One of the common criticisms against ID is that it fails to use the scientific method. I was skimming through an ID website that I hadn’t visited before and found this useful article that lays out the scientific method used by ID researchers.

Here is an excerpt:

Many critics of intelligent design have argued that design is merely a negative argument against evolution.
This could not be further from the truth. Leading design theorist William Dembski has observed that “[t]he
principle characteristic of intelligent agency is directed contingency, or what we call choice.”1 By
observing the sorts of choices that intelligent agents commonly make when designing systems, a positive
case for intelligent design is easily constructed by elucidating predictable, reliable indicators of design.

Design can be inferred using the scientific method of observation, hypothesis, experiment, and conclusion.
Design theorists begin with observations of how intelligent agents act when designing, to help them
recognize and detect design in the natural world. - Casey Luskin

Case against intelligent design fails

This is an interesting article written in the opinion section of the Register-Guard Newspaper in Eugene, OR. The author, Norm Fox, presents a solid argument against some claims that Richard Dawkins has made.

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By Norm Fox

Published: May 4, 2008 12:00AM

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The universe either made itself or it was made. Any argument supporting either alternative automatically opposes the other. This is why neither of these competing cosmogonies can be honestly advanced without at least contemplating its opposite, either philosophically or scientifically.

The alleged third alternative, that all physical reality oscillates eternally through cycles of disintegration and reorganization, is purely metaphysical and not subject to scientific examination since we are, as far as we can tell, in the relentless grip of a universe-wide atrophy arc.

Richard Dawkins’ essay “Creationists haven’t got a chance against aliens” (Commentary, April 27) claims to offer arguments against the universe having been made by a creative intelligence outside itself. Thus by default (since he makes no mention of the oscillating universe hypothesis) he is arguing for a self-created universe without quite confessing so. As a dogmatically atheistic evolutionist and author of the book “The God Delusion,” he is defending the only position his worldview will allow.

Dawkins’ principal strategy, consuming roughly half of his essay, is to focus on “directed panspermia,” (aka “exogenesis”), the irrelevant notion that life on Earth was “seeded” by life forms residing elsewhere in the universe. It’s irrelevant as a theory of the origin of life, of course, because it does not account for life’s origin at all but merely pushes the problem further out in the universe, and I have never heard a creationist advocate it. I’ve heard it proposed by evolutionists, most of whom discuss it seriously but admit its inadequacy to account for ultimate origins. Dawkins tries to turn this tangent into evidence that creationist arguments are dishonest.

His own argument, meanwhile, climaxes in the assertion that a complex, eternal creator is no more conceivable than complex, eternal flagellar motors. Proponents of intelligent design would retort that they can rationally distinguish the likelihood of an eternal creator from the improbability of an eternal product. Still, Dawkins insists, “A creator god who has always existed would be far more improbable” than “visitations from distant star systems.”

Dawkins’ determination to render a creator “improbable” does not provide a compelling basis for treating an intellectually respectable issue — whether God exists — as if it were a question firmly settled in the negative. Observations that call into question the self-creative adequacy of the universe abound all across the natural sciences from astronomy to biochemistry to genetics to paleontology to zoology and back, but since arguments against atheistic evolution are automatically arguments for an intelligent designer, they are being censored with increasing fervor as a matter of public policy. Scholars who admit to the slightest suspicion that the universe did not generate and organize itself are often professionally intimidated (sometimes even “expelled”), casting a chill over scientific inquiry as it relates to origins.

Most scientists or laymen who conclude that intelligent design best explains the complexity of the universe do so not because they are, in Dawkins’ language, “lying for Jesus,” but because they have been impressed with the scientific evidences for design and/or have thought through a sequence of reasoning similar to the following:

1) Something is eternal. If there had ever been absolutely nothing, that condition would have persisted.

2) Biological life is evidently not eternal, being represented by organisms that without exception come from similar temporarily living organisms and then die.

3) Matter-energy is evidently not eternal, as it inescapably spends itself with every energy transaction at a net cost to the whole system. This process cannot have gone on eternally, because it would culminate in the eventual “heat death” of the universe in some finite amount of time (barring the oscillating universe mythology that belongs somewhere beyond science fiction).

