Tag Archives: Darwinism

Polemics

Are Darwinists right to say that the appendix has no useful functions?

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Evolution News points to this Washington Post article.

Excerpt:

The appendix “acts as a good safe house for bacteria,” said Duke surgery professor Bill Parker, a study co-author. Its location — just below the normal one-way flow of food and germs in the large intestine in a sort of gut cul-de-sac — helps support the theory, he said. Also, the worm-shaped organ outgrowth acts like a bacteria factory, cultivating the good germs, Parker said. That use is not needed in a modern industrialized society, Parker said. If a person’s gut flora dies, it can usually be repopulated easily with germs they pick up from other people, he said. But before dense populations in modern times and during epidemics of cholera that affected a whole region, it wasn’t as easy to grow back that bacteria and the appendix came in handy.

Evolution News adds:

Additionally, Loren G. Martin, professor of physiology at Oklahoma State University, lists various likely functions for the appendix . Writing on Scientific American‘s website, he includes these examples:

  •  being “involved primarily in immune functions”
  • “function[ing] as a lymphoid organ, assisting with the maturation of B lymphocytes (one variety of white blood cell) and in the production of the class of antibodies known as immunoglobulin A (IgA) antibodies.”
  • helping with “the production of molecules that help to direct the movement of lymphocytes to various other locations in the body”
  • “suppress[ing] potentially destructive humoral (blood- and lymph-borne) antibody responses while promoting local immunity”
  • Additionally, it is “an important ‘back-up’ that can be used in a variety of reconstructive surgical techniques”

Likewise, a few months back David Klinghoffer reported that researchers in the journal Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology found:

Individuals without an appendix were four times more likely to have a recurrence of Clostridium difficile, [a pathogen common in hospitals,] exactly as Parker’s hypothesis predicted. Recurrence in individuals with their appendix intact occurred in 11% of cases. Recurrence in individuals without their appendix occurred in 48% of cases.

In other words, the appendix performs important immune-related functions. Thus, the appendix is not there to occasionally explode. With the appendix increasingly considered to be an important organ that you wouldn’t want to lose, researchers have also found that antibiotics can cure many cases of appendicitis (see Eriksson et al., 2006  ).

It just goes to show you that it’s a good idea to not decide your worldview by appealing to cartoons and funny one-liners. First of all, just because something is not perfect, it doesn’t mean that it isn’t designed. The Chevy Volt vehicle that Obama subsidizes with your tax dollars might burst into flames unexpectedly, but it’s still designed. Secondly, no designed object can be perfect in every way – every engineered object is a tradeoff of different, conflicting design goals. It might be nice to have a laptop that can last for 16 hours on a single charge, but then it’s either going to either weigh 12 pounds or cost $4000.

Junk DNA

This isn’t the only time that arguments of “poor design” are made by Darwinists, either – I also hear a lot about Junk DNA.

Look at what the peer-reviewed journal Nature says:

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 colibacteria1. 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.”

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 RNA2. 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.

Let’s not be too hasty when making these “bad design” arguments – let’s be guided by the progress of science, and not just by cartoons and snarky terms like “junk DNA”.

News

Dr. Ben Carson faces the Darwinian Inquisition at Emory University

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Evolution News writes about an eminent scientist who is under by professors and students at Emory University because of his disagreement with Darwinian orthodoxy and his assertion that morality isn’t possible on a materialistic worldview.

Here’s the first article from Evolution News, which explains what got Dr. Carson in trouble with the Darwoids.

Excerpt:

You can be a brilliant, innovative pediatric neurosurgeon at a sky-scraping top medical school, in addition to being a generous philanthropist with an inspirational up-from-dire-poverty personal story, plus a Presidential Medal of Freedom winner, and a best-selling writer whose memoir was turned into a TV movie starring Cuba Gooding Jr.

All that, but if you once shared your critical thoughts on evolutionary science and its moral implications — everything else about you suddenly dwindles to very little.

Dr. Ben Carson of Johns Hopkins University is that man. He’s scheduled to give the Commencement address and receive an honorary degree at Emory University but close to 500 faculty members, students and staff protested, drawing up a gravely serious letter to the student paper expressing their “concerns.” Over what? Carson had no intention of speaking about evolution but someone dug up an impromptu interview he once gave to a publication associated with his Christian denomination (he’s a Seventh Day Adventist).

Carson explained why he’s not impressed by the evidence on offer for Darwinian theory and why a materialist philosophy is at odds with the idea of free will and therefore makes it tough to offer a coherent account of moral principles. The interview is casual in tone and it’s not clear whether his views are more along the lines of theistic evolution, intelligent design, or some other perspective. Not that the protestors seemed inclined to make any careful distinctions.

Emory isn’t withdrawing the invitation and the letter’s signatories don’t demand that the university do so. But they do distort his opinions and make him sound far less thoughtful than he actually is. Because he says you can’t, under materialism, give a sound rationale for morality, they claim he said that evolutionists are therefore morally defective, which is of course absurd.

