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New book on intelligent design by molecular biologist Douglas Axe

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Undeniable: How Biology Confirms Our Intuition That Life Is Designed
Undeniable: How Biology Confirms Our Intuition That Life Is Designed

It’s not out yet, but the Kindle edition is only $12.99, so I pre-ordered it. That helps to get the book up in the bestseller lists. I’ll add it to my list of books that I am reading for the third quarter later, and maybe feature it in the coveted spot in the right column of the blog.

Anyway, here is the description:

Throughout his distinguished and unconventional career, engineer-turned-molecular-biologist Douglas Axe has been asking the questions that much of the scientific community would rather silence. Now, he presents his conclusions in this brave and pioneering book. Axe argues that the key to understanding our origin is the “design intuition”—the innate belief held by all humans that tasks we would need knowledge to accomplish can only be accomplished by someone who has that knowledge. For the ingenious task of inventing life, this knower can only be God.

Starting with the hallowed halls of academic science, Axe dismantles the widespread belief that Darwin’s theory of evolution is indisputably true, showing instead that a gaping hole has been at its center from the beginning. He then explains in plain English the science that proves our design intuition scientifically valid. Lastly, he uses everyday experience to empower ordinary people to defend their design intuition, giving them the confidence and courage to explain why it has to be true and the vision to imagine what biology will become when people stand up for this truth.

Armed with that confidence, readers will affirm what once seemed obvious to all of us—that living creatures, from single-celled cyanobacteria to orca whales and human beings, are brilliantly conceived, utterly beyond the reach of accident.

Our intuition was right all along.

Trailer is here:

Evolution News has a deal for those who pre-order:

A remarkable thing about evolutionary theory is the way it demands that we deny our intuition at almost every step. Evolutionists then assure us that the science is all figured out, so we needn’t trouble our silly heads about the relevant biology.

In a new book, Douglas Axe of Biologic Institute turns this standard assurance on its head. In Undeniable: How Biology Confirms Our Intuition That Life Is Designed, Dr. Axe restores the place of intuition alongside intellect in considering the question of life’s origins.

Undeniable will be published on July 12 by HarperOne, but you can pre-order before then and participate in an exclusive, private conference call with Dr. Axe and talk- show host Michael Medved. You’ll also receive digital versions of three complete books from Discovery Institute Press: Debating Darwin’s Doubt, The Unofficial Guide to Cosmos, and Science & Human Origins. See here for easy instructions.

And now, I have a secret story to tell you. I met Doug Axe face to face way back in the late 1990s. He told me and some other people about the post-doctoral work he was doing at Cambridge University on the probabilities of getting a functional protein by chance. He made me promise not to tell anyone, and I never did. It was from conversations like that with the intelligent design scholars that I decided to start using an alias.

From his research at Cambrudge, Dr. Axe found that the number of functional amino acid sequences is tiny:

Doug Axe’s research likewise studies genes that it turns out show great evidence of design. Axe studied the sensitivities of protein function to mutations. In these “mutational sensitivity” tests, Dr. Axe mutated certain amino acids in various proteins, or studied the differences between similar proteins, to see how mutations or changes affected their ability to function properly. He found that protein function was highly sensitive to mutation, and that proteins are not very tolerant to changes in their amino acid sequences. In other words, when you mutate, tweak, or change these proteins slightly, they stopped working. In one of his papers, he thus concludes that “functional folds require highly extraordinary sequences,” and that functional protein folds “may be as low as 1 in 10^77.”

The problem of forming DNA by sequencing nucleotides faces similar difficulties. And remember, mutation and selection cannot explain the origin of the first sequence, because mutation and selection require replication, which does not exist until that first living cell is already in place.

He published his findings in four separate publications with the prestigious Journal of Molecular Biology, and got his PhD with it. To get a PhD from Caltech, and then do post-doctoral work at Cambridge, you have to be good. And Dr. Axe is very, very good.

