Darwin. As Kant explained, a strictly naturalistic origins was based on “incontrovertible principles” which left no doubt of the conclusion. Recently the cover of the venerable Scientific American informed its loyal readers that “Infinite Earths in Parallel Universes Really Exist” and the internationally renown physicist Stephen Hawking proclaimed that even the universe arose on its own.

It would be difficult to overstate the sheer intellectual strength and academic credentials of these leading evolutionists. They are the best and the brightest the world has to offer. Similarly, it would be difficult to overstate the enormous chasm that separates their dogmatic truth claims and reality. While evolutionary theories have been called unwise, evolutionary thinking is undoubtedly the most “spectacularly unwise” movement in history. It would be difficult to imagine a more unlikely science proclaimed with more certainty. Brilliance and intelligence are not necessarily accompanied by wisdom.

Think they will accept it? Religion drives science, and it matters.

Is Evolution a Truism?

2011-12-27T01:04:00.000-08:00

One argument for why evolution is true is that it necessarily follows from the mere existence of biological variation that is inherited, limited resources and natural selection. Here is how one peer-reviewed journal paper described it:

The conventional picture of Darwinian evolution was summarized by Gould as based on two undeniable facts and an inescapable conclusion (Gould, 1977: 11):

(1) Organisms vary, and these [random] variations are inherited (at least in part) by their offspring.

(2) Organisms produce more offspring than can possibly survive.

(3) On average, offspring that vary most strongly in directions favored by the environment will survive and propagate. Favorable variation will therefore accumulate in populations by natural selection.

It is yet another evolutionary proof that has failed badly for, as is intuitively obvious to anyone not committed to evolution, random biological variations do not necessarily add up to the astonishingly complex designs we find in the biological world. Indeed, that would be quite a remarkable finding. As Gould would later explain, the large-scale change evolution requires did not arise from the sorts of small-scale biological variation that can help species to adapt:

Whatever genetic and developmental setting permitted this cardinal event [the Cambrian explosion], it was not business as usual, to be simply extrapolated from Darwinian changes in modern populations. We cannot begin to answer “what is (multicellular) life”? without understanding such events.

Another peer-reviewed paper put it this way:

It is relatively well known how organisms adapt to their environment and, arguably, even how new species originate. However, whether this knowledge suffices to explain macroevolution, narrowly defined here to describe evolutionary processes that bring about fundamental novelties or changes in body plans, has remained highly controversial.

Such sentiment is common and it represents the failure not of a minor tenet of evolutionary theory, but of a fundamental prediction. Indeed, this highlights one of the common reasons people have always been skeptical of evolution.

It’s not exactly shocking (except for evolutionists, see for example here, here and here) that species might be able to adapt to changing environments. We hardly need to invoke the heroic idea that all of biology arose from random events to make sense of adaptation.

But the idea that, beginning in a warm little pond somewhere, random events would inexorably build one upon the next in a biological construction job of ever increasing sophistication is, yes, quite heroic. Yet amazingly evolutionists have insisted this very thing is true. They know not how, but they are sure that somehow the incredibly high-dimension biological design hyperspace is filled with gradual, ever-increasing fitness pathways that lead to the millions upon millions of species and all their intricate and creative designs. And so therefore, they have believed that the mere existence of biological variation that is inherited, limited resources and natural selection, together make evolution a truism.

But now even evolutionists are coming around to what was obvious from the beginning. Biology is not a “just add water” kind of project. It is yet another miserable failure of evolutionary theory. But evolutionists will, of course, remain undeterred. For evolution must be a fact. Religion drives science, and it matters.

Evolutionist: You’re Misrepresenting Natural Selection

2011-12-25T18:59:00.000-08:00

How could the most complex designs in the universe arise all by themselves? How could biology’s myriad wonders be fueled by random events such as mutations?

Sometimes evolutionists try to explain this by saying that mutations aren’t really random and that any such characterization is a strawman. After all, it seems that mutations do not occur at the same rate in different parts of the genome, or in different conditions, and so forth. Their point is that mutations are not at all random. Well that may be true, but this is just a canard because according to evolution the mutations are random with respect to what counts: the miraculous designs of biology.

So evolutionists are having it both ways. On the one hand they reject any teleology. The biological variation must not anticipate the miracles to come and so mutations must not be biased toward such designs. The mutations must be random, with respect to design. Any non randomness that mutations may exhibit is, therefore, inconsequential to the problem of how such mutations could work wonders.

But when their doctrine is repeated back to them, evolutionists sometimes offer this rebuttal that the mutations are not random. They are having it both ways.

Other evolutionists do not make this fallacy. They agree that concerning the problem of how evolution could come up with its many designs, the biological variation that is needed must be random. Instead, they offer up another, more subtle, fallacy.

These evolutionists say that while the mutations are random, the whole complaint that such randomness is not likely to have created all of biology’s wonders is misguided. It is misguided, they say, because evolution on the whole is not at all random. Yes the mutations are random, but there is a very non random filter imposed called natural selection. Selection effectively “takes” the winners from the pool of available mutations and “rejects” the losers. So with only the good mutations being preserved, you have very non random biological change occurring.

Any criticism of evolution that misses this crucial fact is yet another strawman. As one evolution told me:

Natural selection not only helps, it's an integral and essential part of the iterative process of evolution. "Killing off" the bad designs and letting the ones that work survive to pass on their heritable traits is critical to how the whole process works.

I know it's been pointed out a hundred times:

Random genetic variations by themselves don't produce the evolution of new traits. Selection by itself doesn't produce the evolution of new traits. But the iterative process combining both variation and selection (along with the heritable traits) can and does produce amazing new features.

I know you know it too, which is why your posting that sort of rancid garbage in the OP reflects so poorly on your character.

It is true, as this evolutionist states, that evolutionary theory holds that it is a combination of variation + selection that results in new designs. And is true that, according to evolutionary theory, the result would be non random.

But all of this misses the point. Remember, the problem at hand is that evolution says random events are the fuel for incredible designs. How could that be? The evolutionists response, that selection filters out the useless random events, doesn’t help.

Of course that is what evolution envisions. The question still stands, for no one was ever counting on the useless mutations to help out.

Evolutionists erroneously think they are resolving the problem by pointing out the role of selection. In fact, they are simply restating the problem. Of course selection weeds out the bad mutations. So what?

In fact, this simply reinforces the problem, for selection is powerless to help guide those useless mutations. It just weeds them out, and we are left with nothing.

Imagine gamblers losing at roulette. The problem is the roulette wheel has a great many numbers and so a bet is unlikely to win. With evolution, the problem is greatly compounded. Instead of the traditional two dimensional roulette wheel the casinos have, evolution’s roulette wheel is in an astronomical number of dimensions. And in multi dimensional space, those rare winning numbers become far, far less likely.

The point here is that natural selection does not help solve the ridiculous claim that the universe’s most complex designs just happen to happen. This is simply an astronomically unlikely scenario. Random events are simply not likely to create profoundly complex, intricate, detailed designs. Evolution’s natural selection does nothing to change this.

Think of it this way. Every single mutation and the like that produced the giraffe had to occur by itself. They were not coaxed by natural selection. Indeed, quite the opposite, natural selection merely weeds out the losers. Quite literally, the giraffe must have been created by a long series of random events. From a scientific perspective it would be difficult to imagine a more absurd proposition.

That is what happens when religion drives science.

MicroRNA Exchange Between Cells Found to be Key Evolutionary Innovation

2011-12-25T14:02:00.000-08:00

We recently reported the thought-provoking findings that our genes are not only regulated by our own microRNA—those small snippets of transcribed DNA which were often considered to be useless junk—they are also regulated by the microRNA in the food we eat. In other words, food not only contains carbohydrates, proteins, fat, minerals, vitamins and so forth, it also contains information—in the form of these regulatory snippets of miRNA—which regulate our gene production.

In other research microRNA has also been found to move between cells, thus providing a mechanism for one cell to influence the operations within neighboring cells. This helps to explain how the cells can differentiate in a growing embryo according to their position within the embryo. As one scientist explained:

This study provides important insight into how cells communicate positional information to orchestrate the complex process of tissue and organ development.

Add this complex process of microRNA exchange to the list of ways cells can communicate and influence each other via chemical signals. And as with so many of the other mechanisms, microRNA exchange is thought, now that it has been discovered, to have been important in evolution. As one evolutionist explained, there are reasons to think it was key in the evolutionary transition from single-celled algae to land plants.

This evolutionary speculation is yet another example of the monumental levels of serendipity in evolutionary theory. In this case, evolution happened to create DNA, DNA transcription, microRNA regulation, and microRNA transfer mechanisms between cells, only to find that it was the perfect set up for making the transition from single-celled algae to land plants.

Religion drives science, and it matters.

Optical Metamaterials and the Hercules Beetle

2011-12-25T01:00:00.000-08:00

You may recall that objects have particular colors because, at the molecular level, light rays at certain frequencies (corresponding to certain colors) are reflected while at other frequencies the light is absorbed. In other words, an object’s color has to do with its chemistry. But, as David Tyler points out here, coloration can also arise from repeating, detailed submicron geometrical structures at the object’s surface. These surface structures are finely tuned to interact with and control the incoming light, including controlling the frequencies, and hence color, of the reflected light. In these cases, the object’s color has to do with its repeating surface geometry, rather than its chemistry.

That’s interesting because not only can surface structures be designed and fabricated to have a certain color, the structure can also be designed to be sensitive to environmental factors, such as temperature and humidity. Therefore one can construct a panel whose color indicates an environmental reading. Scientists and engineers are busy researching and developing these and other applications for these so-called metamaterials.

But those scientists and engineers were not the first to create metamaterials. Once again, the biological world has “been there, done that,” and has many of its own such metamaterials. One study analyzed the hercules beetle which changes color in high humidity due to an incredibly complex three-dimensional carapace surface structure. As the study explains:

The elytra from dry specimens of the hercules beetle, Dynastes hercules appear khaki-green in a dry atmosphere and turn black passively under high humidity levels. New scanning electron images, spectrophotometric measurements and physical modelling are used to unveil the mechanism of this colouration switch. The visible dry-state greenish colouration originates from a widely open porous layer located 3 micro-meters below the cuticle surface. The structure of this layer is three-dimensional, with a network of filamentary strings, arranged in layers parallel to the cuticle surface and stiffening an array of strong cylindrical pillars oriented normal to the surface. Unexpectedly, diffraction plays a significant role in the broadband colouration of the cuticle in the dry state. The backscattering caused by this layer disappears when water infiltrates the structure and weakens the refractive index differences.

According to evolution all of biology arose via random causes such as mutations. No, natural selection didn’t help—it just killed off the bad designs. The hercules beetle and its fantastic optical metamaterial (and everything else in biology) must have arisen by a long, long series of random mutations, which just happened to lead up to marvelous designs.

Religion drives science, and it matters.

Talking Evolution With Evolutionists

2011-12-24T13:18:00.000-08:00

One day while walking to the life science library I was stopped by a cultist who wanted me to join. Having spoken with cultists before, I was able to explain his problems to him. The cult’s beliefs entailed several obvious contradictions, its leaders had well-documented ulterior motives, and so forth. But the fellow was undeterred. He was certain that his cult held the truth, in spite of the obvious problems.

Later I thought about some of the things he said. They revealed even more problems and I wished I had pointed them out. A few weeks later I saw him again and so I engaged him in conversation. Not only were there the problems I pointed out the first time we had spoken, but now I added several more. But again, the fellow was undeterred.

People have a remarkable capacity to hold bizarre beliefs. Don’t misunderstand me, I am not referring to beliefs that are not provable or don’t adhere to some logical formula. I’m referring to beliefs that are downright false. The cultist I spoke with was sure and it is this unjustified certainty that revealed the problem, not the beliefs themselves. Who knows, maybe his cult did hold the truth, but his reasons provided little confidence. Between his assurance and his facts there was a wide chasm.

It is the same with evolution. Evolution is not about gradual change accumulating to form all the species. This, as well as mutations, punctuated equilibrium, natural selection, common descent, and so forth, are sub hypotheses of evolution. Evolutionists are free to disagree on these sub hypotheses and accept or reject them where they see fit. What evolutionists agree on, indeed insist on, is that evolution is a fact. Somehow, some way, all life and all of biology must have arisen naturalistically. We may not know how but this must be a fact, evolutionists are certain of it.

Evolution’s Lakatosian core is certainty—certainty that all of biology arose on its own. You will see evolutionists disagree about many things, but you won’t see them disagree over this core belief. From Richard Dawkins to Ken Miller, and everywhere in between, evolutionists do not question the fact of evolution.

Evolutionists may wax eloquent on their degree of certainty. Is evolution as certain as heliocentrism or the roundness of the earth? Nay, it is as certain as gravity. Indeed it is more certain than gravity. To doubt it would be perverse.

The evolution genre is loaded with such profundities. Measured assessments of the reality of how the science bears on the theory are nowhere to be found. There literally are no evolution texts that admit to the uncertainty. They will admit to ignorance of the details of how evolution occurred, but not that it occurred.

Like the cultist I spoke with, evolutionists are certain even though the facts do not support such certainty. As with the cultist’s beliefs, evolution may or may not be true. It is difficult to know exactly what happened in the distant past. But it is not difficult to know the current state of our knowledge.

We may not know the truth of a matter, but we do know what we know of the matter. These are two entirely different things, and evolution deals with the latter. Evolution is not merely a collection of disparate, sometimes conflicting sub hypotheses of how life arose. Evolution is the claim that the over arching story is compelling. An indisputable idea that must be accepted by all rational thinkers.

But as with the cultist, the chasm between evolution’s confidence and certainty and reality is immense. The problem here with evolution is not minor. We’re not dealing with a few missing blanks. It is not the difference between a fact and a truth, or however else evolutionists want to describe their certainty.

The problem here is that it is not even close. It is not even controversial that the scientific facts of the matter do not support evolution’s claim of certainty. Any objective analysis of the science, unsullied by evolution’s religious mandates, would conclude not only that evolution is not a scientific fact, but that there are non trivial scientific problems with evolution. Evolution is nowhere close to being a fact.

Perhaps evolution is true, and perhaps we will understand this better in the future. But there simply is no getting around the fact of the matter which is that the current state of our knowledge is in complete disagreement with the insistence of evolutionists that evolution is, beyond a shadow of a doubt, a scientific fact.

Evolution skeptics such as myself are often criticized as undermining and attacking science. It is just the opposite. A key tenet of science is the objective evaluation of data and findings and avoiding the influence of dogma. We are simply calling for science to adhere to this. Those evolutionists who point the finger and accuse evolution skeptics of undermining science are, in fact, themselves undermining science.

It is a hypocrisy that has played out over and over, probably throughout all of history. The king, the priest or the magician manipulates the system and then accuses those who point it out of the very crime of which he is guilty.

And so what is the point of all this? The point is that reasoning with an evolutionist is much like reasoning with that cultist. You can present the facts, you can walk through the logic, you can review the experiments, and you can tally up the findings. It doesn’t matter. It never did matter because, ultimately, evolution never was about the science.

Every discussion I have had with evolutionists always ends up the same. It may be fast or it may take awhile, it may be courteous or it may be rude, and it may be subtle or it may be obvious. But at some point the evolutionist must deny the facts of the matter and blame you.

Of course one hopes that seeds of truth are being sown. I’m not saying people cannot escape their irrationality. But do not expect evolutionists to give up their tightly held beliefs easily. You cannot simply present the facts to an evolutionist and expect them to make a rational conclusion. Upon learning of the science an evolutionist does not then respond “Oh, I see, so evolution is not a fact after all.” Don’t expect a rational discourse.

It doesn’t work that way because evolutionists hold to a web of beliefs and forfeiting their certainty of evolution would conflict with too many other religious beliefs they hold dear.

Religion drives science, and it matters.

Evolution professor: The Origin of Life Problem is Not a Problem

2011-12-23T18:33:00.000-08:00

In our previous two posts we discussed an evolution professor who, in one blog post, makes several fundamental but typical mistakes. But his mistakes don’t stop there. The professor also explains why he thinks criticism of the origin of life problem is unfounded. The problem, according to the professor, is that the critics just don’t understand how life originated. Unfortunately, what the professor forgets is neither do evolutionists.

The assumptions used to make the calculations regarding evolution in the first place are suspect (wrong is a better word, fraudulent is the best word because those making these arguments have had it explained to them before). For example, the assumption in these types of calculations is that there were a bunch of chemicals and then, wham, these chemicals came together to form the first cell.

So chemicals did not come together to form the first cell?

I don’t want to get into a discussion about the origin of life in this post,

Because the absurdity of the creation myth would rapidly become apparent. It would be a tremendous miracle—the spontaneous formation of the first cell, and all life thereafter.

Walk into any life science library. See the volumes and volumes of journals and the stacks and stacks of books. All of this subject matter is supposed to have just happened to happen. There just happened to be an Earth and Sun. And there just happened to be land, oceans and yes, chemicals. And these chemicals just happened to come together to form the first cell and everything else in the life sciences. Biochemistry, anatomy, physiology, molecular and cellular biology, millions and millions of species. It all spontaneously formed due to, well, due to nothing. It all just happened to happen.

but I do want to stress that I have never seen the absurd idea that cells just poofed into existence fully formed from scratch

So the first cell did not form from scratch? What, was there something swimming around in that warm little pond before evolution got going?

Of course, no biologist thinks or suggests that the above happens.

Evolutionists believe that their problem of forming a cell, yes from scratch, goes away if you give it some time. A warm little pond or deep sea vent, a few million years, some sort of selection process, and suddenly the problem is tractable. Of course they don’t provide the scientific details of how this mysterious origin of life process is supposed to have actually happened. But they are certain it must have occurred.

But the problem doesn’t go away, not without those details. And those details would be quite remarkable indeed. For selection doesn’t help—it just kills off the loser designs. You still need to construct one of the most complex designs in the universe, one random act at a time.

Evolution Professor: There’s Plenty of Time for Giraffes to Evolve

2011-12-23T09:43:00.000-08:00

In our previous post we discussed an evolution professor who, in one blog post, makes two fundamental mistakes. But his mistakes don’t stop there. The professor also explains why he thinks mathematicians are wrong to think there isn’t sufficient time for evolution, but the professor ends up making their case for them.

When Darwin was developing his theory, the age of the earth was not well understood. Darwin himself advocated a 400 million year or more age for the earth, which he considered to be required for the new species to evolve. This requirement became particularly evident when William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin), only a few years after Darwin had published his book on evolution, argued that the earth could be no older than 100 million years. Thomson later revised that figure downward to as little as 20-40 million years.

The 100 million years that Thomson allowed was not nearly long enough for evolution to work. “Thomson’s views of the recent age of the world,” wrote Darwin, “have been for some time one of my sorest troubles.” As Cherry Lewis of the University of Bristol has explained, “The age of the Earth was hugely important for people like Darwin who needed enormous amounts of time in which evolution could occur. As Thomas Huxley, Darwin’s chief advocate said: ‘Biology takes its time from Geology’.”

Darwin and Huxley worked to overthrow Thomson’s time restriction. Darwin enlisted his son George, a mathematician at Cambridge, to rework Thomson’s calculations. Eventually, around the turn of the century, geology rejected Thomson’s arguments. The usual reason given for this is that Thomson was unaware of radioactivity as a source of thermal energy, though it seems the story is more complicated than this.

In any case, geology soon extended the age of the earth into the billions of years, and evolution’s requirement for long time periods, so it seemed, was fulfilled.

It is now known, however, that evolution has nowhere near the eons of time it requires. Indeed, the time windows available are even less than those allowed by William Thomson, which themselves were unacceptable to the evolutionists. This falsification of evolution’s expectation does not derive from the age of the earth, but rather from the fossil record. We now know that, even with billions of years of earth history, the major events in the fossil record take place in time windows that are no longer than a few tens of millions of years or even less.

The professor recounts the story of Darwin versus Thomson and naively thinks he has another victory for evolution when in fact unbeknownst to him he is revealing yet another problem:

Kelvin ultimately settled on a more narrow range of 20 - 40 million years. Regardless, Kelvin believed this was too short for evolution to explain the diversity of life on Earth. You know what, Charles Darwin concurred. Darwin knew that his theory requires that the Earth to be extremely old. In the first edition of Origin of Species, Darwin argued that the time necessary for erosion to form the Weald in England is at least 300 million years (But we would also need to factor in the time to deposit all the material to be eroded among other things, which brings us to an age of billions of years). However, based on Kelvin’s calculations, Darwin removed these arguments from later editions of Origin of Speices and referred to the problem (or Kelvin) as an ‘odious spectre’ in letters. To be clear here, both scientists had data to back up their claims, but Darwin was quite cautious in his claims.

The interesting point is that Kelvin was flat out wrong. Based on what was known at the time, Kelvin’s approach was defensible. However, this was before we knew about radioactivity. The Earth did cool, but it is not simply a loss of heat issue, as assumed by Kelvin. Radioactive decay generates heat, and there is a lot of radioactive decay within the planet. Kelvin thought the Earth’s core was solid and that all heat transfer was by conduction (wrong on both counts).

By making a number of assumptions, which were defensible at the time, Lord Kelvin mathematically derived an age of the Earth that undercut the Theory of Evolution as well as most of geology. However, data was already in existence that suggested the Earth was much older than the age calculated by Kelvin. As more knowledge was gained, it became clear that Kelvin’s assumptions were invalid and thus his calculation wrong. Turns out the Earth is ~4.5 billion years old, which is plenty of time for geological formations to arise and giraffes to evolve.

But of course this is all wrong. If evolution is true we must believe it performs its uncanny miracles much faster than 4.5 billion years. The creation of life, the origin of fantastically complex cells, the creation of biology’s myriad designs, new species arising, and yes giraffes could not have evolved over billions of years. They could not have evolved even over hundreds of millions of years. It all must have happened much faster, in what are sometimes referred to as evolution’s “Big Bangs” where evolution leaves the equilibrium and for some reason becomes punctuated.

Of course none of this is a problem for evolutionists. As usual, contradictory evidence is handled with just another just-so story. “Oh,” they conclude, “evolution must have occurred rapidly for some reason.” It’s that easy because when you’re certain you’re right, then evidence doesn’t matter.

Religion drives science, and it matters.

Evolution and Poker: Professor Says There are no Scientific Problems With Evolution

2011-12-23T00:30:00.000-08:00

Poker players don’t lose with bad hands, they lose with great hands. I once saw a player dealt a four of a kind while the other player was dealt a full house. Those are the second and third best hands in poker, but the fellow dealing the cards had a royal flush—the highest hand in all of poker. If you have four of a kind or a full house, then you are supremely confident, and by the time those cards were dealt everyone had all their pennies on the table. It was a complete loss for those two players and an illustration of the dangers of a great hand. If you have a bad hand, then you won’t make losing bets. But great hands are susceptible to losing bets.

It was also an illustration of another important principle. For when the cards were laid down for all to see, the two losing players knew something was awry. Four of a kind, a full house and a royal flush all in the same round? And the royal flush just happening to go to the dealer? No way, it must have been rigged.

Imagine a friend calls you over with great exclamation. “Look at this!” he cries, “I just tossed out these Scrabble letters onto the board and look!” What you see are the letters CONSTANTINOPLE laid out in perfect order. “What are the odds?” he asks incredulously. “Yeah, right,” you respond, not willing to play the fool. He obviously arranged the letters and pretended to have thrown them down randomly.

But this principle, of the rigged game, can be subtle. For the four of a kind, full house and royal flush hands have precisely the same probability as any other set of hands. They are just as likely as garbage hands with nothing more than a high card.

Likewise, CONSTANTINOPLE has the same probability as any other set of 14 letters. So why are we suspicious? How do we know it is rigged? As Pierre-Simon Laplace explained so long ago (before Scrabble was invented), we know the game is rigged not because we miscompute the probabilities.

It is true, the great French mathematician explained, that all the possible letter combinations are equiprobable. But we know CONSTANTINOPLE was probably rigged because we intuitively realize that that outcome has a high probability of having been manipulated. Humans are good at evaluating a wide range of possible causes.

Likewise, the three high poker hands were unlikely to have occurred by chance because those are the types of hands that someone would stack the deck to create. The chance hypothesis is unlikely because the non chance hypothesis is so much more likely.

Evolution and poker

So what do these two principles have to do with evolution? The first describes the evolutionist’s predicament. Like the poker players with the four of a kind and full house, evolutionists are convinced. They are supremely confident they have a winning hand. They are certain that evolution is correct.

People sometimes ask me how evolutionists can do what they do. How can evolutionists engage in and promote such absurdity? It is amazing, but please understand, evolutionists are not out to spread atheism or corrupt science. Evolutionists are out to spread and protect the truth—the scientific truth as they understand it. And they are certain they do understand it.

Evolutionists are in a similar predicament as those poor poker players with, what they were certain were, winning hands. And just as those poker players were more than happy to make losing bet after losing bet, so too evolutionists think nothing of making losing arguments for evolution.