At the First Things website, Princeton University moral philosopher Robbie George comes to Carson’s defense. Professor George agrees with Carson:

But of course Gentle Ben (and he is indeed one of the gentlest, kindest people one could ever meet) doesn’t believe that his Darwinist friends and colleagues are necessarily unethical. What he believes is that Darwinism is necessarily materialistic. (This is a view about Darwinism that he shares with some devout Darwinists themselves.) And he believes that materialism, if true, is incompatible with free will and with ethical norms (which must be, after all, norms for the guidance of free choices, if they are to have any standing, force, and validity at all). Now, he knows perfectly well that people who believe in materialism are in many cases decent, honorable, ethical people. But he thinks that they lead lives that are much better than their formal philosophical beliefs would require them to lead. He believes that their commitment to materialism makes it impossible for them to give a sound account of the ethical norms which they themselves, to their credit, live by. Of course, he might be wrong about that (though I don’t think he is), just as he might be wrong about the validity of Darwinism as a scientific theory, or the compatility of Darwinism with the rejection of materialism. But it’s certainly not a mean or crazy thing to believe or say. It’s scarcely a cause for “concern” about having him as a Commencement speaker.

Robbie George is one of the best moral philosophers out there. If he says that morality is not rationally grounded on a materialist worldview, then that’s the way it is. Naturally, people who believe in Darwinism can behave morally, because they are made in God’s image. Therefore, they have free will and an awareness of the moral law, even though these things are not rationally grounded on materialism. The point that theists make is merely that materialists are not able to make sense of morality on a deterministic worldview. They can, however, act better than their worldview allows – but it’s not rational for them to do that.

I note that Emory University is on the list of LEAST-FREE universities, according to the non-partisan, non-religious Foundational for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), so it’s not surprising that they would be censor anyone who has different views than they do.

Here’s another article from Evolution News.

Excerpt:

Almost 500 Emory faculty and students have expressed their dismay that their commencement speaker on May 14 does not toe the ideological line on evolutionary biology. Yes, gasp, the renowned Johns Hopkins neurosurgeon Ben Carson does not believe in evolutionary theory. Not only that, but biology professors at Emory and their supporters also accuse Carson of committing a thought crime because he allegedly “equates acceptance of evolution with a lack of ethics and morality.”

Since I am a historian who has studied and published on the history of evolutionary ethics, I was rather surprised by the Emory faculty’s consternation over Carson’s belief that evolution undermines objective ethics and morality. Last summer I attended a major interdisciplinary conference at Oxford University on “The Evolution of Morality and the Morality of Evolution.” So I am well aware that there are a variety of viewpoints in academe on this topic. Nonetheless, many evolutionists — from Darwin to the present (including quite a few at that Oxford conference) — have argued and are still arguing precisely the point that Dr. Carson highlighted: they claim that morality has evolved and thus has no objective existence.

One of the keynote speakers at the Oxford conference was a leading philosopher of science, Michael Ruse, who stated in a 1985 article co-authored with Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson: “Ethics as we understand it is an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to co-operate.” Why do biologists at Emory try to make Carson appear foolish for asserting that evolution undermines ethics, while one of the leading evolutionary biologists and one of the leading philosophers of science admit that evolution destroys any objective morality? Wilson in his book Consilience (1998) argued: “Either ethical precepts, such as justice and human rights, are independent of human experience or else they are human inventions.” He rejected the former explanation, which he called transcendentalist ethics, in favor of the latter, which he named empiricist ethics.

Atheists who think about these issues agree – on a materialist interpretation of nature, ethics is arbitrary, made-up nonsense.

Even atheists like Richard Dawkins think so:

The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored. In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.

(“God’s Utility Function,” Scientific American, November, 1995, p. 85)

Surprise! Atheism, which assumes that matter is all there is, implies the complete destruction of rationally grounded morality – including moral standards and human rights. This is denied by no one who has thought about this problem for more than 5 seconds. If you are talking to an atheist, you are talking to someone who thinks that any statement about right and wrong is as true as it’s opposite. On atheism, the morality of rape or slavery is as arbitrary as fashion or food. Any statement that rape is wrong has as much reason behind it, on atheism, as the statement that rape is right. Any statement that slavery is wrong has as much reason behind it, on atheism, as the statement that slavery is right. And that’s what atheists mean by morality, on their view. It’s just like picking which side of the road that people will drive on in different groups of people in different places in different times. That’s “atheist morality”. And when they die, there is no accountability in the afterlife for anything they’ve done and managed to escape judgment for in this life.

And, in point of fact, you can see it right now in the way that they are treating Dr. Carson.

What to do about it

If you are not happy with the actions of the Darwish Inquisition at Emory University, then please  sign the petition!

And any atheists who are reading this post and don’t support Carson’s right to speak, please understand why theists have the opinion that atheism is nothing more than the practice of running from debates and silencing (one way or another) anyone who disagrees with you. That’s our experience of dealing with secular humanists like Richard Dawkins – no debates, just insults and coercion. To us, secular humanism is just a phrase that means totalitarianism and censorship. That’s our experience.

