Making Sense of it All Part I

My view of history makes it impossible for me to believe in an all-loving God who “notes the passing of every sparrow”, but, on the other hand, my knowledge of statistics and my educated-laymen’s view of science also does not permit me to dismiss the existence of a supreme intelligence or God-creature.

For instance, how could an all-loving God allow leftists in the USSR, Nazi Germany or in China to commit, on a monumental scale, mass-murder of their fellow citizens in order to further some ideology?  This is exactly what happened to many millions of people in those and in other countries temporarily ruled by those who recognized no constraints.  Obviously, I don’t buy the ‘free-will’ argument.

As an aside, those who object to my singling out leftist movements for disdain should remember the scale of things.  For example, history tells us that during the entire Spanish Inquisition, fewer people were killed than that accomplished by a few radical Muslims on 9/11/01.

We live in a finely-balanced universe.  Many physicists have noted that the slightest difference or change in many forces and relationships would long-ago have blown our world into smithereens, and that our universe seems designed to support our planet and life.  This point of view has become so widespread that some atheists have invented (out of whole cloth) the notion of the ‘multiverse’ to explain it away.  (The multiverse would have an infinite number of universes so that a perfect one like ours could be explained as happening by accident – just as they explain the origin and development of life as accidents.)

When you also contemplate the statistical probability of life occurring accidentally out of the brew of primeval earth, you also realize that it was an impossibility, just as scientists like Dr. Behe have proven to my satisfaction that major changes in life forms could not have happened through macro-evolutionary accidents.  Evolution is limited to minor changes such as birds’ beaks evolving over generations to best deal with available food sources.  Darwin did not have the use of an electron microscope to guide him in his research, and was not able to see the incredibly-complex world of the living cell.

Where does this leave me?  It leaves me with the humble opinion that I will never know the mind of God, but that He is there, somewhere.  My guess is that He operates in a time frame beyond my conceptual ability, and that He makes slight adjustments from time to time as He proceeds with His grand plan.  Unfortunately I also believe that praying to Him may do the prayer some good, but nothing more.

Where We Stand on Intelligent Design

I’m in good company with Ben Stein, whom I love. Like him I was taught Darwinism in school, and, like him, it made less and less sense to me as I grew older, and as instruments like electron microscopes became more and more sophisticated, revealing complexities Darwin could never have even imagined. Also like Ben Stein, whenever I write an article like this, I will expect to receive snotty comments from members of the established orthodoxy who feel it necessary to defend the foundation of atheism by insulting me and my intelligence. I won’t go into details of ID in this article, but I am always heartened to remember the comment of the former atheist, Dr. Francis Collins, whose team was the first to chart the human genome, and who famously said, “I have looked into the mind of God”.

To read some of the many articles that I have posted here concerning ID, just type the words ‘intelligent design’ in the search box in the upper left corner of this blog. The following article summarized the extent to which intelligent design is starting to make inroads among established scientists and in peer-reviewed scientific journals:

Intelligent Design at the University Club

By Tom Bethell from the May 2012 issue American Spectator

Good things are happening beneath the media radar. Stephen Meyer, the director of the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, spoke the other evening at a forum called “Socrates in the City.” Normally it’s in New York City, but tonight it was at the University Club in Washington, D.C. The founder, Eric Metaxas, gave a great introduction. He’s someone who doesn’t follow the intellectual herd. The author of an influential book, Signature in the Cell, Meyer addressed the question, “Is there a scientific controversy about the theory of evolution?” He made a strong case that there is.

 A few days later, I also interviewed him about the prospects for intelligent design. In his talk, inquiring how life first appeared from simpler pre-existing chemicals, Meyer emphasized the concept of biological information, which is embedded in DNA. Think of it as analogous to software code.

Bill Gates said that “DNA is like a computer program but far, far more advanced than any software ever created.” Software contains instructions that direct computers to accomplish various functions. Likewise, DNA contains instructions for the assembly of tiny machines called proteins, which perform vital functions within every cell. In the 19th century the cell was thought to be simple. Darwin and his contemporaries had no way of knowing just how complex it is. Today it is compared to a high-tech factory. (Except it’s much more complex than that—factories can’t replicate themselves.) So how did the information get into the DNA in the first place? Without it, the first cell wouldn’t have been constructed, and life would not have begun. In Expelled, when Ben Stein asked Richard Dawkins how life began, he said he had no idea.

 We still don’t. Nucleotide bases along the spine of the DNA molecule—in effect the characters in the genetic text—direct the cell’s molecular machinery to link specific amino acids into proteins.

 If the sequence is incorrectly arranged the protein doesn’t get assembled. Watson and Crick described the double helical structure of DNA. But no one has yet explained the origin of the information it contains. “So that’s a huge stumbling block for evolutionary explanations of the origin of life,” Meyer said. Just as computer code comes from programmers, so functional information comes from intelligence—from mind. Intelligence, or conscious activity, is the only known cause of the kind of sequence-specific, information-rich code that we see in biology. We infer that the ultimate origin of biological information is an intelligent agent, or agents. All other proposed explanations have failed. Some think natural selection can get the job done. But as Meyer said, processes such as natural selection can’t take place until life is already up and running.

 Until we have a living and self-replicating cell, natural selection doesn’t enter the picture. Thus, it does nothing to explain how life first evolved from non-living chemicals. Meyer also argued that biological evolutionary theory, which “attempts to explain how new forms of life evolved from simpler pre-existing forms,” faces formidable difficulties. In particular, the modern version of Darwin’s theory, neo-Darwinism, also has an information problem. Mutations, or copying errors in the DNA, are analogous to copying errors in digital code, and they supposedly provide the grist for natural selection.

 But, Meyer said: “What we know from all codes and languages is that when specificity of sequence is a condition of function, random changes degrade function much faster than they come up with something new.” He mentioned the Cambrian explosion—the geologically sudden appearance of most major animal forms. It’s a dramatic event in the history of life. Animals with new body plans—arthropods, brachiopods, chordates—appeared suddenly about 530 million years ago.

 Nothing resembling a precursor appears in the strata below the Cambrian. So the same problem arises: What would it take to build one of those new body plans? You’d need a big instruction set, just for one body part. The trilobite had a compound, lens-focusing eye. “Each new cell for each new tissue had dedicated proteins,” Meyer said. “The proteins in turn need instructions to be built.”

 The problem is comparable to opening a big combination lock. He asked the audience to imagine a bike lock with ten dials and ten digits per dial. Such a lock would have 10 billion possibilities with only one that works. But the protein alphabet has 20 possibilities at each site, and the average protein has about 300 amino acids in sequence. A colleague of Meyer’s, Douglas Axe, formerly a researcher at Cambridge University and now with the Biologic Institute in Seattle, found that the ratio of functional to all possible sequences for a protein 150 amino acids in length is absurdly small (1 in 10 to the power of 74.

 “That search space is larger than the number of atoms in the Milky Way galaxy,” Meyer said. “It’s not remotely plausible that mutation and natural selection could produce one functional protein during the entire history of life on earth.” Remember: Not just any old jumble of amino acids makes a protein. Chimps typing at keyboards will have to type for a very long time before they get an error-free, meaningful sentence of 150 characters. “We have a small needle in a huge haystack.”

 Neo-Darwinism has not solved this problem, Meyer said. “There’s a mathematical rigor to this which has not been a part of the so-called evolution-creation debate.” IN AN INTERVIEW, Meyer told me that good things are happening beneath the media radar. If it’s not in a court or a legislature, the press pays little or no attention. Academic articles, especially if mathematical, are ignored. Mainstream journals have begun publishing peer-reviewed articles promoting intelligent design. In 2004 Rick Sternberg, as editor of the Proceedings for the Biological Society of Washington, got into trouble for publishing an article by Meyer. That was the first peer-reviewed ID article. Last fall the 50th was published.

 “One reason they went after Sternberg was to make an example of him,” Meyer said. “Now the dam has broken.”

