Casey Luskin, Attorney & Program Officer in Public Policy and Legal Affairs-Discovery Institute.
There are some good lessons from this video you should know. The most important thing is to never allow the Darwinist to mention God, the Bible, or religion in a discussion about evolution. Always debate the evidence for and against Darwinism.
Thomas Cudworth explains at Uncommon Descent.
Excerpt:
From June 17 to June 21, 2011, at the University of Oklahoma (Norman) campus, the conference “Evolution 2011” was in session. It was co-sponsored by three scientific societies – The Society for the Study of Evolution, The Society of Systematic Biologists, and the American Society of Naturalists. It was billed by its promoters as “the premier annual international conference of evolutionary biologists on the planet.”
That billing may be somewhat hyperbolic, yet two things are clear: the conference was huge, with an expected turnout of 1400-1500 people; and many of the big names of evolutionary biology were to be there. Jerry Coyne was to give an address; H. Allen Orr was to chair a session; and Gunter Wagner and Sergey Gavrilets, cutting-edge biologists from the famed 2008 Altenberg conference, were to be there as well. Hundreds of papers were scheduled, and the research contributors to the various papers and presentations, according to the index for the conference, numbered something like 2,000.
[…]Let’s start with those Darwin defenders who are actively anti-religious or show contempt for religion in their writings and internet remarks. Conspicuously absent from the list of conference contributors were evolutionary champions Richard Dawkins, P. Z. Myers, Larry Moran, and Eugenie Scott.
Among those who have not attacked religious belief, but have violently bashed ID and/or passionately upheld neo-Darwinian theory, Paul Gross (co-author of Creationism’s Trojan Horse) and plant scientist Arthur Hunt (who has debated ID people live and on the internet) were not listed as contributors to any of the papers.
Among those who were active in the Dover ID trial, as witnesses for the plaintiffs, the no-shows include Kevin Padian, Robert Pennock, and Brian Alters.
Among the prominent Christian Darwinists, i.e., theistic evolutionists/evolutionary creationists, only Ken Miller was going to be there, and not to read a scientific paper, but to issue a cultural manifesto on why evolution matters in America today. The leading figures of Biologos – Darrel Falk, Dennis Venema, Kathryn Applegate, David Ussery, David Kerk, Denis Lamoureux – who have so often been presented, explicitly or implicitly, as experts on evolutionary biology – produced no papers for this conference. British scientists Oliver Barclay and Denis Alexander, who have posted several guest columns on Biologos, are not mentioned. The frequent UD commenter and Quaker TE Allan MacNeill, who has penned hundreds of thousands of words on UD and on his own blogs, apparently couldn’t manage 5,000 or so words for an original research paper for the conference, nor could the belligerent Calvinist TE and almost as prolific anti-ID blogger Steve Matheson.
Here’s why I think this is significant. The people who are the most aware of what intelligent design scholars are publishing in their books and research papers are these Darwinian apologists. They are the ones who know what has to be proven by the Darwinian side in order to counter the research being done by the intelligent design side, e.g. – the protein synthesis papers by Ann Gauger and Doug Axe. So at a major research conference on evolution, you would expect that they would have some research to present to counter the pro-ID research. But there isn’t any.
What I suspect is that the Darwinian side is going to be focused on proving the things that the ID already agrees with as being naturalistic – micro-evolution, adaptation and so forth. That’s what the conference will be about. But the conference will not be about responding to the really hard questions that are required for evolution to be a seamless explanation for all that we see. And that is telling. I see P.Z. Myers writing blog posts that are read by atheists and accepted as true. But what I don’t see is PZ Myers presenting the research to back up his blog posts in a real academic conference. And I especially don’t see PZ Myers agreeing to participate in public debates against pro-ID scholars.
Here are some papers from pro-intelligent design Biologic Institute researchers:
D’Andrea-Winslow L, Novitski AK (2008) Active bleb formation is abated in Lytechinus variegatus red spherule coelomocytes after disruption of acto-myosin contractility. Integrative Zoology 3: 106-113. doi:10.1111/j.1749-4877.2008.00086.x
Axe DD, Dixon BW, Lu P (2008) Stylus: A system for evolutionary experimentation based on a protein/proteome model with non-arbitrary functional constraints. PLoS ONE 3: e2246. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0002246
Sternberg RV (2008) DNA codes and information: Formal structures and relational causes. Acta Biotheoretica doi:10.1007/s10441-008-9049-6. PMID: 18465197
Gonzalez G (2008) Parent stars of extrasolar planets – IX. Lithium abundances. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Online Early Articles doi:10.1111/j.1365-2966.2008.13067.x
Duren RW, Marks II RJ, Reynolds PD, Trumbo ML (2007) Real-time neural network inversion on the SRC-6e reconfigurable computer. IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks 18: 889-901. PMID: 17526353
Gonzalez G, Laws C (2007) Parent stars of extrasolar planets VIII. Chemical abundances for 18 elements in 31 stars. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 378: 1141-1152. doi:10.1111/j.1365-2966.2007.11867.x
Gravagne IA, Marks II RJ (2007) Emergent behaviors of protector, refugee and aggressor swarms. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics, Part B: Cybernetics 37: 471- 476. PMID: 17416173
Weinschenk JJ, Combs WE, Marks II RJ (2007) On the avoidance of rule explosion in fuzzy inference engines. International Journal of Information Technology and Intelligent Computing 1, #4.
Gonzalez G (2006) Condensation temperatures trends among stars with planets. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters 367: L37-L41. doi:10.1111/j.1745-3933.2005.00136.x
Gonzalez G (2006) The sun’s interior metallicity constrained by neutrinos. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters 370 : L90–L93.
doi:10.1111/j.1745-3933.2006.00197.x
Gonzalez G (2006) The chemical compositions of stars with planets: A review.
Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific 118: 1494-1505 (invited review paper). doi:10.1086/509792
Gonzalez G (2005) Habitable zones in the universe. Origins of Life and Evolution of Biospheres 35: 555-606. doi:10.1007/s11084-005-5010-8
Keller D, Brozik JA (2005) Framework model for DNA polymerases. Biochemistry 44: 6877-6888. PMID: 15865433
Shapiro JA, von Sternberg R (2005) Why repetitive DNA is essential to genome function. Biological Reviews 80: 227-250. Review. PMID: 15921050
von Sternberg R, Shapiro JA (2005) How repeated retroelements format genome function. Cytogenetic and Genome Research 110: 108-116. PMID: 16093662
Axe DD (2004) Estimating the prevalence of protein sequences adopting functional enzyme folds. Journal of Molecular Biology 341: 1295-1315. PMID: 15321723
Lu H, Macosko J, Habel-Rodriguez D, Keller RW, Brozik JA, Keller D (2004) Closing of the fingers domain generates motor forces in the HIV reverse transcriptase. Journal of Biological Chemistry 279: 54529-54532. PMID: 15385563
Keller D, Swigon D, Bustamante C (2003) Relating single-molecule measurements to thermodynamics. Biophysical Journal 84: 733-738. PMID: 12547757
von Sternberg R, Cumberlidge N (2003) Autapomorphies of the endophragmal system in trichodactylid freshwater crabs (Crustacea: Decapoda: Eubrachyura). Journal of Morphology 256: 23-28. PMID: 12616572
Bustamante C, Keller D, Oster G (2001) The physics of molecular motors. Accounts of Chemical Research 34: 412-420. PMID: 11412078
D’Andrea-Winslow L, Strohmeier G, Rossi B, and Hofman P (2001) Identification of a Na/K/2Cl cotransporter (NKCC) in sea urchin coelomocytes: microfilament dependent surface expression mediated by hypotonic shock and cAMP. Journal of Experimental Biology 204: 147-156. PMID: 11104718
Gonzalez G, Brownlee D, Ward P (2001) The Galactic Habitable Zone: Galactic chemical evolution. Icarus 152: 185-200. doi:10.1006/icar.2001.6617
Axe DD (2000) Extreme functional sensitivity to conservative amino acid changes on enzyme exteriors. Journal of Molecular Biology 301: 585-595. PMID: 10966772
von Sternberg R (2000) Genomes and form. The case for teleomorphic recursivity.