4) Our consistent experience is that mind manipulates matter, not vice-versa, suggesting that an eternal mind having formed matter is more plausible than matter having created information-rich structures such as the human mind. Here, and with the next point, the “design demands a designer” argument fits.

5) Our consistent experience is that every effect must have an adequate cause. Thus, the universe viewed as a sequence of causes and effects points back to a first cause which is itself uncaused (see point No. 1 above). Just as logically, the universe viewed as a single huge effect also requires a sufficient cause outside itself.

The fact that these arguments are centuries old and have a venerable philosophical pedigree does not diminish their cogency or their relevance to a 21st century debate. Similarly, the existence of vigorous but time-worn rebuttals against these arguments cannot legitimately turn a two-sided issue into a closed question. The doctrinaire teaching of spontaneous macroevolution and the authoritarian stonewalling of intelligent design seeks to do exactly that by penalizing skepticism about the materialist world view and its central article of faith.

The Scientific Case Against Evolution

This is an interesting article written by a prominent creation scientist that sums up the Creationist side of the debate well. It is lengthy so I will post a few excerpts, but you can check out the full article here.

Note- Please read the article before commenting. I know many will dismiss it because it has the tag “creationism” attached to it, but you are failing to engage in intelligent debate if you attempt to comment without reading the source material it makes you look like nothing more than a flamer (disrespectful comments that contain name calling will be deleted). Thanks.

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by Henry M. Morris, Ph.D.

Belief in evolution is a remarkable phenomenon. It is a belief passionately defended by the scientific establishment, despite the lack of any observable scientific evidence for macroevolution (that is, evolution from one distinct kind of organism into another). This odd situation is briefly documented here by citing recent statements from leading evolutionists admitting their lack of proof. These statements inadvertently show that evolution on any significant scale does not occur at present, and never happened in the past, and could never happen at all.

A current leading evolutionist, Jeffrey Schwartz, professor of anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh, has recently acknowledged that:

. . . it was and still is the case that, with the exception of Dobzhansky’s claim about a new species of fruit fly, the formation of a new species, by any mechanism, has never been observed.¹

The scientific method traditionally has required experimental observation and replication. The fact that macroevolution (as distinct from microevolution) has never been observed would seem to exclude it from the domain of true science. Even Ernst Mayr, the dean of living evolutionists, longtime professor of biology at Harvard, who has alleged that evolution is a “simple fact,” nevertheless agrees that it is an “historical science” for which “laws and experiments are inappropriate techniques”² by which to explain it. One can never actually see evolution in action.

Neither is there any clue as to how the one-celled organisms of the primordial world could have evolved into the vast array of complex multi-celled invertebrates of the Cambrian period. Even dogmatic evolutionist Gould admits that:

The Cambrian explosion was the most remarkable and puzzling event in the history of life.⁸

Equally puzzling, however, is how some invertebrate creature in the ancient ocean, with all its “hard parts” on the outside, managed to evolve into the first vertebrate — that is, the first fish– with its hard parts all on the inside.

Yet the transition from spineless invertebrates to the first backboned fishes is still shrouded in mystery, and many theories abound.⁹

Other gaps are abundant, with no real transitional series anywhere. A very bitter opponent of creation science, paleontologist, Niles Eldredge, has acknowledged that there is little, if any, evidence of evolutionary transitions in the fossil record. Instead, things remain the same!

“It is a simple ineluctable truth that virtually all members of a biota remain basically stable, with minor fluctuations, throughout their durations. . . .”¹⁰

Nevertheless, because of the lack of any direct evidence for evolution, evolutionists are increasingly turning to dubious circumstantial evidences, such as similarities in DNA or other biochemical components of organisms as their “proof” that evolution is a scientific fact. A number of evolutionists have even argued that DNA itself is evidence for evolution since it is common to all organisms. More often is the argument used that similar DNA structures in two different organisms proves common evolutionary ancestry.