For instance, evolutionists claim that all the evidence supports evolution. Amazingly, they say there is no contradictory evidence, no scientific problems to deal with.

When I first heard this argument I was astonished. But when you are certain you are right, then any and all arguments must support evolution.

You can see an example of this claim here where an evolution professor calls some mathematicians dumb***** (while issuing several other profanities) and assures his readers that he is “unaware of any general concerns with the theory of evolution that is not steeped in religion.”

One reason the professor makes this monumental scientific blunder is a fundamental yet typical misunderstanding of our second principle above. While it was obvious to most of us that the poker game was rigged, evolutionists make another one of their losing arguments to get around the problem.

Sure biology may seem improbable but, after all, any outcome has the same probability as any other outcome. Don’t be fooled by outcomes that may seem to be unlikely, they warn. The spontaneous origin of everything is no more improbable than any other outcome. As the professor explains:

Let’s start with a simple probability idea and work our way up. If we get a penny and flip it, the chance of it coming up heads is ½ or 50% (the other possibility being tails of course). The odds of getting heads twice in a row is ¼ (½ x ½) or 25%. Similarly the odds of flipping a coin and having it come up heads and then tails is also ¼. We can take this a little further, the chance of flipping a coin 10 times and having it come up heads each time is 1/1024. 1/1024 is the same as 0.0009765 or 9.77x10^-4 or ~1x10^-3. It’s about 1 time in a 1000. The important thing here is that the odds of getting any specific combination of heads and tails in 10 flips is about 1 in a 1000. However, if you flip a coin 10 times, you will get a specific combination. I just flipped a nickel 10 times and got T(ails), T, H(eads), T, H, T, H, H, T, H. Was the chance of that happening 1 in a 1000? Well, it was before I flipped the nickel the first time, but now that it has happened the chance that it happened is 100% or 1/1. …

Remember when we flipped the coin 10 times above? The odds were ~1/1000 (a 1 followed by 3 zeros) that any specific sequence would come up. Well if we flip that coin 270 times, the odds of it coming up heads every time, or any other specific sequence, is 1/1.9x10^81. If I flip that coin every 15 seconds, it will take me just over an hour to get enough flips to get a sequence of heads and tails. If we calculate the odds of getting that sequence ahead of time, we get a number greater than the number of atoms in the universe! Using the creationist logic, then it was impossible to get the sequence of 270 Heads or Tails we just got.

There you have it. The creationist is wrong again. All of biology isn’t improbable any more than winning a million jackpots. All outcomes are equiprobable so a royal flush, CONSTANTINOPLE, and yes evolution, are not at all unlikely.

Religion drives science, and it matters.

New Book (Doesn’t) Explain How Eyes Evolved; The Bible Versus Evolution; Evolutionists Say “We See”

2011-12-19T00:16:00.000-08:00

Ivan Schwab’s new book on the evolution of vision systems is a vivid reminder of our blindness. Recently we reviewed how minor changes such as viruses mutating and allele frequency dynamics are, according to evolutionists, proof texts of evolution. Now in Schwab’s new book we have an example of how comparisons of various designs, again according to evolutionists, show how evolution occurred. Like the ancient myths, it is difficult to believe that anyone actually believes these things.

Vision Systems and Evolution

As we have discussed here many times vision systems are astonishingly complex and evolutionists have failed to explain how such intricacies could have arisen spontaneously (yes, evolution claims that vision systems, and the entire biological world for that matter, arose spontaneously and when evolutionists protest that they would never say anything so ridiculous they are merely judging themselves).

You can read here, for example, about the photocell’s cellular signal transduction cascade which is initiated by a photon interacting with a light-sensitive chromophore molecule known as retinal. The interaction alters the electron distribution of the retinal molecule, thus making intricate changes to its force field which influences several amino acids of the large, trans-membrane opsin protein to which the chromophore is attached.

Next the opsin causes the activation of hundreds of transducin molecules. These, in turn, cause the activation of cGMP phosphodiesterase (by removing its inhibitory subunit), an enzyme that degrades the cyclic nucleotide, cGMP.

A single photon can result in the activation of hundreds of transducins, leading to the degradation of hundreds of thousands of cGMP molecules. cGMP molecules serve to open non selective ion channels in the membrane, so reduction in cGMP concentration serves to close these channels. This means that millions of sodium ions per second are shut out of the cell, causing a voltage change across the membrane. This hyperpolarization of the cell membrane causes a reduction in the release of neurotransmitter, the chemical that interacts with the nearby nerve cell, in the synaptic region of the cell. This reduction in neurotransmitter release ultimately causes an action potential to arise in the nerve cell (of course we’ve skipped a library of detail).

Needless to say evolutionists have no explanation for how this could have arisen from random mutations and the like. Yet they insist that it did. Evolutionists sometimes point to simpler vision systems, such as the so-called third eye (parietal eye) which is not an image forming eye but rather provides for light sensitivity. Was not such a primitive eye an evolutionary precursor, laying a simpler groundwork for the awesome complexities to follow?

No, as you can read here the third eye’s cellular signal transduction cascade is even more complex. For this system includes two antagonistic light signaling pathways in the same cell. Blue light causes the hyperpolarizing response as described above, but green light causes a depolarizing response.

How is this done? By the inhibition of the cGMP phosphodiesterase enzyme. Specifically, there are two opsins, one that is sensitive to blue light which activates the cGMP phosphodiesterase enzyme, and another that is sensitive to green light which inhibits the cGMP phosphodiesterase enzyme. Darwin’s prediction that primitive systems laid a simpler groundwork failed badly.

Or you can read here about the remarkable hammerhead shark’s binocular vision, here about the bug with bifocals, or here about incredible photocell optical filters that focus the incoming light which one writer called “a masterpiece of biological design.”

You can read hints about the massive signal processing that occurs downstream of the photocell here, or here about some of the various and diverse visions systems that contradict evolution’s common descent expectations.

In fact evolutionists have been forced to say that entire vision systems must have evolved more than once because they are found repeated in distant species. The human and squid, for example, share similar intricate vision system designs even though they come from different initial conditions and different environments. These findings make no sense on evolution.

There is Anableps anableps, a fish with eyes half in and half out of the water. Its eyes are divided into two parts giving it the remarkable ability to look simultaneously above and below the water line. Or again, there is the ancient trilobite. It had eyes that were incredibly complex. One expert called them “an all-time feat of function optimization.”

In fact biology’s vision systems display all manner of high-tech gadgetry and creativity. There are telephoto optics, scanning optics, and mirrors. Not surprisingly, evolution over and over fails to explain how these wonders arose spontaneously. This, it would seem, would be rather uncontroversial. After all, evolutionists have presented no scientific explanations for how their theory could have, against all odds, stumbled upon these incredible designs.

But this is where the story takes a turn for the strange. For evolutionists do claim they have provided such explanations. This may be hard to believe since evolutionists, in fact, don’t have any such explanations. But nonetheless they do make such claims. You can read about one pathetic example here.

Now we have another example in Schwab’s new book which bears the rather heroic title: Evolution’s Witness: How Eyes Evolved. How eyes evolved? Is Schwab really going to explain to us how eyes evolved? Of course he can do no such thing. That would be quite an accomplishment.

What evolutionists do tell us is which design came when, which subsystems and molecules where used and reused where, how the fossils and extant designs are all related, what the evolutionary tree looks like, and so forth. In other words, evolutionists tell us just-so stories about their mythical big-picture evolutionary moves.

And of course, all of this is predicated on the assumption that evolution did, in fact, occur. Meanwhile evolution’s massive scientific contradictions and problems remain. The heavy lifting—explaining scientifically just how such marvels actually arose spontaneously as evolution claims they did—is not surprisingly nowhere to be found. It is like a five-year-old “explaining” how Santa comes down the chimney.

And so we have yet another example of the curious dichotomy between evolutionary claims and reality. The immense abyss between the two reminds us that evolution is more than merely a flawed scientific theory. It is a religiously-driven creation narrative and we wonder if, while evolution’s predictions regarding vision (and everything else for that matter) have consistently failed, how have the Bible’s predictions regarding vision held up?

The Bible Versus Evolution

While evolution’s vision-related predictions have fallen one after the other, the Bible also makes certain vision-related predictions. Interestingly, not only have they held up rather well, but evolutionists themselves have done much of the fulfilling. Let’s have a look.

The Bible’s vision predictions often deal with the related topics of blindness and darkness. For instance, at one point Jesus refers to certain religious leaders as blind guides who “strain out a gnat but swallow a camel.” This fits evolutionary thought very well. Elsewhere Paul speaks of men’s understanding being darkened because of the blindness of their heart.

But the Bible’s vision predictions don’t stop there. For while the Bible speaks of blindness and people in darkness, and of God opening the eyes of the blind and leading people out of darkness, the Bible also speaks of a willful aspect to our blindness.

Isaiah, for instance, discusses the blindness of disobedience. “Blind yourselves and be blind,” he writes. Likewise Jesus explains to Nicodemus that though the light has come into the world, “men loved darkness rather than light.”

And thus Paul explains to Timothy that the time will come when men “will heap up for themselves teachers, and they will turn their ears away from the truth, and be turned aside to fables.”

When Jesus healed a blind man the religious leaders were upset. Jesus suggested they were blind but that the real problem was their certainty amidst their blindness. They denied their blindness and instead said “We see.”

So how do the Bible’s descriptions hold up? Blind guides and straining out a gnat while swallowing a camel? Given the evolutionists many misrepresentations of science in textbooks and popular works, and their focusing on trivial points of consistency while ignoring massive scientific problems, these biblical descriptions fit very well.

And do men love darkness rather than light? Given evolutionists unceasing, unswerving, inexplicable attachment to twisting the science, this too seems quite accurate. They won’t even consider the possibility that their bizarre ideas could be wrong. They seem to be dogmatically attached to scientific lies.

And do men heap up teachers to turn away from the truth and turn to fables instead? Again, a perfect description of evolutionary thought.

And do evolutionists say “We see”? Indeed, for evolutionists their ideas are not merely ideas. They are not merely theories or hypotheses. For evolutionists, evolution must be a fact. They are insistent that they are right. There is no awareness of the incredible scientific absurdity that attends their ideas. No sense of the uncertainty, no shadow of a doubt. The idea that the entire biological world spontaneously arose is held with a mixture of certainty and hubris. Anyone who reasonably doubts is ridiculed, dismissed and blackballed. It isn’t pretty.

Religion drives science, and it matters.

RNA interference Computer Animation Speaks Volumes

2011-12-17T10:10:00.001-08:00

If a picture is worth a thousand words then an animation is worth a thousand books. Biology is often well suited to those who learn through images rather than text and equations. There is less math and more qualitative concepts, compared to some of the other areas of sciences, and these concepts are often best communicated with figures, graphics, and more recently with animations.

In fact the combination of our rapidly advancing (i) knowledge of biology, (ii) computer software and display technology and (iii) internet speed and availability make computer animations such as this one a revolutionary educational tool. Such animations also reveal the dramatic failure of evolution’s expectation that the biological world is a fluke that just happened to happen.

Extrachromosomal Transmission of Information: How Evolution Created Larmarckism

2011-12-15T01:20:00.000-08:00

If you know nothing else about the theory of evolution you probably remember that it is supposed to be driven by natural selection acting on random biological change caused, for instance, by DNA mutations. But new research has found that parents can pass acquired traits to progeny without changing the DNA. Specifically, the research found that immune responses to viruses in worms can be inherited for many generations to come (they checked up to a hundred generations). As the researchers concluded:

These results provide evidence for the transgenerational inheritance of an acquired trait, induced by the exposure of animals to a specific, biologically relevant physiological challenge.

This is of course reminiscent of the pre Darwin theory proposed by Jean Baptiste Larmarck that evolution occurs via traits developing not via random change but in response to need, and then the passing of these traits to later generations. Evolutionists harshly criticized, ridiculed and blackballed Larmarckism in the last century but now even they are finding it difficult to deny the accumulation of evidence.

As usual, evolution will simply evolve to accommodate the contradictory findings. Before they said it was false, now they say evolution did it. Somehow, evolution created the molecular mechanisms not only to respond to viruses, resulting in new traits at the cellular level, but the ability to pass these new traits on to later generations. What was once denied by evolutionists is now yet another feature that evolution somehow created.

Religion drives science, and it matters.

Transformations of Lamarckism: The Next Nightmare for Evolutionists

2011-12-11T15:18:00.001-08:00

Tel Aviv’s Eva Jablonka and Snait Gissis have a new volume out, courtesy of MIT Press, on the resurgence of Lamarckism which is, as Oxford’s Denis Noble notes, long overdue:

This book is long overdue. Lamarck and Lamarckian ideas were not only ignored but actively ridiculed during the second half of the 20th century. As the subtitle of this book indicates, some of the most cogent reasons for reassessing those ideas come from within the citadel of molecular biology itself. A great strength of the book is that it does not seek to reintroduce Lamarckian ideas as they were originally formulated; rather, the Lamarckian perspective is used to assess where the modern synthesis needs extending or even replacing. For any serious student of evolutionary biology, this work will be a bible for many years to come.

It has been a long wait, but evolutionists could no longer suppress the scientific evidence. As Washington University’s Garland Allen explains:

Ever since Darwin and the neo-Darwinians came to dominate the interpretation of evolutionary theory and its history, Lamarck has been ignored, misrepresented and stereotyped. The same was about to happen in the year of Darwin's bicentennial, but thanks to Snait Gissis and Eva Jablonka, Lamarck has finally received the serious attention his work deserves. The editors have assembled a group of world-class scholars – historians, philosophers, and evolutionary developmental biologists – to produce a far more accurate, comprehensive, and exciting portrait of Lamarck as one of the most sophisticated, knowledgeable, and influential naturalists of his day. The series of essays in this volume are an interdisciplinary tour de force.

Nonetheless the evolutionary resistance to the science will not go easily. Look for evolutionists such as PZ Myers to continue screaming “But it’s not Lamarckism!”

Religion drives science and it matters.

Solution to Pop Quiz: Who Believes and Promotes the Fixity of Species Belief?

2011-12-10T09:04:00.001-08:00

Like punctuated equilibrium, Ernst Mayr occasionally sprinkled his work with unintended bits of brilliance. In one spurt, he once told Michael Ruse that “People forget that it is possible to be intensely religious in the entire absence of religious belief.” Indeed, atheists say they are not religious because, after all, they don’t believe in god, and creationists say atheists are religious because, after all, believing in evolution requires faith. But both are wrong.

When atheist PZ Myers says he doesn’t think god would have created this universe or atheist Richard Dawkins says our eye’s backward photocells would never have been designed, they are expressing non scientific, religious beliefs. There is no scientific experiment that demonstrates Myers’ or Dawkins’ convictions. These atheists are “intensely religious in the entire absence of religious belief” in god.

This oft-heard argument that god doesn’t exist because god wouldn’t have created this world is not an argument from atheism. The conclusion is atheism, but the argument is from theism. Ironically, not believing in god usually entails beliefs about god.

Who believes in the fixity of species?

How does this apply to the fixity of species? The fixity of species refers to the religious belief that if god created the species they would be fixed. Populations would not undergo any kind of biological change under the divine plan. This belief that once created, all species remain fixed throughout history is often associated with the eighteenth century Swedish super-scientist Carl von Linne, or Linnaeus. But Linnaeus soften his views and no longer accepted the fixity of species in his later years.

Linnaeus had tremendous influence, but not enough to rid the world of the doctrine of the fixity of species. And so a century later Darwin inherited the view that if god created the species they would be fixed.

This is why those differing bird populations on the Gallapagoes Islands were so significant for Darwin. Surely god would not stoop so low as to create slightly different variants of birds on some remote islands. The great botanist and natural theologian John Ray had made this argument a century earlier and by Darwin’s time the infra dig (beneath god’s dignity) argument was well entrenched.

But on the other hand, if these differing bird populations were different species, then the species were not fixed. And if the species were not fixed, then god must not have created them, because if god did create them, they would be fixed. Therefore those bird species must have evolved.

So while arguing that the species are not fixed, Darwin also argued they would be fixed if god had created them. God didn’t do it, because here’s how god would do it. As Mayr said, it is possible to be intensely religious even when god is removed from the picture.

The tiny differences between the bird species did not suddenly reveal to Darwin how fish could change to amphibians, or how amphibians could change to reptiles, or how reptiles could change to mammals. Rather, the revelation was that the idea of creation was suddenly becoming untenable. The crucible for Darwin was not an abundance of positive evidence for evolution but rather negative evidence against creation.

This has become even more true today. Darwin had no scientific reason to think that variations between bird populations revealed that all life arose spontaneously. And today the evidence even more so rejects such a move. Even evolutionists agree that the massive biological changes their theory requires must have come about by some unknown mechanisms more powerful than the adaptive mechanisms we observe at work in populations.

But such problems are inconsequential, for evolution has been proven. True we don’t know how macro evolution could have occurred, but we know god did not create the species. As Mayr points out, the doctrine of fixity of species was a key barrier to overcome in order if the concept of evolution was to flourish:

Darwin called his great work On the Origin of Species, for he was fully conscious of the fact that the change from one species into another was the most fundamental problem of evolution. The fixed, essentialistic species was the fortress to be stormed and destroyed; once this had been accomplished, evolutionary thinking rushed through the breach like a flood through a break in a dike.

This is why the species barrier, as fuzzy as it is, has always been so important to evolutionists. They do not believe the species are fixed, but they do believe in the fixity of species.

Today’s evolutionists inherit these religious ideas and replay them over and over. In his Toward a New Philosophy of Biology Mayr writes that “evolutionary change is also simply a fact owing to the changes in the content of gene pools from generation to generation.”

What? Changing gene frequencies make the spontaneous origin of all life a fact? This would be laughable if not understood within its historical context. But such statements do make sense once we understand the historical context of the fixity of species doctrine.

Isaac Asimov claimed that color changes in the peppered moth prove evolution. Steve Jones wrote that the changes observed in HIV (the human immunodeficiency virus) contain Darwin’s “entire argument.” According to science writer Jonathan Weiner, the changes in the beaks of birds show us “Darwin’s process in action.”

Likewise Professor Marta Wayne tells us that “Evolution is change in gene frequency” and science writer Emily Willingham defines evolution as “a change in population over time.” Professor Pamela Bjorkman states that a mutating virus is “evolution at work” and that “In the same way, people have evolved, but over a much slower time scale.”

These statements by evolutionists make no sense from a scientific perspective. Evolutionary thought would be absurd in the absence of its historical context. But it is perfectly logical when we understand the underlying metaphysics. Remember, it is possible to be intensely religious in the entire absence of religious belief.

Religion drives science, and it matters.

Independent Intron Insertion: More Evidence for Common Mechanism

2011-12-09T23:11:00.001-08:00

It is perhaps the most celebrated evolutionary evidence from the genomics era. Like a grammar school teacher who knows cheating occurred when he sees identical typos in essays from different students, evolutionists know common descent occurred when they see identical junk DNA (yes we know the junk DNA often seems to be found to be functional, but that’s a different story) in the genomes of different species. In what philosopher Elliott Sober has called Modus Darwin, evolutionists reason that only evolution can account for these so-called shared errors. But is the premise true? Can only evolution account for such observations? (yes we know the evolutionary reasoning is, as usual, not scientific, but that’s a different story).

In fact sometimes these shared errors cannot be shared after all. Like identical typos in essays from students who have never met, sometimes the identical junk DNA could not have originated from a common ancestor even if one believed in the mythical common descent to begin with. In these cases evolutionists agree that lightning did strike twice, such as in this study which found introns at common DNA insertion sites. As one evolutionist put it:

Remarkably, we have found many cases of parallel intron gains at essentially the same sites in independent genotypes. This strongly argues against the common assumption that when two species share introns at the same site, it is always due to inheritance from a common ancestor.

What if common descent had been the only explanation for such similarities in the genomes of different species? That would have been remarkable given the substantial scientific problems with the idea.

More Evidence of Adaptive Mutations: Adaptation by Directed Modification Rather Than Selection, Lamarck N, Darwin 0

2011-12-06T01:27:00.001-08:00

One of the major pillars of evidence claimed for the fact of evolution is the adaptation in populations that we observe. As Ernst Mayr—one of the leading evolutionists in the twentieth century—wrote in his Toward a New Philosophy of Biology, “evolutionary change is also simply a fact owing to the changes in the content of gene pools from generation to generation.” This equating of minor change—even a mere change in gene frequencies within a population—with all of evolution is rampant within evolutionary apologetics. For example in the first 20 seconds of the recent Let’s Talk About Evolution video Professor Marta Wayne tells viewers that “Evolution is change in gene frequency” and science writer Emily Willingham defines evolution as “a change in population over time.” Similarly in this video Professor Pamela Bjorkman states that a mutating virus is “evolution at work” and that “In the same way, people have evolved, but over a much slower time scale.”

But are allele frequency changes and virus mutations tantamount to evolution?

The answer is “no” for several reasons. First, there is no proof that such small-scale change can add up to the massive changes—including everything from molecular machines to body plans—that evolution requires. Evolutionists are fully aware of this and in their “honest moments” (as Stephen Jay Gould once put it) admit this to each other. As we understand them small-scale mechanisms of change, such as random mutations, simply do not provide the degree or type of change needed by evolution.

Furthermore, in the past century another category of evidence has arisen that highlights the failure of this pillar of evolution: The small-scale change mechanisms themselves are highly complex. In other words, if evolution is true then it created incredibly complex cellular and molecular mechanisms so that, yes, evolution could occur.

One example of this are the so-called adaptive mutations. These mutations are not random with respect to need, as evolutionists have insisted, but rather are often the right one for the need at hand. In other words, when faced with a challenging environment populations respond with changes that meet the new challenges.

Whereas evolution requires random changes that ever so slowly are produced by undirected mutations, science reveals just the opposite: rapid change brought about by non random adaptive mutations which meet the current environmental challenge, as one recent paper from Israel demonstrated. The paper first explained that in neo-Darwinism heritable diversity comes from:

neutral and advantageous mutations that occur rarely, spontaneously at random locations, and independently of any selection processes imposed by the environmental conditions.

But biological designs comprise a vast combinatorial space and so:

it is reasonable to hypothesize that existing and rare genetic variation cannot provide an immediate advantageous solution

Indeed. But there is dearth of knowledge of how adaptation occurs, for:

Little information exists on the dynamics of processes that lead to functional biological novelties and the intermediate states of evolving forms.

Their results provide hints, however, for contra evolutionary theory they found heritable adaptation which “must have been induced in individual cells by this environment.” They conclude:

This study, therefore, details a process that is different from the fundamental common view of adaptation. Here adaptation seems not to rely on random and rare genetic variability that accumulated independently from the selection agent. …

Thus, adaptation in our experiments was a property of individual cells rather than a property of the population and the process that led each cell to the adapted state was induced by the challenging environment. In fact, further findings corroborated this striking result. …

Notably, the decline in the adaptive potential over time argues against the existence of an advantageous subpopulation during phase I and supports the notion that adaptation was achieved by cells only after the transition into the challenging environment. …

These adjustments, as we have shown, can be rapidly gained by individual cells and stably propagated for many generations and, thus, should be considered an adaptation that might have a significant role in evolution of regulatory systems. …

cells acquired adaptive mutations (mutations directed at advantageous positions) at a very high rate after the exposure to glucose. …

adaptive mutations might arise as a response to stressful environments and allow such a widespread adaptation of individuals and the rapid adaptation of the whole population. …

Thus, our experiments prove the existence of a cellular mechanism enabling an inherited cellular adaptation that was induced by an unforeseen challenge in many cells simultaneously. …

The implications of such a mechanism are far reaching in diverse areas of biology; …

In other words, these results indicate a built-in response mechanism. The population of cells rapidly and efficiently adjusts to the environmental challenge and these changes are passed on to later generations.

These types of results contradict evolutionary theory and evolutionists have resisted them all along. I once debated an evolution professor who dismissed such evidence and assured the audience it was all false. This is how science works for evolutionists. Theory first, evidence second.

The claim that adaptive change is a proof text for all of evolution is an incredible misrepresentation of the scientific evidence. It is an equivocation on evolution so over the top it is difficult to believe. Indeed, it is astonishing to see evolutionists such as Mayr, Bjorkman, Wayne and the rest make such statements with a straight face.

Religion drives science, and it matters.