 Internationally, ID is also growing. There’s a new Centre for Intelligent Design in London (C4ID). Affiliated with it is Norman Nevin, one of the leading geneticists in the UK. A number of full professors of science within the British system are also affiliated.

 The Centre has teamed up with Discovery Institute for various events. In addition, “leading U.S. biologists, including evolutionary biologists, are saying we need a new theory of evolution,” Meyer said. Many increasingly criticize Darwinism, even if they don’t accept design. One is the cell biologist James Shapiro of the University of Chicago. His new book is Evolution: A View From the 21st Century. He’s “looking for a new evolutionary theory.” David Depew (Iowa) and Bruce Weber (Cal State) recently wrote in Biological Theory that Darwinism “can no longer serve as a general framework for evolutionary theory.” Such criticisms have mounted in the technical literature.

 At the same time, most draw the line at accepting intelligent design. They insist it is “not science,” maybe a “science stopper.” Science, they believe, can operate only by invoking material causes. But as Meyer has written, scientists earlier felt no such constraint. Newton argued that the arrangements of the planets and the stability of their orbits could only have arisen as the result of “an intelligent and powerful Being.” Robert Boyle, the 17th century chemist, invoked the activity of a “most intelligent and designing agent.”

 There are plenty of reasons for thinking that ID is scientific, among them its ability to make predictions that contrast sharply with those of Darwinism. One addresses the question of whether most DNA is “junk,” randomly accumulated throughout evolution’s history of trial and error. Because it seems to lack function, official science a few years ago proclaimed 98 percent of DNA to be junk. But if it is designed we would not expect that. Now more and more of the DNA is turning out to be functional—not junk at all.

 Official science, it seems to me, wants to say that everything we see in the world can be explained without any reference to God. Darwinism is overwhelmingly an atheistic project, and has been from the beginning. That’s why any scientific opposition to that agenda stirs up such resentment.

Liberal Ridicule of Rick Perry on Evolution

Regular readers of my blog are well-aware that I disagree with some of the tenets of Darwinism because of the scientific discoveries that have been made since Darwin published his theories in 1859. Liberals tend to stick closely to Darwinism and ridicule those who have reservations because these recent discoveries tend to support a belief in a Supreme Being. Liberals, of course, both progressives and those on the hard-left, tend to be atheists, but even a former atheist, like Dr. Francis Collins. the scientist who led the team that charted the human genome, said at the conclusion of this project that “I have looked into the mind of God”. I won’t go into details of what the science now shows to be the case involving evolution and the tree of life because I have done that several times already, but I am going to publish this excellent article by Ann Coulter. To see my past articles on the subject, just click on the label, “Darwinism”, at the bottom of this blog entry.

I have no brief for either Ann Coulter or Rick Perry, because both of them have a habit of saying outrageous things, but this ridicule from liberal morons who refuse to consider the implications of real science concerning either Darwinism or manmade-global warming must be confronted.

Liberals' View of Darwin Unable to Evolve

By Ann Coulter 8/31/201 Townhall.com

Amid the hoots at Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry for saying there were "gaps" in the theory of evolution, the strongest evidence for Darwinism presented by these soi-disant rationalists was a 9-year-old boy quoted in The New York Times.

After his mother had pushed him in front of Perry on the campaign trail and made him ask if Perry believed in evolution, the trained seal beamed at his Wicked Witch of the West mother, saying, "Evolution, I think, is correct!"

That's the most extended discussion of Darwin's theory to appear in the mainstream media in a quarter-century. More people know the precepts of kabala than know the basic elements of Darwinism.

There's a reason the Darwin cult prefers catcalls to argument, even with a 9-year-old at the helm of their debate team.

Darwin's theory was that a process of random mutation, sex and death, allowing the "fittest" to survive and reproduce, and the less fit to die without reproducing, would, over the course of billions of years, produce millions of species out of inert, primordial goo.

The vast majority of mutations are deleterious to the organism, so if the mutations were really random, then for every mutation that was desirable, there ought to be a staggering number that are undesirable.

Otherwise, the mutations aren't random, they are deliberate -- and then you get into all the hocus-pocus about "intelligent design" and will probably start speaking in tongues and going to NASCAR races.

We also ought to find a colossal number of transitional organisms in the fossil record -- for example, a squirrel on its way to becoming a bat, or a bear becoming a whale. (Those are actual Darwinian claims.)

But that's not what the fossil record shows. We don't have fossils for any intermediate creatures in the process of evolving into something better. This is why the late Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard referred to the absence of transitional fossils as the "trade secret" of paleontology. (Lots of real scientific theories have "secrets.")

If you get your news from the American news media, it will come as a surprise to learn that when Darwin first published "On the Origin of Species" in 1859, his most virulent opponents were not fundamentalist Christians, but paleontologists.

Unlike high school biology teachers lying to your children about evolution, Darwin was at least aware of what the fossil record ought to show if his theory were correct. He said there should be "interminable varieties, connecting together all the extinct and existing forms of life by the finest graduated steps."

But far from showing gradual change with a species slowly developing novel characteristics and eventually becoming another species, as Darwin hypothesized, the fossil record showed vast numbers of new species suddenly appearing out of nowhere, remaining largely unchanged for millions of years, and then disappearing.

Darwin's response was to say: Start looking! He blamed a fossil record that contradicted his theory on the "extreme imperfection of the geological record."

One hundred and fifty years later, that record is a lot more complete. We now have fossils for about a quarter of a million species.

But things have only gotten worse for Darwin.

Thirty years ago (before it was illegal to question Darwinism), Dr. David Raup, a geologist at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, said that despite the vast expansion of the fossil record: "The situation hasn't changed much."

To the contrary, fossil discoveries since Darwin's time have forced paleontologists to take back evidence of evolution. "Some of the classic cases of Darwinian change in the fossil record," Raup said, "such as the evolution of the horse in North America, have had to be discarded or modified as a result of more detailed information."

The scant fossil record in Darwin's time had simply been arranged to show a Darwinian progression, but as more fossils were discovered, the true sequence turned out not to be Darwinian at all.

And yet, more than a century later, Darwin's groupies haven't evolved a better argument for the lack of fossil evidence.

To explain away the explosion of plants and animals during the Cambrian Period more than 500 million years ago, Darwiniacs asserted -- without evidence -- that there must have been soft-bodied creatures evolving like mad before then, but left no fossil record because of their squishy little microscopic bodies.

Then in 1984, "the dog ate our fossils" excuse collapsed, too. In a discovery The New York Times called "among the most spectacular in this century," Chinese paleontologists discovered fossils just preceding the Cambrian era.

Despite being soft-bodied microscopic creatures -- precisely the sort of animal the evolution cult claimed wouldn't fossilize and therefore deprived them of crucial evidence -- it turned out fossilization was not merely possible in the pre-Cambrian era, but positively ideal.

And yet the only thing paleontologists found there were a few worms. For 3 billion years, nothing but bacteria and worms, and then suddenly nearly all the phyla of animal life appeared within a narrow band of five million to 10 million years.

Even the eye simply materializes, fully formed, in the pre-Cambrian fossil record.
Jan Bergstrom, a paleontologist who examined the Chinese fossils, said the Cambrian Period was not "evolution," it was "a revolution."

So the Darwiniacs pretended they missed the newspaper that day.

Intelligent design scientists look at the evidence and develop their theories; Darwinists start with a theory and then rearrange the evidence.

These aren't scientists. They are religious fanatics for whom evolution must be true so that they can explain to themselves why they are here, without God. (It's an accident!)

Any evidence contradicting the primitive religion of Darwinism -- including, for example, the entire fossil record -- they explain away with non-scientific excuses like "the dog ate our fossils."

Questions on How We Got Here

Below is a portion of an essay that sets out, in language understandable by lay persons, the disagreements so many present-day scientists are having with the concepts now known as neo-Darwinism. Many of us who have considered some of the implications of modern-day discoveries in microbiology and archeology are just baffled that the science establishment continues to resist these implications. As of now, more than 800 scientists, all PhD’s or MD’s, have signed a pledge that they dissent from Darwinism.