Neither argument is valid. There is no reason whatever why the Creator could not or would not use the same type of genetic code based on DNA for all His created life forms. This is evidence for intelligent design and creation, not evolution.

The fact is that the best known and most fundamental equation of thermodynamics says that the influx of heat into an open system will increase the entropy of that system, not decrease it. All known cases of decreased entropy (or increased organization) in open systems involve a guiding program of some sort and one or more energy conversion mechanisms.

Evolution has neither of these. Mutations are not “organizing” mechanisms, but disorganizing (in accord with the second law). They are commonly harmful, sometimes neutral, but never beneficial (at least as far as observed mutations are concerned). Natural selection cannot generate order, but can only “sieve out” the disorganizing mutations presented to it, thereby conserving the existing order, but never generating new order. In principle, it may be barely conceivable that evolution could occur in open systems, in spite of the tendency of all systems to disintegrate sooner or later. But no one yet has been able to show that it actually has the ability to overcome this universal tendency, and that is the basic reason why there is still no bona fide proof of evolution, past or present.

The atheistic nature of evolution is not only admitted, but insisted upon by most of the leaders of evolutionary thought. Ernst Mayr, for example, says that:

Darwinism rejects all supernatural phenomena and causations.²³

A professor in the Department of Biology at Kansas State University says:

Even if all the data point to an intelligent designer, such a hypothesis is excluded from science because it is not naturalistic.²⁴

It is well known by almost everyone in the scientific world today that such influential evolutionists as Stephen Jay Gould and Edward Wilson of Harvard, Richard Dawkins of England, William Provine of Cornell, and numerous other evolutionary spokesmen are dogmatic atheists. Eminent scientific philosopher and ardent Darwinian atheist Michael Ruse has even acknowledged that evolution is their religion!

Evolution is promoted by its practitioners as more than mere science. Evolution is promulgated as an ideology, a secular religion — a full-fledged alternative to Christianity, with meaning and morality . . . . Evolution is a religion. This was true of evolution in the beginning, and it is true of evolution still today.²⁵

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Those are just a few excerpts from a much lengthier article. Check it out as it sums up well the Creationist side of the argument.

Often those who study and espouse a form of ID are ridiculed as not using the scientific method and not having anything published in peer-reviewed publications. This list will lay that nonsense to rest. There will be those who will call the list short, but you have to remember that the number of scientists who study ID are far fewer (and have far less access to funding) than those who espouse Darwinian evolution so it is to be expected that ID’ers would have fewer publications (not to mention the hostility to ID that also undoubtedly makes it harder to get published).

There is an interesting post up over at Evolution News about the evolutionary bias of the MCAT. It is worth checking out.

I have a friend in medical school who can attest not just to the bias in testing required to get into medical school, but also to the lack of openness to anyone who would question evolution. Forget the main goal of science in exploring new theories and hypotheses, evolution is the be all, end all, theory for explaining origins.

Here’s an excerpt:

I find this not only poor science for those that are preparing to enter the medical field, but it also makes a very poor basis for assessing a person’s competence in biology. Not only that, this is an incredibly stressful and tense test. I understand them testing our knowledge of evolution (as a hypothesis) on the biology section and I would not object to that. But why do they insist on using it unnecessarily in the verbal reasoning section on an exam, and always treating it as a widely accepted fact? It seems that they are using my acceptance of evolution as a measure of my competence as a doctor, and I find that to be both bad science and bad medicine. My ability to treat patients with care, compassion, and competence in no way relates to my beliefs about Darwinism.

An interesting take on the debate with evolution.

This is an interesting post from Evolution News about the controversy stirring around a soon to be published biology textbook and the potential questions it raises about evolution.

Here is an excerpt:

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No, I don’t much like the paranoid or ominous-sounding phrase “science establishment,” but for the moment, it will have to do. (I have in mind organizations such as the National Academy of Sciences, the major professional scientific societies that regularly issue anti-ID edicts [you know who you are], and lobbying groups such as the National Center for Science Education.) There is a growing disconnect between statements issued for public consumption by “the establishment,” about the certainties of evolution, and the actual state of evolutionary theory, as one finds it in the primary research literature, at meetings (such as the one Timmer attended, and where I often find myself), and in personal conversations and communications with evolutionary biologists (I speak from long experience). As that distance — that disconnect — increases, an inevitable crisis looms.