Repeated acquisition and loss of complex body form characters: New Evidence for an Old Problem

2011-12-03T03:07:00.001-08:00

It is one of the most celebrated proof texts for evolution and at the same time a good example of what is wrong with the life science’s dominant paradigm. The pentadactyl structure—five digits (four fingers and a thumb for humans) at the end of the limb structure—is found throughout the tetrapods. The activities of this massive group of fauna include flying, grasping, climbing and crawling. Such diverse activities, evolutionists reason, should require diverse limbs. There seems to be no reason why all should need a five digit limb. Why not three digits for some, eight for others, 13 for some others, and so forth? And yet they all are endowed with five digits. And, evolutionists explain, this structure neatly fall into a pattern of common descent. Obviously the pentadactyl structure must be an artefact of common descent—a suboptimal design that was handed down from a common ancestor rather than specifically designed for each species. Darwin canonized this proof with one of his most cited passages:

What can be more curious than that the hand of a man, formed for grasping, that of a mole for digging, the leg of the horse, the paddle of the porpoise, and the wing of the bat, should all be constructed on the same pattern, and should include similar bones, in the same relative positions?

Curious indeed. This example is today a staple in the apologetics literature. Look in any textbook or popular work demonstrating the fact of evolution, and you are likely to see a graphic showing various pentadactyl structures in the tetrapods. Here is how evolutionist Mark Ridley echoes Darwin’s original interpretation in his Evolution textbook:

Other similarities between species are less easily explained by functional needs. The pentadactyl (five-digit) limb of tetrapods is a classic example. … Tetrapods occupy a wide variety of environments, and use their limbs for many differing functions. There is no clear functional or environmental reason why all of them should need a five-digit, rather than a three- or seven- or 12-digit limb. And yet they all do. … The evolutionary explanation of the pentadactyl limb is simply that all the tetrapods have descended from a common ancestor that had a pentadactyl limb and, during evolution, it has turned out to be easier to evolve variations on the five-digit theme, than to recompose the limb structure. If species have descended from common ancestors, homologies make sense; but if all species originated separately, it is difficult to understand why they should share homologous similarities. Without evolution, there is nothing forcing the tetrapods all to have pentadactyl limbs.

Here is how the Public Broadcasting Service evolution site explains the evidence:

The limbs of tetrapods all have the same pattern of bones. Darwin was one of the first to comment that it seems unlikely that this single skeletal structure could be the best one possible for each of the activities it is required to perform in different animals. … If you want to see concrete evidence of evolution, look no further than your hand or your foot. Five fingers, five toes. There's nothing magical about the number, yet five digits at the end of their limbs is a motif that runs through all the animals with four limbs, called tetrapods. … Pentadactyly (having five digits) is, in fact, an accident of evolutionary history.

And here is how evolutionist Douglas Futuyma put it:

If God had equipped very different organisms for similar ways of life, there is no reason why He should not have provided them with identical structures, but in fact the similarities are always superficial.

But as usual, the evolutionary apologetics are less convincing than evolutionists believe. In this case there are four different problems with this evidence and the evolutionary arguments.

Four problems with the evidence

The first problem is that evolution has no scientific explanation for the origin of the pentadactyl structure. Amazingly, evolutionists cannot account for the evolution of the very structure they claim proves their theory.

The second problem is that evolutionists are having it both ways. When they find a biological pattern, such as the pentadactyl structure, they claim it is a sign of evolution’s contingencies. Evolution, they say, can only work with the limited raw materials and designs that are immediately available. It knows not where it goes, and so you have patterns that, while workable, are less than efficient.

But on the other hand, evolutionists also claim ownership of all of biology’s fantastic designs. In fact, evolutionists claim ownership of all of biology, period. That’s right, evolution is supposed to have created everything in the biological world. Walk through any life science library and in the stacks you will see a seemingly endless supply of archived journals covering the seemingly endless list of subjects that comprise the life sciences. All of this is little more than scratching the surface of the biological world. We have learned so much, and yet have so much more to learn.

And according to evolutionists, it all came from evolution. All the DNA, proteins and organelles. All the millions and millions of different species, including all their fantastic and unique designs. All of biology. Though evolutionists do not know how, they are certain these all were the creation of evolution.

Evolution, apparently, is an incredibly imaginative and powerful design and creation tool. It can do it all. And yet, when evolutionists find a pattern, this they say is due to how clumsy their process is. Evolutionists aren’t fooling anyone, they can weave a story for any occasion.

The third problem is that similarities such as the pentadactyl structure in fact do not fit the expected pattern of common descent. In spite of all the textbook propaganda, the empirical evidence is all over the map. There are all kinds of digit patterns, both extant and in the fossil record. As Stephen Jay Gould once admitted, “The conclusion seems inescapable, and an old ‘certainty’ must be starkly reversed.” And as one recent study concluded:

Our phylogenetic results support independent instances of complete limb loss as well as multiple instances of digit and external ear opening loss and re-acquisition. Even more striking, we find strong statistical support for the re-acquisition of a pentadactyl body form from a digit-reduced ancestor. … The results of our study join a nascent body of literature showing strong statistical support for character loss, followed by evolutionary re-acquisition of complex structures associated with a generalized pentadactyl body form.

In other words, morphological patterns in biology, including the pentadactyl structure, do not fit the common descent model. This has evolutionists doing mental gymnastics as limbs and other designs must come and go as needed to make sense of evolution. They are lost, then reevolved, then lost, then whatever. It is all just storytelling.

Finally, the fourth problem is that the argument for why the pentadactyl structure proves evolution is metaphysical. Darwin’s argument, and those before and since are all about evolutionists non scientific premises about how biology should work and be designed. Surely god would never use such a thing as the pentadactyl structure in so many different species.

This, of course, is nothing more than religious rationalism. This silliness opens science up to all manner of argument. Imagine if there were no patterns such as the pentadactyl structure. If the designs were all different and somehow optimized for their respective applications, then evolutionists would point to that as evidence of natural selection choosing the best design. If God created the species, they would argue, wouldn’t we see some pattern? Instead, all we see is adaptation. Why wouldn’t God leave some sign that they were created instead of making the species appear to have evolved by natural processes? Evolution must be true.

It is, in a word, junk science. Religion drives science, and it matters.

Is Martin Mahner an Anti-Realist?

2011-12-02T02:12:00.001-08:00

In his new paper on why science must presuppose metaphysical naturalism (the view that there is no supernatural, but only a materialistic world) Martin Mahner largely ignores questions of completeness and realism. Indeed, completeness goes unmentioned and Mahner’s only mention of the question of realism versus antirealism is in an end note where he dismisses the issue as not too relevant:

… there is an ongoing realism/antirealism debate in philosophy. However, this debate concerns mostly epistemological problems regarding the justification of more detailed realistic claims such as the status of unobservable entities, the truth of scientific theories, etc.

Well perhaps questions of completeness and realism are not what Mahner wants to address in his paper, or perhaps they are just inconvenient. In any case, Mahner is stuck with losing one or the other. As we have discussed before, such as here, here and here, those who mandate method necessarily lose a guarantee of either completeness or realism.

Bacon forfeited completeness and Descartes forfeited realism, but evolutionists will forfeit neither (which is possible only by introducing additional metaphysics which, of course, evolutionists do).

When mandating methodological or metaphysical naturalism, questions of completeness and realism immediately become important. But evolutionists want simply to mandate naturalism without reckoning with the implications. Mahner’s paper, unfortunately, does nothing to remedy this.

East of Durham: The Incredible Story of Human Evolution

2011-12-01T23:10:00.001-08:00

Imagine if Galileo had built his telescope from parts that had been around for centuries, or if the Wright Brothers had built their airplane from parts that were just lying around. As silly as that sounds, this is precisely what evolutionists must conclude about how evolution works. Biology abounds with complexities which even evolutionists admit could not have evolved in a straightforward way. Instead, evolutionists must conclude that the various parts and components, that comprise biology’s complex structures, had already evolved for some other purpose. Then, as luck would have it, those parts just happened to fit together to form a fantastic, new, incredible design. And this mythical process, which evolutionists credulously refer to as preadaptation, must have occurred over and over and over throughout evolutionary history. Some guys have all the luck.

In fact this incredible string of serendipity must extend all the way down to the molecular level. This is because different species have similar genes and proteins, and evolutionists must assume that these molecular similarities originated in a common ancestor. In other words, the proteins had to have been already present before the new species evolved.

Consider, for example, the human and chimpanzee. There is great similarity in most of the protein coding genes in humans and chimps, and evolutionists must assume those genes were already present in the supposed chimp-human common ancestor. So how did humans evolve? Evolutionists must conclude that it was not so much the evolution of new proteins (though that too must have occurred but that’s another incredible story) or the modification of existing proteins (though again that also must have uncannily occurred making for yet another incredible story), but the evolution of when and how many of those proteins are expressed. As one Duke University research team concluded:

The finding that neural adaptation has occurred mainly via noncoding changes is particularly important in view of the remarkable cognitive innovations in the human lineage.

Yes, that is remarkable. It would be as though the parts for the telescope or the airplane had been lying around for eons, just waiting to be used to form a new wonderful design.

Religion drives science, and it matters.

Pop Quiz: Who Believes and Promotes the Fixity of Species Belief?

2011-11-29T16:16:00.001-08:00

Historians will point to the eighteenth century Swedish super-scientist Carl von Linne, or Linnaeus, as a key figure in the history of thought who promoted the religious belief that once created, all species remain fixed throughout history.

That answer gets an F because not only did Linnaeus soften his views and no longer accept the fixity of species in his later years, but the question is not in the past tense. The question is in the present tense. Who believes, not believed, in the fixity of species.

Ah, that’s easy. Creationists, right? Wrong again. Go back and do your homework, or if you must, see the next line where the answer is given backwards:

stsinoitulovE

Yes, it is they who believe in the fixity of species. After all, modern evolutionary thought arose in the highly religious culture of seventeenth and eighteenth century western Europe. It was motivated by, and inherits religious ideas from that day. It is, in fact, stuck fast to its centuries-old metaphysical foundation. Far from the cutting-edge science it purports to be, evolution is little more than today’s ossified remains of long-since discarded religious ideas.

For example, as one of the major pillars of evidence for their theory evolutionists cite the adaptation of organisms that we observe in the laboratory and in the field. It is, according to evolutionists, a powerful proof text for evolution. There is a constant stream of evolutionists insisting that such evidence proves evolution to be a fact.

It is as if they are forever stuck in the nineteenth century, replaying Darwin’s marvel at how differing bird populations “undermine the stability of species.” Like Sisyphus forever pushing the rock up the hill, they are forever pushing the absurd idea that resistance to pesticides and antibiotics in plants and microbes, respectively, make evolution the only possibility because as Darwin believed, if God created the species they would be fixed.

As Ernst Mayr pointed out, the doctrine of fixity of species was a key barrier to overcome if the concept of evolution was to flourish:

Darwin called his great work On the Origin of Species, for he was fully conscious of the fact that the change from one species into another was the most fundamental problem of evolution. The fixed, essentialistic species was the fortress to be stormed and destroyed; once this had been accomplished, evolutionary thinking rushed through the breach like a flood through a break in a dike.

And indeed evolutionary thinking eventually did rush in, on the power of metaphysical arguments such as this one. But these powerful religious motivations don’t just go away. Indeed, they provide the justification and motivation in the face of daunting scientific contradictions. And so to this day, evolutionists continually repeat their mantras from centuries past. Here is a typical example of how, today, the religion has become so ingrained in evolutionary thought. Below the video is the text beginning at the 9 second mark.

[0.09] What we study is how viruses and bacteria and other microbes get inside your body to infect them. And what I wanted to talk to you about today was how evolution is involved in that process, and basically why we think evolution is very important to understand.

So, when you get infected by a virus or a bacterium, there is basically a war going on inside your body, where the virus wants to multiply, or the bacteria wants to multiply, and your immune system wants to keep it back down. Now what happens is that, we as humans have evolved over millennia to actually have specific cells and those cells have particular receptors that will get rid of the virus or kill it or sequester it or some way make it so that it can’t infect you and make you sick.

Now the virus then, is evolving inside our bodies to get around that immune system. And if you look at the genes inside viruses, sometimes they steal long stretches of genes from their host, and other times they have mimics of genes in their host. So basically, viruses have this tremendous chance to evolve inside of people, that is their host, so they can get around an immune system.

So a successful virus would be something like influenza virus, that changes every year. So what it does is it mutates. It makes a lot of different forms of itself. Most of these are completely useless—that is they are defective viruses. But out of the millions and millions of viruses that it makes, one or a few of those will be better, and those will go on and multiply and infect other people.

That is evolution at work.

So basically, the viruses make millions of copies of themselves, most of them are worse. They’re making random mutations, random changes. They don’t know beforehand what’s good or what’s bad. The best ones will win out, and those will go on and infect.

In the same way, people have evolved, but over a much slower time scale. So that they made some changes in their immune system, to keep up with particular viruses and other changes that were actually worse. And the changes that were beneficial gradually win out.

So in a nutshell, that’s an example of evolution, at play, in your body, that goes on all the time.

And so I think we need to understand this, because bacteria in particular are able to mutate to get around antibiotics. It’s another example of evolution. We need to understand this, so that we can develop drugs that will actually get around bacteria’s incredible ability to evolve quickly, to get around the drugs we use today. Thank you.

For many this just proves that evolutionists are liars. Or that they are fools.

But when evolutionists such as Professor Bjorkman make these arguments, they are not consciously lying. Here Professor Bjorkman is smart, knowledgeable and honestly speaking her mind.

So how to explain evolutionists, such as Bjorkman, when they present their evolutionary absurdities with all the earnestness of a five-year-old talking about Santa Claus? It isn’t from ignorance or from deceit.

Religion drives science, and it matters.

Research Sheds Light on How the Brain Responds to Stimulus and Learns

2011-11-29T09:35:00.001-08:00

It’s no surprise that the brain is profoundly complex. We discussed here, here and here that the brain contains hundreds of billions of nerve cells which are connected via hundreds of trillions of synapses. That a single synapse is like a microprocessor (although far more complex of course), with both memory-storage and information-processing functions and thousands of molecular switches. That a single human brain has more switches than all the computers, routers and Internet connections in the world. That evolutionists now admit that the brain’s complexity is beyond anything they’d imagined, almost to the point of being beyond belief. That evolutionists insist it is a fact that the brain evolved, and yet fail miserably to explain how such an incredible event occurred, or even how we could know it to be a fact. It just is, because, ultimately, it boils down to metaphysical claims about what must be true, scientific evidence be damned.

But all of this is, as usual, only one small sliver the evolution’s absurdities. For if the brain itself is complex, consider what it does. For instance, the brain is a fantastic learning machine. As a baby explores its environment it learns, and in this process a massive array of molecular switches and controls are adjusted within the brain.

One research study, for instance, found 12,000 segments of DNA (which as usual evolutionists had thought were mere oddities) that are transcribed in response to environmental stimuli. This is the first step in the brain’s process of responding, adjusting and learning. These DNA segments, known as enhancers, influence gene expression which in turn influences how the brain’s neurons function and communicate with each other.

Presumably learning processes such as this lead to knowledge. But does knowledge lead to wisdom?

Global Warming Quandary Resolved

2011-11-29T00:21:00.000-08:00

In light of last week's release of more emails revealing ulterior motives of climate researchers, we felt a reprint of our reporting of an overlooked breakthrough resolution to the entire quandary was in order. --Ed.

New research out this week has resolved a long-standing, and important, quandary about the causes of global warming. While several models point to anthropogenic CO2 and other greenhouse gases as the leading cause of global warming, the warming trends do not quite match the history of anthropogenic CO2. In fact, shrinking glaciers and other undeniable evidences of warming trace back to about the mid seventeenth century. But this predates the significant rise in anthropogenic CO2 that came in later centuries. Now environmental researchers have solved the puzzle. While CO2 is undoubtedly an important factor in certain warming events, by far the most significant cause is the hot air emitted by evolutionists. In other words, anthropogenic theory rather than anthropogenic industry is the root cause of global warming.

What is particularly convincing about the new research is how precisely the earth's temperature correlates with major discharges of evolutionary hot air. As the figure illustrates, temperature spikes over the past three and a half centuries align perfectly with the history of thought. The correlation is simply too uncannny to doubt. Only the "flat-earth" warming deniers will find a way to explain this away.

In fact just today Canadian researchers recorded a significant warming event, which they were able to localize to a region over central Canada and the northern midwest of the USA. The timing (and location) correlate perfectly with a blog published by evolutionist PZ Myers entitled "The Ubiquity of Exaptation" where Myers pollutes science with a particularly acute hot gaseous emission. In fact one of the researchers, using a new experimental localization algorithm, believes he has traced the emission to a city block where, as it turns out, Myers resides. The researcher believes Myers wrote the blog from his home office.

In that blog Myers made several asanine statements about the evolution myth. In particular Myers emitted seemingly hilarious, but in fact environmentally dangerous, statements about the evolution of the nervous system. These included:

We use variations in these voltages to send electrical signals down the length of our nerves, but they initially evolved as a mechanism to cope with maintaining our salt balance.

I concluded this section by trying to reassure everyone that their brain is something more than just a collection of paramecia swimming about. Although the general properties of the membrane are the same, evolution has also refined and expanded the capabilities of the neuronal membrane: there are many different kinds of ion channels, which we can see by their homology to one another are also products of evolution, and each one is specialized in unique ways to add flexibility to the behavioral repertoire of the cell. The origins of the electrical properties are a byproduct of salt homeostasis, but once that little bit of function is available, selection can amplify and hone the response of the system to get some remarkably sophisticated results.

Once again, the cell simply reuses machinery that evolved for other purposes to carry out these functions.

The Trichoplax genome has been sequenced, and found to contain a surprising number of the proteins used in synaptic signaling…but it doesn't have a brain or any kind of nervous system, and none of its four cell types are neurons. What a mindless slug like Trichoplax uses these proteins for is secretion: it makes digestive enzymes, not neurotransmitters, and sprays them out onto the substrate to dissolve its food. Again, in more derived organisms with nervous systems, they have simply coopted this machinery to use in signaling between neurons.

We also contain a great many possible signals: long- and short-range cues, signals that attract or repel, and also signals that can change gene expression inside the neuron and change its behavior in even more complicated ways. It's still at its core an elaboration of behaviors found in protists and even bacteria; we are looking at amazingly powerful emergent behaviors that arise from simple mechanisms.

You can see how extreme was this incident of evolutionary story telling. But what we once thought were merely hilarious and asanine mythological narratives are now clearly very, very dangerous environmental toxins. The bad news is that evolutionary theory far exceeds anthropogenic CO2 as the leading cause of global warming. The good news is that we now understand the cause.

New Finding: Perhaps Food Comes With Its Own Instructions

2011-11-28T08:17:00.001-08:00

New research from the PRC is lending credence to those nutty health-food advocates who have suspected all along that food is more than your daily intake of carbon-carbon bonds and vitamins and minerals, that oats are better than Cheerios, and that the food chain is far more complex than evolution would have it.

Background

Because evolution was supposed to use mutations in the DNA’s genes, evolutionists focused heavily on the genes. Wasn’t the remaining 98% of the genome pretty much junk anyway? But much to the evolutionist’s surprise DNA is far more complex. As one writer put it:

Few predicted, for example, that sequencing the genome would undermine the primacy of genes by unveiling whole new classes of elements. … Biology's new glimpse at a universe of non-coding DNA — what used to be called 'junk' DNA — has been fascinating and befuddling.

As one evolutionist admitted:

We fooled ourselves into thinking the genome was going to be a transparent blueprint, but it's not.

And another echoed this sentiment:

The more we know, the more we realize there is to know.

An important function of non-coding DNA is regulation. The coding DNA contains the information to construct proteins and the non-coding DNA helps to regulate that construction. For instance, short snippets of transcribed DNA called microRNA (miRNA), about twenty nucleotides long, can halt the protein construction process. These recently discovered regulators are one example of the immense complexity of biology at the molecular level. But there’s more.

New research suggests new role for microRNA

PRC researchers have now shown that our genes are not only regulated by our microRNA, they are also regulated by the microRNA in the food we eat. In other words, food not only contains carbohydrates, proteins, fat, minerals, vitamins and so forth, it also contains information—in the form of these regulatory snippets of miRNA—which regulate our gene production.

There is much to learn, but this could be a hint of a much more complex, cross-species web of information in the biological world. Here’s how one writer summarized the findings:

The finding is obviously very thought-provoking; for instance, it would indicate that in addition to eating "materials" (in the form of carbohydrates, proteins, etc), you are also eating "information" (as different miRNAs from distinct food sources could well bear different consequences on the regulation of host physiology once taken by the host due to potential regulation of different target genes as determined by the "information" contained within the miRNA sequence), thus providing a whole new dimension to "You are what you eat." Furthermore, the potential significances of this finding would be:

1. has significantly expanded the functions of miRNAs;

2. is an extremely intriguing and novel idea that has far-ranging implications for human health and metabolism;

3. shed new light on our understanding of cross-domain (such as animal-plant) interactions, or perhaps even the 'co-evolution', and to open new ways of thinking about regulation of miRNAs, and about the potential roles of exogenous miRNAs such as those from food, plants and insects in prey-predator interactions;

4. provides evidence that plant miRNAs may be the seventh "nutrient" in the food (the six others are: H2O, protein, FFA, carbohydrate, vitamins and real elements);

5. provides a novel mechanism of development of metabolic disorder.

6. provides evidence that plant miRNAs may represent essential functional molecules in Chinese traditional herb medicine,

It is curious that evolution, which evolutionists insist is a fact, is so often surprised by the evidence.

David Coppedge is Guilty (Again)

2011-11-27T22:02:00.001-08:00

Must we sift through the entire sordid affair of David Coppedge yet again? Although we have repeatedly and conclusively proved Coppedge’s guilt (which everyone already knew anyway), some dim-witted judge has now decided that the case has the merit to move forward. Recall that we provided iron-clad proof (and yes, our sources are very reliable) that while in college Mr. Coppedge, then in his Sophomore year, once argued late into the night with his roommate and one other student (from down the hall) about various political issues. Furthermore we proved that Mr. Coppedge was seen entering a bookstore on campus. Our source, who was naturally curious, ascertained that Coppedge browsed several controversial books in the Philosophy section of that bookstore.

Since that time we have learned more, much more. For instance, we now have records indicating that Coppedge has been checking out books from his local public library. One of them was about science.

We had hoped to have an out-of-court settlement that could keep this from getting ugly. We approached a certain individual—a go-between—with our damning evidence. His response, predictably, was that our evidence was too spotty. He missed, most likely on purpose, the entire point. And that point is that our evidence, regardless of how “spotty,” reveals an unmistakable pattern.

And that’s what this is about. Patterns and behaviors. And ulterior motives. Coppedge has demonstrated a clear and obvious pattern, year in and year out, of thinking. Not only that, but he questions things. Of course he was fired and blackballed—that’s what we do with people who think.

We once again stand in full support of the actions of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory which acted in great wisdom in this matter.

Evolutionists Aren’t the Only Ones: More Climate Emails

2011-11-26T19:49:00.001-08:00

Scientists, as Del Ratzsch has pointed out, are people. And qua people, they sometimes have non scientific biases. These biases and motivations are crucial for they guide and restrict the science. Some answers are acceptable and other answers are not acceptable. It is that simple. There are those who are blackballed, and there are those who do the blackballing. It all depends on whether one is interested in truth or in dogma. You know who you are.

And what are these biases and motivations? It’s really quite simple. All you need to do is listen as this week’s new round of emails from climate-change scientists demonstrates yet again.

Once again we see deception, manipulation, misrepresentation and the like, but this time it is from climate researchers. Evolutionists are not the only ones who use and abuse science as a vehicle to advance and enforce their non scientific views.

Religion drives science, and it matters.

Eric Alm: It’s A Plausible Idea

2011-11-26T11:51:00.001-08:00

plau•si•ble /’plôzəbəl/
1. (of an argument or statement) Seeming reasonable or probable.
2. (of a person) Skilled at producing persuasive arguments, esp. ones intended to deceive.

When one thinks of MIT one thinks of engineering and hard sciences. No nonsense academia that doesn’t suffer fools gladly. But now MIT Professor Eric Alm tells us that the spontaneous generation of a super progenitor is “plausible.” That’s an interesting choice of words because, in fact, that is precisely what evolution is not and it is difficult to imagine how Alm could have arrived at such a strange conclusion.

As we have discussed before, whereas Darwin absurdly hoped that cells could develop in a warm little pond somewhere, science had other things to say. Not only is the spontaneous generation of cellular life not plausible, so is the subsequent evolution of the last universal common ancestor (LUCA).

Contra evolution, what science has been indicating for decades is that any such evolutionary LUCA would have had to have been a super progenitor. If evolution is true, then this ancient progenitor of all life must have been extremely complex. As one evolutionist admitted:

We may have underestimated how complex this common ancestor actually was.

That wins the understatement of the year award. Here is how one article describes the origin of the LUCA:

ONCE upon a time, 3 billion years ago, there lived a single organism called LUCA. It was enormous: a mega-organism like none seen since, it filled the planet's oceans before splitting into three and giving birth to the ancestors of all living things on Earth today.

This strange picture is emerging from efforts to pin down the last universal common ancestor - not the first life that emerged on Earth but the life form that gave rise to all others.