Mutations

by MATT CHAIT NOVEMBER 5, 2009 BEYOND EVOLUTION (EXCERPTS)

“In this post I question some of the assumptions of both Darwinian evolutionists and intelligent designers. Intelligent designers are not to be confused with creationists. Creationists are people that refuse to consider any ideas or conjectures, no matter how they were arrived at, that are in conflict with the account of creation as found in the biblical Book of Genesis. Intelligent designers are people, often scientists, who reject Darwinian evolution as an explanation for the origin and development of life because they feel that it fails, as a theory, to explain the bewildering complexity and coherence of life forms.

Perhaps the population of creationists is dwindling as more progress is made in biological research, but with the use of modern instrumentation, including electron microscopes, X-ray crystallography and DNA micro arrays, and the fantastic complexity of life that is revealed at it's most minute and 'simple' level, the ranks of intelligent designers, as opposed to creationists, are swelling.

Just as people tend to confuse and conflate creationists with intelligent designers, there is much confusion and conflation regarding the theory of Darwinian evolution itself. There are really, as microbiologist Michael Behe, the 'father' of intelligent design explains, three separate yet related Darwinian notions. The first is the theory of common descent which states that all life forms have evolved from the same original ancestor. There is seemingly a lot of proof for this part of the theory, including many similarities of structures and function in all life at the molecular level and within phyla or kingdoms or species, a remarkable similarity of structure and function at the level of visible organs and traits.

From the perspective of modern science, including intelligent designers, this is powerful evidence for a common ancestor. And it does seem like a fairly reasonable assumption: if we have hair and an ape has hair and a raccoon has hair; then at some point in the very distant past, there was probably an ancestor of all three of ours that had hair. As I say, intelligent designers have no quarrel with this aspect of evolutionary theory, although I do, and will discuss this later on.

A second notion of evolutionary theory is natural selection, which is basically this: If there are a variety of species and a variety of different individuals within a species, then those species and those individuals that are more fit, that are better adapted to their environment, will survive more readily than those individuals and species that are not as well adapted. Over time the better adapted individuals will replace the more poorly adapted ones and will dominate that species, just as the better adapted species will dominate other species.

Natural selection, for the most part, is also not really argued among intelligent designers. It is obviously true, but perhaps, more complicated than originally thought. The qualities that make an individual member of a species better adapted are often other than the obvious qualities of stronger and faster. Sometimes species and individual members of species survive because they are better able to float below the radar of predators. Sometimes they are better able to cooperate among themselves to get their needs met, and function better in groups. And so on. Also, as the environment keeps changing, it favors certain individuals over others and certain species over others. As the weather gets hotter then colder, then hotter, different species and different individuals within species are favored. The same is true for cyclical changes in humid vs. dry environments, warmer vs. colder ocean water, and many chemical changes; more saline vs. less, more oxygenated vs. less, more carbonized vs. less, etc. Once the basic conditions on this planet stabilized and the atmosphere became oxygenated, all indications are that environmental changes have been cyclical rather than linear. It's hard to imagine a linear evolutionary path being naturally selected by cyclical changes in the environment.

It should be noted that both of these first two aspects of evolutionary theory, common descent and natural selection, have no power what so ever to explain how anything originally got here or how anything gets more complicated once it is here. The first part alludes to a common ancestor, but from where and how did this ancestor arrive? The second deals with selection not creation. Natural selection can cull from existing types, but how do those types find their existence in the first place?...”

“The only explanation for the creation of new species, new forms, new body plans and for the increase in complexity of these forms and plans in Darwinian evolution is through the avenue of blind, accidental and fortuitous mutations. Although Darwin had no way of knowing it in his day, these mutations take place, according to modern science, by an accident in the genetic copying of genes during the process of replication.

Genetic sequences are long strings of nucleic acid molecules, or nucleotides, which are coded for specific amino acids. In our cells, a long series of coded nucleic acids is transcribed within the nucleus onto an RNA molecule which transports this code outside of the nucleus of the cell to a ribosome where it is translated to a corresponding long series of amino acids that, when linked together and folded, form a protein.

A genetic copying accident can result in a change in a nucleic acid, which can result in a change in the amino acid that that nucleic acid is coded for. These accidental changes are very rare (about one 'mistake' in one hundred million copies) and are almost always either deleterious, and damage the mechanisms of the cell and the workings of the body; or neutral and have no visible effect at the level of either the cell or the organism; still, extremely rarely, there is a very, very rare mutation that, according to the theory, causes an improvement in the workings of the cell, that increases the survivability of the cell and the organism of which this cell is a part; and future generations will favor this positive change and in this way the organism will improve and eventually, over a very, very long time, undergo radical change.

This part, the random mutation part, is the one that most bothers intelligent designers. It just does not seem, to intelligent designers, to be a process that occurs frequently enough to deliver anything like the amazing variety and complexity of life forms that we find today. So the math does not work. Also you would expect from this sort of change a very gradual yet very consistent change among organisms so that not only would every organism be linked in very gradual clear steps to every other organism, but that these changes should have taken place at consistent, regular and frequent intervals in our history.

Yet, simple observation tells us that there are no such links. Each mammal is very much a mammal and not to be confused with a bird or an insect; just as every insect is very much an insect and not to be confused with a reptile or a fish. Not just on the outside of their bodies, but each has a completely distinctive internal form of organization; there is clearly a mammalian way of organizing internal organs, a mammalian kind of digestive, reproductive and nervous system, and there are very clear and distinct avian and insectivore forms of internal organization.

Also, historically, there is absolutely no evidence of this gradual, relentless change of species. In fact, quite the opposite is the case. All evidence points to the first cells appearing suddenly, about four billion years ago, at the moment that conditions on this planet supported their survival (when the surface of the Earth became cool enough to have non-boiling water). There are no traces of organic tide pools (the so-called pre-biotic soup), no traces of any organic material at all prior to the appearance of these photosynthetic, metabolizing, digesting, growing and environment sensing bacteria.

Then, for two billion years after that, fully half of the entire history of life on Earth, there was absolutely no evolutionary change, in the sense of life forms changing their basic structure or complexity. Four billion years ago there were bacteria and only bacteria; and two billion years later there were bacteria and only bacteria. Now among these bacteria there were all sorts of adaptations, so that bacteria were able to thrive in all kinds of environmental conditions: extreme heat, extreme cold, high acid, high base, little water, etc.

If by evolution one means adaptation, then, yes evolution was taking place. But what we commonly think of as evolution is the evolving of one species from another; of a change of shape, body plan and basic structure. In that sense of evolutionary change, for two billion years there was none.” Beyond Evolution

The Evolution Battleground

On the question of Darwinism, my friends and readers know that I spent many years trying not to think too much about what I had been taught about purposeless evolution - versus belief in a Supreme Being. They know also that in my later years I have concluded that 1. evolution only plays a minor role in the development of life, 2. in any case evolution is most probably part of God's plan anyway, and 3. that Darwin was right about at least one thing: that all life forms are related.

A defining moment came for me when I read Dr. Michael Behe's book, "Darwin's Black Box", in which Behe, a prominent microbiologist, pointed out the existence of irreducibly complex mechanisms contained in living cells that could not possibly have come into existence through evolutionary processes. Said mechanisms could not be seen until the invention of the electron microscope, a tool that was unknown to scientists of Darwin's time. Behe has made further conclusions about the limits of evolution, and his thoughts have been complimented by many other scientists - most notably in my mind by Dr. Francis Collins, the leader of the project that mapped the human genome. Dr. Collins, the recipient of the nation's highest civilian honor, the Medal of Freedom, who had previously been an atheist, said of this experience, "I have looked into the mind of God".