Here’s an example. Natural selection, as Darwin discovered, explains the origin of biological complexity, novelty, and innovation. There’s a stock phrase that populates any number of official statements about evolution. One could utter that statement in any biology classroom around the USA, and no one would blink. You know: Darwin found the process by which new structures evolved, where they did not exist before.

Now here’s the opening argument from a research paper I happen to be reading this week, from the evolutionary theoretician Armin Moczek (2008):

Given its importance and pervasiveness, the processes underlying evolutionary innovation are, however, remarkably poorly understood, which leaves us at a surprising conundrum: while biologists have made great progress over the past century and a half in understanding how existing traits diversify, we have made relatively little progress in understanding how novel traits come into being in the first place.

This is an interesting video clip from the “Beyond Expelled” conference in which Nancy Pearcey discusses the broad implications of a Darwinistic world view. She discusses how Darwinism has become more than a scientific philosophy and how both ID and Darwinism have an effect on how one views the world. It is definitely worth the two minutes it takes to see the clip.

Here is the link.

8 May 2008

There are those out there who believe that ID is a vast right-wing conspiracy, funded by wealthy Christians, in an effort to get Creationism into the classroom. The fact is, I see this accusation in almost every anti-ID article that I read. The problem is that not a single person has any evidence to back up the accusations.

Here is an interesting article from ID’er, Joel Borofsky at Uncommon Descent, refuting the myth.

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Intelligent Design Myth #486 - “ID is politically motivated”

Joel Borofsky

ID is merely a politically motivated agenda that is meant to further the cause of the far right Republicans.

One common objection against ID is that it is merely a tool of the scary Right Wing political party. As the theory goes, the Religious Right is attempting to get ID snuck into classrooms in order to subvert science, progression, women’s rights, alternative religions to Christianity, secularism, and even wants to attack your grandparents (just like robots).

The only problem(s) with this theory? There are those of us who believe in ID who aren’t Christian, religious, or even Republican.

Now, for myself, I am a very religious Christian…but I’m not a Republican. I consider myself to be independent and even side with the Democrats quite a bit. I believe Global Warming exists and has been heavily influenced by human activity. I believe we need to do what we can – within ethical and practical limits – to help improve the environment. I think the government needs to watch out economically for those who can’t watch out for themselves. I even toy with the idea that state’s have the right to allow civil unions (and everyone now gasps). I don’t want prayer in public school as I think everyone has a right to his or her own religious beliefs. I think we should leave Iraq. Yet, I support ID.

I can think, off hand, of many ID proponents that are Jewish, Muslim, agnostic, or simply refuse to hold to any ideology.

The point is there really is no political agenda. It’s hard to say, “There is a Designer…now vote Republican!”

Instead, this myth is simply a ‘smoke and mirrors’ tactic to avoid the issue of ID. If the opposition can link ID to an already unpopular movement (conservative Christianity of the Republican form) then they feel they can discredit it in the eyes of those sitting on the sidelines. The problem is they’re not really using actual arguments against ID.

In the end, ID is not a political movement, is not part of the religious right, and is merely concerned with discovering scientific evidence that displays design in biological entities. How is that political?

Leaping into Trouble — April 3rd, 2008 by Douglas Axe

Douglas Axe has written a fascinating article about one of the building blocks of life and how it points to a designer. Here is a link to the original article.

The full text follows:

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Darwinists have always recognized the existence of an intuitive barrier that prevents many of us from joining them. Human understanding of complex things is strongly shaped by our experiences with human technology. You don’t have to be an engineer to appreciate in some way the extraordinary difficulty of getting physical systems to perform extraordinary tasks. Technology doesn’t just happen. It only comes with sizable investments of genius and diligence, along with more than a little patience.