The latest results suggest LUCA was the result of early life's fight to survive, attempts at which turned the ocean into a global genetic swap shop for hundreds of millions of years. Cells struggling to survive on their own exchanged useful parts with each other without competition - effectively creating a global mega-organism.

It was around 2.9 billion years ago that LUCA split into the three domains of life: the single-celled bacteria and archaea, and the more complex eukaryotes that gave rise to animals and plants (see timeline). It's hard to know what happened before the split. Hardly any fossil evidence remains from this time, and any genes that date that far back are likely to have mutated beyond recognition.

Unfortunately science will always be vulnerable to such pseudo science. This is because science deals not only with what we do understand, but with what we do not understand as well. Science is constantly exploring and adding to our knowledge, but such explorations take it beyond the realm of the known, and into the realm of the unknown. This will always make it vulnerable to the charlatan.

And so it with sadness that we report that such academic chicanery has infected the venerable Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The evolution of the LUCA is, of course, not plausible. Not by any stretch of the imagination, and scientists are well aware of this.

We need not get philosophical about the concept of plausibility. We all know what it means. A hypothesis is plausible if it is reasonable or probable. A LUCA may have evolved, or a LUCA may not have evolved. But such an event is certainly not plausible according to our current scientific knowledge. We can argue about what happened long ago, but the state of our knowledge and its implications for the evolutionary narrative are quite clear. Which brings us to the second definition of “plausible” that unfortunately is also relevent to evolution.

Religion drives science, and it matters.

Mark Pallen is Half Right (And All Wrong)

2011-11-25T00:49:00.001-08:00

Evolutionist Mark Pallen asks “Is it possible to be a rationalist (a believer in the laws of logic) but not believe in evolution?” Pallen’s answers is “no,” which seems almost correct. Evolution arose from religious rationalism and today dominates rationalist thought. Can you find a rationalist who does not believe in evolution?

Unfortunately the Professor’s thinking is all downhill from there. In fact the parenthetical—where Pallen equates rationalists with believers in the laws of logic—is a dead give away of problems to come. It is true that rationalism draws heavily on logic, but this is hardly a distinctive of rationalism.

While it is good to see evolutionists acknowledge the inherent rationalism within their thinking, they also need to understand what this really means. Pallen later ridicules philosophers in what is all too common in the literature. Evolutionists present their sophomoric reasonings and then take a swipe at those from whom they should be seeking counsel.

Rationalism, empiricism and the Kalman filter

Rationalism is a style of reasoning that emphasizes axioms and preconceptions whereas empiricism focuses on observations. A good analogy is the Kalman filter which combines both a preconceived formula and measured data. Imagine a radar that tracks an aircraft flying overhead. The radar observations are used along with equations of how aircraft fly in the Kalman filter.

And the filter has a knob that controls its behavior. You can tell the filter to follow the data closely and ignore the equations of flight. This is like extreme empiricism. On the other hand you can tell the filter to follow the equations of flight closely and ignore the data. This setting—affectionately known as the “Oblivious Filter”—is like extreme rationalism.

Most scientists operate somewhere in between in the Happy Medium zone where theory and evidence are combined using common sense. Evolutionary thought, on the other hand, is in the Oblivious Filter zone. It doesn’t matter how many predictions are contradicted, evolution must be a fact. Evidence does not affect the fact of evolution.

The mother of all false dichotomies

And so Professor Pallen, like all evolutionists, believes there is only one way to deny the fact of evolution. The only escape is through Berkeley’s eighteenth century trap door that leads into the matrix. All of reality is just inside our heads, or maybe inside some computer somewhere in another reality.

Pallen walks his patient readers through such bizarre notions as though they are the only alternatives to evolution. In the mother of all false dichotomies, either evolution is true or everything must be a dream.

But this is standard evolutionary reasoning. A professor once explained to me that it’s either evolution or else there must be a grand cosmic conspiracy of deception. So this is the evolutionist’s absurd dichotomy: either the world just happened to arise all by itself or the world is a fiction.

Evolution is the result of religious rationalism and it is truly astonishing to see where it leads. Religion drives science and it matters.

Let’s Talk About Evolution: How Religious Insanity Has Corrupted Science

2011-11-24T14:43:00.001-08:00

Think the evolutionary non scientific bluster is limited toa few outspoken blowhards? For those not familiar with the world of evolutionand its deep infection of the life sciences, here is an educational video thatappears to be the evolutionist’s version of whack-a-mole.

If there was any question of what this video is about it isanswered within the first fifteen seconds with multiple pop-ups of evolution’sstaple equivocation:

Evolution is a change in population over time [0.12]

Emily Willingham, Ph.D.
Science writer

Evolution is change in gene frequency [0.14]

Marta Wayne
Professor of Biology, University of Florida

This equivocation comes in many forms, such as the ruse thatobserved changes constitute evolution:

Evolution is not a theory. Evolution is actually anobservable phenomenon that is supported by a significant body of evidence. [0.54]

Jeanne Garbarino
Laboratory of Biochemical Genetics and Metabolism
The Rockefeller University

Then there is the evolution-is-true lie. Do lies count asfallacies? In any case, maybe evolution is true, maybe it isn’t, but what we doknow with absolute certainty is that we don’t know. I can’t tell you what thetruth is about whether or how evolution occurred. But I can tell you the truthabout the current state of our knowledge. Evolutionists say evolution is afact, but the fact is evolution is not a fact. But evolutionists are certain,and therein lies the problem:

It’s the true story of where we came from [4:40]

Sheril Kirshenbaum
Research Associate
Center for International Energy and Environmental Policy
University of Texas-Austin

And of course no compendium of evolutionary’s fallacieswould be complete without Theodosius Dobzhansky’s classic summary of evolution’s metaphysics:

Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light ofevolution. [4.20]

Jenny Ruth Morber, Ph.D.
Former nanoscience researcher, current freelance sciencewriter

Well we could go on and on, but what’s the point? Theevolution lie, with its many distortions, misrepresentations and fallacies hasthoroughly corrupted the life sciences. Religion drives science, and itmatters.

An Open Letter to Ard Louis

2011-10-26T12:28:00.000-07:00

Dear Professor Louis:

You have presented the view that from a theological perspective evolution is not objectionable. You explained, for instance, that we ought not to confuse mechanism with meaning. If the creator used evolution as a creation tool, that need not detract from the meaning of the creation. And you thoughtfully defended Leibniz’s arguments that occasional divine intervention demeans God’s craftsmanship and that God doesn’t do miracles to satisfy the wants of nature, but rather those of grace.

But have you considered what theology has to say about scientific realism? Solomon, for example, wrote that “It is the glory of God to conceal a matter, But the glory of kings is to search out a matter.” Is there not a theological mandate that science ought to adhere to the evidence and data?

I ask the question because evolution is so often at odds with the scientific evidence. For instance, science suggests that the evolution of even a single protein is highly unlikely. One study concluded that the number of evolutionary experiments required to evolve a protein is 10^70 while another study concluded that the maximum number of evolutionary experiments possible is only 10^43. So the number of evolutionary experiments required is 27 orders of magnitude greater than the number of evolutionary experiments possible.

By any reasonable measure a 27 order of magnitude shortfall is at least tantamount to “highly unlikely.” In fact, this estimate is conservative for several reasons. First, these studies were performed not by skeptics but by evolutionists.

Second, these studies were not carefully selected to magnify the problem but on the contrary, are optimistic. The conclusion that the number of evolutionary experiments required to evolve a protein is 10^70 was arrived at using only part of a protein and only part of its function was considered. Also, other pre existing proteins were used in the experiment.

And the conclusion that the number of evolutionary experiments possible is 10^43 was computed by making every assumption as optimistic as possible. The evolutionists computed a range of values, and 10^43 was the upper end of their range. It was computed assuming a four billion year time frame and assuming the preexistence of an earth full of bacteria. The time frame is two to three orders of magnitude too large (proteins must have evolved in a matter of millions, not billions, of years). And bacteria need thousands of, yes, proteins. So even to compute the number of evolutionary experiments available to evolve a protein, it was again necessary to assume the pre existence of proteins.

The evolutionists did provide a more conservative estimate of the number of evolutionary experiments possible, reducing the number from 10^43 to 10^21. This increases the evolutionary shortfall from 27 orders of magnitude to 49 orders of magnitude. But even in this more conservative estimate the evolutionists continued to use the four billion year time frame and the pre existence of bacteria (with their many thousands of pre existing proteins).

Therefore according to today’s science the evolution of even a single protein, by the evolutionist’s own reckoning, is unworkable. This is, of course, one particular example in a consistent trend. Science presents substantial problems with the theory of evolution. Is this not a matter we should search out?

NT Wright Versus Karl Giberson

2011-10-22T01:56:00.000-07:00

NT Wright has cogently argued that evolutionary thinking did not begin in 1859 and Darwin was not an intellectual revolutionary who single-handedly illuminated a new truth. In fact, the evolutionary foundation and framework were already in place “long before Darwin got in a boat and went anywhere.”

Wright is keenly aware that the origins debate and the greater science-religion landscape holds much more than the caricatured positions often presented. In the video below, Wright gives this solemn warning at the 3:04 mark:

Let’s put this thing on a broader canvas and let’s lighten up and have the proper discussion, instead of assuming that we already know, as soon as anyone mentions any scientific evidence for anything, “oh, they’re a Darwinian, they’re a liberal, they’re this that and the other.” Or, when somebody says they believe in God, “Oh, well you must be anti science then.” These are both trivial—actually childish reactions and we need to grow up.

Compare Wright’s wise cautionary words with Karl Giberson’s stereotypical attack on “Evangelicals” from the New York Times op-ed this week.

The rejection of science seems to be part of a politically monolithic red-state fundamentalism, textbook evidence of an unyielding ignorance on the part of the religious.

For Giberson, those who question the metaphysically-laden theory of evolution are guilty of a “rejection of science.” But Giberson sees hope, which in his world means some of those anti-intellectual fundamentalists are coming around to his position:

There are signs of change. Within the evangelical world, tensions have emerged between those who deny secular knowledge, and those who have kept up with it and integrated it with their faith. Almost all evangelical colleges employ faculty members with degrees from major research universities — a conduit for knowledge from the larger world. …

Scholars like Dr. Collins and Mr. Noll, and publications like Books & Culture, Sojourners and The Christian Century, offer an alternative to the self-anointed leaders. They recognize that the Bible does not condemn evolution and says next to nothing about gay marriage. They understand that Christian theology can incorporate Darwin’s insights and flourish in a pluralistic society.

Secular knowledge? For Giberson there is this thing called secular knowledge. It is a neutral, objective source of truth, free of metaphysical influence. It gives us things like “Darwin’s insights.” Then there is religious belief which must accommodate that “secular knowledge.” And of course to question evolution is to “deny secular knowledge.”

Giberson’s caricatures stand in stark contrast to Wright’s plea for more understanding. Ironically the Wright video above was produced by Giberson’s Biologos organization. Perhaps Giberson should watch it.

Gene Expression Evolution: Your Daily Teleology …

2011-10-21T08:12:00.000-07:00

Here is a new paper that claims to show the rate of gene expression evolution in a range of different mammalian species. Of course the paper shows no such thing. What it does show are gene expression rates in extant species. And what they found is that those rates are all over the map. The rates are often similar, but in other cases the rates not only vary between species, they also vary between organs and even chromosomes. As usual, the evolutionists describe the findings using teleological language to cover over what evolution really says:

We show that the rate of gene expression evolution varies among organs, lineages and chromosomes, owing to differences in selective pressures: transcriptome change was slow in nervous tissues and rapid in testes, slower in rodents than in apes and monotremes, and rapid for the X chromosome right after its formation.

Of course there is no such thing as “selective pressure.” This phrase is commonly used to envision an active process that responds to environmental challenges. If natural selection shapes and designs the species according to need, then it sounds more plausible. In reality, all natural selection does is kill off the bad designs.

Although gene expression evolution in mammals was strongly shaped by purifying selection, …

Translation: The evolutionists found that many cases similar genes have similar expression rates.

we identify numerous potentially selectively driven expression switches, which occurred at different rates across lineages and tissues and which probably contributed to the specific organ biology of various mammals.

In other words, the evolutionists also found some similar genes that have significantly different expression rates. So the evolutionists must infer a new kind of evolution. Instead of mutations grinding away which, on rare occasion, provide a slightly better design (in terms of reproduction of course), the new kind of evolution states that the genes and their regulation mechanisms are generally already in place. What changes is their expression rates. So evolution created all these genes and regulation mechanisms, no knowing that it had just created the building blocks for all massive biological complexity. All that was needed was some expression rate changes.

Aside from being unlikely, evolution calls for massive serendipity. As usual, it is presented in teleological terms.

Transcription Factors: More Species-Specific Biology

2011-10-21T01:34:00.000-07:00

Evolutionists say that molecular biology has provided resounding confirmations of the fact of evolution. But actually the new molecular data reveal many contradictions. Far from confirming evolution, molecular biology has revealed yet more problems with the “fact.” For example, we find variations between species that are at odds with evolutionary expectations. One such example is in the transcription factors—proteins that bind to DNA and influence which genes are expressed.

Last year I discussed a study of how transcription factor binding is not conserved between mice and men. Evolutionists were surprised to find that similar transcription factors in human and mouse embryonic stem cells bind in very different DNA locations. In fact, the binding sites are often so-called “lineage-specific,” meaning that the transcription factor binds to a section of DNA that is unique to that species. As one writer explained:

Remarkably, many of these RABS [repeat-associated binding sites] were found in lineage-specific repeat elements that are absent in the comparison species, suggesting that large numbers of binding sites arose more recently in evolution and may have rewired the regulatory architecture in embryonic stem cells on a substantial scale.

Rewired the regulatory architecture on a substantial scale? In other words, evolutionists must believe that although evolution had provided, in a common ancestor to mice and men, perfectly good transcription factors and perfectly good binding sites for those transcription factors to attach to, nonetheless this was all “rewired.”

They call this species-specific or lineage-specific biology, which simply means that evolution’s predictions don’t work. Evolution doesn’t help explain the findings, it is a gratuitous, unparsimonious layer added to the science. Rather then the theory guiding the science and elucidating the findings, it is the science that is contradicting the theory.

Such divergence between transcription factor binding sites even shows up in very similar species, such as different species of yeast. As one paper explains, “most of these sites have diverged across these species, far exceeding the interspecies variation in orthologous genes.” And as usual the evolutionists did not miss a step in reinventing their theory to accommodate the contradictory findings:

Transcription factor binding sites have therefore diverged substantially faster than ortholog content. Thus, gene regulation resulting from transcription factor binding is likely to be a major cause of divergence between related species.

In other words, the unexpected findings between different species become a causal mechanism for the evolutionists. The right mutations just happened to occur in both the genes that code for the transcription factors, and in the DNA to create new binding sites which just happened to drive evolutionary change to fantastic new designs. Saying this is unlikely is putting it kindly.

Another study found “large interspecies differences in transcriptional regulation” between different vertebrates which the evolutionists claimed “provide insight into regulatory evolution” and reveal “the evolutionary dynamics of transcription factor binding.” But of course the findings reveal no such thing. There were no “evolutionary dynamics” revealed by the transcription factor binding differences. That is a multiplied entity based on the dogma that evolution is a fact. Here is how one writer described the findings:

Researchers from Cambridge, Glasgow and Greece have discovered a remarkable amount of plasticity in how transcription factors, the proteins that bind to DNA to control the activation of genes, maintain their function over large evolutionary distances.

The text books tell us that transcription factors recognise the genes that they regulate by binding to short, sequence-specific lengths of DNA upstream or downstream of their target genes. It was widely assumed that, like the sequences of the genes themselves, these transcription factor binding sites would be highly conserved throughout evolution. However, this turns out not to be the case in mammals.

[…]

In all tested species, the transcription factors CEBPA and HNF4A are master regulators of liver-specific genes. By mapping the binding of CEBPA and HNF4A in the genomes of each species and comparing those maps, they found that in most cases neither the site nor the sequence of the transcription factor binding sites is conserved, yet despite this, these transcription factors still manage to regulate the largely conserved gene expression and function of liver tissue.

[…]

"By studying changes in transcription factor binding, we can understand the evolution of gene regulation," said Duncan Odom from Cancer Research UK Cambridge Research Institute and coauthor on the paper.

Once again the evolutionary textbooks are wrong, but no matter, evolution is a fact. Religion drives science and it matters.

New Research Continues to Point to a Super Progenitor

2011-10-19T15:57:00.000-07:00

Everyone knows biology is full of complicated designs, but evolutionists think it arose spontaneously, as a result of the play of natural laws. In other words, it happened to happen. First there was nothing, then there was something, then that something became very complicated. All this just happened to happen.

There are many problems with this evolutionary narrative. One is that we can’t explain how such complexity could have arisen on its own. Another is that if evolution is true, then complexity must have somehow formed early in evolutionary history. In fact, evolutionists sometimes use this fact to dodge the failure of their idea. They say that immense complexities, such as molecular machines and codes, are not really a problem because they occurred so early in evolutionary history. That early history, these evolutionists say, falls under the origin of life (OOL) phase, not evolution proper. So with a wave of the hand, they dismiss major failures of their idea.

But the failure of the evolutionary expectation of simple beginnings will not go away so easily. One such example in the news is the last universal common ancestor (LUCA) to all life. If evolution is true, then this ancient progenitor of all life must have been extremely complex. Here is what I wrote ten years ago in my book Darwin’s God:

[T]he next step was to piece together what the progenitor would have looked like by comparing the genetic differences and similarities of the three lineages. But the task became confusing due to the wide variety of genes between and amongst the three lineages. No clear picture of a simple progenitor emerged. Instead the only solution seemed to be a super progenitor that already had most of the highly complex traits found in each of the three lineages. The super progenitor would have been as complex as modern cells yet would have somehow arisen in a short time.

This story has not changed and recent research continues to point to a mythical “super progenitor.”

Last Universal Common Ancestor More Complex Than Previously Thought

New evidence suggests that LUCA was a sophisticated organism after all, with a complex structure recognizable as a cell, researchers report. Their study appears in the journal Biology Direct.

The study builds on several years of research into a once-overlooked feature of microbial cells, a region with a high concentration of polyphosphate, a type of energy currency in cells. Researchers report that this polyphosphate storage site actually represents the first known universal organelle, a structure once thought to be absent from bacteria and their distantly related microbial cousins, the archaea. This organelle, the evidence indicates, is present in the three domains of life: bacteria, archaea and eukaryotes (plants, animals, fungi, algae and everything else).

The existence of an organelle in bacteria goes against the traditional definition of these organisms, said University of Illinois crop sciences professor Manfredo Seufferheld, who led the study.

"It was a dogma of microbiology that organelles weren't present in bacteria," he said. But in 2003 in a paper in the Journal of Biological Chemistry, Seufferheld and colleagues showed that the polyphosphate storage structure in bacteria (they analyzed an agrobacterium) was physically, chemically and functionally the same as an organelle called an acidocalcisome (uh-SID-oh-KAL-sih-zohm) found in many single-celled eukaryotes.

Their findings, the authors wrote, "suggest that acidocalcisomes arose before the prokaryotic (bacterial) and eukaryotic lineages diverged." The new study suggests that the origins of the organelle are even more ancient.

So even given evolutionary assumptions, this evidence indicates an early organelle and with it, early complexity.

"There are many possible scenarios that could explain this, but the best, the most parsimonious, the most likely would be that you had already the enzyme even before diversification started on Earth," said study co-author Gustavo Caetano-Anollés, a professor of crop sciences and an affiliate of the Institute for Genomic Biology at Illinois. "The protein was there to begin with and was then inherited into all emerging lineages."

But the evolution of even a single protein is astronomically unlikely, even according to evolutionist’s unrealistically optimistic assumptions.

The study lends support to a hypothesis that LUCA may have been more complex even than the simplest organisms alive today, said James Whitfield, a professor of entomology at Illinois and a co-author on the study.

"You can't assume that the whole story of life is just building and assembling things," Whitfield said. "Some have argued that the reason that bacteria are so simple is because they have to live in extreme environments and they have to reproduce extremely quickly. So they may actually be reduced versions of what was there originally. According to this view, they've become streamlined genetically and structurally from what they originally were like. We may have underestimated how complex this common ancestor actually was."

Early complexity is yet another example of evolutionary expectations gone wrong. Religion drives science, and it matters.

Two-Fold Fragile Codons and Amino Acids

2011-10-18T01:03:00.000-07:00

If you read Brian Cusack’s paper (discussed here) you may have wondered why the evolutionists did not distinguish the two-fold fragile codons from the single-fold fragile codons. Perhaps I missed it, but I saw no mention of this distinction. The evolutionists define as “fragile” those codons that can be changed into a STOP codon with a single substitution. They are shaded gray in the table below (from Figure 1 in the paper):

For instance, TCG, which codes for the amino acid serine (Ser), becomes a STOP if the cytosine (C) at the second position is replaced with an adenine (A). As the table shows, there are 18 such codons (shaded in gray).

But of these 18 “fragile” codons, five of them are two-fold fragile. That is, there are two different substitutions that can change the codon into a STOP. The other 13 codons are single-fold fragile in that one and only one substitution can effect the change to a STOP.

The two-fold fragile codons are: TTA, TCA, TAT, TAC and TGG. The first two code for the amino acids leucine (Leu) and serine, respectively. The next two both code for tyrosine (Tyr), and the final one codes for tryptophan (Trp).

This leads to another distinction. The evolutionists also point out that there are six amino acids that are coded for exclusively by fragile codons. They are also shaded in gray in the figure (Tyr, Gln, Lys, Glu, Cys and Trp). These are the “fragile amino acids.”

But Tyr and Trp—both aromatic hydrophobics and the two largest amino acids—are coded for exclusively by two-fold fragile codons. We might call them the “two-fold fragile amino acids.”

The theme of the evolutionists’ paper is that these fragile codons appear less frequently where transcriptional error correction mechanisms are less effective. Fewer fragile codons means there will be fewer erroneous STOP signals in regions where they are more likely to go uncorrected.

All that makes sense, but why didn’t the evolutionists mention the two-fold fragile codons and the amino acids that are coded for exclusively by them? Would they not have expected the correlation with the correction mechanisms to be even stronger? Am I missing something, or could this be yet another case of evolutionary confirmation bias by the authors and reviewers?

Nature: Life is Complicated

2011-10-17T11:24:00.000-07:00

According to the theory of evolution the biological world arose spontaneously. Evolutionists, however, prefer to use teleological language to explain how biology came to be. “Natural selection,” they explain, “has evolved a strategy.” Teleological language is needed to cover over the awkwardness of evolution. For evolutionists have no choice. Inspite of the data, evolutionists must dogmatically insist that they are right. It must be a fact that the most complex designs arose all by themselves. And complex they are. In fact, in spite of having been created by nothing and arising all by themselves, biological designs are too complex for our best scientists. Armies of the world’s smartest researchers using the most powerful supercomputers available still cannot figure out how it all works. As one article from last year explained, “Life is complicated.”

Non-coding DNA is crucial to biology, yet knowing that it is there hasn't made it any easier to understand what it does. "We fooled ourselves into thinking the genome was going to be a transparent blueprint, but it's not," says Mel Greaves, a cell biologist at the Institute of Cancer Research in Sutton, UK.

Instead, as sequencing and other new technologies spew forth data, the complexity of biology has seemed to grow by orders of magnitude.

Complexity growing by orders of magnitude? This is precisely what was not expected.

"It seems like we're climbing a mountain that keeps getting higher and higher," says Jennifer Doudna, a biochemist at the University of California, Berkeley. "The more we know, the more we realize there is to know."

Biologists have seen promises of simplicity before. The regulation of gene expression, for example, seemed more or less solved 50 years ago. In 1961, French biologists François Jacob and Jacques Monod proposed the idea that 'regulator' proteins bind to DNA to control the expression of genes. Five years later, American biochemist Walter Gilbert confirmed this model by discovering the lac repressor protein, which binds to DNA to control lactose metabolism in Escherichia coli bacteria. For the rest of the twentieth century, scientists expanded on the details of the model, but they were confident that they understood the basics. "The crux of regulation," says the 1997 genetics textbook Genes VI (Oxford Univ. Press), "is that a regulator gene codes for a regulator protein that controls transcription by binding to particular site(s) on DNA."

Indeed, for evolutionists all of biology is a fluke. It just happened to arise, so isn’t it simple?

Just one decade of post-genome biology has exploded that view. Biology's new glimpse at a universe of non-coding DNA — what used to be called 'junk' DNA — has been fascinating and befuddling. Researchers from an international collaborative project called the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE) showed that in a selected portion of the genome containing just a few per cent of protein-coding sequence, between 74% and 93% of DNA was transcribed into RNA.