Although the number of scientists who agree with Dr. Behe and Dr. Collins has grown tremendously, the scientific community which controls major organizations and publications continue to downplay their work, and, in the case of Dr. Behe, continuously attempt to refute his major conclusions. Just as global warming advocates constantly say that "the issue has been decided", so also do Behe opponents say over-and-over that "everyone knows that Behe has been proven wrong". One of Dr. Behe's major talents is his ability to explain complex phenomena to lay audiences. As a lay person, I don't understand the technical details discussed in the article below, but I thought it important to show that the argument isn't over, it has just begun. If you like, you can scan the article and focus on the conclusion (in red) at the end.

Michael Behe Hasn't Been Refuted on the Flagellum

Jonathan M. March 15, 2011 Evolution News

Those of us who have been reading the literature surrounding the ID/evolution controversy for any length of time will be quite acquainted with the standard Darwinian retort with regards the "Behean" argument for irreducible complexity as far as the bacterial flagellum is concerned. There seems to be this unanimity of opinion among Darwinian theorists that the claims of irreducible complexity with respect to the bacterial flagellum have been refuted, and that we ID proponents are constantly shifting the goal posts, burying our heads in the sand, and generally clutching at straws. Indeed, one person on Facebook recently remarked,
"My main gripe with the ID proponents is that they never seem to give up. How many times do you need to be told that something is wrong before you'll admit it? How many times does ID need to be refuted in the peer reviewed media before you'll give it up as a lost cause? The bacterial flagellum irreducible complexity story is completely and utterly dead. It's wrong. Get over it."

I recently brought up the flagellum, as a documented instance of irreducible complexity, at a lunch bar Q&A session on the science/faith intersect, and received responses to much the same effect.

But is this claim actually true? Has this argument been refuted by critics? About a year ago, I read Why Intelligent Design Fails - A Scientific Critique of the New Creationism (edited by Matt Young and Taner Edis). Chapter 5 of that book was contributed by Ian Musgrave and is titled "Evolution of the Bacterial Flagellum." Targeted as a response to Michael Behe and William Dembski, Musgrave attempts to dispel of the notion of irreducible complexity once and for all. Reading his chapter, I recall being deeply unimpressed. On page 82 of the book, Musgrave offers us the following argument:

Here is a possible scenario for the evolution of the eubacterial flagellum: a secretory system arose first, based around the SMC rod and pore-forming complex, which was the common ancestor of the type-III secretory system and the flagellar system. Association of an ion pump (which later became the motor protein) to this structure improved secretion. Even today, the motor proteins, part of a family of secretion-driving proteins, can freely dissociate and reassociate with the flagellar structure. The rod- and pore-forming complex may even have rotated at this stage, as it does in some gliding-motility systems. The protoflagellar filament arose next as part of the protein-secretion structure (compare the Pseudomonas pilus, the Salmonella filamentous appendages, and the E. coli filamentous structures). Gliding-twitching motility arose at this stage or later and was then refined into swimming motility. Regulation and switching can be added later, because there are modern eubacteria that lack these attributes but function well in their environment.(Shah and Sockett 1995). At every stage there is a benefit to the changes in the structure.Indeed, Mark Pallen and Nick Matzke make a very similar argument in their 2006 Nature Reviews article (a paper which was raised by an audience member during the recent UK Behe tour). Ken Miller is also reputed for routinely making similar claims regarding the flagellum's evolution from the Type III Secretion System based largely on considerations of protein sequence homologies.

So, do these points succeed in laying to rest that pesky business of intelligent design once and for all? Well, actually no; they don't. In fact, I submit that the arguments of all of the aforementioned gentlemen fundamentally trivialize several important issues.

First and foremost, it trivializes the sheer complexity and sophistication of the flagellar system -- both its assembly apparatus, and its state-of-the-art design motif. Actually, the process by which the bacterial flagellum is self-assembled within the cell is so sophisticated that I have long struggled to convey it in an accessible way to lay-persons. Its core concepts are notoriously difficult to grasp for those not accustomed to thinking about the system or for those encountering it for the first time. But, at the same time, the mechanistic basis of flagellar assembly is so breath-takingly elegant and mesmerizing that the sheer engineering brilliance of the flagellar motor -- and, indeed, the magnitude of the challenge it brings to Darwinism -- cannot be properly appreciated without at minimum a cursory knowledge of its underpinning operations. Let's take a peek.

The Self-Assembly of the Flagellar Apparatus

The synthesis of the bacterial flagellum requires the orchestrated expression of more than 60 gene products. Its biosynthesis within the cell is orchestrated by genes which are organised into a tightly ordered cascade in which expression of one gene at a given level requires the prior expression of another gene at a higher level. The paradigm, or model, organism for flagellar assembly is Salmonella, a bacterium of the family Enterobacteriaceae. My discussion thus pertains principally to Salmonella, unless otherwise indicated.

The flagellar system in Salmonella has three classes of promoters (promoters are akin to a kind of molecular toggle switch which can initiate gene expression when recognised by RNA polymerase and an associated specialised protein called a "sigma factor"). These three classes of promoters are uninspirationally dubbed "Class I," "Class II," and "Class III." This sequential transcription is coupled to the process of flagellar assembly. Class I contains only two genes in one operon (called FlhD and FlhC). Class II consists of 35 genes across eight operons (including genes involved in the assembly of the hook-basal-body and other components of the flagellum, as well as the export apparatus and two regulatory genes called "FliA" and "FlgM"). Those genes which are involved in the synthesis of the filament are controlled by the Class III promoters.

The Class I promoter drives the expression of a master regulator (particular to the Enterobacteriaceae of which Salmonella is a member) called "FldH4C2" (don't worry about remembering it!). This enteric master regulator then turns on the Class II promoters in association with a sigma factor, σ70 (remember, I said that a sigma factor is a type of protein which enables specific binding of RNA polymerase to gene promoters). The Class II promoters are then responsible for the gene expression of the hook-basal-body subunits and its regulators, including another sigma factor called σ28 (which is encoded by a gene called FliA) and its anti-sigma factor, FlgM (anti-sigma factors, as their name suggests, binds to sigma factors to inhibit their transcriptional activity). The sigma factor σ28 is required to activate the Class III promoters. But here we potentially run into a problem. It makes absolutely no sense to start expressing the flagellin monomers before completion of the Hook-Basal-Body construction. Thus, in order to inhibit the σ28, the anti-sigma factor (FlgM) alluded to above inhibits its activity and prohibits it from interacting with the RNA polymerase holoenzyme complex. When construction of the Hook-Basal-Body is completed, the anti-sigma factor FlgM is secreted through the flagellar structures which are produced by the expression of the Class II hook-basal-body genes. The Class III promoters (which are responsible for the expression of flagellin monomers, the chemotaxis system and the motorforce generators) are then finally activated by the σ28 and the flagellum can be completed.

But it gets better. The flagellar export system (that is, the means by which FlgM is removed from the cell) has two substrate-specificity states: rod-/hook-type substrates and filament-type substrates. During the process of flagellar assembly, this substrate-specificity switch has to flick from the former of those states to the latter. Proteins which form part of the hook and rod need to be exported before those which form the filament. But how does this switch in substrate-specificity take place?

A membrane-bound protein called FlhB is the key player in this process. There is also a flagellar hook-length protein which is responsible for making sure that the hook length is of the right size (around 55nm) called FliK. This same protein is also responsible for initiating the switch export substrate specificity. As it turns out, without FliK, both the ability to switch and export filament and the hook length control are completely lost. FliK has two key domains, i.e. the N-terminal and C-terminal domains. During hook assembly, FliKN functions as a molecular sensor and transmitter of information on hook length. When the hook reaches the right length, the information is transmitted to FliKC and FliKCT, resulting in a conformational change, which in turn results in FliKCT binding to FlhBC. This, in turn, results in a conformational change in FlhBC.
This causes the substrate specificity switch.

