Video clips below.
Part 1:
Part 2:
Part 3:
Part 4:
Part 5:
By the way, Apologetics Junkie posted video of the McDowell-Corbett debate! Part 1 and part 2.
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Tag Archives: Biological Information
New paper casts doubt on Stuart Kauffman’s self-organization theory
One of the naturalistic theories for the origin of biological information in the origin of life is Stuart Kauffman’s “self-organization” theory. The theory attempts to account for the functional sequences of information in living systems by arguing that the information emerges automatically from a sufficiently diverse pre-biotic soup.
In his book, “At Home in the Universe”, Kauffman writes:
I hope to persuade you that life is a natural property of complex chemical systems, that when the number of different kinds of molecules in a chemical soup passes a certain threshold, a self-sustaining network of reactions—an autocatalytic metabolism—will suddenly appear. Life emerged, I suggest, not simple, but complex and whole, and has remained complex and whole ever since… The secret of life, the wellspring of reproduction, is not to be found in the beauty of Watson-Crick pairing, but in the achievement of catalytic closure.
Doug Axe explains the theory a bit more: (H/T Evolution News)
When chemicals react, they produce different chemicals. So the idea here—call it Kauffman’s conjecture—was that mixtures with a sufficient number of different chemicals are bound to give rise to local compositions that continually replenish themselves through a self-catalyzed network of chemical reactions. Those special compositions would typically differ from the original mixture, but since they make more of themselves, they should be able to ‘grow’ by establishing themselves repeatedly in local pockets. The ability to propagate in this way, if proven, would be something like reproduction, only at the low level of chemical composition rather than at the high level of organismal form.
It was clear enough to me why Kauffman and others liked this idea. If some kind of reproduction and inheritance could conceivably be achieved in systems that are much, much simpler than anything we think of as living, then maybe scientists were making the problem of explaining life much, much harder than it really needed to be.
But now a new peer-reviewed research paper has cast doubt on this naturalistic theory.
Axe explains:
The paper’s title is a diplomatic statement of its main conclusion: Lack of evolvability in self-sustaining autocatalytic networks constrains metabolism-first scenarios for the origin of life. It becomes clear on reading the paper that the word constrains is here being used euphemistically. After testing the effect of fitness on the evolution of their model compositional assemblies, they report that “some slight relative increases and decreases in their replication-mutation equilibrium frequencies are detected, but the effects are so minor that it is hard to think of any evolutionary relevance.” The problem is that the behavior of the whole system is almost completely determined by the inherent chemistry, leaving no room for selection to do anything interesting.
The citation is “Lack of evolvability in self-sustaining autocatalytic networks constraints metabolism-first scenarios for the origin of life”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, vol. 107, no. 4, pp. 1470-1475.
William Dembski debates Lewis Wolpert about intelligent design
It’s the latest debate from Unbelievable, courtesy of Justin Brierley!
Details:
William (Bill) Dembski is an American mathematician, theologian and professor of Theology at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, TX. He debates the issue of ID with atheist Lewis Wolpert, Emeritus Professor of Biology at University College London.
For Bill Dembski see http://www.designinference.com/ or his blog http://www.uncommondescent.com/
For Lewis Wolpert’s Wikipedia profile see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Wolpert
Intro:
- Bill Dembski’s religious background (Catholic-raised atheist/agnostic, later Protestant)
- Dembski’s view of the interface between science and religion
- Lewis Wolpert’s religious background (Jewish-raised atheist)
- Wolpert’s view of whether God exists
First half:
- Dembski explains the mathematical foundations for detecting design
- Wolpert asks whether designs can emerge without intelligence
- Dembski asks whether anything in biology could be like SETI signals
- Wolpert says that it is impossible to recognize design in biology
- Dembski asks whether the Darwinian hypothesis is falsifiable
- Wolpert says that it is never warranted to rule out chance as an explanation
- Dembski says that you can set limits on what chance can do within a certain time
- Wolpert says that chance can do anything regardless of time, etc.
- Dembski says, what about the work of Doug Axe published in the peer-reviewed JMB?
- Wolpert says those calculations must be wrong!
- Dembski says then you’re just a dogmatic reductionist
- Wolpert agrees that he is a dogmatic reductionist
Second half:
- Dembski explains why intelligent is not repackaged creationism
- Dembski explains why intelligent design isn’t an argument from ignorance
- Dembski talks about whether evolutionary mechanisms can create more information
- Wolpert asks whether chemistry requires intelligent design too
- Dembski says that there is a fine-tuning argument for cosmological constants too
- Wolpert agrees that the origin of life is unexplained naturalistically
- Wolpert asks if everything after the origin of life is explained
- Dembski says that there are still problems like the Cambrian explosion
- Wolpert asks Dembski if anything could falsify intelligent design
- Dembski gives an example of something that could falsify intelligent design
- Dembski asks whether naturalistic explanations of life are falsifiable
- Wolpert asks whether intelligent design affects the way that people do science
- Dembski asks whether it is possible that the resources of naturalism are adequate to explain life
- Wolpert says that you can’t explain anything in nature as the result of intelligence
- Dembski says that it happens all the time in other sciences like engineering
- Wolpert says that he doesn’t want a Designer
- Dembski says we should just follow the evidence and who cares what people on either side want
And then there are closing speeches.
I am not sure if I had anything to do with this, but I did send Justin Bill’s e-mail address recently. I’m pretty happy that Justin managed to get Bill and Lewis to debate on this topic. Justin says that Bill will be back next week! He’ll be discussing his new book “The End of Christianity” which is about the problem of evil.
Did you miss Lewis Wolpert’s last debate with the professor of nanotechnology?
UPDATE: Justin says that it was indeed my e-mail that helped him to contact Bill, and what’s more we should expect a show that features Stephen C. Meyer soon, too!
WINTERY KNIGHT 