So Darwin’s suggestion that genius and diligence are optional if patience is plentiful is a stretch for most of us. Richard Dawkins put it this way:

It took a very large leap of imagination for Darwin and Wallace to see that, contrary to all intuition, there is another way and, once you have understood it, a far more plausible way, for complex ‘design’ to arise out of primeval simplicity. A leap of the imagination so large that, to this day, many people seem unwilling to make it. [1]

I doubt anyone, Dawkins included, would generally recommend sweeping aside all intuition to accommodate leaps of imagination, particularly when the intuition is your own and the leap is not. If Darwinism really is plausible, it must instead be the case that Darwin leapt to something of substance—something that really explains how, contrary to our intuitions, the remarkable gadgets we see in biology can be chalked up to mindless inevitability. What exactly is this explanation? It needs to be compelling, whatever it is, since the intuition we’re being asked to abandon is so tied to real-world experience—the very stuff of science.

About forty years ago, plant physiologist Frank Salisbury posed the question in terms of the origin of enzymes, the intricately folded protein chains that do all of life’s chemistry. Appearing in thousands of distinct natural forms, each form suited to a well-defined function or set of functions, these tiny workhorses have proven to be technological wonders not just inside cells but in laboratories as well. Much of today’s advanced technology for manipulating and analyzing DNA depends on them. Genomes don’t get sequenced without them. Whole companies are devoted to purifying them and selling them. [2] Do little marvels like that really just happen if we wait long enough? Long before the age of genomics, Salisbury put the question this way:

In reasonable time intervals, is mutation by random rearrangement of nucleotides [i.e., DNA bases] likely to produce an enzyme… Will there be an enzyme (gene) for selection to act on? [3]

Here’s the problem. Enzymes, like all proteins, are built within cells by linking amino acids together into long chains. There are 20 different amino acids, any one of which could potentially be placed at any position along the chain. But the actual chain sequences are anything but arbitrary. Rather, cells use elaborate machinery to link the amino acids according to the precise sequence specifications contained in genes. And because the protein chains are typically hundreds of amino acids long, the cellular machinery is hitting a very tight design specification every time a protein is made. So, even if we grant that some changes to these specifications are tolerable, the mere existence of a production line tuned to such precision implies that the precision is needed. If so, enzymes are much more complicated than they should be if they just happened. A short word might surface in your alphabet soup by chance, but a paragraph won’t.

In response to Salisbury, eminent British biologist John Maynard Smith offered an analogy along the lines of alphabet soup, starting with this succession of words:

WORD -> WORE -> GORE -> GONE -> GENE.

“This is an analogue of evolution,” he wrote, “in which the words represent proteins; the letters represent amino acids; the alteration of a single letter corresponds to the simplest evolutionary step, the substitution of one amino-acid for another; and the requirement of meaning corresponds to the requirement that each unit step in evolution should be from one functional protein to another.”[4] It’s an analogy worth considering because, despite its simplicity, it does capture the crucial aspect of different functions arising from different sequences.

Maynard Smith reasoned that for evolution to work, all functional proteins must be interconnected by stepwise changes in a manner analogous to four-letter words. But does his succession of words really illustrate Darwinian evolution? And is it really reasonable to think that proteins are analogous to four-letter words in this respect?

Actually, there appears to be a significant problem with the illustration itself. For a succession of changes to illustrate an adaptive process, each one has to provide not just function but function that is helpful in the sense of advancing a principal objective. For Darwinism, the principal objective is reproductive success. New functions are only adaptive if they advance that objective. Language has communication as a principal objective. While these objectives are very different, both imply that functions are very unlikely to be helpful simply by virtue of being new.

For example, imagine needing to communicate something with a vocabulary restricted to four-letter English words. “NEED HELP CALL COPS”, might be the desired message. As a further restriction, suppose you’re granted your first word but have to construct the rest of your message from single-letter variants of that word or subsequent ones. Suppose also that adding a word is permissible only if it advances your communication objective as is. It becomes apparent that your objective needs to be met with your first word—the one given to you—because these constraints virtually preclude adding anything to it. “HELP” on its own is much better than “HELP KELP” or “HEAP HELP”.

