Three episodes of the ID the Future podcast on human origins.
Part 1:
On this episode of ID the Future, the CSC’s Rob Crowther speaks with Casey Luskin, co-author of the new book Science & Human Origins. There are frequent and spurious claims made in the media that the genetic and fossil evidence of human-ape common ancestry is incontrovertible. In Science and Human Origins, Doug Axe, Ann Gauger, and Casey Luskin seek to equip readers with the knowledge to discern interpretation from fact and rhetoric from evidence. Listen in as Luskin introduces the book and specifically discusses his own assessment of the fossil data.
On this episode of ID the Future, Casey Luskin interviews Dr. Ann Gauger, co-author of Science & Human Origins and senior research scientist at the Biologic Institute. In recent years, human origins has become an especially hot topic as some scientists claim that the human race is a product of undirected natural selection and cannot be traced back to two parents. Dr. Gauger disagrees. Tune in to hear Dr. Gauger discuss the evidence against human-ape common ancestry, drawing from her research in such fields as anatomy and population genetics.
On this episode of ID the Future, Casey Luskin and Ann Gauger, co-authors of Science & Human Origins, discuss the assumptions behind the Darwinian evolutionist’s argument for common ancestry. Are these assumptions valid, or are there too many unknown variables? Dr. Gauger presents the inconsistencies between the Darwinian doctrine of common ancestry and the evidence from population genetics.
While intelligent design research is a new scientific field, recent years have been a period of encouraging growth, producing a strong record of peer-reviewed scientific publications. New publications continue to appear, now listed at our updated page.
The current boom goes back to 2004, when Discovery Institute senior fellow Stephen Meyer published a groundbreaking paper advocating ID in the journal Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington. There are multiple hubs of ID-related research.
Biologic Institute, led by molecular biologists Doug Axe and Ann Gauger, is “developing and testing the scientific case for intelligent design in biology.” Biologic conducts laboratory and theoretical research on the origin and role of information in biology, the fine-tuning of the universe for life, and methods of detecting design in nature. That’s Dr. Gauger at the Biologic lab pictured above.
Another ID research group is the Evolutionary Informatics Lab, founded by senior Discovery Institute fellow William Dembski along with Robert Marks, Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Baylor University. Their lab has attracted graduate-student researchers and published multiple peer-reviewed articles in technical science and engineering journals showing that computer programming “points to the need for an ultimate information source qua intelligent designer.”
Other pro-ID scientists around the world are publishing peer-reviewed pro-ID scientific papers. These include biologist Ralph Seelke at the University of Wisconsin Superior, Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig who recently retired from the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research in Germany, and Lehigh University biochemist Michael Behe.
Researchers have published their work in a variety of relevant technical venues, including peer-reviewed scientific journals, peer-reviewed scientific books from mainstream university presses, trade-press books, peer-edited scientific anthologies, peer-edited scientific conference proceedings and peer-reviewed philosophy of science journals and books.
These papers have appeared in scientific journals such as Protein Science, Journal of Molecular Biology, Theoretical Biology and Medical Modelling, Journal of Advanced Computational Intelligence and Intelligent Informatics, Quarterly Review of Biology, Cell Biology International, Rivista di Biologia/Biology Forum, Physics of Life Reviews, Annual Review of Genetics, and many others. At the same time, pro-ID scientists have presented their research at conferences worldwide in fields such as genetics, biochemistry, engineering, and computer science.
This body of research is converging on a consensus: complex biological features cannot arise by unguided Darwinian mechanisms, but require an intelligent cause.
My favorite area of ID research is the area of protein formation. I like to read about the research done by Doug Axe and Ann Gauger in that area. Research performed by Doug Axe at Cambridge University, and published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Molecular Biology, has shown that the number of functional amino acid sequences (ones that can form functioning proteins) is tiny:
Doug Axe’s research likewise studies genes that it turns out show great evidence of design. Axe studied the sensitivities of protein function to mutations. In these “mutational sensitivity” tests, Dr. Axe mutated certain amino acids in various proteins, or studied the differences between similar proteins, to see how mutations or changes affected their ability to function properly. He found that protein function was highly sensitive to mutation, and that proteins are not very tolerant to changes in their amino acid sequences. In other words, when you mutate, tweak, or change these proteins slightly, they stopped working. In one of his papers, he thus concludes that “functional folds require highly extraordinary sequences,” and that functional protein folds “may be as low as 1 in 10^77.”
