Tag Archives: Douglas Axe

News

How do proponents of Darwinian evolution respond to debate?

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Here’s what happened at the recent public discussion on Darwinism and intelligent design at Southern Methodist University.

Excerpt:

The evening started with a screening of Darwin’s Dilemma:The Mystery of the Cambrian Fossil Record for a standing room only crowd in the theater of the Hughes Trigg Student Center, and was rounded out by four presentations and a question and answer period with the speakers.

CSC’s Stephen Meyer moderated the discussion after the film which included four serious challenges to Darwinian evolution. The first speaker was evolutionary biologist Richard Sternberg, who presented the challenge of population genetics to Darwin’s Theory. He was followed by Biologic Institute’s Doug Axe, who spoke on the challenge of finding functional proteins, and CSC Fellow Paul Nelson, who explained why evolving animal body plans by random mutation and natural selection is probably impossible. CSC biologist Jonathan Wells concluded the short presentations by explaining the challenge of ontogenetic information. The evening closed with a robust 40 minutes of questions from the audience.

Is that crazy? Four scholars with Ph.Ds from Yale, Berkeley, Harvard, Cambridge, etc. – 6 Ph.Ds in all for FOUR speakers spoke. The four scholars presented information then had 40 minutes of unscripted public discussion with the audience.

Excerpt:

What do hox genes, gene duplication, evo-devo and ontogenetic information all have in common? They were among the subjects raised–in some detail–by audience members during the Q&A portion of 4 Nails in Darwin’s Coffin: New Challenges to Darwinian Evolution event at SMU last night.

Wow. Public, unscripted discussion of biological science between two opposing points of view.

I’ll bet that open discussion of controversial theories happens all the time in public schools, right?

Not so much.

Excerpt:

I was treated to a –sadly– all too typical story in the aftermath of the great 4 Nails in Darwin’s Coffin: New Challenges to Darwinian Evolution conference the other night at SMU. An SMU staffer told me about what happened to a student that wanted to let his friends know about the event.

Earlier this week the student asked his science professor if at the end of class he could make a quick announcement and the prof said no problem. At the end of the class the student stood up and very quickly announced the name of the event and that students could come and hear about some of the flaws in Darwin’s theory. At that point the professor put his hand on the student’s shoulder and said, in front of the whole class: “Hold on, if I’d known you were going to announce that I wouldn’t have let you stand up. There are NO flaws in Darwin’s theory!” The teacher continued to pontificate about how there simply are no flaws in Darwin’s theory and that any such claims are all myths.

Then yesterday I read the Nature blog about the new ID Centre that has just launched in the UK. There was a link to this story about the British Humanist Association which is lobbying for the government to grant what amounts to special status to Darwinian evolution in British schools. The ink has barely dried from the announcement and already British Darwinists are feverishly trying to stamp out any dissent.

Essentially, they want to put their hand on every British school student and tell them not to question Darwin’s theory.

Yeah, those secular humanists are as open-minded about dissent as Mao Zedong. He was a secular humanist, too.

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Events

Four intelligent design experts will present at Dallas event on Thursday

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I really don’t like the liberal Southern Methodist University, and their liberal Perkins Seminary (ultra-liberal), but this is good news.

Details:

4 Nails in Darwin’s Coffin: New Challenges to Darwinian Evolution

  • Date: Sept. 23, 2010
  • Place: Southern Methodist University, Hughes-Trigg Ballroom
  • Time: 7:00-9:30 pm

Featuring a Free Screening of Darwin’s Dilemma: The Mystery of the Cambrian Fossil Record

Plus Live Presentations and Q and A with:

More than a century ago, Charles Darwin thought he had explained away the evidence for intelligent design in biology. But now new evidence from molecular biology, genetics, and related fields are raising four important challenges to the claim that complex biological life is the result of an undirected process of natural selection acting on random mutations. Learn about these “4 nails in Darwin’s coffin” at this FREE event.

Bring your questions!

Sponsored by PULSE and Victory Campus Ministries, SMU
For more information, email sykes@smu.edu or call 214.528.7343 x110

Every single one of these guys is an expert on ID. Do not miss this if you are in the area.

And don’t forget the On Guard conference in Dallas that is happening in early November.

Podcasts

Doug Axe publishes a new peer-reviewed paper on protein folding

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A new podcast from ID the Future is worth listening to.

Participants

  • Jay Richards, Director of Research at the CRSC, (Discovery Institute)
  • Doug Axe, Director of the Biologic Institute

The MP3 file is here.

Topics

  • the new BIO-Complexity peer-reviewed journal
  • new peer-reviewed paper challenges Darwinian account of protein folding
  • proteins are found in every living system
  • a protein is a chain of parts called amino acids
  • there are 20 amino acids used in living systems
  • it’s like a 20-letter alphabet used to make sentences (proteins)
  • if the sequence is just right, it folds up and has a function
  • the information about the functional sequences is in the genome
  • the “protein fold” is the 3D shape that a functional protein takes on
  • the folding problem is good because you can TEST Darwinian mechanisms
  • the problem is simple enough to be tested rigorously in a lab
  • Question: how easy is it to create a sequence that folds?
  • English is a good analogy to the problem of protein folding
  • you have a long string of characters (e.g. – 200 letters)
  • each “letter” can be one of 20 amino acids
  • if you assign the letters randomly, you almost always get gibberish
  • there are tons of possible sequences of different letters
  • it’s like a 200 digit slot machine with each digit having 20 possibilities!
  • the number of sequences that would actually make sense is tiny
  • protein folding is the same
  • Doug’s paper assesses how many “tries” could have been attempted
  • Doug’s paper calculates the total number of possibilities
  • cells have arrived a large number of functional sequences
  • but only a small number of the total possibilities could have been tried
  • this is called the “sampling problem”
  • there isn’t enough time to test all of the possibilities (see previous paper below)
  • how did living systems arrive at the functional sequences so quickly?
  • there are some possible naturalistic scenarios for solving the problem
  • Doug’s new paper shows that none of the naturalistic explanations work
  • the only explanation left is that an intelligence sequenced the amino acids
  • it is identical to the way that I can sequence letters to make this post

A picture is worth a thousand words

Here’s a video clip from the DVD Darwin’s Dilemma showing the process:

If you would like to know more about Darwin’s Dilemma, you can read Brian Auten’s review of Darwin’s Dilemma.

Who are these guys?

I wrote a post before on Doug Axe’s previous publications in the Journal of Molecular Biology, where he researched how many of the possible sequences of amino acids have biological function. His PhD is from Caltech, and his post-doctoral research on proteins was conducted at Cambridge University.

Jay Richards is a Senior Fellow of the Discovery Institute and a Contributing Editor of The American at the American Enterprise Institute. In recent years he has been a Visiting Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, and a Research Fellow and Director of Acton Media at the Acton Institute. His PhD is from Princeton University.

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