If you disagree, then sign the petition and prove us wrong.

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Polemics

Is intelligent design creationism? Dr. Stephen C. Meyer explains

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Dr. Meyer explains the truth in the UK Telegraph.

Excerpt:

In 2004, the distinguished philosopher Antony Flew of the University of Reading made worldwide news when he repudiated a lifelong commitment to atheism and affirmed the reality of some kind of a creator. Flew cited evidence of intelligent design in DNA and the arguments of “American [intelligent] design theorists” as important reasons for this shift.

[…]Contrary to media reports, ID is not a religious-based idea, but an evidence-based scientific theory about life’s origins. According to Darwinian biologists such as Oxford University’s Richard Dawkins, living systems “give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose”.

But, for modern Darwinists, that appearance of design is illusory, because the purely undirected process of natural selection acting on random mutations is entirely sufficient to produce the intricate designed-like structures found in living organisms.

By contrast, ID holds that there are tell-tale features of living systems and the universe that are best explained by a designing intelligence. The theory does not challenge the idea of evolution defined as change over time, or even common ancestry, but it disputes Darwin’s idea that the cause of biological change is wholly blind and undirected.

[…]Consider an even more fundamental argument for design. In 1953, when Watson and Crick elucidated the structure of the DNA molecule, they made a startling discovery. Strings of precisely sequenced chemicals called nucleotides in DNA store and transmit the assembly instructions – the information – in a four-character digital code for building the protein molecules the cell needs to survive. Crick then developed his “sequence hypothesis”, in which the chemical bases in DNA function like letters in a written language or symbols in a computer code. As Dawkins has noted, “the machine code of the genes is uncannily computer-like”.

The informational features of the cell at least appear designed. Yet, to date, no theory of undirected chemical evolution has explained the origin of the digital information needed to build the first living cell. Why? There is simply too much information in the cell to be explained by chance alone.

The information in DNA (and RNA) has also been shown to defy explanation by forces of chemical necessity. Saying otherwise would be like saying a headline arose as the result of chemical attraction between ink and paper. Clearly, something else is at work.

DNA functions like a software program. We know from experience that software comes from programmers. We know that information – whether, say, in hieroglyphics or radio signals – always arises from an intelligent source. As the pioneering information theorist Henry Quastler observed: “Information habitually arises from conscious activity.” So the discovery of digital information in DNA provides strong grounds for inferring that intelligence played a causal role in its origin.

Thus, ID is not based on religion, but on scientific discoveries and our experience of cause and effect, the basis of all scientific reasoning about the past. Unlike creationism, ID is an inference from biological data.

It might be a good idea now to echo Meyer’s claim with something from the secular magazine Scientific American.

Excerpt:

As recently as the middle of the 20th century, many scientists thought that the first organisms were made of self-replicating proteins. After Francis Crick and James Watson showed that DNA is the basis for genetic transmission in the 1950s, many researchers began to favor nucleic acids over proteins as the ur-molecules. But there was a major hitch in this scenario. DNA can make neither proteins nor copies of itself without the help of catalytic proteins called enzymes. This fact turned the origin of life into a classic chicken-or-egg puzzle: Which came first, proteins or DNA?

RNA, DNA’s helpmate, remains the most popular answer to this conundrum, just as it was when I wrote “In the Beginning…” Certain forms of RNA can act as their own enzymes, snipping themselves in two and splicing themselves back together again. If RNA could act as an enzyme, then it might be able to replicate itself without help from proteins. RNA could serve as gene and catalyst, egg and chicken.

But the “RNA-world” hypothesis remains problematic. RNA and its components are difficult to synthesize under the best of circumstances, in a laboratory, let alone under plausible prebiotic conditions. Once RNA is synthesized, it can make new copies of itself only with a great deal of chemical coaxing from the scientist. Overbye notes that “even if RNA did appear naturally, the odds that it would happen in the right sequence to drive Darwinian evolution seem small.”

The RNA world is so dissatisfying that some frustrated scientists are resorting to much more far out—literally—speculation. The most startling revelation in Overbye’s article is that scientists have resuscitated a proposal once floated by Crick. Dissatisfied with conventional theories of life’s beginning, Crick conjectured that aliens came to Earth in a spaceship and planted the seeds of life here billions of years ago. This notion is called directed panspermia. In less dramatic versions of panspermia, microbes arrived on our planet via asteroids, comets or meteorites, or drifted down like confetti.

Naturalists who resort to aliens are still implicating intelligent causes to explain life, ironically enough.

Please share and re-tweet this post, because not understanding intelligent design is a mistake that virtually everyone in the mainstream media makes when discussing this topic. I would bet $100 that there is not a single journalist in the mainstream media who can define intelligent design by citing a peer-reviewed article or academic textbook, and then give an example of where proponents of ID think that intelligent design is evident in nature.

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Documentaries on intelligent design

Here are the 2 playlists: