Archive: Intelligent Design, T rex, Protein Folding, Introns, Alaska Dinos, Scopes, More
Here are some of the stories we were reporting at the end of February 2002, restored from archives. Do the Darwinians sound like a broken record sometimes? They’re still using some of the same arguments and excuses now that they were 23 years ago.
Note: some embedded links may no longer work.
Natural Selection Works in Fruit Flies 02/28/2002
Two papers in the Feb 28 Nature, one by Smith and Eyre-Walker, another by Fay, Wyckoff and Wu make a case that natural selection works in fruit flies. They claim their evidence discredits the theory of neutral evolution, that most mutations have no effect on the fitness of the organism.
These papers are basically evolutionists fighting among themselves which theory is correct, when neither explains the origin of information and new organs. The sample size is sufficiently small and the tweak space sufficiently large to allow them to prove their a priori assumptions. But they start with fruit flies and end up with fruit flies; where’s the evolution?
Intelligent Design Discussed in Missouri Newspaper 02/28/2002
The Feb 24 Digital Missourian has a feature story by John Heys entitled, “Deconstructing Darwin: A new theory of evolution challenges conventional thought.” It gives approximately equal time to William Harris, proponent of Intelligent Design, and Jan Weaver and Garland Allen, defenders of Darwinism.
As public consciousness of Intelligent Design theory grows, it will become increasingly important to recognize the types of rebuttals the Darwinists use. Unfortunately, they often convey a tone of patronizing arrogance (“These people just don’t understand evolution and don’t understand science”) that comes from their long hegemony over the scientific institutions. We want to take this opportunity to hunt, in their defense of Darwin, for substance instead of propaganda tactics, logical fallacies, and smokescreens (i.e., baloney). Consider these quotes from the article, that amount to essentially their whole case:
“statements like the one advertised by the Discovery Institute [e.g., biological information is the fingerprint of intelligence; evolution is a philosophy that stifles consideration of all but naturalistic causes] show a lack of understanding of evolution, its mechanisms and the calculation of probabilities. In particular, says Weaver, the statement ignores several other mechanisms for evolution like symbiosis and jumping genes.”
Big lie and bluffing. I.D. proponents often know more about evolution than the evolutionists do. Symbiosis and jumping genes are not mechanisms of evolution. Neither of these explain the origin of information, and evolutionists themselves rely on traditional mutations plus natural selection as the mechanism, almost all of the time.
“Weaver also doubts the nature of the evidence cited by proponents of intelligent design. ‘There is no objective, independent way to determine if something is designed,’ she says.”
Big lie, or ignorance. William Dembski’s book The Design Inference, widely known as a key I.D. text, defines an objective explanatory filter that can segregate design from chance or natural causes. Design explanations are used routinely in other sciences: cryptography, forensics, archaeology, and SETI.
“The majority of her peers in the scientific community, Weaver says, agree.”
The old Bandwagon tactic.
“A more troubling implication, Weaver says, is that intelligent design’s proponents attack the secular purposes of evolution science but allegedly camouflage their educational and public policy motives.”
Fear-mongering and hate-mongering. This argument ignores any merit in I.D. arguments and just tries to speculate about conspiracies and hidden agendas, as if Darwin’s defenders have none (but the sole purpose of the NCSE is to keep evolution in the science classroom and keep creation out).
“Allen, sharing this concern, describes the theory as ‘watered down creationism.’”
Loaded words and ridicule. Again, no serious response, just mudslinging with arrogance.
“Weaver explains including a concept like intelligent design in science curricula could lead to the introduction of other subjects that lack the underpinnings of prior scholarship and evidence, which are the hallmarks of Western education since the Renaissance.”
More fear-mongering and association, and red herring. Weaver associates Darwinism with the Renaissance, when history shows it was creationists and believers in design who gave us the scientific method in the first place, and made some of the most important discoveries.
“‘That could be a dangerous door to open,’ Weaver said. Behind this door, Weaver says, lie other unverifiable concepts like alien abductions, astrology, mind reading and ghosts.’”
Oh, the bogeymen. This fear-mongering and negative-association tactic is so absurd it need not be dignified with a response.
“Allen says the Discovery Institute’s dissent and the ensuing debate underscores that science is always open to challenge. Debates in science, he explains, often confuse many non-scientists because they misunderstand that science always evolves.”