Flagellar assembly begins in the cytoplasmic membrane, progresses through the periplasmic space and finally extends outside the cell. The flagellum basically consists of two main parts: the secretion system and the axial structure. The principle components of the axial structure are FlgG for the rod, FlgE for the hook, and FliC for the filament. All of these assemble with the assistance of a cap protein (FlgJ, FlgD and FliD respectively). Of those, only FliD remains at the tip of the filament in the finished product. Other components of the axial structure (called FlgB, FlgC and FlgF) connect the rod and MS ring complex. The hook and filament are connected by FlgK and FlgL.

When the C ring and C rod attach to the M ring at its cytoplasmic surface, the MS ring complex -- which is the structural foundation of the apparatus -- can begin to secrete flagellar proteins.

The rod structure is built through the peptidoglycan layer. But its growth it isn't able to proceed past the physical barrier presented by the outer membrane without assistance. So, the just-alluded-to outer ring complex cuts a hole in the membrane, so that the hook can grow beneath the FlgD scaffold until it reaches the critical length of 55nm. Then the substrates which are being secreted can switch from the rod-hook mode to flageellin mode, FlgD can be replaced by hook-associated-proteins, and the filament continues to grow. Without the presence of the cap protein FliD, these flagellin monomers become lost. This cap protein is thus essential for the process to take place.

Why the Flagellum Evolution From the T3SS Doesn't Work

One might have thought that the description given above should be more than enough to render the hand-waving gestures of Kenneth Miller et al. trivializations in the extreme. But it gets even worse for the Darwinian story. Why exactly is flagellum biosynthesis so tightly regulated and orchestrated? Not only do the energy demands render the flagellum an extremely expensive system to run, but untimely expression of flagellum proteins may induce a strong immune response in the host system, something no bacterium wants to do.

What is the significance of this from the standpoint of evolutionary rationale?

Well, flagellin monomers are somewhat potent cytokine inducers. If you are a Yersinia organism in possession of a Type-III Secretion System the last thing you want to do is display those flagellin peptides to the macrophages. Such would be liable to significantly countermand the Yersinia's anti-inflammatory strategy.

Conclusion

My description, given above, has really only scratched the surface of this spectacular item of nano-technology (for more detail, see here). I have not, for the sake of brevity, even discussed the remarkable processes of chemotaxis, two component signal transduction circuitry, rotational switching, and the proton motive force by which the flagellum is powered. But the bottom line is that modern Darwinian theory -- as classically understood -- has come no where close to explaining the origin of this remarkably complex and sophisticated motor engine. Just as Darwinian "explanations" of the eye may, at first, appear convincing to the uninitiated, largely unacquainted with the sheer engineering marvel of the biochemistry and molecular basis of vision, so too do the evolutionary "explanations" of the flagellum rapidly become void of any persuasiveness when one considers the molecular details of the system. When one couples the above details with demonstrations of the sheer impotence of neo-Darwinism to produce novel protein folds and novel protein-protein binding sites, do you really think that this system can be cobbled together by virtue of slight, successive modification, one small step at a time? Given that neo-Darwinism's key selling point lies in its purported efficacy in explaining away the overwhelming appearance of design, doesn't it stand to reason that its demonstrable impotence throws the design postulate back on the table as a viable and respectable scientific proposition?

Douglas Axe of the Biologic Institute showed in one recent paper in the journal Bio-complexity that the model of gene duplication and recruitment only works if very few changes are required to acquire novel selectable utility or neo-functionalization.

If a duplicated gene is neutral (in terms of its cost to the organism), then the maximum number of mutations that a novel innovation in a bacterial population can require is up to six. If the duplicated gene has a slightly negative fitness cost, the maximum number drops to two or fewer (not inclusive of the duplication itself).

It seems that the bacterial flagellum is as much a -- and perhaps a greater -- challenge to Darwinism as it was when Behe first wrote Darwin's Black Box in 1996.

"Signature in the Cell" - on CSPAN2

"IMAGINE A NANOTECHNOLOGY MACHINE far beyond the state of the art: a microminiaturized rotary motor and propeller system that drives a tiny vessel through liquid. The engine and drive mechanism are composed of 40 parts, including a rotor, stator, driveshaft, bushings, universal joint, and flexible propeller. The engine is powered by a flow of ions, can rotate at up to 100,000 rpm (ten times faster than a NASCAR racing engine), and can reverse direction in a quarter of a rotation. The system comes with an automatic feedback control mechanism. The engine itself is about 1/100,000th of an inch wide -- far smaller than can be seen by the human eye.

Most of us would be pleasantly surprised to learn that some genius had designed such an engineering triumph. What might come as a greater surprise is that there is a dominant faction in the scientific community that is prepared to defend, at all costs, the assertion that this marvelous device could not possibly have been designed, must have been produced blindly by unintelligent material forces, and only gives the appearance -- we said appearance! -- of being designed."

A book ("Signature in the Cell") that confronts this question and has gained a huge following is to be discussed on CSPN2 this weekend on the following schedule (ET)

Saturday September 5 - 7PM
Sunday September 6 - 7AM
Monday September 7 - 12PM
Tuesday September 8 - 12AM

Continued excerpt:

"As you may have guessed, these astonishingly complex, tiny, and efficient engines exist. Millions of them exist inside you, in fact. They are true rotary motors that drive the "bacterial flagellum," a whip-like propulsion device for certain bacteria, including the famous E. coli that lives in your digestive system.

Oddly enough, this intricate high-speed motor is at the center of a controversy that has been kindling in scientific circles for a decade, and is now igniting hot debate outside those circles. That's because, even more oddly, the implications of whether this little engine was designed are incalculably profound. They involve questions such as: What constitutes science? Did living things "just happen" by natural causes or were they designed by an intelligence? And what follows from those two competing alternatives -- in morality, education, culture, and science itself?

THE CONTROVERSY STEMS from the work of a growing cadre of scientists, mathematicians, and scholars in the field of "intelligent design," or ID for short. In the life sciences, the proponents of intelligent design are challenging the reigning orthodoxy that life developed entirely by the blind operation of natural forces. Their arguments are essentially of two kinds.

First, building on recent discoveries in cell biology, molecular genetics, and other disciplines, they contend that life, and the complex processes by which cells do their work, cannot have been produced by that combination of chance and necessity known as Darwinian evolution. Second, using the analytical techniques of information theory, they contend that the kind of information embodied in things that are designed can only be produced by an intelligent agent, not by undirected material causes. Design, they say, is empirically detectable -- and it is detectable, in fact, in living things. (Some of the ID proponents have demonstrated that the physical laws of the universe also show overwhelming evidence of being designed. For reasons of space rather than interest, I can only discuss here the work that ID is doing in the biological sciences.)

Of course, if the hypothesis that the universe and life are designed is true, the ready inference is that this designer has to be an incomprehensibly potent and awesome Intelligent Agent. A lot of influential people in science, the media, the schools, and other institutions don't much like the notion of the Big Intelligent Agent. Hence the controversy over ID, and the slanted treatment of it that is often seen."

To read the rest of this fascinating article go
here.

Lord, You Must Be So Disappointed in Us

Physicists are now in general agreement that our Universe must have been designed; there are too many critical forces and relationships that are necessary for its creation and continued existence for it to have been an accident. Our Universe, our Solar System and our Planet contain many wonders, but for billions of years there was no-one to observe these wonders and contemplate them until the arrival of humans.

Still, at the present time, most other scientists profess to believe that life and its development was through a series of accidents. Increasingly, as the genomes of different life-forms are studied, this position becomes more and more untenable, but the scientific establishment continues strenuously to suppress all challenges, by threats, intimidation and ridicule.

Not until the Cambrian explosion were there creatures with eyes to see and brains to register the wonders of our surroundings, but it took the development of mankind for there to be life-forms that could realize, study and appreciate our world. That so many people still consider it all to be accidental must be a great disappointment to God, because it may be undoing the main reason for our presence here. Still, our concept of time is different from His.

From page 148-9 of the book, “Why Us?”, by James Le Fanu, Pantheon Books, New York, NY, 2009. This is definitely a book worth reading and re-reading.

“The strangest thing about the universe of which we are part is that there should be 'something rather than nothing'. The second strangest, that we humans are the only beings (as far as we can tell) to know both that it does exist, and the extraordinary events that brought it into being. Without that human presence, 'This moving and sublime spectacle of nature would be sad and mute: observed the eighteenth¬century French philosopher Denis Diderot. 'Everything would be a vast solitude, a phenomenon taking place obscurely, unobserved.'

This uniquely human capacity to know the universe exists is predicated on three separate events, each by itself almost as remarkable as the fact of there being 'something rather than nothing'. The first event was the emergence of 'life 3,500 million years ago, touched on in the preceding chapter, where the simplest of single-celled organisms is both an astonishingly complex chemical factory and an encyclopaedia of genetic information transmitting the necessary instructions for those chemical reactions from one generation to the next. The second event was the arrival of the earliest marine creatures, such as the trilobite, six hundred million years ago, with the capacity to see, and so be aware of the external world - thanks to the twin and simultaneous 'innovations' of both the seeing eye and a brain capable of interpreting the image that falls upon it.

That brain would, over time, become enormously more sophisticated and complex, but the universe would still not become 'knowable' till the third and final event, the emergence of humans, with the faculty of language that permits them to think, and then to think about those thoughts and discuss their significance by inserting them into the minds of others gathered around the campfire. Thus, the arrival of our species, witnessed so eloquently by the wondrous art and technology of our earliest ancestors, introduces a radically new element into the universe that had never existed before - the thoughts, values and understanding of what it might all mean.

And it does not end there, for that self-reflective human brain comprehends the world from the perspective of the individual to whom it belongs - so that brain must also acquire the sense of that inner person we know our¬selves to be, and to whom those thoughts belong. And further, that now reflective self must be free to prefer one thought over another, to argue one interpretation over another and recognise the sovereignty of some 'higher court' than its own immediate impressions: the notion of 'the truth', on which all discourse (whether around the campfire or in the university seminar room) depends - where agreeing with another individual is to acknowledge the truth of his argu¬ment, and to disagree is to reject it.

There is more, but the gist is clear enough. The privilege of our species in having a larger brain is by itself not sufficient to 'know' the universe. Man must also possess that perception of himself as an 'autonomous self, free to choose' - or, as the eighteenth-century philosopher Adam Smith put it, 'the impartial and well informed spectator' of himself and his thoughts:

When I endeavour to examine my own conduct. . . I divide myself as it were into two persons; and that I, the examiner and judge, represent a different character from the other I, the person whose conduct is examined into and judged of. The first is the spectator. . . the second is the agent, a person who I properly call myself, and on whose conduct I was endeavouring to form some opinion.

That sense of the autonomous self is more than just a property of the non-material mind, but has a distinctive character whose beliefs and attitudes may change over time but whose personality remains resolutely the same.”

“All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players”

William Shakespeare

Can Life Be Initiated Randomly In Nature?

Although most scientific organizations and bureaucracies have yet to recognize this, many discoveries involving DNA and gene research of the last 60 years have confirmed some of Darwin’s theories, (microevolution, all living things are related), while other aspects of Darwin’s theories have been disproved or called into serious question (macroevolution, single tree of life). My opinion of the main reason for the resistance of the scientific community is that the most recent genetic research has also shown how little we know, rather than how much we know, about where the information comes from to construct a living being. When DNA was discovered, science assumed that soon everything would become clear. Just the opposite has happened, and science doesn’t like that.

One question that Darwinists have never been able to confront, much less answer, is how life was first created. One has to laugh at the answer famously given to Ben Stein in his movie, “Expelled”, by the most prominent Darwinist of our time, Richard Dawkins, when he said a possibility was that a superior race had seeded life on earth (then where did the superior race come from?).

Can Life Be Initiated Randomly In Nature?

Dr. Zvi Shkedi, January 2009

The author is a retired aerospace engineer, with a Ph.D. in nuclear physics from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel.

A note for those who are not mathematically oriented: In this article we show large numbers using "to the power of " notation. 102 means 10 to the power of 2 which is 100. 103=1000. 109=1,000,000,000 etc. 10-3 means 1 divided by 103 which is 0.001 ; 10-6=0.000001 etc. The symbol ^ is an alternative notation which also means "to the power of ". 10^3=103=1000 etc.
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The first, most primitive, RNA or DNA sequence had to be encoded correctly with the ability to absorb food from its lifeless surroundings, metabolize it, and repeatedly reproduce itself, or else, it would not survive. Such a complicated initial encoding is not something that can happen by chance. It can also not develop and improve itself to gain this ability over time because, prior to gaining this ability, it would be nothing but lifeless organic matter. Self-replicating molecules may be able to replicate themselves through chemical reactions. Such lifeless molecules, however, do not contain the information necessary to support and reproduce life. Such molecules have been synthesized through an investment of energy and intelligence by people in the lab. They did not make themselves. No such molecules were ever found in nature.

To understand the probability of encoding survivable DNA by chance, let's look at the following example. We will not ask how long it will take a monkey with a typewriter to produce all the writings of Shakespeare. Instead, we will ask how long will it take a monkey to randomly type the first 12 letters of the ABC in the correct order. At a typing rate of one letter per second without external guidance, the probability is once in 3 billion years! And, if we want to produce all the 26 letters of the ABC in the correct order, how many monkeys will it take, and how long will it take them? Without external guidance, the probability is that 400 trillion monkeys might do it once in 400 trillion years! The orderliness in RNA and DNA is much higher than the 26 letters of the ABC. It takes hundreds or thousands of genes to encode survivable DNA. The rate of biological changes in large quantities of matter is much slower than one per second. So, the probability of getting it right, without external guidance, is many orders of magnitude lower. The wildest most imaginative theories cannot explain such a high degree of orderliness without external guidance.

Some imaginative theories propose that life was not initiated on earth. The first DNA was carried to earth on a meteorite from outer space. How exactly would such living organisms survive the glowing-white temperatures experienced by meteorites during their travel through the atmosphere?

In the 1920's and 1930's, Oparin and Haldane proposed another theory as if life in nature started in a Primordial Soup pond. According to this theory, lifeless chemicals in this pond turned into living organisms by lightning strikes or some other source of energy. This theory has been presented to students, academics, and the general public as if it were an irrefutable scientific fact. Let's calculate what is the minimum possible quantity of materials necessary to initiate a living organism in such a pond. Then, we will compare this quantity to the size of planet earth. This thought experiment is about an attempt to initiate the very first independently survivable DNA, before any other life processes have a chance to begin. It is not about an attempt to change or improve an existing form of life.

All DNA is encoded with four nucleotide bases which serve as the coding building blocks. In the following analysis we will ignore the resources required to complete the biochemical reactions necessary to compose and duplicate the nucleotide base molecules. We will also ignore the mechanisms by which nucleotide bases join other molecules in a survivable sequence to form the DNA structure. The following analysis will focus only on the probability and quantity of organic materials necessary to initiate the information contents carried by the DNA in the first living organism.

Each gene coding location contains one of the four possible bases. Each gene is composed of hundreds or thousands of such bases. The number of genes in most living organisms is between about 1000 and 40,000. Therefore, the probability of randomly composing a survivable DNA is much less than 10-1000 (less than 1 chance out of 101000 possibilities). Now let's imagine an attempt to create the minimal possible variations of genetic codes with the hope of discovering and initiating the very first one which is capable of absorbing food, metabolizing it, repeatedly reproducing itself, and surviving.

The cell-size of most independently survivable living organisms is between 1 micron and a few hundred microns. (Viruses are smaller, however they are symbiotic organisms - unable to survive on their own without a host. In the absence of live hosts, symbiotic organisms could not have been the first ones to appear. Organisms which depend on food produced by other organisms could also not have been the first ones to appear.) Let's attempt to create the smallest imaginable non-symbiotic organism at a size of 0.1 microns. This size is less than any known non-symbiotic organism in nature and less than the smallest theoretically possible size of 0.2 microns. Using this size in the calculation, will give us a lower limit of the total volume of materials necessary to find at least one survivable organism.

We can minimize the number of experimental cells by requiring only 200 nucleotide bases in the entire DNA of each cell. There are no known living organisms and there are no theories which predict the possibility of living organisms with such a small number of bases. Such a short genetic code cannot support even the most primitive form of a living organism. It is not known how many additional bases will be required before at least one of the permutations will produce a survivable living organism. This number is probably in the thousands. However, using only 200 bases in the calculation will give us a lower limit of the total number of experimental cells necessary to find at least one independently survivable organism.

200 base locations will yield 4200 possible permutations which is 10120. Multiplying 4200 by the volume of a 0.1 micron cell yields a volume of 1099 cubic meters as the lower-limit volume of materials in this over-simplified experiment. The volume of planet earth is 1021 cubic meters. Therefore, the lower-limit volume of materials necessary to randomly produce a living organism is 1078 times the volume of planet earth.

This analysis shows that even if such a short genetic code could somehow create a living organism, and even if this organism could be as small as 0.1 microns, getting it randomly initiated in nature would still need a volume of organic matter which is 78 orders of magnitude larger than the total volume of planet earth.

This experiment and all possible DNA permutations do not need to be constructed all at once. Let's investigate a hypothesis as if the attempt to randomly initiate life on planet earth lasted a period of 3 billion years, as some theories propose. If we allocate one day for each step in the experiment, and divide the lower-limit volume of necessary experimental organisms (1099 cubic meters) by the number of days in 3 billion years, we obtain a necessary daily volume of 1066 times the volume of planet earth for each step in the experiment. If we allocate just one second for each step, the volume of organisms during each such step still needs to be more than 1061 times the volume of planet earth. Some chemical reactions can occur as fast as one picosecond. If we allocate one picosecond for each step in the experiment, the lower-limit volume of experimental organisms during each such step would still be more than 1049 times the volume of planet earth. The volume of space taken up by the Milky Way galaxy is of the order of 1061 cubic meters. Therefore, the minimum necessary volume of experimental organisms during each one-picosecond step is larger than 109 times the total volume of the Milky Way galaxy.

In summary, the lower-limit quantity of organic matter needed to randomly initiate the smallest and most primitive form of life in nature, compared to the size of planet earth, demonstrates how futile such an attempt would be. It proves that random initiation of life in nature is absolutely impossible. Therefore, the Primordial Soup theory proposed by Oparin and Haldane and all other similar theories are nothing but human imagination. DNA as the carrier of genetic codes was not yet discovered at their times. Had they known about the complex structure of DNA, they would not have proposed such a theory.

The English Professor Anthony Flew was, for half a century, the world's leading authority on atheism. When he learned, in 2004, about the breaking of the genetic code in DNA, he changed his mind and announced that he believes in God as a first cause. The structure of DNA, he explained, was so awesomely complex that it could not have just evolved. It must have been designed and created by God.

Editorial Note: Anthony Flew is not the only person to be shaken by the implications of the DNA code and by the unfolding knowledge of genes. Many scientists, who were atheists, have become believers – including Dr. Francis Collins, who was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his work in mapping the human genome. Dr. Collins famously said, “I have seen the mind of God”.

We Pay Such a Price for Ignoring Common Sense

A question for the ages is why the class of people we call the “intelligentsia” always seems to get the really big questions wrong. The three great movements that captured their attention: Freudianism, Marxism and Darwinism (and the present-day, “man-made global warming”) have now all been proven wrong by events or by scientific advances, but you would never know it from the positions of the organizations and bureaucracies that represent them, pushing on and trying to ridicule those calling attention to the events and to the science.

1. “Together with Marx and Freud, he (Darwin) is one of that triumvirate of imaginative thinkers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries whose assertion of the priority of the scientific view 'would occupy the centre stage of Western thought for so long.

'Darwin made theological and spiritual explanations of life superfluous'; Douglas Futuyma of the University of New York State observes. 'Together with Marx's theory of history and Freud's attribution of human behaviour to influences over which we have little control, the theory of evolution was a crucial plank in the platform of materialist science.'

Each denied the reality of the self as an autonomous being 'free to choose', claiming rather that human action is determined by a powerful hidden force, whether economic, psychic or (loosely speaking) genetic - over which the individual has no control. Each saw himself as a materialist, and was hostile to religion, which for Marx was famously 'the opium of the people', and for Freud 'an infantile yearning for a powerful protective father', while Darwin confided in his cousin Francis Galton, 'I gave up religious belief almost independently of my own reflections'.

Darwin's contributing 'plank' to that 'platform of materialist science' alone endures - but for how much longer? It certainly seems surprising in retrospect that Marx's and Freud's self-evidently erroneous theories should have proved so persuasive to so many and for so long. Now it is the turn of Darwin, whose reputation can scarcely survive the devastating verdict of the findings of the recent past. Before long he must fill that vacant chair in heaven alongside Marx and Freud, at which point the triumvirate will be complete. As for ourselves, the eighteenth-century poet Alexander Pope could not, it now appears, have put it more succinctly:

Sole judge of Truth, in endless Error hurled
the glory, jest and riddle of the world!”

1. From page 261 of the book, “Why Us?”, by James Le Fanu, Pantheon Books, New York, NY, 2009.

And from the American Spectator today:

Hazardous Times Ahead

By Tom Bethell June, 2009

I worry that by the time Obama is through with us, the U.S. will be a second-class country. A lot of people feel the same way. A similar concern has been in the back of my mind for years. In the Carter era I also worried about the fate of the country, but I have to say that the hazards seem far greater now.

After the Berlin Wall came down I thought the obvious lesson—that socialism doesn’t work—would penetrate the skulls of our domestic intelligentsia. But somehow it never did. They never regard a limit to government expansion as a desirable thing. Nothing seems to have been learned from the fall of Communism—the great history lesson of the 20th century.

Consider health care, much in the news. When I first came to America, people would inquire about Britain’s “socialized medicine.” Their tone was politely skeptical.

Was it really free? Well, no. You’re not charged when you go to the doctor, but everyone pays because taxes are much higher. The National Health Service was introduced in 1948 (it now employs more than 1.3 million people), and before that, if you went to the doctor, you paid for the service. To blunt the blow of misfortune there was private insurance, and doctors recognized a moral obligation of charity toward the indigent.

Today, almost everyone will acknowledge that America’s private health system delivers better services than the state does in Europe. (“Formerly private,” I should have said.) Don’t forget, the Soviet Union also had “free” medical care, and good luck if you went to a doctor in Leningrad.

Maybe things have improved now that it’s St. Petersburg again. Yet today, with little sense of déjà vu, America is moving toward nationalized health. Obama made “a promise” of “affordable high-quality care available to every American.” The thrust of politics will be to make health care much more expensive for the nation as a whole, and of lower quality—without intending any such decline.

A few words about education: Until the 19th century, it too was something that the customer paid for. By the 1870s, however, all states were providing “free” elementary education. Today, private schooling has become a much more valuable good than it was 50 years ago, when government schools still functioned properly. They had not yet collapsed under the influence of teacher unions, progressive politics, and the decline of the family. So government schooling remained a viable alternative.

Even today, in the better suburbs vigilant parents have been able to maintain standards to some extent by keeping close track of what goes on in school. The true victims of public education are the inner-city poor, where all liberal reforms have worked to their disadvantage. A comparable trend may well reappear with universal health care.

I sometimes wonder whether progressive elites really care about education. My suspicions were aroused when I read in a book by Robert Conquest that Lenin said he didn’t care about the education of the Soviet masses, disavowing Communist propaganda on the issue. All Lenin cared about was whether the proles could understand and obey the Party’s instructions.

Do the liberals care about our chaotic urban schools today? No doubt some do. But effective action would mean challenging unions and the whole progressive mindset. As long as the unions keep delivering the votes, they will continue to exercise a major influence over the Democratic Party and will be allowed to run their own show—whether or not the inner-city kids learn to read or write. The recent shutdown of the voucher program in D.C. showed that the education of poor blacks is not an important consideration for the establishment.