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 901: 224-236. PMID: 10818573
Wuite GJ, Smith SB, Young M, Keller D, Bustamante C (2000) Single-molecule studies of the effect of template tension on T7 DNA polymerase activity. Nature 404: 103-106. PMID: 10716452
Axe DD, Foster NW, Fersht AR (1998) A search for single substitutions that eliminate enzymatic function in a bacterial ribonuclease. Biochemistry 37: 7157-7166. PMID: 9585527
Axe DD, Foster NW, Fersht AR (1996) Active barnase variants with completely random hydrophobic cores. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA. 93: 5590-5594. PMID: 8643620
Gauger AK, Goldstein LS (1993) The Drosophila kinesin light chain. Primary structure and interaction with kinesin heavy chain. Journal of Biological Chemistry 268: 13657-13666. PMID: 8514798
So there is plenty there to refute – if there were refutations available.
Dr. Fazale Rana has this interesting post up on protein binding at Reasons to Believe.
Excerpt:
Nobody likes getting the flu. In fact, the influenza virus represents a serious health challenge. For most people it causes a few days of misery, but tragically for others, it takes their lives.
Biomedical researchers are looking for ways to develop therapies against the strains of the influenza virus that avoid destruction by the immune system or fail to respond to antiviral drugs. Recently scientists from the University of Washington and The Scripps Institute made progress toward this end. They designed novel proteins from scratch that bind to the stem region of hemagglutinin, a viral protein that plays a central role in the infection process.1 The hope is that the new proteins will have therapeutic use and also help with diagnosis.
This advance has obvious biomedical importance. It also contributes toward understanding the fundamental nature of protein-protein interactions (PPIs), and with this insight comes powerful new evidence that life stems from a Creator.
Often, in order to carry out their function, proteins must interact and bind in a highly specific manner with other proteins. These PPIs are selective. If the wrong proteins bind to each other, the interaction is of no use to the cell.
A large and varied population of proteins crowds the cell’s interior. Even the simplest bacterium harbors several thousand different types of proteins, along with numerous copies of the other biomolecules inside it. The jam-packed environment complicates things. Proteins are more likely to encounter the “wrong” partners than the ones they are designed to interact with.
Biochemists are currently working to understand the specificity of PPIs and how proteins avoid unintended interactions. As it turns out, protein surfaces are carefully structured to allow strong interactions between protein pairs while minimizing the strength of the unwanted interactions. Recent work by Harvard scientists indicates that the concentration of PPI-participating proteins in the cell is also designed carefully.
In other words, protein structure and concentrations have to be precisely regulated to promote the PPIs critical for life.
The rest of the article talks about all the intricate and cutting-edge engineering and computation done by the scientists to create a situation where the proteins could bind, and then ends with this:
When considering this study, it is remarkable to note how much effort it took to design a protein that binds to a specific location on the hemagglutinin molecule. As biochemists Bryan Der and Brian Kuhlman point out while commenting on this work, the design of these proteins required:
…cutting-edge software developed by ~20 groups worldwide and 100,000 hours of highly parallel computing time. It also involved using a technique known as yeast display to screen candidate proteins and select those with high binding affinities, as well as x-ray crystallography to validate designs.2
If it takes this much work and intellectual input to create a single protein from scratch, is it really reasonable to think that undirected evolutionary processes could accomplish this task routinely?
If you have to involve human intelligence to this degree, then I think that the best explanation is intelligent design.
WINTERY KNIGHT 