Equivocation and association. Allen equates evolution with science, when it is a philosophy: methodological naturalism, a system of interpreting the observational facts that both evolutionists and creationists accept.
“Allen cites a Colorado effort, funded by the National Science Foundation, to develop a science curriculum that teaches evolution as an example of how the science process works. Efforts like these, Allen says, can help raise awareness of how science is done.
Ignoring the opposition, indoctrination, non-sequitur. How is teaching more evolution, and ignoring the controversy, supposed to improve science education? Is that how science works?
“‘Every theory we’ve (science has) ever had has changed over time,’ Allen says. ‘We may someday have an evolution theory that looks very different from what we have now.’ But Allen does not believe that future refinements of the theory will ‘invoke a mystical part’ similar to ideas advanced by intelligent design advocates.”
Straw man argument. I.D. proponents are not mystics. In fact, they are trying to get scientific discussions of origins away from the mystical pantheism of evolution that treats natural selection like a goddess, able to work miracles like creating bat sonar and wings without leaving a trace in the fossil record. If evolution evolves, maybe some day it will evolve into intelligent design; is that a possibility in their thinking? Of course not; evolution is a fact [dogma].
“This conventional wisdom [i.e., evolution] has guided work in other scientific areas. Garland Allen, a biology professor at Washington University in St. Louis, says many advances in plant science have been based on evolutionary ideas. Some of these same ideas, Allen says, ‘have changed the way we practice medicine’ in the fight against disease. Allen, who also studies the history, philosophy and sociology of science, cites a thesis defended in his department that applied models based on conventional evolutionary ideas to HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. The virus can mutate rapidly, requiring changes in medical treatment to match its evolution.”
Here is the only attempt to supply a substantive idea that evolution is good for science, but it is just bluffing with only one questionable example cited. We have reported often in Creation-Evolution Headlines that evolutionary explanations in botany and zoology are forced and unnatural, leading to conundrums and contradictions (wander through the Chain Links on Darwin for many examples). This argument also begs the question whether evolution is the best explanation, or the only one. Regarding HIV, we reported on August 28 that some scientists feel HIV represents a stable quasi-species, and that there is “no evidence whatsoever” it is evolving.
It could also be argued that evolution is bad for science; look at the old argument about vestigial organs that quelled research on tonsils, the appendix, the pineal and pituitary glands, and other organs assumed to be useless evolutionary leftovers. A belief these organs were designed could have encouraged scientists to discover their functions. Belief in intelligent design has often spurred great scientists to make their discoveries.
Have Allen and Weaver made a good case for the exclusion of intelligent design in science classes? Have they defended Darwinism as the only contender? Sift their arguments through the Baloney Detector and see what remains.
Tyrannosaurus Not a Sprinter 02/28/2002
A new analysis in the Feb 28 Nature claims that T. rex was too heavy-set to run, and probably only managed a 12 mph walk. For summary, see Nature Science Update.
Sorry to ruin all your Jurassic Park nightmares. You’d still have to run, though.
Paper View: “Evolution of ‘constants’: has the speed of light or the electric charge changed?” a new analysis about how to discriminate between which component has varied if the fine structure constant has varied: the speed of light, or the electric charge. Paper by Maguiejo, Barrow and Sandvik, in arXiv preprint server. (For background, see our Aug 15 headline on the possibility of varying physical constants.)
Protein Folding an Olympic Event 02/27/2002
A news release from the University of Pennsylvania puts biological molecules into the Winter Olympics:
It’s a long-simmering debate in the world of physical chemistry: Does the folding of proteins into biologically active shapes better resemble a luge run – fast, linear and predictable – or the more freeform trajectories of a ski slope? New research from the University of Pennsylvania offers the strongest evidence yet that proteins shimmy into their characteristic shapes not via a single, unyielding route but by paths as individualistic as those followed by skiers coursing from a mountain summit down to the base lodge.
The researchers, who published in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found a great deal of variety in the paths and rates of folding. Only when a protein is folded correctly can it perform its function. Misfolded proteins are the cause of many serious diseases. The team explains that there are chaperones on hand to fix errors:
“In the skiing analogy, chaperones could be thought of as rescue helicopters that return wayward skiers to the summit so they can try to make their way down the mountain again,” said [Feng] Gai, an assistant professor of chemistry at Penn.
Protein folding is fiendishly intricate, yet crucial to the chemistry of life – so much so that a small army of biologists and chemists has devoted itself to better understanding the process.
Another article in another source describes just how fiendishly intricate the process is. The March 12 issue of PC Magazine has a feature section on Technology in America. Alan Cohen describes how supercomputers, after showing their skill in deciphering the human genome, are trying to tackle the puzzle of protein folding:
Problems like protein folding, where the number of possible shapes for the average-size protein is greater than the number of atoms in the universe, are far more complex. Thus, such problems require “a tighter, faster, parallel machine, where the processors of each work in conjunction with the others,” says Professor [David A.] Bader [director of the High Performance Computer Lab at the University of New Mexico].
… Advances like these require intense computation, and as impressive as the clusters that sequenced the genome are, they’re not enough for this new phase.
IBM’s Blue Gene project, which will be able to perform 1 quadrillion operations per second, sets out to tackle protein folding. IBM scientists estimate that calculating the folding process of even a very small protein on today’s most powerful computer would take 300 years. Even Blue Gene, once completed in 2005, will take a year to crunch the numbers.
In other words, the cell accomplishes with ease, thousands of times a day, within milliseconds, what today’s most powerful computers would take 300 years to figure out.
Proteins are likely to overshadow DNA as the hottest topic in biology. Most lay people think of meat or poultry when they hear the word protein, thinking of one of the basic ingredients of food, which of course, protein is. But on the molecular level, proteins are a toolkit of staggering complexity and design. Made up of chains of amino acids, all left-handed and often hundreds of units long, their precise folded shapes allow them to perform thousands of tasks in the cell. They are the Legos of molecular biology, but not just toy tanks and planes and soldiers, but real ones made of the same 20 building blocks.
Proteins shuttle cargo around, they speed up chemical reactions, they open and close gates into the cell and the nucleus, they form structural scaffolds and roadways, they proofread DNA, and much more. Perhaps most astonishing, they form actual motors that can spin up to 100,000 RPM (in the case of the bacterial flagellum). Modern biochemistry is pulling back the curtain on a new universe of microminiature machines that keep us, and the simplest bacteria, alive. In Darwin’s day, such wonders could not have been imagined. The time has come to cast off a paradigm far too simplistic to account for a technology this advanced. See also this May 3 headline about the dynamic stresses affecting protein folding.
Introns Found in Primitive Eukaryote 02/26/2002
Another evolutionary assumption needs revision. Science Now reports that introns have been found in Giardia, a primitive eukaryotic single-celled organism. Sometimes considered “junk DNA,” introns are pieces of genetic code that do not code for proteins, that have to be cut out of the strand by genetic scissors called spliceosomes before transcription can begin. Introns were thought to have evolved later in the eukaryotic line, but here they were, scissors and all, in an early “primitive” eukaryote. The original paper is in the Feb 19 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Introns are a bit of a mystery as to their function, but we have learned to question the assumption that anything in biology is useless. The machinery to handle introns and move pieces of genetic code around is very sophisticated and complex. Introns and transposons are subjects of intense research; indications are that they will prove to be vital for proper operation of the cell. This story puts more pressure on evolutionists to explain how complex machinery that cuts and splices DNA – and knows just where to put it – could have evolved by chance in the earliest, simplest nucleated cells.
Alaskan Dinosaurs Cause Shivers for Meteor Impact Theory 02/26/2002
Everybody knows that a big meteor impact killed off all the dinosaurs 60 million years ago; that’s what scientists have been telling us for almost two decades now (and it was the dramatic ending of Walking with Dinosaurs). But a cache of finely-preserved dinosaur bones along the Colville River in Alaska, reported in the Alaska Daily News, is calling that theory into question. The dinosaurs at this high latitude were too well adapted to cold to have been knocked off by one “nuclear winter” (which we reported on Jan 22 may not have resulted from a big impact anyway; today, National Geographic released a summary of that story). Meanwhile, scientists are drilling into the Chicxulub Crater in the Yucatan, so we shall have to wait and see what becomes the next conventional wisdom.
The massive deposits along the Colville River have the potential to upset a lot of theories. Creationists claim to have found unfossilized bone and cartilage. This could call into question the whole idea that dinosaurs went extinct millions of years ago.