Much non-coding DNA has a regulatory role; small RNAs of different varieties seem to control gene expression at the level of both DNA and RNA transcripts in ways that are still only beginning to become clear. "Just the sheer existence of these exotic regulators suggests that our understanding about the most basic things — such as how a cell turns on and off — is incredibly naive," says Joshua Plotkin, a mathematical biologist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

But wait, did not the non-coding DNA, like everything else, spontaneously arise by itself? How could we be so “incredibly naïve” about all of this?

Even for a single molecule, vast swathes of messy complexity arise. The protein p53, for example, was first discovered in 1979, and despite initially being misjudged as a cancer promoter, it soon gained notoriety as a tumour suppressor — a 'guardian of the genome' that stifles cancer growth by condemning genetically damaged cells to death. Few proteins have been studied more than p53, and it even commands its own meetings. Yet the p53 story has turned out to be immensely more complex than it seemed at first.

In 1990, several labs found that p53 binds directly to DNA to control transcription, supporting the traditional Jacob–Monod model of gene regulation. But as researchers broadened their understanding of gene regulation, they found more facets to p53. Just last year, Japanese researchers reported that p53 helps to process several varieties of small RNA that keep cell growth in check, revealing a mechanism by which the protein exerts its tumour-suppressing power.

Even before that, it was clear that p53 sat at the centre of a dynamic network of protein, chemical and genetic interactions. Researchers now know that p53 binds to thousands of sites in DNA, and some of these sites are thousands of base pairs away from any genes. It influences cell growth, death and structure and DNA repair. It also binds to numerous other proteins, which can modify its activity, and these protein–protein interactions can be tuned by the addition of chemical modifiers, such as phosphates and methyl groups. Through a process known as alternative splicing, p53 can take nine different forms, each of which has its own activities and chemical modifiers. Biologists are now realizing that p53 is also involved in processes beyond cancer, such as fertility and very early embryonic development. In fact, it seems wilfully ignorant to try to understand p53 on its own. Instead, biologists have shifted to studying the p53 network, as depicted in cartoons containing boxes, circles and arrows meant to symbolize its maze of interactions.

Did all of this spontanously arise via random biological change, such as caused by mutations?

"When we started out, the idea was that signalling pathways were fairly simple and linear," says Tony Pawson, a cell biologist at the University of Toronto in Ontario. "Now, we appreciate that the signalling information in cells is organized through networks of information rather than simple discrete pathways. It's infinitely more complex."

Evolution’s predictions routinely turn out to be false. Evolutionists are constantly surprised because their theory is always pointing in the wrong direction.

"In many cases you've got high-throughput projects going on, but much of the biology is still occurring on a small scale," says James Collins, a bioengineer at Boston University in Massachusetts. "We've made the mistake of equating the gathering of information with a corresponding increase in insight and understanding."

A new discipline — systems biology — was supposed to help scientists make sense of the complexity. The hope was that by cataloguing all the interactions in the p53 network, or in a cell, or between a group of cells, then plugging them into a computational model, biologists would glean insights about how biological systems behaved.

In the heady post-genome years, systems biologists started a long list of projects built on this strategy, attempting to model pieces of biology such as the yeast cell, E. coli, the liver and even the 'virtual human'. So far, all these attempts have run up against the same roadblock: there is no way to gather all the relevant data about each interaction included in the model.

In many cases, the models themselves quickly become so complex that they are unlikely to reveal insights about the system, degenerating instead into mazes of interactions that are simply exercises in cataloguing.

No way to gather all the relevant data about each interaction? But according to evolution the creative force behind biology is, well, nothing. So how could there be such mazes of interactions?

In retrospect, it was probably unrealistic to expect that charting out the biological interactions at a systems level would reveal systems-level properties, when many of the mechanisms and principles governing inter-and intracellular behaviour are still a mystery, says Leonid Kruglyak, a geneticist at Princeton University in New Jersey. He draws a comparison to physics: imagine building a particle accelerator such as the Large Hadron Collider without knowing anything about the underlying theories of quantum mechanics, quantum chromodynamics or relativity. "You would have all this stuff in your detector, and you would have no idea how to think about it, because it would involve processes that you didn't understand at all," says Kruglyak. "There is a certain amount of naivety to the idea that for any process — be it biology or weather prediction or anything else — you can simply take very large amounts of data and run a data-mining program and understand what is going on in a generic way."

From where did that “naivety” come, and will they learn from their mistakes? It seems not:

For example, transcription factors encoded in the urchin embryo's genome are first activated by maternal proteins. These embryonic factors, which are active for only a short time, trigger downstream transcription factors that interact in a positive feedback circuit to switch each other on permanently. Like the sea urchin, other organisms from fruitflies to humans organize development into 'modules' of genes, the interactions of which are largely isolated from one another, allowing evolution to tweak each module without compromising the integrity of the whole process. Development, in other words, follows similar rules in different species.

"The fundamental idea that the genomic regulatory system underlies all the events of development of the body plan, and that changes in it probably underlie the evolution of body plans, is a basic principle of biology that we didn't have before," says Davidson. That's a big step forwards from 1963, when Davidson started his first lab. Back then, he says, most theories of development were "manifestly useless".

In other words, the massive biological change change evolution brought about was based on the genomic regulatory system which, of course, evolution had just happened to have already created. That was fortunate.

This article is worth revisiting because the problem with all of this is not merely that mistakes were made. Nor is there anything wrong with a theory that doesn’t work out. This happens all the time in science. The problem is that evolution is driven by theological and philosophical convictions that won’t be overturned by scientific evidence. Religion drives science, and it matters.

Brian Cusack’s Latest: Anti Parsimonious, Teleological, Petitio Principii, Cum Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc and Misrepresentations—Other Than That It’s Perfect

2011-10-16T11:13:00.000-07:00

Or should we say, it is perfect, for creatively finding new ways to cram as many fallacies as possible into a single paper is precisely what “scientific” evolutionism seems to be all about. Cusack’s latest peer-reviewed contribution to the evolution literature, Preventing Dangerous Nonsense: Selection for Robustness to Transcriptional Error in Human Genes, is perfectly typical. But alas, due to the strict page limits of Darwin’s God, we are only able to provide a mere brief overview.

Background

When a gene is used to synthesize a protein, error checking and prevention is performed all along the way. An important and dangerous error is the so-called nonsense error in which the code for an amino acid is erroneously replaced with a stop signal. This causes the protein synthesis process to be halted in mid stream, leaving a half-baked and useless segment of protein. Cell’s have various processes to check for and correct such nonsense errors, but another way around the problem is to avoid the genetic coding that is particularly susceptible to nonsense errors.

Anti parsimonious

The main contribution of Cusack’s paper is its elucidation of how these correction and prevention mechanisms often complement each other nicely. In particular, the error correction mechanisms have their limitations. One of the correction mechanisms usually doesn’t work for genes that are written out in one, single continuous region. And for genes that are divided into several separate regions, that mechanism often doesn’t work for the final region.

It is in these particular regions—where the error correction is more limited—that the prevention is stronger. In these regions, the particular genetic coding that is susceptible to nonsense errors is diminished. It would be like having a spell-checker that cannot check a certain page, but that page doesn’t have any long words to begin with.

This and other examples need nothing more than common sense to understand. Looking at the design of the error correction and prevention mechanisms, it makes perfect sense that where the error correction is less effective, there would be more error prevention. Nonetheless, the evolutionists break every rule of parsimony to impose their evolutionary framework. They multiply entities and construct superfluous causes. From Occam to Einstein we know not to do this, but evolutionists must have their theory. Here are two examples from the paper:

Given the high rate of transcriptional errors in eukaryotes, we hypothesized that natural selection has promoted a dual strategy of “prevention and cure” to alleviate the problem of nonsense transcriptional errors. A prediction of this hypothesis is that [the error correction’s] inefficiency should leave a signature of “transcriptional robustness” in human gene sequences that reduces the frequency of nonsense transcriptional errors.

[…]

Interestingly, one group of genes falls entirely outside of the range of [the error correction’s] surveillance. Replication-dependent histones contain neither introns in their coding sequences nor polyA-tail in their mRNAs. Therefore, histone genes represent a blind-spot for both mammalian [the error correction] pathways. According to our hypothesis histone genes should represent the most transcriptionally robust genes in the mammalian genome since PTC-containing transcripts of their genes will not be recognized and degraded before translation.

Evolution adds nothing to the science here. These are yet more examples of how evolution is a gratuitous explanation, adding nothing but “multiplied entities” as Occam put it. We may as well say, with the Aristotelians, that fire is hot because it has the quality of heat.

Teleological

Evolution adds little to the science beyond gratuitous explanation, and furthermore that explanation is awkward. The theory states that the entire biological world just happened to arise all by itself.

Not surprisingly evolutionists never describe it this way. Nor do they use equally accurate but more detailed explanations, such as that blind mutations just happened to create complex, interdependent designs while natural selection killed off the bad designs. Such accurate explanations of the theory are not used because they make obvious the absurdity of the whole project.

Instead evolutionists craft clever explanations that cast evolution and its natural selection in the active role of a designer. The theory sounds so much more plausible when natural selection responds to a need by creating a new design. And so there is an underlying, latent Lamarckianism running through the evolution genre. Out of one side of their mouth they rail against teleology while from the other they appeal to it over and over. Here are typical examples from the paper:

we hypothesized that natural selection has promoted a dual strategy of “prevention and cure” to alleviate the problem of nonsense transcriptional errors.

[…]

Nonsense errors are potentially highly toxic for the cell, so natural selection has evolved a strategy called Nonsense Mediated Decay (NMD) to “cure” such errors.

[…]

Moreover, these “prevention and cure” strategies are used interchangeably …

Natural selection has promoted a dual strategy to alleviate a problem? Strategies are used interchangeably? Of course evolutionists do not mean any of this to be true. Their teleology is rhetorical. They need it to avoid the literal.

Petitio principii

The evolutionists force-fit the evidence into their theory, and the fit isn’t very good. Cusack’s flawed thesis is that evolution predicts how the error correction and prevention methods complement each other. But as usual the project depends on the pre existence of biology’s wonders. In this case, the evolutionists believe that evolution just happened to create the genetic code, which conveniently just happened to have some stop signals.

Evolution also just happened to create genetic information, including stop signs at the appropriate places, and the incredible molecular machines to read, copy and translate that genetic information, and to stop at the stop signs.

But sometimes errors occurred which inserted stop signs somewhere in the middle of a copy of a gene. Fortunately, evolution just happened to create incredible molecular machinery and mechanisms to check for and correct for such errors. The likelihood of all (or any) of this happening is of course beyond ridiculous. The theory isn’t even wrong.

The only way to avoid evolution’s massive contradictions is simply to assume it is true. Having swallowed such lunacy the evolutionists are now in a position to declare that the new evidence is yet another fulfilled prediction of, yes, evolution. Evolution is true, therefore evolution is true.

Cum hoc ergo propter hoc

A common evolutionary fallacy is to confuse correlation with causation. In this case Cusack and the evolutionists find a good correlation between the correction and prevention mechanisms. Simply put, where the correction is weaker, the prevention is stronger. And so they assume the former is the cause of the latter via the evolutionary process:

We observe that single-exon genes have evolved to become robust to mistranscription, because they show a significant tendency to avoid fragile codons relative to robust codons when compared to multi-exon genes.

[…]

Depletion of fragile codons is due primarily to inactivity of EJC–dependent NMD but also to reduced efficiency of PABP–dependent NMD.

[…]

We show that variable NMD efficiency also leaves its signature in the coding sequences of human genes and in the amino-acid content of the proteins they encode.

When will evolutionists learn that correlation does not imply causation. The answer of course is that they will learn this only when they learn to stop corrupting science with their religious dogma. That may sound harsh, but that is precisely what evolutionists are doing. Their metaphysics mandates evolution to be true. Therefore such correlations must be assumed to be the result of evolutionary causation.

Misrepresentations

No evolutionary treatise would be complete without misrepresentations of the science. If there is any common thread to scientific evolutionism it is the very bizarre interpretations of the scientific evidence which, to put it kindly, amount to misrepresentations. Such misrepresentations run all though the genre, from the popular works on down to the technical papers. Consider these misrepresentations from Cusack’s paper:

In contrast, gene expression errors are not inherited and have tended to be disregarded in evolutionary studies. Here we show how human genes have evolved a mechanism to reduce the occurrence of a specific type of gene expression error—transcriptional errors that create premature STOP codons (so-called “nonsense errors”).

But of course the paper showed no such thing. It did not “show how human genes have evolved a mechanism …” That is an incredibly unlikely, religiously-driven hypothesis that makes little scientific sense. The paper continues:

Nonsense errors are potentially highly toxic for the cell, so natural selection has evolved a strategy called Nonsense Mediated Decay (NMD) to “cure” such errors. However this cure is inefficient. Here we describe how a preventative strategy of “transcriptional robustness” has evolved to decrease the frequency of nonsense errors.

These are yet more blatant misrepresentations of the science. The paper does not “describe how a preventative strategy of ‘transcriptional robustness’ has evolved to decrease the frequency of nonsense errors.” The paper not only did not describe how such a strategy evolved, it did not even show that it evolved.

Religion drives science, and it matters.

Independent Evolution of Complex Designs in Molluscs: Why the Explanations are in Need of Explaining

2011-09-20T09:56:00.000-07:00

To the modern student Aristotle’s physics and cosmology are likely to seem bizarre. His final causes, geocentrism, and sublunar and superlunar realms seem to have no correspondence with reality. But Aristotelianism makes more sense when one understands the historical context of ancient Greek thought. In fact Aristotle’s physics and cosmology describe and explain what we observe in nature. This is attested to by the fact that it was well accepted and influential for a millenium and a half. Eventually, however, as scientific understanding progressed, the Aristotelian explanations became increasingly strained. Aristotelianism became more of a tautology, as whatever was observed was described according to the ancient system. Fire, for example, had the quality of dryness and heat. But is this not simply a tautology? As Descartes put it: “If you find it strange that … I do not use the qualities called ‘heat,’ ‘cold,’ ‘moistness,’ and ‘dryness,’ as do the philosophers, I shall say to you that these qualities appear to me to be themselves in need of explanation.” Aristotelianism failed to explain the physical action causing the effects. Today Darwin’s theory of evolution follows a similar denouement. To modern scientists it seems strange, but Darwin had good reasons for his theories of common descent and evolution. In the final acts, however, evolution is more of a tautology. Like Aristotelianism, evolution is a superfluous explanatory device rather than a value added. The difference is that evolution is running its course over a couple of centuries, rather than a couple of millenia.

Mollusca: A case study

Molluscs are mostly slugs and snails, but they also include larger, more advanced creatures, including the giant squid whose over-sized nerve cells have helped make it possible to study the physics and electrical properties of neurons.

The squids, along with others such as the octopus and cuttlefish make up the brainy side of the phylum and one would think (at least an evolutionist would think) that their more sophisticated central nervous systems would fall into the usual common descent pattern.

New research, however, suggests otherwise. It is a plot line that has played out over and over. Evolutionists arrange the species according to common descent, but when we look under the hood the species don’t cooperate. Contradictory differences in the supposedly closely-related cousins, and contradictory similarities in the supposedly distantly-related neighbors, betray evolutionary expectations.

In this case we now must believe that these advanced central nervous systems evolved independently, not once, but several times. Here is how one report summarized the new findings:

The findings, which rely on advanced statistical analyses, fundamentally rearrange branches on the mollusc family tree. In the traditional tree, snails and slugs (gastropods) are most closely related to octopuses, squid, cuttlefish and nautiluses (cephalopods), which appears to make sense in terms of their nervous systems: both groups have highly centralised nervous systems compared with other molluscs and invertebrates. Snails and slugs have clusters of ganglia – bundles of nerve cells – which, in many species, are fused into a single organ; cephalopods have highly developed central nervous systems that enable them to navigate a maze, use tools, mimic other species, learn from each other and solve complex problems.

But in Kocot's new family tree, snails and slugs sit next to clams, oysters, mussels and scallops (bivalves), which have much simpler nervous systems. The new genetic tree also places cephalopods on one of the earliest branches, meaning they evolved before snails, slugs, clams or oysters.

All this means that gastropods and cephalopods are not as closely related as once thought, so they must have evolved their centralised nervous systems independently, at different times.

That's a remarkable evolutionary feat. "Traditionally, most neuroscientists and biologists think complex structures usually evolve only once," says Kocot's colleague Leonid Moroz of the University of Florida in Gainseville.

"We found that the evolution of the complex brain does not happen in a linear progression. Parallel evolution can achieve similar levels of complexity in different groups. I calculated it happened at least four times."

Once again evolutionary expectations are at odds with reality, and once again the uncooperative empirical data are force fit to the theory. As with Aristotelianism, evolution does not add scientific knowledge. It does not tell us what to look for, and where to look for it. Quite the opposite, it is consistently turning up wrong. And yet the theory simply morphs to encompass the new, uncooperative results. No matter what is found, evolution is assumed to have created it. As one evolution remarked, concerning these new results, “This is more evidence that you can get complexity emerging multiple times.”

If you find it strange that I do not use the explanations of evolution, I shall say to you that these explanations appear to me to be themselves in need of explanation.

Religion drives science, and it matters.

What Michele Bachmann and Charles Darwin (Don’t) Have in Common

2011-09-19T20:41:00.000-07:00

In a recent political debate presidential hopeful Michele Bachmann raised the topic of vaccines. She accused Rick Perry, governor of Texas, of abusing his authority when he imposed vaccine mandates. What does this have to do with Charles Darwin? Darwin was also concerned about vaccines. But the so-called Father of Modern Biology had a different sort of concern. Darwin erroneously worried that vaccines preserved the lives of those who otherwise would have succumbed. “Thus,” warned the Sage of Kent, “the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind.” And that, he ominously concluded:

must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.

The aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy, which was originally acquired as part of the social instincts, but subsequently rendered, in the manner previously indicated, more tender and more widely diffused. Nor could we check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature. The surgeon may harden himself whilst performing an operation, for he knows that he is acting for the good of his patient; but if we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with an overwhelming present evil. Hence we must bear without complaining the undoubtedly bad effects of the weak surviving and propagating their kind; but there appears to be at least one check in steady action, namely the weaker and inferior members of society not marrying so freely as the sound; and this check might be indefinitely increased, though this is more to be hoped for than expected, by the weak in body or mind refraining from marriage.

It is little wonder that fifteen years later Nietzsche proclaimed that “The invalids are the great danger to humanity, not the evil men.” The rest, as they say, is history. Let’s hope it stays that way.

Religion drives science, and it matters.

Rosenberg: Evolution Produces Awareness of Evolution

2011-09-19T12:01:00.000-07:00

One of the amazing things about evolution, aside from spontaneously creating everything, is its creation of conscious automata which in turn figured out that they, and everything else, had evolved. As Duke’s Alex Rosenberg informs New York Times blog readers:

“On the Origin of Species” revealed how physical processes alone produce the illusion of design. Random variation and natural selection are the purely physical source of the beautiful means/ends economy of nature that fools us into seeking its designer. Naturalists have applied this insight to reveal the biological nature of human emotion, perception and cognition, language, moral value, social bonds and political institutions. Naturalistic philosophy has returned the favor, helping psychology, evolutionary anthropology and biology solve their problems by greater conceptual clarity about function, adaptation, Darwinian fitness and individual-versus-group selection.

There you have it. Rosenberg reveals that he is the result of physical processes alone which he then became aware of. And fortunately naturalists have applied this insight to reveal the source of emotion, morality and everything else. That’s just the Stuff of Good Solid Scientific Research.

Infra Dig: What Goes Around Comes Around and Why Evolution is a Fact

2011-09-19T02:53:00.001-07:00

re•li•gion [ri-lij-uhn], noun: A set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the world, especially when considered as the creation of a god or gods.

The view that God should work according to natural laws rather than direct providence has always been attractive to religious believers. These believers prefer a more distant God for many reasons. For instance, is it not obvious that God would not have directly created such an evil world? Instead, God must have created the laws and went away. Like Aristotle’s Prime Mover, God is removed from the evil and not culpable. But there are several other theological traditions that argue just as strongly against divine intervention, and for creation by natural law. One is that the world, especially the lowly things of the world, are beneath God’s dignity.

In the era of modern science the infra dignitatem argument, or infra dig for short, traces at least back to the Cambridge Platonists in the seventeenth century. The idea was that God would not, as the Anglican botanist John Ray put it, “set his own hand as it were to every work, and immediately do all the meanest and trifling’st things himself drudgingly, without making use of any inferior or subordinate Minister.”

The subordinate minister or agent was Plastic Nature which, unlike the Creator, was not infallible or irresistible. Instead, Plastic Nature had to contend with the ineptitude of matter. The results were those “errors and bungles” of nature.

Such gnostic tendencies by no means ceased with the seventeenth century. Indeed, this view seemed to have a divine sanction. After all, to control the world exclusively through natural laws—God’s secondary causes—required an even greater God. In 1794 Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus Darwin wrote this Gnostic-sounding vision of how natural history should be viewed:

The world itself might have been generated, rather than created; that is, it might have been gradually produced from very small beginnings, increasing by the activity of its inherent principles, rather than by a sudden evolution by the whole by the Almighty fiat. What a magnificent idea of the infinite power of the great architect! The Cause of Causes! Parent of Parents! Ens Entium! For if we may compare infinities, it would seem to require a greater infinity of power to cause the causes of effects, than to cause the effects themselves.

A striking example of these gnostic tendencies in Darwin’s time arose when John Millais’ painting Christ in the house of his parents was first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1850. In the painting, the boy Jesus had injured his hand in his father’s carpentry shop. Mother Mary attended to the boy while Joseph continued with his work. Outside the door sheep patiently awaited their future savior. The scene was both symbolic and realistic, with wood scraps lying all about and workers going about their duties.

But the Victorians emphasized God’s wisdom, power and transcendence. Could he really have bruised his hand in a messy carpenter’s shop? The Times complained that the painting was revolting, for its “attempt to associate the holy family with the meanest details of a carpenter’s shop, with no conceivable omission of misery, of dirt, even of disease, all finished with the same loathsome meticulousness, is disgusting.” Blackwood’s Magazine said “We can hardly imagine anything more ugly, graceless and unpleasant,” and Charles Dickens called the painting “mean, odious, revolting and repulsive.”

The gnostics could not believe God became a man for the same reasons they could not believe God directly created the world—they could not envision God involved in a world so fraught with misery. Similarly, just as the Victorians were troubled by Millais’ depiction of the human side of Jesus, they also would have trouble with the idea that God so lowered himself to create the messy and detailed biological world, so full of not only of useless bloodshed but of anomalies and particulars. It was all beneath God’s dignity.

A few years earlier the Reverend Baden Powell had insisted that physical and moral problems had completely separate foundations and should have nothing to do with one another. God’s works and God’s word were separate and moral and physical phenomena were completely independent. He wrote in 1838:

Scientific and revealed truth are of essentially different natures, and if we attempt to combine and unite them, we are attempting to unite things of a kind which cannot be consolidated, and shall infallibly injure both. In a word, in physical science we must keep strictly to physical induction and demonstration; in religious inquiry, to moral proof, but never confound the two together. When we follow observation and inductive reasoning, our inquiries lead us to science. When we obey the authority of the Divine Word, we are not led to science but to faith. The mistake consists in confounding these two distinct objects together; and imagining that we are pursuing science when we introduce the authority of revelation. They cannot be combined without losing the distinctive character of both.

The message here is that religion and science are to be kept separate. God is retained to supply the former, but it would never do to consider him in the latter. So it is not too surprising that in his 1844 book Vestiges, Robert Chambers reissued the infra dig argument:

How can we suppose an immediate exertion of this creative power at one time to produce the zoophytes, another time to add a few marine mollusks, another to bring in one or two crustacea, again to crustaceous fishes, again perfect fishes, and so on to the end. This would surely be to take a very mean view of the Creative Power.

Divine providence could engage in the noble activity of impressing laws upon matter, but not grovel in the muck of nature.

Alfred Wallace agreed. Evolution’s cofounder argued that the universe was self-regulating according to its general laws and in no need of continual supervision and rearrangement of details. “As a matter of feeling and religion,” concluded Wallace, “I hold this to be a far higher conception of the Creator of the Universe than that which may be called the ‘continual interference hypothesis’.”

Darwin, for his part, was keen to the implications of this modern gnosticism. If God was not intimately involved in the world, then was He involved at all? In a letter Darwin challenged his American friend Asa Gray to think this through:

I see a bird which I want for food, take my gun and kill it, I do this designedly. An innocent and good man stands under a tree and is killed by a flash of lightning. Do you believe (and I really should like to hear) that God designedly killed this man? … If you believe so, do you believe that when a swallow snaps up a gnat that God designed that that particular swallow should snap up that particular gnat at that particular instant? I believe that the man and the gnat are in the same predicament. If the death of neither man nor gnat are designed, I see no good reason to believe that their first birth or production should be necessarily designed.