The problem of forming DNA by sequencing nucleotides faces similar difficulties. And remember, mutation and selection cannot explain the origin of the first sequence, because mutation and selection require replication, which does not exist until that first living cell is already in place. I think that this very valuable research, indeed.
A new article by Dr. Joseph Kuhn of the Department of Surgery at Baylor University Medical Center, appearing in the peer-reviewed journal Baylor University Medical Center Proceedings, poses a number of challenges to both chemical and biological evolution. Titled “Dissecting Darwinism,” the paper begins by recounting some of the arguments raised during the Texas State Board of Education debate that challenged chemical and biological evolution. Those challenges include:
1. Limitations of the chemical origin of life data to explain the origin of DNA
2. Limitations of mutation and natural selection theories to address the irreducible complexity of the cell
3. Limitations of transitional species data to account for the multitude of changes involved in the transition.
(Joseph A. Kuhn, “Dissecting Darwinism,” Baylor University Medical Center Proceedings, Vol. 25(1): 41-47 (2012).)
It’s a good little introduction to where the action is on the origins debate but regular readers will have read it all before.
But there was one thing I found interesting.
The naturalistic response to this paper: (links removed)
The journal also published a rebuttal to Dr. Kuhn by Charles Stewart Roberts, a cardiovascular surgeon in Virginia. Dr. Roberts’s rebuttal simply asserted, as if it were a truth that required no scientific backing, that all biological features could be produced by evolution:
The notion of “irreducible complexity” in a cell, as an argument against evolution, is beyond my present understanding. Knowing that life has existed on planet earth for billions of years, however, I suspect that there has been time enough for evolution, no matter how complex, with reducibility.
I was having a debate with an atheist on Facebook and this guy did nothing but duck and dodge by citations of peer-reviewed evidence, like the paper from December 2011 on the oxygen in the early Earth’s atmosphere, which destroys naturalistic origin of life scenarios. My favorite of his speculations was when he responded to the Big Bang cosmology by saying “one can easily envision a scenario in which the universe has existed eternally”. Or something like that. Atheists – always easily envisioning things that are falsified by the available experimental evidence.
Casey comments on Roberts’ “rebuttal”: (links removed)
We’ve addressed this sort of unsophisticated and poorly articulated argument in defense of defending Darwinian evolution many times. You can’t just vaguely appeal to vast and unending amounts of time (and other probabilistic resources) and assume that Darwinian evolution can produce anything “no matter how complex.” Rather, you have to demonstrate that sufficient probabilistic resources exist to produce the feature.
Rather than making assumptions, proponents of intelligent design ask what the Darwinian mechanism can, or cannot, do. For example, a 2010 peer-reviewed research paper by pro-ID scientist Doug Axe modeled a population of evolving bacteria, and found that there are severe limits on the ability of Darwinian evolution to produce multi-mutation features. (A multi-mutation feature is one that requires multiple mutations to be present before there is any advantage given to the organism.)
Axe’s research makes assumptions very generously favoring Darwinian evolution. He assumed the existence of a huge population of asexually reproducing bacteria that could replicate quickly — perhaps nearly 3 times per day — over the course of billions of years. But he found that complex adaptations requiring more than six neutral mutations would exhaust the probabilistic resources available over the entire history of the earth.
[…]Axe’s work suggests that we cannot assume, as Roberts does, that sufficient probabilistic resources exist to produce all the features we see in life, “no matter how complex.” Indeed, follow-up research by Axe and Ann Gauger suggests that many features might require more mutations before conferring an advantage than could arise in the history of the earth. Their 2011 study attempted to convert one protein into another, closely related protein — the kind of transformation that evolutionists claim happened easily in the history of life. Through mutational analysis, they found that a minimum of seven independent mutations — and probably many more — would be necessary to convert the protein and its function into that of its allegedly close relative.
Evolutionary theory certainly can explain some things. It works up to a point. But there is only so much time available, so much material to react, and so many reactions per second. Hand-waving is not going to prove the neo-Darwinian hypothesis. It’s going to take published experimental results. Like the results of Doug Axe and Ann Gauger.
Oh by the way, there’s another peer-reviewed article confirming the inability of naturalistic mechanisms to create first life discussed on Evolution News. (David L. Abel, “Is Life Unique?,” Life, Vol. 2:106-134 (2012)). I can’t blog on all of them!
WINTERY KNIGHT 