Let the impact theory be a lesson about how one generation’s accepted truth might become the next generation’s trash. The real impact was not from a meteorite, but from propaganda, the power of a fictional story made real by artistic computer graphics and doled out by authoritative-sounding experts.
Scientists Harness Cell’s Machines as Robots 02/26/2002
Nano-robots have been designed to map out surfaces of materials at 20-nanometer resolution, according to an article in Nature Science Update. The University of Washington team harnessed cell scaffolding called microtubules that are ferried about by cell motors called kinesins.
This underscores the fact that kinesins are indeed true machines; we can get into the driver’s seat and drive them around. They are freely called motors in the literature. The old argument by Scottish skeptical philosopher David Hume is dead, that living tissue could not be compared to artificial machines, like wristwatches. Enlightenment rationalists have used this argument to combat William Paley’s “Divine Watchmaker” argument for the existence of God. But now, in our time, the discoveries in molecular cell biology have resurrected Paley’s argument and given it increased force.
Click image for link to book.
PBS Clears the Air on Scopes Trial 02/25/2002
In his Weekly Wedge Update for Feb. 25, Phillip Johnson says that PBS has done a service to dispel myths about the Scopes Trial in their recent airing of Monkey Trial, Feb. 17. He states, “You may assume on the basis of their record that WGBH and PBS would present only Darwinist propaganda, but you would be mistaken. Perhaps WGBH is trying to atone for its sins. MT totally demolishes the ‘Inherit The Wind’ myth of the Scopes trial and tells all kinds of truth about the event and the participants, truth that has long been suppressed or distorted.”
Johnson also recommends an article by Barry Commoner in the February 2002 Harper’s, which, he claims, inadvertently debunks neo-Darwinism while debunking myths about DNA. Commoner seeks to dispel the “central dogma” of molecular biology, that DNA alone is the sole repository of the code of life, arguing that the proteome is just as important.
The movie Inherit the Wind is a classic propaganda piece geared to make evolutionists look respectable and critics of evolution (particularly Bible-believing Christians) look like bigoted obscurantists. Those familiar with what actually took place in the Scopes Trial (1925 in Dayton, Tennessee) know that William Jennings Bryan stuck to the issue while evolutionists held a media circus with loaded words, ridicule, and other propaganda flying fast and furious. Inherit the Wind did not claim to be a re-enactment of the Scopes Trial (the names of characters were changed, etc.), so that its producers were free to lie and invent incidents out of thin air, but everybody knows the Scopes Trial was the basis for the movie. It’s good that some historical facts are coming to light to clear the air, but caution is still advised for any PBS treatment of such a heated subject. The old Inherit the Wind, however, should be viewed only as a case study in twisting history to advance a point of view.
Crabs Evolved Five Times 02/25/2002
A paper by Morrison et al in the Feb 22 Biological Proceedings of the Royal Society claims that gene sequence studies show that the crab-like form evolved five times independently, “a remarkable case of parallel evolution.” Some crabs are so similar that observers have a hard time telling they come from different lineages. The authors explain that in convergent evolution, selective forces in the environment produce similar structures (such as in streamlining in sharks and in marine reptiles), but in parallel evolution (such as crabs), no selective forces are known: “More enigmatic are cases in which a group of organisms seem to have a tendency to produce the same form or structures repeatedly, but in which the basis for selection is not so obvious.” They postulate that some developmental mechanism must lead to this body form, and it appears to be irreversible. But they admit they cannot say for certain why the crab body has evolved so many times independently.
Something is seriously wrong with this hypothesis. How can anyone believe the highly unlikely crab form appeared not once, not twice, but five times independently, with some so similar that a casual observer would not be able to tell them apart? Darwinists keep saying that evolution is directionless; that it is unlikely that aliens would ever look like us, for instance. But here you have them saying five different families of organisms are all walking the same road. How can “parallel evolution” even exist within a strict understanding of Darwinism? The terms parallel evolution and convergent evolution are vacuous terms; they are merely equivocations designed to save Darwinism from the evidence.
Here we have another serious case of molecular phylogeny disagreeing with phenotypic phylogeny (see also this Feb 6 headline about birds and many more in the back issues). DNA comparisons are not proving to be the help to Darwinism that was hoped. If chance is the author of nature, why did it go to such lengths to make organisms look like they were designed?