Many argue about whether Darwin believed in God, but Darwin certainly held strongly to the popular beliefs about God. It was reasonable for Darwin to argue that God would not be personally involved in the swallow’s attack on the gnat and then leverage his theological principle to conclude that all of biology arose on its own. Evolution is the right conclusion given a gnostic starting point. God and matter don’t mix, so life wasn’t created. If Archimedes needed only a place to stand to move the world, Darwin needed only a theological ledge.

Not surprisingly Darwin also used gnostic ideas to defend his theory against the problem of complexity. Darwin pointed out that while it is tempting to see God as the master engineer who crafted complex organs such as the eye, this would make God too much like man.

Darwin agreed that the perfection of the eye reminds us of the telescope which resulted from the highest of human intellect. Was it not right to conclude that the eye was also the product of a great intellect? This may seem the obvious answer but Darwin warned against it, for we should not “assume that the Creator works by intellectual powers like those of man.” Better to imagine the eye as the result of natural selection’s perfecting powers rather than having God too much involved in the world.

The Victorians could not believe that the boy Jesus actually labored in his earthly father’s carpentry shop. Likewise, it was reasonable for Darwin to argue that complex organs were not likely shaped by God because that would mean he works as man does.

These Gnostic tendencies remain with us today. Evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould, for example, admiringly recounted the Darwin-Gray correspondences. The problem, according to Gould, is not the religious motivation in Darwin’s supposedly scientific theory, but rather that Darwin’s position can be depressing. Gould wrote a book on how we are supposed to understand this new gnosticism. He believed that science and religion do not overlap and are non-overlapping magisteria.

Likewise Niles Eldredge takes the position that “religion and science are two utterly different domains of human experience” and Bruce Alberts, writing for the National Academy of Sciences, informs us that:

Scientists, like many others, are touched with awe at the order and complexity of nature. Indeed, many scientists are deeply religious. But science and religion occupy two separate realms of human experience. Demanding that they be combined detracts from the glory of each.

Similarly Salman Khan at the Khan Academy explains that an all-powerful God would not design the particular. God, if there is one, would use simple laws to create a complex world. Khan concludes:

That to me is a better design.

And isn’t that all that matters?

These are just a few of the many examples of modern gnosticism within evolutionary thought. God must be disjoint from creation and any attempt to force-fit them together is bound to be awkward. Or again, how is it that God could create the universe but have nothing to do with science? The answer of course is that God did not create the world, at least not directly—the world evolved. The historian’s assessment of gnosticism could just as easily apply to evolution:

The cardinal feature of gnostic thought is the radical dualism that governs the relation of God and world … The deity is absolutely transmundane, its nature alien to that of the universe which it neither created nor governs and to which it is the complete antithesis … the world is the work of lowly powers. [Hans Jonas, quoted in: Philip J. Lee, Against the Protestant Gnostics, p. 16, Oxford University Press, 1987.]

The gnostic’s hope in “lowly powers” was fulfilled in evolution’s natural selection. And the acceptance of evolution, in turn, reinforced gnosticism in modern thought. Darwin gave form to the gnostic’s vision, but that brought with it a movement towards gnosticism. The influence of gnostic thought today is not often acknowledged or understood. It is, according to Harold Bloom, the most common thread of religious thought in America. He calls it the American Religion, and he finds it “pervasive and overwhelming, however it is masked, and even our secularists, indeed even our professed atheists, are more Gnostic than humanist in their ultimate presuppositions.”

It is perhaps one of the great enigmas in religious thought that one can profess to be an agnostic, skeptic, or even atheist regarding belief in God yet still hold strong opinions about God. Evolution may breed skepticism, but its adherents have continued to make religious proclamations. Indeed, those proclamations are really no different than those made by Darwin and his fellow Victorians.

Religion drives science, and it matters.

The Khan Academy Promotes Theological Naturalism

2011-09-18T10:38:00.000-07:00

A friend pointed out that over at the Khan Academy, Salman Khan, while assuring his students he is not taking sides, seems to have been channeling such luminaries as John Ray and Alfred Wallace as he informs them that god would never design or create the particulars of this world. Khan—who has four degrees from MIT and Harvard and is certain that evolution and its natural selection created the entire biological world—assures the viewer that “You can ask any engineer” and they will tell you that simple laws underlying a complex design, as exemplified by the Mandelbrot set, is the better way. Of course non of this comes directly from Ray or Wallace—what this illustrates is not a homologous doctrine, but rather the independent origin and persistence of theological traditions. The infra dignatatum argument appears and reappears in the history of thought not because it derives from a single teacher, but because we like it. Here then, we present the 21st century’s version of this age-old tradition within theological naturalism:

[4:19] A belief in god would not point to a god who—a belief in a universal, all-powerful god, would not point to a god who designs the particular—who designs each particular. And even more, the imperfections we see around us—and especially because we see variation and they’re being selected for—we can’t just focus on the eye, we’d have to focus on viruses and cancers and it would have to speak to a god who is designing one-off every version of every sequence of DNA. Because if someone talks about designing the eye, we know the eye is the by product of DNA, and we know that DNA is a sequence of base pairs, ATGCA, billions and billions of them, and so when we talk about design, we would be talking literally about designing the sequence, and we even know there is some noise in there, that comes from primitive viruses in there deep in our past. So the argument I’m making here is that in order to give credit to the all-powerful, at least to my mind, a system that comes from very simple, elegant and basic ideas—like natural selection and variations; in our DNA we call those mutations, but the laws of physics and chemistry, from those simple and elegant and basic ideas, for complexity to emerge. …

This speaks to a higher form of design, this speaks to a more profound design. …

This idea of the laws of physics and chemistry and natural selection … This is a very profound design, and it speaks to the art of the designer. As opposed to designing each of these entities, one off. And what is even more profound about the design is that it is adaptive. If there is environmental stress, then the other variations survive more frequently. … That to me is a better design.

Religion drives science, and it matters.

He’s Baaaack: Evolution Professor Walks it Back, Then Forward, Then Back, Then …

2011-09-17T12:29:00.000-07:00

When I explained how astronomically unlikely protein evolution is, a professor complained that I had it all wrong. When he saw evolution’s ridiculously long odds he figured I must be assuming that the entire protein sequence space must be randomly sampled to yield functional proteins.

Of course that’s not true and my calculations were, in fact, on the optimistic side for evolution.

Next the professor recommended a paper that would clear it all up by explaining that only a very limited fraction of the protein sequence space actually need be searched.

But of course the paper didn’t help. Even though its assumptions were completely ridiculous (e.g., protein evolution is explained by first assuming the earth is loaded with bacteria which are each chocked full of, yes, proteins), the paper nonetheless proved how unlikely is protein evolution. Even with their ridiculous assumptions, and giving evolution every advantage (e.g., assuming only part of a protein need be evolved, with the other parts already, somehow, evolved), protein evolution is 27 to 49 orders of magnitude from reality. That puts it somewhere between a myth and a fairy tale.

So next the professor explained that protein evolution—even though the subject of massive evolutionary assaults—is actually not part of evolution at all. “Evolutionary theory,” he said, “makes no claims about the origin of life.”

This is a favorite trick of evolutionists. Biology is incredibly complex and defies evolutionary musings, so evolutionists say that incredible complexity actually occurred in the beginning, when life first formed. Evolution proper, they say, took the helm at that point. It is another evolutionary shell game that reveals their desperation.

Next the professor said I was playing a “numbers game.” That was similar to what the paper said:

We hope that our calculation will also rule out any possible use of this big numbers ‘game’ to provide justification for postulating divine intervention.

As usual divine intervention was the target. It must, of course, be ruled out. After all, that’s not scientific and evolution is a fact.

Next the professor said such “numbers games” are futile because there is too much uncertainty:

The frivolity is in his probability calculations. Such calculations depend on such questionable assumptions that they are scientifically useless - though they seem to be useful to anti-evolution apologists.

I pointed out that I was using assumptions from the paper which he had recommended. Why was he now disparaging the assumptions as “questionable” and “scientifically useless”?

Now the professor says that he did not disparage the paper but rather my use of the paper. But all I did was use the results from the paper.

But since I pointed out that those results were ridiculously optimistic, the professor now says we shouldn’t use those results because “probability calculations are only as good as the qualifying assumptions behind them.”

So let’s see, evolutionists provide the results, those results show evolution to be astronomically unlikely, but since the results, as bad as they are, are nonetheless unrealistically optimistic toward evolution, we should just drop the whole thing.

Right.

I’m not sure if this is just the Stuff of Good Solid Scientific Research or if the ball bearings are rolling.

Religion drives science, and it matters.

How the Protein Amyloid State Once was a Good Thing: Evolution’s Lurking Anti-Realism

2011-09-16T18:30:00.000-07:00

If there were the equivalent of a “Most favored nation” status in science, evolution would be granted it. If there was an Emperor of science, evolution would be it. If there was a “Get Out of Jail” card in science, evolution would have it. For evolution is special. It can lack the evidence and still be a fact. It can fail and still be true. It can get it all wrong, and still be right.

It is not uncommon for scientists to use false ideas. The flat earth model, for example, is often used. In that case everyone knows the model is wrong. In other instances the status of the model or theory may not be so obvious. Four centuries ago different cosmological theories competed. Did the cosmos revolve about the earth or the sun? Such radically different models could, both, produce reasonably accurate predictions. So it was well understood that a scientific model could be accurate but not true, and that scientists could develop and use a theory with no claim of realism.

In science there is a long history of using models and theories and have limited or no correspondence with reality. Theories fill the spectrum from realism to anti realism and everything in between. For instance, realism may be intended in one part of a model but not another part.

Scientists know the difference and have no difficulty juggling different ideas with different levels of realism. Scientists don’t become confused and make truth claims for theories that have no basis in reality.

Evolution, on the other hand, is different. Evolutionists routinely devise all manner of mechanisms and processes that have no correspondence with reality while simultaneously making high truth claims.

For instance, evolutionists say that the important, information-bearing, DNA molecule was once not so. Instead, they say it was an RNA world. According to this idea the RNA molecule held and processed the information. There is a wealth of information missing from this story. This is not too surprising since it has no correspondence with reality.

Or again, evolutionists say that there was a time when biological cells exchanged genetic information on a massive level, in sophisticated networks using never-observed processes. Evolution, they say, was more horizontal than vertical. But these processes are far beyond anything actually observed in biology.

Evolutionists also say that there was a time when evolution experimented with different DNA codes. What is observed today, on the other hand, is that the DNA code is robust. New and different codes do not easily evolve.

Evolutionists also say that there was once a time when the amyloid state of proteins was a good thing, which evolution made use of. Did not the self-complementary stickiness of short segments of proteins turn them into useful building blocks?

That is in sharp contrast to what is actually observed. Only a relatively small set of particular proteins stick together normally. Usually protein aggregation is harmful and cells have a range of sophisticated strategies to eliminate any such possibility.

Unlike most theories, evolution is special. It can employ any number of just-so stories which have no basis in reality. Like a good bed-time story, the narrative can take any turn at any time, with no need for justification. For as evolutionists say, their theory is a given.

Religion drives science, and it matters.

What the Science Really Says: The Theory of Evolution Versus the Fact of Evolution or Science Versus Religion

2011-09-16T02:43:00.000-07:00

While evolutionists consistently state that evolution is a fact beyond all reasonable doubt, the empirical evidence consistently states otherwise. One can see examples of this in the scientific journals, where articles assume evolution is true from the beginning, but then also present the scientific evidence which point in the other direction. It is interesting to see this manifestation of science versus religion buried in the depths of research papers. Here is one paper that tries to explain how evolution works, but must admit that “we know little about the fundamental principles of phenotypic variability that permit new phenotypes to arise.”

In other words, our convictions mandate that evolution is true even though after centuries of trying, we can’t force-fit the facts to the theory. But we’ll keep on trying anyway because we have no other choice.

Religion drives science, and it matters.

The Amyloid Threat, Big Numbers Game and Quote Mining: Protein Evolution and How Evolutionists Respond to the Empirical Evidence

2011-09-15T01:37:00.000-07:00

Even by the evolutionist’s own numbers protein evolution has failed by somewhere between 27 to 49 orders of magnitude. And those estimates—which make evolution unquestionably the worst theory in science—are optimistic. They are based not on the evolution of a protein, but only part of a protein. But even worse, those estimates assume, believe it or not, the prior existence of proteins. That’s right, when evolutionists estimated the number of searches evolution could have made for those elusive protein sequences, they assumed billions of bacteria were available to do the job. But to synthesize a protein, bacteria need hundreds of different types of, yes, proteins. Indeed, to be bacteria, they need an army of proteins. So we cannot sneak in billions of bacteria when trying to show that evolution can create proteins. If we are going to argue that X could have evolved, we are not allowed to assume the prior existence of X. Nonetheless the evolutionists did just that, and concluded:

We hope that our calculation will also rule out any possible use of this big numbers ‘game’ to provide justification for postulating divine intervention.

As usual divine intervention is the target and ruling it out is the motivation for the pseudo science. For evolution’s theoretical core, as Lakatos would put it, is not gradualism or selection, but naturalism.

Gradualism and selection are two of the many explanations of how evolution occurred, a topic that is always up for grabs because evolution is so unlikely. But despite its many scientific problems, evolutionists insist that evolution must have occurred. It is a fact, no question about it. Divine intervention is strictly disallowed, for otherwise we would be faced with all those unthinkables. The problem is not with the “divine,” it is with the “intervention.” That’s a no-no. So much for the separation of church and state.

Another problem: Protein aggregation

But science knows none of this. It continues on its inexporable march toward truth. One finding long hypothesized, that further aggravates the problem of protein evolution, is that what seem to be perfectly good proteins, in fact, have a propensity to stick to each other and form fibrils. Like a crystal, multiple copies of a protein can attach and form a growing and dangerous amyloid fibril.

The cell’s solution to this that the sticky patches on proteins, which cause the proteins to aggregate, are conveniently tucked away in the protein’s interior when it folds up. Furthermore, the cell is equipped with a variety of mechanisms to guard against aggregation, and detect and destroy fibrils when they do occur.

All of this simply creates more problems for the evolution narrative. Not only are proteins unlikely to evolve, but even if evolution somehow performs miracle after miracle, it must also ensure those sticky patches are not exposed, and evolution will rapidly need those additional safeguard mechanisms, with the hundreds of, yes, proteins they require.

Reader comments

But evolutionists will have none of this. As usual they are unfazed by empirical evidence. One evolutionist in the know commented:

Cornelius Hunter, 2011, paraphrased (blogpost): "It is too easy for proteins to evolve to bind to each other. Therefore, evolution is impossible."

Michael Behe, 2007, paraphrased (Edge of Evolution): "It is too hard for proteins to evolve to bind to each other. Therefore, evolution is impossible."

That’s funny, and perhaps more tongue-in-cheek than serious, but to be clear the amyloid state is caused by the binding of short, self-complementary protein sequences which have a relatively high propensity to stick to themselves. These self-complementary sequences are fairly common. The quaternary binding surfaces to which Behe refers, on the other hand, are far more elusive and difficult to generate at random.

Another evolutionist continued with the “numbers game” criticism:

The kinds of numbers games that Dr Hunter likes to play may be amusing to some, but they are futile at our current state of ignorance. … To disparage evolution for not being able to offer an explanation for every event in the history of life is a cheap shot, much favored by creationists.

Evolutionists insist that science completely and unequivocally confirms evolution, but when the evidence is presented to them they appeal to our ignorance and future resolution of the problems.

Of course no one knows what the future findings will reveal. That is the nature of science. But when we claim a theory is a fact, we are referring to our current knowledge. Evolutionists cannot claim their idea is a fact, beyond a shadow of a doubt, while simultaneously denying the empirical evidence. The evolutionist later continued:

The frivolity is in his probability calculations. Such calculations depend on such questionable assumptions that they are scientifically useless - though they seem to be useful to anti-evolution apologists.

Actually, while the evolutionist’s assumptions are “questionable,” as discussed above, even these estimates from the evolutionists themselves show how severely the evidence contradicts evolution. The evolutionary shortfall is between 27 orders of magnitude and 49 orders of magnitude, according to the evolutionist’s own numbers. So these probabilities do not come from me, they come from evolutionists. In fact, this same evolutionist had once recommended the paper which he now disparages. So what an evolutionist writes is good science. But when repeated by a skeptic, it becomes a frivolous “numbers game.”

Another evolutionist denied that contrary evidence is important:

Saying that something is unlikely really doesn't mean anything on it's own. A hypothesis can be extremely unlikely and still be correct. This is a point that Cornelius simply refuses to understand.

Actually I agree with this point. My point is not that evolution is false, as this evolutionist seems to think. The problem is not so much with the idea of evolution, which is empirically unlikely, but with the evolutionist’s insistence that it is a fact.

As I have explained many times, this “fact” claim is an epistemological claim. It is a claim about the state of our knowledge. I do not know whether evolution occurred or not. But I do know that it is not a fact. The protein evolution evidence discussed above is one example of why it is not a fact. So contrary to this evolutionist’s claim, saying that something (such as evolution) is unlikely really does mean something. It means it is not a fact.

Another evolutionist said that I was ignoring an obvious solution to the problem:

[T]hat's why so many of us have problems with CH's lack of honesty. The paper CH continually cites shows nothing of the sort. It says the protein couldn't evolve in that time frame by adaptive walking only. But then the paper goes on to add that adaptive walking isn't the only mechanism at work, that there are other known mechanisms such as homologous recombination that greatly shorten the timeline. So there's no huge time problem.

CH loves to quote-mine the first part of the summary but always forgets to include the later explanation.

Here is the quote this evolutionist refers to:

Such a huge search is impractical and implies that evolution of the wild-type phage must have involved not only random substitutions but also other mechanisms, such as homologous recombination.

I have discussed this several times, such as here and here. Homologous recombination is a complex genetic mechanism assisted by, yes, finely-tuned proteins. As with the bacteria example above, it is circular to recruit such a mechanism for the initial evolution of proteins—for no such mechanism is likely to have existed.

And even if homologous recombination could somehow have been in play, it wouldn’t help anyway. For while this is a clever mechanism for the swapping of nature’s protein modules, it does not help when used with sequences that are nowhere close to solving the problem. Jumping from one local peak in sequence space to another doesn’t improve the odds in finding the astronomical, one-in-10^70, longshot.

Finally, an evolutionist attacked a common strawman:

The "amyloid threat" that you mention poses a challenge to science only if you assume that the functional state of a protein must be its most thermodynamically stable state. But this is not a valid assumption since evolution does not aim for the all-time best possible protein structure in terms of stability but one that is stable enough to perform the intended function.

It is true that the “amyloid threat,” as he puts it, poses no threat to science. I never made such a claim. It does pose yet another problem, however, for evolution. And none of this assumes that the functional state of a protein must be its most thermodynamically stable state. Indeed, it may not be for many proteins, but that is a separate issue. He continued:

The error in your thinking is a common one, that of assuming that evolution must somehow aim toward an ideal situation (in this case thermodynamically most stable structure). The reality is that evolution can only work on what already exists, which often is far from being the best possible set of solutions.

Except that I made no such assumption.

Evolution, even with extremely optimistic assumptions, is easily the worst scientific theory. One can find theories that may be unlikely, but evolution’s shortfall, of 27 orders of magnitude (and that is assuming a biosphere teeming with life already exists), is extreme.

That does not mean future findings won’t somehow reverse our current knowledge. Nor does it mean that our current knowledge falsifies evolution. Though most scientists would drop a theory with such astronomically unlikely probabilities, low probability—even incredibly low probability—cannot insure that an idea is false.

What all this does tell us is that evolution is not a fact. It is not beyond all shadow of a doubt. But this is what evolutionists claim. And when presented with the science, you can see above how they react.

Religion drives science, and it matters.

The Amylome: More Constraints on Protein Design and Evolution

2011-09-12T11:21:00.000-07:00

According to evolutionists scientific problems don’t count for much. They believe evolution is a fact that science will confirm. Scientific problems with evolution, therefore, are more indicative of gaps in our knowledge rather than any fault of their convictions. Hence they view scientific critiques as based on gaps or ignorance, rather than any direct evidence against evolution. This is a good example of how the religion that drives evolutionary thought harms science. In this case evolutionists make science vulnerable to just-so stories. If scientific problems don’t matter then anything goes. In fact, there are substantial empirical problems with evolution. Not only have most of evolution’s fundamental predictions failed, the science shows the idea to be highly unlikely. Consider, for example, the area of protein evolution where recent findings make the theory even more unlikely.

Review: Not enough evolutionary experiments possible

Unlike most of the evolution narrative which appeals to speculative hypotheses about the distant past that cannot be tested, protein evolution is more amenable to scientific experimentation. For instance, in one case evolutionists concluded that the number of evolutionary experiments required to evolve a protein is 10^70 (a one with 70 zeros following it).

Yet elsewhere evolutionists computed that the maximum number of evolutionary experiments possible is only 10^43. So the number of evolutionary experiments required is 27 orders of magnitude greater than the number of evolutionary experiments possible.

Furthermore, both these estimates are optimistic. The number of evolutionary experiments required was estimated using only part of a protein and only part of its function was considered.

And the number of evolutionary experiments possible was estimated assuming a four billion year time frame and assuming the preexistence of an earth full of bacteria. The time frame is two to three orders of magnitude too large (proteins come early, not late in the history of life). And bacteria need thousands of, yes, proteins. You can’t use bacteria to explain how proteins first evolved when the bacteria themselves require an army of proteins.

The evolutionists did provide a more conservative estimate of the number of evolutionary experiments possible, reducing the number from 10^43 to 10^21. This increases the evolutionary shortfall from 27 orders of magnitude to 49 orders of magnitude. But even in this more conservative estimate the evolutionists continued to use the four billion year time frame and the pre existence of bacteria (with their many thousands of pre existing proteins).

Evolution, even by the evolutionist’s own reckoning, is unworkable. The theory fails by a degree that is incomparable in science. Scientific theories often go wrong, but not by 27 to 49 orders of magnitude. And that is conservative. The problem is too complicated for precise estimates, but the evolutionary shortfall is probably in the hundreds of orders of magnitude.

Another problem: Protein aggregation

Even if evolution could somehow create proteins, another problem that awaits is the propensity of proteins to stick to each other and form fibrils. As one researcher explained, “The amyloid state is more like the default state of a protein, and in the absence of specific protective mechanisms, many of our proteins could fall into it.”

The problem is that short protein segments of say half a dozen amino acids can be self-complementary and sticky. If these sticky patches are on the exterior of a protein, then multiple copies of the protein can attach and form a growing and dangerous amyloid fibril.

Not surprisingly the cell has several mechanisms to protect against protein fibrillation. The sticky patches may be particularly exposed when proteins are initially synthesized and folding. So other molecules, such as the so-called chaperone proteins, help to ensure proteins fold correctly and avoid the amyloid state. Other cellular mechanisms recognize and destroy amyloids that do form, and proteins that are particularly susceptible may be sequestered in their own compartments. In all there are hundreds of genes that help to protect against the amyloid threat.

Beyond these protective mechanisms, the proteins themselves tend to have their sticky patches safely hidden away in the protein interior. As one evolutionist hypothesized, “Most proteins have evolved to fold in a way that effectively conceals their amyloid-prone segments.”

If that is true, then it is yet another hurdle for evolution. Not only is there the conservative estimate of a 27 to 49 orders of magnitude shortfall just for evolution to create a protein, but now we have the problem of avoiding the amyloid threat. It is not good enough for the protein merely to fold and function. Its sticky patches need to be buried in the interior. And then the cell needs those hundreds of genes for all the additional protective mechanisms.

The scientific problems with evolution do count for those not committed a priori. But religion drives science, and it matters.

They’ll Always Blame it on You: Response to Comments

2011-09-11T17:07:00.000-07:00

It’s the oldest trick in the world. Tell your lies and then blame it on the other guy. After centuries (millennia actually if you care to go back that far) of proclaiming religious truths and mandating their pseudo science, evolutionists blame it on you.

They insist the world must have spontaneously arisen because, after all, “Odd arrangements and funny solutions are the proof of evolution—paths that a sensible God would never tread.” They can’t provide the details, but they’re absolutely certain evolution is a fact. And if you doubt any of this—if you point out the sham—then you get the blame.

Here is a typical response from an evolutionist. When I explained the evidence of DNA repair, the reader blamed me:

I share Dr Hunter's awe at the beauty of biology as science has been revealing it. I don't share his presupposition that the origin of life or its subsequent history are dependent on an imaginary supernatural creator.

I am also in awe at the scale of the Universe as science has been revealing it. I don't share his religiously inspired presupposition that the scale of the Universe necessarily required supernatural creation.

Burn me at the stake.

So after constructing a religious theory based on centuries of theological dogma and ruining the careers of those who dare to question the pseudo science, evolutionists turn it around and point the finger at the dissenters. Those who question evolution, they must be the ones with the religious presuppositions. They are the ones who persecute.

I couldn’t care less if the evolutionist’s silly ideas are true or not. Given the evidence it would be remarkable if evolution is anywhere close to the mark. But there is some evidence for evolution, and perhaps its many problems will be resolved in the future. If the evidence shifts to support the idea, that’s fine by me. For the idea of evolution is not the problem. The problem is the evolutionist’s misrepresentation that evolution is a fact.

From the misrepresentations of the science, to the bogus truth claims, to the blackballing, to the legal canards, evolutionists have perpetrated not one long argument, but one long misrepresentation. It is a sordid tale that even Hans Christian Andersen could never have imagined.

Religion drives science and it matters.

DNA Repair and the Choices We All Must Make

2011-09-11T08:07:00.000-07:00

When you repair a broken pipe, shattered window or cracked sidewalk, you first remove the broken pieces and establish a starting point. Likewise when a break occurs in DNA, the automatic repair machines must first remove the broken, dangling molecules and establish a starting point. It is another fantastic capability of the cell’s DNA repair kit.

Your genome is under constant attack. Radiation and carcinogens from the outside and even the cell’s own chemicals can damage and break the flimsy DNA molecule. When only one of the strands of the double helix breaks, the repair job can take advantage of the complementary strand. Just as DNA is replicated by using one strand as a template, so too the repair job can rebuild the broken DNA by using the unbroken, complementary strand.

But when both DNA strands break the repair job is much more difficult. Like a bridge that has lost a section in an earthquake, you now have two DNA helices floating freely which need to be rejoined. And like the bridge which has broken rebar and chunks of cement dangling off the edge which need to be cleared, the DNA helices have pieces of broken nucleotides which need to be removed.

A repair job begins by cleaning away the damage. And so the proteins that repair DNA breaks begin by cleaning up the damaged site. They first remove the pieces of the broken nucleotides. New research is showing that the protein that so efficiently searches and identifies DNA breaks also performs this clean up job.

This research adds to the other wonders of the cell’s DNA repair kit, such as discussed here, here and here, which make no sense on evolution. The problem is DNA (and RNA) repair is at once complex and necessary. And so we must imagine that evolution created such capabilities very early in the history of life.

And imagine they do. Evolutionists imagine a gradual build up of capability, or they imagine early proteins that were far more versatile. These ancient proteins handled many tasks and, as luck would have it, RNA and DNA repair was one of them.

But there is no avoiding the fact that evolution fails to provide a plausible explanation for how random mutations just happened to create fantastic machines. In this case—as is often the case—the problem is aggravated by the fact that the astonishing complexity had to arise fast and early in the history of life. In fact, in this case, evolution must have been astonishingly fast since most life forms that we know of require these repair kits.

It is not that these DNA repair kits, or the myriad other empirical evidences from biology, by themselves falsify evolution. Such a feat is elusive given evolution’s low specificity and high malleability. Indeed, natural selection has produced a modern creation narrative—the theory of evolution—which is as hardy as any virus. But the narrative does not comport with reality.

Evolution is required to satisfy our metaphysics. Even the mere questioning of evolution immediately raises the specter of those unthinkables. Evolution must be true.

But on the physical evidence, evolution makes no sense. There may be test tubes and Bunsen burners in the laboratories, but believe me, this is all about metaphysics.

Each of us must make a choice and our decision has consequences. We can follow the evidence, or we can follow the dogma. Evolutionists have made their choice. Religion drives science, and it matters.

More Insertion Site Preferences: A Reminder of Evolutionists Having it both Ways

2011-09-08T16:30:00.000-07:00

New research is showing that P transposable elements have some interesting insertion site hotspots. Specifically, in the fly genome these transposons often show up in the promoter region of a few hundred seemingly unrelated genes. One common theme, however, is that many of the P element target sites serve as starting points for the DNA replication process that creates a duplicate copy of the genome prior to cell division. So there is a correlation, in this case, between the transposon insertion site preference and DNA replication. This finding has implications for how the P elements spread through a population. And it is yet another indication of, in contrast to evolution’s it’s-all-just-a-random-fluke view, how much really goes on under the hood. But this new twist on insertion site preferences also reminds us of evolution’s pretzel logic.

One way evolutionists try to avoid the many problems with their theory is to compare evolution with an alternative. Elliott Sober explains this in his book Evidence and Evolution, and you can see examples here, here and here.

The idea is to show how much more likely common descent is than the alternative. But in making this comparison, what evidence does Sober and the evolutionists use, and what alternative do they use?

Would you be shocked to learn that Sober and the evolutionists are highly selective? They avoid the many evidences that contradict common ancestry. And they use a strawman alternative which, for example, has no common mechanisms.

Not surprisingly the verdict of this kangaroo court is that common descent is a no-brainer—it is beyond a shadow of a doubt.

When challenged evolutionists say their strawman allows for no common mechanisms because—notwithstanding findings such as the transposon insertion site preferences discussed above—we don’t have evidence for common mechanisms on such a massive level.

True enough but if evidence of mechanisms were required then common ancestry would have been ruled out as well. In fact, evolutionists repeatedly explain that their proof does not entail explanations of exactly how common ancestry is supposed to have worked. The details, for the purposes of the proof, are not required. Regardless of the mechanics, evolutionists say common descent can be evaluated against the evidence, and compared to the alternative. But when it comes to hypothesizing an alternative, only known, fully established, mechanisms are allowed.

It is another example of the evolutionist’s pretzel logic. In order to prove common descent he has it both ways. The many contradictions to common descent are ignored, and a strawman alternative serves as the foil.

Religion drives science, and it matters.

Does Huntsman believe in evolution?

2011-09-08T00:39:00.000-07:00

Once again politicians are discussing evolution, this time at the Republican presidential debate Wednesday night held at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Los Angeles exurb Simi Valley. The comments, made by moderate Jon Huntsman, former Utah Governor and US Ambassador to the PRC, seemed to be more about politics than science, but perhaps not. Here is what Huntsman had to say:

Listen, when you make comments that fly in the face of what 98 out of 100 climate scientists have said, when you call into question the science of evolution, all I’m saying is that in order for the Republican party to win, we can’t run from science, … And by making comments that basically don’t reflect the reality of the situation, we turn people off.

Huntsman is a politician, and speaking here qua politician his comments make some sense. Huntsman is merely pointing out that, in his view, Republicans need to acknowledge and respect the leading scientific opinions. Otherwise they risk losing votes. In other words, it seems he is talking about political strategy, not scientific realism.

There is of course the philosophical and ethical question that politicians always face. Should politicians “sell out” for votes? How many lies and absurdities should one tolerate to gain office?

But beyond this, one wonders if Huntsman’s remarks go beyond political gamesmanship. When the Palo Alto High dropout speaks of “the science of evolution” it almost sounds as though he is speaking as an evolutionary realist who believes evolution is true, or approximately true.

Adding to this speculation, Huntsman speaks of “the reality of the situation.” Does he mean the political reality of the situation, or the scientific reality of the situation?

Unfortunately Huntsman has never had the question put directly to him: Does he believe evolution is a fact?

Paying homage to evolution for political reasons, as low as that may seem, is an understandable political strategy. Believing in the absurd religious theory that the world spontaneously arose, is quite another.

An Electric Face: A Rendering Worth a Thousand Falsifications

2011-09-07T21:10:00.000-07:00

From electron microscopes to earth-orbiting observatories, scientists use a variety of instruments to study nature by measuring, observing and yes, rendering. Measurements are graphed and fitted with mathematical models. Renderings, on the other hand, are not so easily quantified. This can make them less useful for the business of building quantitative models and making predictions. But renderings can, in an instant, convey a powerful message. A picture, as they say, is worth a thousand words.

Consider, for instance, ribonuclease A, an enzyme that voraciously chops up RNA molecules. In the mid twentieth century scientists figured out how to determine the structure of such proteins using X-rays, and then later using other techniques as well. A protein sample is carefully crystallized and then exposed to an X-ray beam. The X-rays diffract as they pass through the sample and create a complex pattern which indicates the positions of the various atoms in the protein. Here is what the 124 amino acid ribonuclease A protein structure looks like when its many atoms are rendered in a three-dimensional graph:

As you can see, a graph of a protein’s individual atoms doesn’t tell you very much. It looks like, well, a bunch of atoms. But if we step back and consider the protein’s amino acids we see something very different. In a protein, the amino acids are sometimes wound tightly in a helix. Or they can be stretched out into a strand. These two patterns can be detected from the atomic locations and graphed. Here is the ribonuclease A structure again, but this time with these amino acid patterns rendered and their individual atoms left off the graph:

Suddenly a coherent structure is apparent.

Because ribonuclease A is such a voracious eater it sometimes needs to be turned off. Enter the ribonuclease inhibitor. Here are some different renderings of this beautiful horse-shoe shaped protein:

The ribonuclease inhibitor is shaped to dock with ribonuclease A and bring it to a halt. Here are renderings of the two proteins docked together:

Such renderings provide an immediate peek at the phenomena at work. They provide higher level information than do mere measurements. And it is interesting that these renderings were made with graphing tools that know nothing of ribonuclease A or ribonuclease inhibitors, in particular. Computer scientists have developed these powerful rendering tools based on general principles of protein structure. But these tools do nothing without the structural data provided by measurement techniques, such as X-ray diffraction.

So as with electron microscopes and astronomical observatories, these molecular tools create impressive, beautiful and meaningful renderings that are completely dependent on the measurements. The computer scientist creates the tool, but has no idea what rendering might emerge after the raw data are input.

A recent example of the power of rendering, and the importance of stepping back and choosing the right perspective, is the frog embryo’s electric face. If that sounds strange read on, for as one researcher said, “electric face” is the perfect description.

The body electric

Electricity is not just for engineers, it is crucial in biology as well. For instance, a cell contains various ionic compounds which give the cell interior a net charge. And the difference between the intracellular charge and that of the the external environment causes a voltage across the cell membrane. This membrane voltage is crucial in cellular biology. For instance, a wide variety of membrane proteins, such as channels that allow chemical in and out of the cell, are controlled by the membrane voltage. Change the voltage and you suddenly change the state of those proteins and their various actions.

Yes electricity is important in biology, but when Dany Adams left her digital camera and microscope apparatus running overnight, she had no idea what stunning electrical patterns would emerge on the frog embryo she was studying. Watch this video to learn more:

Here is a shorter video of just the embryo:

The video suggests that bioelectric signals presage the morphological development of the face. It also, in an instant, gives a peak at the phenomenal processes at work in biology. As the lead researcher said, “It’s a jaw dropper.”

The frog’s electric face is one of those renderings worth a thousand words. We could make detailed protein measurements showing that evolution cannot even explain how a single protein could have arisen. In fact there are 27 orders of magnitude between evolution’s expectations and reality. And that is going by the evolutionist’s own reckoning (in reality it is 100+ orders of magnitude). Or we could make detailed measurements of mutations and show that unicellular organisms are not likely to evolve spontaneously into elephants.

But the frog’s electric face, in an instant, reminds one of the utter absurdity of evolution. Religion drives science, and it matters.

* Hat tip to bornagain77

Animals Found a the Bottom of the Sea With No Oxygen

2011-09-07T13:05:00.000-07:00

As you remember from high school biology plants take in carbon dioxide and give off oxygen, and animals take in oxygen and give off carbon dioxide. But what about the recently discovered loriciferans—tiny animals at the bottom of the ocean where oxygen is hard to come by? The loriciferans, living two miles under the surface of the Mediterranean Sea, apparently spend their entire existence in anoxic conditions.

Most animals use oxygen when metabolizing food to produce the crucial ATP molecules—the body’s ubiquitous fuel pellets. But these creatures have a different type of organelle that does the job with oxygen.

So evolution just happened to import or produce a completely different energy system in these creatures, along with several other adaptations, so they could relocate to the bottom of the sea. Or perhaps the creatures happened to explore the depths first, and then luckily evolution provided the massive changes needed.

And how many random biological design changes were needed (yes, they are random with respect to what counts) to do the job? As evolutionists like to say, “That would be: a lot.”

And why did the loriciferans hang around waiting all that time? Or if they didn’t then why were the changes selected? As evolutionists like to say, “Evolution is a contingent process.” It happened because it happened (and other tautologies). That’s just good solid scientific research.

Remember, evolution is a fact, Judge Jones said so. Religion drives science, and it matters

Message Are Not Only in Bottles: What’s in an Egg?

2011-09-06T18:47:00.000-07:00

Everyone knows that eggs contain nourishment, but eggs also contain messages. As one researcher explained:

We’ve known for about twenty years that maternal substances in the egg can influence how chicks develop, but the common assumption is that they are a means by which mothers manipulate their offspring in a way that suits the mother more than the chick.

What we’ve shown is the reverse: these substances are actually there to suit the chick. If we muck up the message in the egg experimentally, it is the chick that is penalized directly rather than the mother.

So let’s see, a whole bunch of mutations created birds and a whole bunch of mutations created eggs (not sure which came first, but evolutionists have that all figured out), and then a bunch of mutations created the capability to insert messages into eggs. That didn’t help, but a another bunch of mutations created the capability to interpret those messages and, Eureka!, evolution did it again. That’s just good solid scientific research.

DNA Signals Too: Findings Unexpected But Not to Worry

2011-09-06T13:59:00.000-07:00

You know the drill, scientific findings refute evolution’s everything-is-just-a-fluke expectations, evolutionists are flabbergasted, evolutionists re-engineer their theory for the (n+1)th time, evolutionists sing the praise of Darwin, saying their theory explains the evidence so well, and the findings become yet another proof text for our creation myth. This time the finding is that DNA does more than sit at the center of everything like Jabba the Hutt. Evolution’s geno-centric, DNA-is-king myth expects DNA—which is supposed to hold the keys to the phenotype (remember how DNA mutations were supposed to create the dinosaurs, and everything else?)—to receive care and feeding from its various cyto-servants. Remember selfish and greedy DNA?

According to evolution those cellular slaves attended to DNA and sent requests to the double-helix majesty indicating what gene products might or might not needed. Now we find DNA can be just another messenger. DNA has moved off its throne to be part of the cellular signaling chain. As one researcher explained:

It’s a basic change in our way of thinking about cell signaling—that all signals go into the nucleus and dead-end at DNA, that they point to chromatin and stop. Our data show that’s not the case. We have a new fundamental aspect of cellular regulation that we need to now explore.

Next we’ll be hearing how this is a new proof of evolution. Remember when the DNA difference between chimps and humans was found to be only about 2%? A few amino acid swaps per protein does not magically produce Johannes Brahms. Unless, that is, you are a doctrinaire evolutionist. Soon their absurdity became the new normal, and the 2% difference became the latest apologetic, once again proving evolution without a doubt.

Religion drives science, and it matters.

Transgenerational Epigenetic Inheritance (Shhhh, It’s NOT Lamarckism!)

2011-09-06T00:33:00.000-07:00

Funny thing about scientific evidence, it doesn’t go away. After a century of playing whack-a-mole with Lamarckians, the evolutionist’s worst nightmare keeps reoccurring. Like Bill Murray forever waking up to I Got You Babe by Sonny and Cher, evolutionists are continually reminded that the science isn’t going anywhere soon.

Of course one trick, after rejecting Lamarckism for a century, is to appropriate it and say you knew it all along, as evolutionists did with Paul Kammerer. After driving him to suicide they then realized he was right and so called him an evolutionist. With friends like that who needs enemies?

The dumbest trick is to just deny the whole thing and keep shouting “(and again, it’s NOT Lamarckism!),” like Lutheran PZ Myers does.

But the best trick is to rename it and hope they’ll forget about the whole thing, like this paper does. Let’s just call it “transgenerational epigenetic inheritance” OK?

Whatever happened to those random mutations that “occur without reference to their possible consequences or biological uses,” as heir to the throne Julian Huxley so dogmatically put it?

Religion drives science, and it matters.

The World Through Evolutionary Eyes: Theological Naturalism, Hypocrisy and Response to Comments on the CSC Case

2011-09-05T11:35:00.000-07:00

The theoretical core of evolutionary thought is naturalism. Evolutionists dogmatically insist that the world must have arisen strictly via 100% naturalistic processes. This extreme position is in the minority, but it dominates academia today and is now taken as a given by elites and opinion makers. Not surprisingly this extreme position on naturalism has fueled atheism. If creation arises on its own, then what need is there for a creator? But ironically naturalism arose not from atheism, but from the exact opposite: theism. In fact it is the underlying religious ideas that give evolutionists their strong convictions. This is why evolutionary thought and the Enlightenment arose from the highly religious culture of 17th century western Europe, and it is why religious people do most of the evolutionary apologetics, even today. From the Roman Catholic Ken Miller to the protestant Francis Collins, religious people are insistent that evolution must be a fact. Atheists such as Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers help out on the fringes, but even their arguments are religious. They have been fooled by religion. When it comes to evolution, there is no difference between the theist and atheist. Hence when we speak of the naturalism that drives evolutionists, we are speaking of theological naturalism. Here is how I described theological naturalism in my book Science’s Blind Spot:

There were many religious influences within science in centuries past. In fact, theological concerns often guided and constrained scientific ideas and thought. A variety of such concerns were raised by different thinkers at different times. This makes them both easy to see but not necessarily easy to trace out. These ideas were prevalent but complex—there was no single religious tradition, no single theological concern, no leading thinker or even school of thought, at the interface between religion and science. What was the motivation for these religious ideas, how were they related, and importantly exactly what influence did these religious ideas have on science?

The answers to such questions are not simple but, on the other hand, they are not beyond our reach. There are strong connections between religion and science and recurring themes are obvious. Theological premises do not merely suggest possibilities or stimulate thinking—they are at times crucial in framing scientific thought. This book traces out these connections and their effects.

We begin in Chapter Two with a survey of several common religious influences in the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries. Most of them fall into four distinct categories: greater God theology, religious rationalism and deism, the problem of evil, and theological opposition to miracles. These categories are overarching. None of them represent a single tradition or concern, but rather a family of similar concerns. And these categories do not capture the totality of religious thought impinging on science. Other concerns that we will see in later chapters include the warning against anthropomorphizing God, the God of the gaps warning, and the intellectual necessity.

This history and framework gives helpful structure to the religion-science interface. As we shall see, these different theological traditions would circumscribe scientific activity by defining what types of solutions were, and were not, acceptable. Indeed, these theological mandates are common in the scientific literature.

There are, as it were, theological ground rules imposed on science. And although these theological concerns are varied, they all funnel toward a similar consequence. Put simply, the theological ground rules are that scientific explanations must be purely naturalistic. The term "naturalism" can take on different meanings when used by historians and philosophers of science. Here it is used to refer to this restriction of science to naturalistic explanations for religious reasons. We use a new term, theological naturalism, to clarify this and avoid ambiguity.

This term theological naturalism reminds us that the assumption of naturalism in science is neither a result of atheistic influence nor an empirically-based scientific finding. It is a consequence of metaphysical reasoning, and the implications for science are profound. Theological naturalism provides science with well defined universal criteria to which it conforms. Instead of merely following the data where ever it may lead, science has a framework already in place. The answer, to a certain extent, is already in place. This is a move toward rationalism and away from empiricism. The result is that science has a powerful philosophy of science but, as we explore in Chapter Three, it does not come without cost. Theological naturalism brings with it a blind spot.

A fascinating aspect of theological naturalism is that, on the one hand, it is obvious, but it can also be very subtle. Here is an example of how obvious theological naturalism can be:

Odd arrangements and funny solutions are the proof of evolution—paths that a sensible God would never tread but that a natural process, constrained by history, follows perforce. No one understood this better than Darwin. Ernst Mayr has shown how Darwin, in defending evolution, consistently turned to organic parts and geographic distributions that make the least sense.—Stephen Jay Gould

This is a powerful argument that resonates with many. So powerful, in fact, that it seems to be in no need of defending. Is it not obvious and undeniable that “odd arrangements and funny solutions” disprove design? Is it not obvious that identical mutations in sister species must have arisen in a common ancestor? Is it not obvious that death and destruction in the biological world would have be part of an all-good divine plan?

The metaphysics seems so compelling and obvious that it goes overlooked. Evolutionists are convinced they are doing “just science.” And so the obvious theological naturalism becomes subtle. Darwin’s book on evolution was one long religious argument. Over and over he made religious claims about how the creator would never have created this creation. Evolution was the only answer.

But Darwin never felt the need to explain, justify or defend any of his religious claims. They were bare assertions, presented as simple and undeniable truths. And, importantly, his readers felt the same way. Even sophisticated challengers, such as Princeton’s Charles Hodge, weren’t quite able to pinpoint the message.

So evolutionists make their metaphysical claims casually, with no hesitation or concern. In the next breath they insist they are all about science. Here is an example from a leading textbook:

However, there are some homologies that do look positively disadvantageous. One of the cranial nerves goes from the brain to the larynx via a tube near the heart. In fish this is a direct route. But the same nerve in all species follows the same route, and in the giraffe it results in an absurd detour down and up the neck, so that the giraffe has to grow maybe 3-5 meters more nerve than it would with a direct connection. The “recurrent laryngeal nerve,” as it is called, is surely inefficient. It is easy to explain such an efficiency if giraffes have evolved in small stages from a fish-like ancestor; but why giraffes should have such a nerve if they originated independently … well, we can leave that to others to try to explain. …

In the scientific version of the theory which we are concerned with here, supernatural events do not take place … [Mark Ridley, Evolution, Blackwell, p. 50, 57, 1993]

Notice how easily the textbook slips into metaphysics. A scientific text, discussing scientific evidence, suddenly is doing metaphysics without warning or justification, as though it all is obviously true.

This is typical. Evolutionists insist evolution is a fact, and they arrive at this lofty conclusion via metaphysical proofs. As Alfred North Whitehead once advised, do not question someone on what he feels he needs to defend, but rather on what he takes for granted. The popular version goes like this: It isn’t what a man doesn’t know that scares me, but what he knows for sure.

The corollary to evolution’s theological naturalism is that those who do not adhere to their religious claims are, in fact, the religious ones. After all, such skeptics are allowing that god might have designed this obviously undesigned world. Isn’t that an obvious religious belief? So while evolutionists assert religious claims, those who are make no such claims are, according to evolutionists, religious. For the evolutionists, such fundamentalism is obviously not scientific and must be censored. This is the Alice-in-Wonderland world of evolution.

The CSC case

And so it is not surprising that evolutionists brand any skepticism, such as in the Darwin’s Dilemma film, as “religious.” The specter of its showing at the California Science Center’s IMAX theater prompted USC professor Hilary Schor to be “less troubled by the freedom of speech issues than why my tax dollars which support the California ‘Science’ Center are being spent on hosting religious propaganda.”

So where exactly is the “religious propaganda” in the Darwin’s Dilemma film? Of course there is none. Here is how one commenter here described the film:

I watched the documentary online and found it very scholarly and well presented. The narrator was very professional and I actually found the lack of creationism refreshing, because if in fact it was there, it would have been tough to mask. Most creationism films spend more time attacking Evolutionists than dealing with the science and of course most Evolutionist propaganda films do likewise.

I think the fact that it WAS well written and presented from the standpoint of asking logical skeptical scientific methodical questions instead of religiously accepting religious story telling is what actually infuriates the Darwin crowd. It's not a matter of allowing intelligent people to honestly ask for real world factual proofs [minus the massive amounts of story invention] as it is a matter of being skeptical and actually asking questions in the first place and not accepting through blind faith that the self-promoting geniuses have it right. As history has shown through the ages around the Earth, religious Ecclesiastical Hierarchies hate being questioned.

In fact there are no religious claims in the movie, those are in evolutionary thought. There are no metaphysical mandates or theological dictates. Again, those are in evolutionary thought. Evolutionists openly and consistently make religious claims and then blame it on the skeptics who are looking at the evidence. It is the height of hypocrisy.

But meanwhile an evolutionist accused me of misrepresenting the CSC case:

Let's look at what the press release actually said

"The debate over Darwin will come to California on October 25th, when the Smithsonian Institution's west coast affiliate premieres Darwin's Dilemma: The Mystery of the Cambrian Fossil Record, a new intelligent design film which challenges Darwinian evolution."

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/intelligent-design-documentary-to-premiere-at-smithsonian-affiliated-california-science-center-63527687.html

By 'Smithsonian Institution's west coast affiliate' the AFA obviously meant the CSC. But the CSC wasn't premiering the film, the AFA was. The CSC and Smithsonian had nothing to do with the film save renting building space.

That's the sort of blatant dishonesty we've come to expect from the IDiots and the professional liars at the DI. You want to defend the wording of the press release CH?

As is typical, the evolutionist manipulates the evidence. He quotes from the first paragraph of the press release and cries foul. But only two sentences later the press release explicitly states who is sponsoring and hosting the event:

The screening is sponsored and hosted by the American Freedom Alliance.

The evolutionist uses a selective reading of the press release and then jumps to the usual ridicule and false accusations.

This is how evolutionists treat those who are not theological naturalists. This is how they treat those who do not, as they do, insist on religious truths that all must follow. This is how they treat those who are interested in the evidence, rather than dogma.

Religion drives science, and it matters.

The CSC Case and Evolution: More Than Just Bad Science

2011-09-04T22:37:00.000-07:00

When Darwin’s Dilemma, a film that examines evolution in light of the scientific evidence, was booked at the California Science Center’s IMAX theater two years ago, evolutionists from around the country were furious. They made sure the booking was cancelled. So while the CSC censored the film, their censorship was by no means an independent action. The CSC was at the tip of the spear, but evolutionists near and far drove that spear home. And those evolutionists were by no means limited to life scientists. For evolutionary thought is about much more than merely the origin of species. Consider, for example, Hilary Schor, Professor of English, Comparative Literature, Gender Studies and Law at the University of Southern California.

Schor is co-director of the Center for Law, History, and Culture at USC, sponsored in part by the Gould School of Law. When not studying feminist theory and gender studies, Schor’s research interests include “law and literature.”

Schor’s view of the law, however, seems to be rather selective. Regarding the CSC case, as she explained, she was “less troubled by the freedom of speech issues than why my tax dollars which support the California ‘Science’ Center are being spent on hosting religious propaganda.”

Schor characterizes Darwin’s Dilemma as “religious propaganda.” And why would that be? The film, which is shot on location in southern China, the Canadian Rockies, and Great Britain, explores the Cambrian Explosion and how the rapid appearance of so many species compares with the theory of evolution. The film includes interviews of both evolutionists (Simon Conway Morris of Cambridge University and James Valentine of the University of California at Berkeley) and skeptics.

So where exactly is the “religious propaganda”? Of course there is none. There are no religious claims in the movie, those are in evolutionary thought. There are no metaphysical mandates or theological dictates. Again, those are in evolutionary thought. It is curious how evolutionists openly and consistently make religious claims and then blame it on the skeptics who are looking at the evidence. It is the height of hypocrisy.

The result is Schor is not too concerned about trampling on freedom of speech rights. As always, the law is only as good as the people behind it. When the elite single out particular groups as not deserving of protection under the law, then the law is not universal. It protects only the preferred groups.

So evolution misrepresents science, biases education, manipulates justice and tramples on constitutional rights. What’s next?

Religion drives science, and it matters.

More CSC Coverups

2011-09-04T18:38:00.000-07:00

As we have seen evolutionists at the California Science Center, in response to the booking of a film that questions evolution, censored the film. To hide this violation of the public trust they constructed a cover-up: The evolutionists said they cancelled the event because of a press release. This lie was in stark contrast to internal emails. One CSC Vice President wrote that the main problem was that the event was sponsored by “an anti-Darwin/creationist group.” And as the CSC Vice President of Communications explained, the CSC Chief Executive Officer instructed his staff to find a false pretense:

Jeff just called and is wondering if they violated an agreement -- like was this supposed to be a private screening or did they say it was a public screening? If they misrepresented the event, then we can cancel them.

Next the evolutionists lied about the press release, claiming it implied the CSC was a sponsor of the event. But the press release said no such thing. In fact it explicitly stated that “The screening is sponsored and hosted by the American Freedom Alliance.”

Next the evolutionists raised the stakes with an even more bold lie. They said there was, in fact, no censorship. After all, were they not originally willing to book the event? Again, internal emails exposed the lie. The booking was accepted only because there was a lack of vigilance. As one CSC Vice President wrote:

This screening event was booked through the Events Dept., and they were unaware of the nature of the groups involved. It has come to Jeff’s attention and he is “working on it.”

Similarly, another evolutionist from the nearby Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County concluded:

Apparently the IMAX was booking events without CSC knowing about all of them, and when they found out they immediately cancelled the event.

Of course there was censorship.

The next evolution lie was about the court case. This was one case where the evolutionists could not fool the judge and lie their way through a trial. They had to settle so they lied about the settlement, saying they were right all along and that the sponsor and the Discovery Institute had not “learned their lesson.”

In fact it was the evolutionists who have not learned their lesson, for this trail of lies was by no means an isolated event. From blatantly misrepresenting science to censorship, blackballing dissenters, ruining careers and misleading judges, lying and flaunting the law is a way of life for evolutionists. It is ironic that Inherit the Wind, a play targeting precisely such misdeeds, is exploited by evolutionists as their poster child.

In this particular case, the evolutionists at CSC had been lying all along. For instance, before the above litany of lies, the evolutionists attempted to manipulate justice by using a phony shell organization. Unlike the publicly-funded CSC, the shell organization, dubbed the CSC Foundation, was private and so escaped public accountability.

In other words, so they can leech off the public the evolutionists funnel the funding through the CSC while their misdeeds are funneled through “the Foundation.”

Without public funding evolution would die a quick death. They must have your tax dollars. But evolution also relies on manipulation. These two are at odds with each other. Taking public funds and perpetrating untruths don’t mix well. So in order for evolutionists to have both their funding and their lies they need a shell game.

Consider, for example, one Christina M. Sion. Ms. Sion is a CSC employee. In fact, not only is Sion a CSC employee, she is a Vice President. That is according to the CSC’s own promotional material, such as this press release, which states:

“We were absolutely thrilled to win the Best Non Profit Event Concept category with our Star Wars themed Discovery Ball. We especially felt so privileged to be in such good company. The events that were showcased this year were nothing less than stellar and it reinforced how sincerely delighted we are to be part of the events industry in LA,” said the California Science Center Vice President of Event Services, Chris Sion.

And this is also what her email signature shows:

Next consider one Shell Amega. Like Sion, Amega is a CSC employee. In fact, Amega is the CSC Vice President of Communications. At least according to her email signature:

Amega’s status as a CSC employee is also confirmed on any number of web pages, such as this press release, which lists Amega is a CSC press contact.

But when it came time for the evolutionists to give an account of their actions, suddenly Sion and Amega were identified as employees not of the public CSC, but of the private CSC Foundation. And as such, the evolutionists claimed their records were private, not public. How convenient. So evolutionists take the public monies, but they are not accountable.

It was yet another lie the evolutionists used to try to avoid the light of day. It was one lie after another as the evolutionists manipulated justice and violated the public trust. These lies pale in comparison to the lies evolutionists tell everyday about science, but they are lies nonetheless. Oh, what a web we weave.

Religion drives science, and it matters.

Why the CSC Case is Important

2011-09-04T04:22:00.000-07:00

Two years ago a group booked the California Science Center’s IMAX theater, in downtown Los Angeles, for a screening of Darwin’s Dilemma, a film that questions evolutionary theory. Furious evolutionists quickly censored the showing and canceled the event.

After being sued for censorship the CSC constructed a cover-up lie. The evolution lie was that there was no censorship. Instead, as the lie contended, the CSC cancelled the event because of a press release. This lie was in stark contrast to internal emails. One CSC Vice President wrote that the main problem was that the event was sponsored by “an anti-Darwin/creationist group.” And as the CSC Vice President of Communications explained, the CSC Chief Executive Officer instructed his staff to find a false pretense:

Jeff just called and is wondering if they violated an agreement -- like was this supposed to be a private screening or did they say it was a public screening? If they misrepresented the event, then we can cancel them.

So first the evolutionists censored the event, and then they lied, in order to cover-up their censorship. Next the evolutionists lied about the press release, claiming it implied the CSC was a sponsor of the event. But the press release said no such thing. In fact it explicitly stated that “The screening is sponsored and hosted by the American Freedom Alliance.”

Next the evolutionists lied to cover-up their cover-ups. This evolution lie was that there was no censorship because, after all, they originally were willing to book the event. Again, internal emails shine a light on the lie. They reveal that the booking was accepted only because there was a lack of vigilance. As one CSC Vice President wrote:

This screening event was booked through the Events Dept., and they were unaware of the nature of the groups involved. It has come to Jeff’s attention and he is “working on it.”

Similarly, another evolutionist from the nearby Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County concluded:

Apparently the IMAX was booking events without CSC knowing about all of them, and when they found out they immediately cancelled the event.

The next evolution lie was about the court case. This was one case where the evolutionists could not fool the judge and lie their way through a trial, so they had to settle. So they lied about the settlement, saying they were right all along and that the sponsor and the Discovery Institute have not “learned their lesson.” So after a long trail of lies the CSC casts judgment on the sponsor, saying they have not “learned their lesson.” Oh, what a web we weave.

Not your garden variety theory

But is this anything more than the sordid tale of a rogue department gone wrong? Were not the usual lines of authority broken and was not this department operating independently of the greater evolution movement? Surely there is plausible deniability and we cannot equate their many lies with evolution itself. Right?

Wrong. Unfortunately, the CSC case is typical. This is evolution in action. The only difference in this case is the evolutionists were found out. To understand why CSC is representative and not a loose cannon, one first must understand evolution itself.

Evolution is not your typical scientific theory that makes predictions for evaluation against empirical findings. If that were the case it would have been dropped long ago as evolution is, if anything, a contra indicator. Practically all of evolution’s fundamental expectations are in the red. Whatever it says, go with the opposite.

Far from an innocent scientific theory, evolution is a metaphysical commitment. For if evolution is wrong then the specter of teleology is raised. Final causes are back in the fight and perhaps design is detectable. All kinds of unthinkables must now be thought and unquestionable truths must now be questioned. For evolutionists that is unacceptable, no matter what the evidence.

So evolution is not common descent, or gradualism, or selection acting on random biological variation, or a dozen other spin offs. In Lakatosian terms, those are all auxiliary hypotheses making up the protective belt that surrounds and shields the theoretical core. And what is that core? Evolution, at its core, is naturalism.

It is not atheism, as often is charged. Nor is it bad science as is equally as often charged. Would that those were evolution, for the problem would be far simpler. But those are both merely consequences. At its core evolution is a metaphysical commitment to naturalism—it must be true.

It is no surprise that evolutionists are so insistent that their idea is a fact. The fact of evolution is at its very core. Evolution was not declared to be a fact after boat loads of evidence endlessly corroborated a theoretically sound idea. That is a fiction. It never happened. Not only is evolution at odds with the data, the declaration of its certainty was at the very beginning.

We can go back to the formalization of neo Darwinism in the twentieth century, or back to Darwin himself, or to Kant, or Hume, or Leibniz, or we can go farther back in antiquity to Lucretius and the Epicureans. Wherever your resting place, you will find metaphysical certainty amidst empirical confusion.

The consequence of all this is, yes, lies. The science is misrepresented to fit the mandate. The philosophy of science is misrepresented to arrive at the predetermined truth. The education and law are twisted and force fit to support the fiction, judges are misled, photographs are altered, data are misinterpreted, and at the National Center for Science “Education,” dissenters are blackballed. All of this to promote the dogma that the world and everything we see must have arisen spontaneously, by itself. For it must have, there is no other option.

Religion drives science, and it matters.

California Science Center to Not Pay $110,000 Settlement; Evolutionary Lies Continue

2011-09-02T15:37:00.000-07:00

In the seventeenth century the Roman Catholic theologian Nicholas Malebranche proposed that nature’s evil and inefficiency were not created by god but by natural processes. Simply put, Malebranche said that god preferred to use simple though imprecise natural laws rather than a long sequence of complicated miracles that would be needed to achieve perfection. Malebranche was by no means the first thinker in history to argue for theological naturalism—the belief that god wouldn’t have intended for this world so it must have arisen naturalistically. In ancient Greece the Epicureans believed that randomly swerving atoms created the world. As Lucretius put it:

That in no wise the nature of all things
For us was fashioned by a power divine-
So great the faults it stands encumbered with.

Malebranche, however, marks the rise of theological naturalism in Christianity. Before Malebranche, Rene Descartes and Francis Bacon had both argued for naturalistic explanations, but their reasons were very different. Descartes argued that strictly naturalistic explanations were more useful, but with theological naturalism Malebranche argued they were true. That’s an important difference. Religious beliefs are the most powerful, and evolutionary thinking had its start in the modern science program.

In fact explaining evil and inefficiency was only one of the religious motivations behind evolutionary thought. After Malebranche several other theological itches were scratched. For instance, science was increasingly uncovering nature’s detailed minutia. But god would not, as botanist John Ray argued fifty years after Malebranche, “set his own hand as it were to every work, and immediately do all the meanest and trifling’st things himself drudgingly, without making use of any inferior or subordinate Minister.”

These arguments, from theodicy and infra dignitatem, are only two examples from the complex web of beliefs that underlie and mandate evolution. One way or another something other than divine miracles were needed to explain how the world arose. After Malebranche, Anglicans and Lutherans aggressively promoted evolutionary thinking in geology, cosmology and biology. This theological naturalism movement continues to this day, and helps to explain the otherwise curious actions of evolutionists.

When you believe your ideas are true, rather than merely useful, then the ends justify the means. Hence we see today’s evolutionists misrepresenting science, blackballing dissenters, destroying careers, suppressing debate, manipulating media, education and public policy, and violating laws. All of this because, after all, they’re right.

Consider the case of the California Science Center (CSC), a Smithsonian Institution affiliate. Two years ago a group booked the CSC’s IMAX theater, in downtown Los Angeles, for a screening of Darwin’s Dilemma to be followed by a panel discussing evolution and the scientific evidence.

But Darwin’s Dilemma, featuring interviews of Intelligent Design advocates and evolutionists, is a film that questions evolutionary theory. Since evolution is a religiously-motivated theory that contradicts the science, such scrutiny and uncontrolled discussion could not be allowed. Furious evolutionists quickly censored the showing and canceled the event.

After then being sued for such crude censorship the CSC next constructed a cover-up lie. The evolution lie was that there was no censorship, and that CSC merely cancelled the event because of a press release. This lie was in stark contrast to internal emails. One CSC Vice President wrote that the main problem was that the event was sponsored by “an anti-Darwin/creationist group.”

And the CSC Vice President of Communications explained the origin of the lie. The CSC Chief Executive Officer instructed his staff to find a false pretense:

Jeff just called and is wondering if they violated an agreement -- like was this supposed to be a private screening or did they say it was a public screening? If they misrepresented the event, then we can cancel them.

So first the evolutionists censored the event, and then they lied, in order to cover-up their censorship. Next the evolutionists lied about the press release, claiming it implied the CSC was a sponsor of the event. But of course the press release says no such thing. In fact it explicitly states that “The screening is sponsored and hosted by the American Freedom Alliance.”

Next the evolutionists constructed another lie to cover-up their cover-ups. This evolution lie was that the fact that the CSC originally was willing to book the event proves there was no censorship. Again, internal emails shine a light on the endless trail of lies. They reveal that in truth, the booking was accepted only because there was a lack of vigilance. As one CSC Vice President wrote:

This screening event was booked through the Events Dept., and they were unaware of the nature of the groups involved. It has come to Jeff’s attention and he is “working on it.”

Similarly, another evolutionist from the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County concluded:

Apparently the IMAX was booking events without CSC knowing about all of them, and when they found out they immediately cancelled the event.

Brain Components Found in Single-Celled Organisms; Evolutionary Expectations Fail Again

2011-09-02T07:55:00.000-07:00

One of the themes of biology is the ubiquity of complexity. From microbes to humans, and everything in between, biology is chocked full of fantastic designs. For evolutionists, these roads lead to the unexpected conclusion of early complexity. If evolution is true, then it somehow produced incredible feats of engineering early on, even before they would have been useful. The DNA code, with its exquisite nuances, must have arisen before those nuances would be helpful. This early complexity is another example of the evolution’s massive serendipity—evolution somehow created designs that would be crucial down the line. One example of this is the human brain, as one science writer explains:

When wondering about the origins of our brain, don't look to Homo sapiens, chimpanzees, fish or even worms. Many key components first appeared in single-celled organisms, long before animals, brains and even nerve cells existed. …

The finding is intriguing on its own, but much more significant when combined with a growing body of evidence that essential brain components evolved in choanoflagellates before multicellular life appeared.

In 2008, Xinjiang Cai of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, discovered that M. brevicollis has the same calcium channels in its cells as those used by neurons. Then, in 2010, it emerged that M. brevicollis also has several proteins that neurons use to process signals from their neighbours.

And this year, Harold Zakon of the University of Texas at Austin and colleagues discovered that M. brevicollis has the same sodium channels that neurons use to pass electrical signals along their length.

Put together, these findings suggest that choanoflagellate cells have components for each of the three main functions of neurons: carrying electrical signals along their bodies, signalling to their neighbours with neurotransmitters, and receiving those signals. …

"The choanoflagellates have a lot of precursors for things we thought were only present in animals," says Fasshauer. Today, says Zakon, the nervous system seems "unbelievably complex", but evidence from these tiny organisms suggests it was built up from several simple systems, which evolved separately for different reasons. For instance, Fasshauer suspects M. brevicollis uses Munc18/syntaxin1 to secrete chemicals, much like neurons use it to release neurotransmitters.

So an ancient, primitive organism just happened to evolve spontaneously incredibly complex molecular machines that would be crucial components in the exquisite neuron designs in multicellular life. It would be like finding jet engine components in a wagon train. It seems that nothing in biology makes sense in the light of evolution.

Paul Krugman’s Embarrassing Politicization of Evolution

2011-09-01T23:25:00.000-07:00

It is practically impossible to stay abreast of the many misconceptions and misrepresentations of evolution in the popular media. Across the political spectrum, in print, radio, TV and the new electronic media, pundits who know little to nothing about evolution hold forth on this debate as though they were experts. Here is one example from this week that is notable for its high source (The New York Times) and extreme naiveté. When The Huffington Post issues a rebuke you know it must be absurd. The writer is Paul Krugman, a New York Times OP-ED columnist. Krugman writes:

Jon Huntsman Jr., a former Utah governor and ambassador to China, isn’t a serious contender for the Republican presidential nomination. And that’s too bad, because Mr. Huntsman has been willing to say the unsayable about the G.O.P. — namely, that it is becoming the “anti-science party.” This is an enormously important development. And it should terrify us.

To see what Mr. Huntsman means, consider recent statements by the two men who actually are serious contenders for the G.O.P. nomination: Rick Perry and Mitt Romney.

Mr. Perry, the governor of Texas, recently made headlines by dismissing evolution as “just a theory,” one that has “got some gaps in it” — an observation that will come as news to the vast majority of biologists.

Mr. Krugman’s concern is that a politician stated that evolution is just a theory and that it has some gaps in it.

In fact, evolution does not explain how mammals arose. Nor does it explain how reptiles, birds, amphibians or fish evolved. It doesn’t explain how species evolved abruptly in many cases. It doesn’t explain how the DNA code evolved or life itself first arose. In fact, evolution cannot even explain how a single protein could have arisen. There are 27 orders of magnitude between evolution’s expectations and reality. And that is going by the evolutionist’s own reckoning (in reality it is 100+ orders of magnitude). Indeed, practically all of evolution’s major predictions have turned out false. Need we say more?

Yes, evolution has gaps. Even evolutionists admit it has gaps. But Mr. Krugman believes otherwise. He thinks evolution’s many gaps would “come as news to the vast majority of biologists.” And he is alarmed that this is a sign of increasing anti-intellectualism.

Yes there is anti-intellectualism afoot, but it is much closer than Mr. Krugman thinks. He is not only ignorant of a rather straightforward topic, but he is ignorant of his ignorance. The result is an embarrassing political rant premised on a profound ignorance. Here is how Rabbi Shmuley Boteach reacted in the Huffington Post:

I am not a scientist. But beginning in about 1990 I started organizing an annual debate at Oxford University on science versus religion where the focus was almost always on evolution and which featured some of the world's greatest evolutionists like Richard Dawkins, who appeared several times, and the late John Maynard-Smith of the University of Sussex, who, at the time, was regarded by many as the greatest living evolutionary theorist. While I moderated the first few debates, I later participated in a debate against Richard Dawkins at Oxford which he later denied ever took place, forcing us to post the full video of the debate online where Dawkins is not only the principal proponent of the science side but actually loses the debate in a student vote at the end. I later debated Dawkins again at the Idea City Convention at the University of Toronto, the video of which is likewise available online.

What I learned from these debates, as well as reading extensively on evolution, is that evolutionists have a tough time defending the theory when challenged in open dialogue. Indeed, David Berlinski, the author of The Devil's Delusion, was, although an agnostic, on the religion side of one of the debates against Dawkins and tore large holes in evolution that Dawkins and Maynard-Smith struggled to address.

This does not mean that evolution is not true or that theory is without merit or evidence. It does, however, corroborate what Governor Perry said. Evolution is a theory.

It is unfortunate that hack journalism is alive and well, and misrepresenting science.

Richard Dawkins New Book for Children and Why His Atheism is not Relevant

2011-09-01T14:09:00.000-07:00

In his new book for children, The Magic of Reality, Richard Dawkins laments that many intelligent adults struggle with the idea of evolution. As his Foundation explains:

Could it be, he suggests, that we become “weighted down by misleading familiarity?” He blames the philosophy of essentialism, that of Aristotle and Plato, which asserts that categories are distinct, with clear demarcation between them. The great magic of evolution, he notes, is the manner in which one thing, so very slowly, can become another. Given time, a cell can become an eye, or an elephant, or a man.

Why of course a cell can become an eye, or an elephant, or a man. Isn’t that obvious? And the failure of evolutionists to explain how this actually happens is OK because the problem is too complicated.

You can’t make this stuff up. Here we have a leading evolutionist confused about why intelligent adults don’t march off into the sea with him. Isn’t it obvious that a single cell spontaneously transforms into an elephant?

Professor Dawkins’ atheism is central to his fervency. This should not be a distraction.

Not only is Dawkins’ atheism not a distraction, it is not relevant. For when it comes to evolution (and probably everything else), Dawkins is driven by his theism, not his atheism.

Dawkins’ convictions are not that evolution must be true because god does not exist. Rather, Dawkins’ convictions are that evolution must be true because god never would have designed this world. Like atheists everywhere, Dawkins does not believe in god, but he sure does believe about god, and that’s just as metaphysical.

Dawkins argues that biological structures, such as our eye and the giraffe’s recurrent laryngeal nerve would not have been intended by anyone otherwise capable of creating the world.

“No intelligent designer,” he assures the reader, “would ever have done that.”

That, of course, is not a scientific claim. Richard Dawkins is driven by his metaphysics which he then proceeds to deny.

If evolutionists are correct that no intelligent designer would ever have done that, then, yes, evolution (in one form or another) is a no-brainer. Their claim that evolution is a fact would be secure.

But all of this rests on their non scientific premise. Without the premise, all we are left with is the ludicrous, junk science that cells spontanously transform into elephants.

Was Early Evolution Genetics or Metabolism Based? Composomes, Environmental Patchiness and Other Evolutionary Imaginings

2011-09-01T09:44:00.000-07:00

Yet another failed expectation of evolutionary theory is that early evolution doesn’t make sense. In the twentieth century evolutionists expected that life could be shown to arise spontaneously, but even the simplest microbe is immensely complicated. As a recent paper explains:

Once beyond the abiogenic synthesis and accumulation of a variety of complex organic compounds on Earth took place, the conceivable paths toward life’s emergence have been dominated by two fundamentally different views in origin-of-life research: the genetics- or replication-first approach, and the metabolism-first scenario.

In other words, once upon a time a range of organic compounds spontaneously formed and, in spite of obvious dilution processes, just happened to create a cell. Just how this incredible event could have happened is, of course, unknown, and so as usual evolutionists take sides on equally bizarre hypotheses.

Both schools acknowledge that a critical requirement for primitive evolvable systems (in the Darwinian sense) is to solve the problems of information storage and reliable information transmission. Disagreement starts, however, in the way information was first stored.

Yes there is that minor issue of information storage (not to mention information creation). As the paper explains, there are plenty of problems with both the genetics-first and the metabolism-first hypotheses. But of course evolution is a fact, so the evolutionists confidently proceed with the pseodo-science and speculation:

We think that the real question is that of the organization of chemical networks. If (and what a big IF) there can be in the same environment distinct, organizationally different, alternative autocatalytic cycles/networks, as imagined for example by Gánti and Wächtershäuser, then these can also compete with each other and undergo some Darwinian evolution. But, even if such systems exist(-ed), they would in all probability have limited heredity only and thus could not undergo open-ended evolution.

In other words, we have no idea how life could have evolved, but so what, we have “strong reasons to believe.”

We do not know how the transition to digitally encoded information has happened in the originally inanimate world; that is, we do not know where the RNA world might have come from, but there are strong reasons to believe that it had existed.

Of course these “strong reasons” all hinge on the belief that evolution is true. Without the religious fervor the house of cards falls apart. And as usual, the religion leads to junk science, such as this make believe absurdity:

Template-free systems like composomes could only have had the limited role of accumulating prebiotic material and increasing environmental patchiness.

You may wonder why you don’t remember composomes from your high school biology class. That’s because they are a part of the evolutionist’s make believe. Like Flew’s Gardener they are part of the ever-growing evolutionary fiction that evolutionists insist must be a fact.

Religion drives science, and it matters.