I have used the papers he wrote in many, many conversations with engineers in different companies where I have worked. He hit a home run with that research. You could never look at the evidence for intelligent design the same way again. Christian parents, if you have any children, be sure that you tell them about Doug Axe’s story.

Commentary

Four ways the Earth is fine-tuned for life, and one more

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Circumstellar Habitable Zone
Circumstellar Habitable Zone

This is a post from J. Warner Wallace, over at Cold Case Christianity.

Let’s see his four ways first, then I’ll add one that I know.

He writes:

  1. The Earth’s Relationship to the Sun Is Favorable to Life
  2. The Earth’s Atmospheric Conditions Are Favorable to Life
  3. The Earth’s Terrestrial Nature Is Favorable to Life
  4. The Earth’s Relationship to the Moon Is Favorable to Life

I’ve blogged about the moon and plate tectonics before, so we won’t pick #3 and #4 to look at. And I blogged about the stellar habitable zone before, so we won’t pick #1, either.

Let’s look at #2:

The Earth’s Atmospheric Conditions Are Favorable to Life:
The surface gravity of Earth is critical to its ability to retain an atmosphere friendly to life. If Earth’s gravity were stronger, our atmosphere would contain too much methane and ammonia. If our planet’s gravity were weaker, Earth wouldn’t be able to retain enough water. As it is, Earth’s atmosphere has a finely calibrated ratio of oxygen to nitrogen—just enough carbon dioxide and adequate water vapor levels to promote advanced life, allow photosynthesis (without an excessive greenhouse effect), and to allow for sufficient rainfall.

Ok, that’s very good.

Now here is one from me… well, it’s from Science Daily, but I found it. Actually, ECM found it. But he told me.

Excerpt:

They suggest that the size and location of an asteroid belt, shaped by the evolution of the Sun’s protoplanetary disk and by the gravitational influence of a nearby giant Jupiter-like planet, may determine whether complex life will evolve on an Earth-like planet.

This might sound surprising because asteroids are considered a nuisance due to their potential to impact Earth and trigger mass extinctions. But an emerging view proposes that asteroid collisions with planets may provide a boost to the birth and evolution of complex life.

Asteroids may have delivered water and organic compounds to the early Earth. According to the theory of punctuated equilibrium, occasional asteroid impacts might accelerate the rate of biological evolution by disrupting a planet’s environment to the point where species must try new adaptation strategies.

The astronomers based their conclusion on an analysis of theoretical models and archival observations of extrasolar Jupiter-sized planets and debris disks around young stars. “Our study shows that only a tiny fraction of planetary systems observed to date seem to have giant planets in the right location to produce an asteroid belt of the appropriate size, offering the potential for life on a nearby rocky planet,” said Martin, the study’s lead author. “Our study suggests that our solar system may be rather special.”

So, that’s 5 ways that the Earth and our solar system are fine-tuned to be habitable for complex, embodied minds. Somebody is looking out for you, so be thankful and recognize.

 

Polemics

Peer-reviewed paper: Michael Behe’s “First Rule of Adaptive Evolution”

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Christianity and the progress of science
Christianity and the progress of science

JoeCoder was writing some JavaScript code last night and he ran into a problem where a 3rd-party open source library was not performing as expected. So he got the non-minified version of the library and commented out two lines to get the behavior he wanted. He said this to me “Michael Behe’s first rule of adaptive evolution has been confirmed once again.” So, let’s take a look at Mike Behe’s first rule of adaptive evolution.

The paper was published in the Quarterly Review of Biology. I found it on PubMed.

Abstract:

Adaptive evolution can cause a species to gain, lose, or modify a function; therefore, it is of basic interest to determine whether any of these modes dominates the evolutionary process under particular circumstances. Because mutation occurs at the molecular level, it is necessary to examine the molecular changes produced by the underlying mutation in order to assess whether a given adaptation is best considered as a gain, loss, or modification of function. Although that was once impossible, the advance of molecular biology in the past half century has made it feasible. In this paper, I review molecular changes underlying some adaptations, with a particular emphasis on evolutionary experiments with microbes conducted over the past four decades. I show that by far the most common adaptive changes seen in those examples are due to the loss or modification of a pre-existing molecular function, and I discuss the possible reasons for the prominence of such mutations.

By far the most common adaptive changes in the examples we have are due to loss of function or modification of pre-existing function?

Evolution News has a post up about the paper.

Excerpt:

After reviewing the effects of mutations upon Functional Coding ElemenTs (FCTs), Michael Behe’s recent review article in Quarterly Review of Biology, “Experimental Evolution, Loss-of-Function Mutations and ‘The First Rule of Adaptive Evolution’,” offers some conclusions. In particular, as the title suggests, Behe introduces a rule of thumb he calls the “The First Rule of Adaptive Evolution”: “Break or blunt any functional coded element whose loss would yield a net fitness gain.” In essence, what Behe means is that mutations that cause loss-of-FCT are going to be far more likely and thus far more common than those which gain a functional coding element. In fact, he writes: “the rate of appearance of an adaptive mutation that would arise from the diminishment or elimination of the activity of a protein is expected to be 100-1000 times the rate of appearance of an adaptive mutation that requires specific changes to a gene.” Since organisms will tend to evolve along the most likely pathway, they will tend to break or lose an FCT before gaining a new one. He explains:

It is called the “first” rule because the rate of mutations that diminish the function of a feature is expected to be much higher than the rate of appearance of a new feature, so adaptive loss-of-FCT or modification-of-function mutations that decrease activity are expected to appear first, by far, in a population under selective pressure.(Michael J. Behe, “Experimental Evolution, Loss-of-Function Mutations and ‘The First Rule of Adaptive Evolution’,” Quarterly Review of Biology, Vol. 85(4) (December, 2010).)

Behe argues that this point is empirically supported by the research reviews in the paper. He writes:

As seen in Tables 2 through 4, the large majority of experimental adaptive mutations are loss-of-FCT or modification-of-function mutations. In fact, leaving out those experiments with viruses in which specific genetic elements were intentionally deleted and then restored by subsequent evolution, only two gain-of-FCT events have been reported

After asking “Why is this the case?” Behe states, “One important factor is undoubtedly that the rate of appearance of loss-of-FCT mutations is much greater than the rate of construction of new functional coded elements.” He draws sound and defensible conclusions from the observed data:

Leaving aside gain-of-FCT for the moment, the work reviewed here shows that organisms do indeed adapt quickly in the laboratory–by loss-of-FCT and modification-of-function mutations. If such adaptive mutations also arrive first in the wild, as they of course would be expected to, then those will also be the kinds of mutations that are first available to selection in nature. … In general, if a sequence of genomic DNA is initially only one nucleotide removed from coding for an adaptive functional element, then a single simple point mutation could yield a gain-of-FCT. As seen in Table 5, several laboratory studies have achieved thousand to million-fold saturations of their test organisms with point mutations, and most of the studies reviewed here have at least single-fold saturation. Thus, one would expect to have observed simple gain-of-FCT adaptive mutations that had sufficient selective value to outcompete more numerous loss-of- FCT or modification-of-function mutations in most experimental evolutionary studies, if they had indeed been available.

But this stark lack of examples of gain-of-functional coding elements can have important implications:

A tentative conclusion suggested by these results is that the complex genetic systems that are cells will often be able to adapt to selective pressure by effectively removing or diminishing one or more of their many functional coded elements.

Behe doesn’t claim that gain-of-function mutations will never occur, but the clear implication is that neo-Darwinists cannot forever rely on examples of loss or modification-of-FCT mutations to explain molecular evolution. At some point, there must be gain of function.

Now, there was a response to this paper from Jerry Coyne on his blog, and then a rebuttal from Mike Behe in a separate article on Evolution News.