Tag Archives: Chemistry

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Walter Bradley presents the fine-tuning argument at UCSB

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Walter Bradley is one of my favorite lecturers in the whole universe!

Here’s a 5-minute sample of the lecture he presented at the University of California (Santa Barbara).

And if you like it, you can watch the whole lecture here on Vimeo.

Here’s a bio from his faculty page at Baylor University:

Walter Bradley (B.S., Ph.D. University of Texas at Austin) is Distinguished Professor of Engineering at Baylor. He comes to Baylor from Texas A&M University where he helped develop a nationally recognized program in polymeric composite materials. At Texas A&M, he served as director of the Polymer Technology Center for 10 years and as Department Head of Mechanical Engineering, a department of 67 professors that was ranked as high as 12th nationally during his tenure. Bradley has authored over 150 refereed research publications including book chapters, articles in archival journals such as the Journal of Material Science, Journal of Reinforced Plastics and Composites, Mechanics of Time-Dependent Materials, Journal of Composites Technology and Research, Composite Science and Technology, Journal of Metals, Polymer Engineering and Science, and Journal of Materials Science, and refereed conference proceedings.

Dr. Bradley has secured over $5.0 million in research funding from NSF grants (15 yrs.), AFOSR (10 years), NASA grants (10 years), and DOE (3 years). He has also received research grants or contracts from many Fortune 500 companies, including Alcoa, Dow Chemical, DuPont, 3M, Shell, Exxon, Boeing, and Phillips.

He co-authored The Mystery of Life Origin: Reassessing Current Theories and has written 10 book chapters dealing with various faith science issues, a topic on which he speaks widely.

He has received 5 research awards at Texas A&M University and 1 national research award. He has also received two teaching awards. He is an Elected Fellow of the American Society for Materials and the American Scientific Affiliation (ASA), the largest organization of Christians in Science and Technology in the world. He is President elect of the ASA and will serve his term in 2008.

You can read more about his recent research on how to use coconuts to make car parts in this article from Science Daily.

My favorite lecture of all

My favorite lecture of all is “Giants in the Land”.

He delivered that lecture at the University of Georgia in 1997.

News

William Dembski discusses irreducible complexity and co-option

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William Dembski explains what the debate on origins is really about.

About the speaker:

Dr. Dembski has taught at Northwestern University, the University of Notre Dame, and the University of Dallas. He has done postdoctoral work in mathematics at MIT, in physics at the University of Chicago, and in computer science at Princeton University. A graduate of the University of Illinois at Chicago where he earned a B.A. in psychology, an M.S. in statistics, and a Ph.D. in philosophy, he also received a doctorate in mathematics from the University of Chicago in 1988 and a master of divinity degree from Princeton Theological Seminary in 1996. He has held National Science Foundation graduate and postdoctoral fellowships.

The lecture:

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

Summary (snark is in italics)

What is evolution:

  • Is it enough for Christian students to just retain their faith in college?
  • Or should Christian students seek to transform their universities?
  • The word “evolution” refers to a unguided, purposeless, undirected process
  • Living organisms are not designed, they just appear to be designed
  • Therefore, it is an atheistic theory – there is NO ROOM for God
  • Random variations and natural selection can do the creating of life without God
  • Nothing about evolution suggest that God had anything to do with it

The appearance of design:

  • The cell is a nano-engineered information processing system.
  • The cell has engineering, e.g. – signal transduction, message passing, etc.
  • There are molecular machines similar to man-made machines, but less efficient
  • E.g. – the bacterial flagellum which has 40 parts
  • These molecular machines have minimal complexity – all the parts are needed
  • can’t build a molecular machine step-by-step – all the parts must be present and integrated

How does evolution try to explain molecular machines:

  • The standard naturalistic response is “co-option”
  • Each intermediate step has pieces that are used for other purposes
  • I.e. – Subsets of the parts can have different functions
  • For example, a subset of the bacterial flagellum can be used as a syringe
  • The subset, called the Type-3 secretory system, has only 13 parts
  • The problem is that evolutionists don’t show all the steps, and all the functions
  • For this to be a good response, you need a smooth path from 1 part up to 40
  • Each step of the path has to have a working system with a different function
  • But the atheists don’t have the path, or the intermediate functions
  • It’s like arguing that you can walk from Seattle to Tokyo via the Hawaiian islands

Is the bacterial flagellum a cherry-picked example?

  • There are no detailed molecular pathways for any biochemical systems in the cell
  • The atheistic response is to speculate that pathways will be found as science progresses
  • The pathways are unobservable entities, just like the multiverse and the Cambrian precursors

Where does the machinery to create proteins come from?

  • The molecular machines are composed of proteins
  • The proteins are manufactured by copying protein-building instructions from the DNA
  • The instructions are carried to the build site by messenger RNA
  • The build site is called a ribosome
  • The DNA requires proteins to build, so there is a chicken-and-egg problem
  • The problem is that protein transcription systems require everything in place
  • There is no materialistic theory about how to build this step-by-step

So what do the molecular machines tell us about how life began?

  • The problem of the origin of life is the problem of the origin of information
  • What needs to be explained are the functional sequences of parts
  • The sequences are identical to sequences of letters that make sense
  • The atheist has to say that material processes can create the information
  • The problem of finding sequences of amino acids or proteins is a search problem
  • A blind search of the space of possible sequences is not efficient
  • even with lots time, parts and trials, you can’t converge on functional proteins
  • information is required and the only known producer of information is a mind

Bill is one of my favorite people. He’s smarter than practically all of the atheists who dominate the universities. But because he is an outspoken Christian, he never gets the recognition he deserves. He just keeps plugging away on his research. He doesn’t make excuses.

What is intelligent design?

Related DVDs

Illustra also made two other great DVDs on intelligent design. The first two DVDs “Unlocking the Mystery of Life” and “The Privileged Planet” are must-buys, but you can watch them on youtube if you want, for free.

Here are the 2 playlists:

I also recommend Coldwater Media’s “Icons of Evolution”. All three of these are on sale from Amazon.com.

Related posts

News

New paper casts doubt on Stuart Kauffman’s self-organization theory

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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.