Furthermore, if letters correspond to amino acids, as Maynard Smith suggested, then biological functions that require several protein chains, each consisting of hundreds of amino acids, are more like lengthy messages than short words. If Darwin’s approach has trouble finding the words to summon the police, just imagine how much trouble it would have dispatching the police—to a particular location, prepared to deal with particular circumstances.

Of course, we should keep in mind that the exchange between Salisbury and Maynard Smith took place in 1969, when molecular biology was in its infancy. The genetic code, used by cells to build proteins according to the sequence information in genes, had just been cracked; only a few protein structures were known [5]; and the beginnings of the boom in DNA technology were still years away. But did the huge scientific discoveries of the subsequent decades strengthen Maynard Smith’s case? Have we found that protein structures, and therefore sequences, are mostly accretions of junk, with just a handful of amino-acid residues forming the equivalent of his four-letter words?

Quite the opposite. I was present in 1997 when the champagne was uncorked at the MRC Centre in Cambridge in honor of John Walker. He was to share the Nobel Prize in chemistry that year with Paul Boyer and Jens Christian Skou for his work on the structure of the enzyme complex that uses pH gradients to drive ATP synthesis. Known as F-type ATPase, this molecular machine is built of dozens of protein chains of seven specialized types. Boyer was not exaggerating when he described it as “a splendid molecular machine”. [6] With design elegance and miniaturization wholly unrivaled in human technology, the F-type ATPase is a double energy transducer, first converting gradient energy into rotational energy, and then using the rotational energy to make ATP, the chemical energy currency used in all life—all in a package 1/500 the size of a small pollen grain.

There is no junk here. The ATPase is made not of four amino acids but four thousand—more like an essay than a paragraph (much less a word). Could it have started out much smaller? Not much, in view of the two sections that have to be coupled for it to work. Like an essay, it might withstand trimming in some places, and some of the parts might be reworded if we knew the rules of composition for proteins. Typos can be tolerated to an extent, as with essays. But none of this explains how random single-letter changes can produce new essays, whether from scratch or from existing essays on other subjects. According to intuition, there’s only one way to get an essay.

So, Maynard Smith’s beautiful analogy ends up supporting the design intuition that troubles Darwinism so. And the funny thing is, it’s awfully hard to find an analogy that doesn’t do that. Maybe that’s why so many people are unwilling to leap along with Darwin’s imagination. And maybe that’s why the leapers keep resorting to the same arguments, long after their flaws are known.

The year that we toasted Walker’s achievements, geneticist Graham Bell’s excellent monograph on natural selection came out. [7] Upon receiving my copy and glancing at the contents, I immediately turned to section 10, titled: “Very improbable structures readily arise through the cumulation of small alterations.” That would certainly solve the problem, if structural innovations could morph themselves into existence, one adaptive frame at a time. So, was Bell going to deliver the goods that no one else seemed to be able to deliver? Was the long awaited violation of the design intuition finally going to be revealed?

I’m afraid not. Bell took his argument straight from Maynard Smith:

WORD -> WORE -> GORE -> GONE -> GENE.

Evidently three decades of huge advances in molecular biology hadn’t improved the case for the leap.

What about the design intuition, though? If proposed justifications for the leap always come up short, often validating the design intuition instead, doesn’t that indicate something more substantive than an intuition? Many would argue that it does, and you have to admit that their position has something potent in its favor. It’s called common sense. No leap required.

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[1] Dawkins R (1986) The Blind Watchmaker. Penguin Books.
[2] http://www.neb.com/nebecomm/about.as
[3] Salisbury FB (1969) Natural selection and the complexity of the gene. Nature 224: 342-343.
[4] Maynard Smith J (1970) Natural selection and the concept of a protein space. Nature 225: 563-564.
[5]http://pdbbeta.rcsb.org/pdb/statistics/contentGrowthChart.do?content=molType-protein&seqid=100
[6] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9242922
[7] Bell G (1997) Selection—The Mechanism of Evolution. Chapman & Hall.