Obama surely does understand that instructing inner-city blacks has become a big problem. But he will only be able to do something about it only if it becomes his top priority. That is not going to happen— other issues will always be more urgent. Instead he will preserve the comfortable fiction that education can be reformed by increasing the dollars appropriated for it.

Let me also say something about the energy madness that engulfs us. Here lies the real threat to America. The carefully stoked fears about “climate change” and “energy independence” have the potential to do real harm. Liberals really believe that oil and coal will have to make way for renewables, notably wind and solar, and they believe that this transformation can happen within a few years. They think goodwill can surmount all problems.

The potential for harm was increased when the Environmental Protection Agency ruled that carbon dioxide threatens our health and welfare. Before that a prudent delay had seemed likely, but the EPA may push Congress into something really foolish.

I WAS FRUSTRATED BY GEORGE BUSH on the energy front. He failed to confront the bogus science of global warming and he tiptoed around nuclear power. He favored it, but quietly, as though hoping to avoid arousing the opposition. But you either confront the anti-nukes directly or they will defeat you. When irrational fears drive policy, only full-bore presidential power can turn things around.

The same was true of global warming. Bush never accepted that it was man-made, yet he didn’t confront it, even though the scientific support for the warmists’ claim is abysmal. It’s a house of cards that could have collapsed (and could still) with the right opposition. But Bush didn’t want to stick his neck out, and that meant the “warm-mongers” won.

Now we find ourselves in the murky waters of cap and trade. A bill that hits the manufacturing, oil, and coal-producing states with higher taxes will be resisted by lots of Democrats as well as Republicans. But the relevant congressional chairmen are leftist ideologues—Reps. Waxman and Markey and Sen. Boxer—determined to impose big penalties on CO2 emitters. No one knows how this will play out. I was cheered the other day when the president of the Cato Institute, Bill Niskanen, told me that cap and trade won’t pass the Senate. The Democrats just could end up hoist on their own petard.

The propaganda on behalf of “renewables” has been so misleading that most Americans—probably a sizable majority—have no idea how far we are from being able to replace coal, oil, and natural gas with politically correct power sources (which don’t include hydropower). Al Gore actually called for all of the nation’s electricity to come from wind and solar within a decade. Currently, only 1 percent does. Obama wants 10 percent of electricity to come from these sources by the end of his first term, but that too is a fantasy.

Late in the day, some journalists have begun drawing attention to problems with renewables. It was as though they had found out about them for the first time. Climate change advocate Juliet Eilperin reported on page one of the Washington Post that wind and solar projects “may carry costs for wildlife.” The land area needed for renewable energy is far greater than that required by traditional energy sources, she reported. If a nuclear power plant occupies one square mile, for example, 15 square miles would be needed to generate the same power by solar technology and 30 square miles for wind power (according to the Post).

Those ratios struck me as far too low, minimizing the problem. I checked with Howard Hayden, a physicist who puts out a newsletter called The Energy Advocate. For wind farms, he told me, the year-round average output “translates into 300 square miles per 1,000 megawatts, the size of a nuke.” So it seems the Post reduced this particular renewable problem (there are many others) by a factor of 10.

Just about everything we have been told about renewable energy is a fantasy, but that doesn’t mean the Democrats won’t try to cram it down our throats. So get ready for difficult times ahead, and pray for the country.

Eventually, the American Public Gets It

It usually takes a long time for Joe Six-pack (a term used endearingly) to wade through the media blitz to the truth, but eventually the American public gets it. This is true regarding global warming and Darwinism, as the following reports point out. What has been amazing to me is the speed at which the scales have fallen off Obama, as the corruption and ineptness of his appointees has become painfully obvious, and as the details of his pork-bill became understood.

Zogby Poll Shows Dramatic Jump in Number of Americans Who Favor Teaching Both Sides of Evolution

EvolutionNews.com February, 2009

Surprisingly Strong Support Seen Among Democrats and Liberals

A new Zogby poll on the eve of Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday shows a dramatic rise in the number of Americans who agree that when biology teachers teach the scientific evidence for Darwin’s theory of evolution, they also should teach the scientific evidence against it. Surprisingly, the poll also shows overwhelming support among self-identified Democrats and liberals for academic freedom to discuss the “strengths and weaknesses” evolution.

Over 78% of likely voters agree with teaching both the evidence for and against Darwin’s theory, according to the new national poll.

“This represents a dramatic 9-point jump from 2006, when only 69% of respondents in a similar poll favored teaching both sides,” said Discovery Institute’s Dr. John West. “At the same time, the number of likely voters who support teaching only the evidence that favors evolution dropped 7 points from 21% in 2006 to 14.4% in 2009.

“We need to change Darwin Day to Academic Freedom Day because just when Darwinists are celebrating evolution’s triumph, this poll shows that they have been losing the public debate over whether students need to hear both sides,” added West. “There appears to be a public backlash against the strong-arm tactics being employed by many Darwinists to intimidate scientists, teachers, and students who want to raise criticisms of Darwin’s theory.”

The poll results also shatter some preconceptions about who supports letting students hear a balanced presentation on Darwinian evolution, with Democrats supporting teaching Darwinism’s “strengths and weaknesses” even more overwhelmingly than Republicans, at 82% and 73%, respectively.

Added West: “Media reports insinuate that a right-wing conspiracy of know nothings and religious extremists is afoot. But the Zogby poll reflects a very broad-based and well-informed constituency for academic freedom that includes liberals, moderates, independents, and people from every race and age group. The Darwin Lobby has really isolated itself from public opinion.”

Editorial Note: Thank you, Ben Stein; thank you, “Expelled”.

44% Say Global Warming Due To Planetary Trends, Not People

Monday, January 19, 2009 Rasmussen Reports (Excerpt)

“Al Gore’s side may be coming to power in Washington, but they appear to be losing the battle on the idea that humans are to blame for global warming .

Forty-four percent (44%) of U.S. voters now say long-term planetary trends are the cause of global warming, compared to 41% who blame it on human activity.

Seven percent (7%) attribute global warming to some other reason, and nine percent (9%) are unsure in a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey.

Fifty-nine percent (59%) of Democrats blame global warming on human activity, compared to 21% percent of Republicans. Two-thirds of GOP voters (67%) see long-term planetary trends as the cause versus 23% of Democrats. Voters not affiliated with either party by eight points put the blame on planetary trends.

In July 2006, 46% of voters said global warming is caused primarily by human activities, while 35% said it is due to long-term planetary trends.

In April of last year, 47% of Americans blamed human activity versus 34% who viewed long-term planetary trends as the culprit. But the numbers have been moving in the direction of planetary trends since then.“

Editorial Note: When temperatures in Maine hit 50 below, it's hard to keep selling global warming.

How Much Longer Can Darwinism Be Sold? Part 4

This is the fourth post in a series of articles on the evils and errors of Darwinism. So far, we have postulated that Darwinism, - the tenets of which furnish the philosophical foundation for atheism and materialism (I do know they both preceded Darwin), and for the actions of Stalin and Hitler in exterminating millions, - is correct about some things and wrong about others.

That which Darwin got wrong, however, is crucial. We have seen how the DNA code structure argues conclusively for the tenet that we are all related in some way; but that same DNA code also argues conclusively that there had to be a designer to produce such a perfect code millions and maybe billions of years ago – a code that remains unchanged in every living thing to this day. The fossil record, however, and the absence of transitional forms (only a pitiful few have been discovered among the millions of fossils found, and those found are questionable) shows that there is no such thing as a single “tree of life”, but rather many trees and telephone poles.

Today I want to discuss random mutation and natural selection. In this I am heavily influenced by the works of the microbiologist, Dr. Michael Behe. Random mutation happens frequently when the DNA code is accidentally altered in the embryo of an offspring. If the mutation is favorable to survival and passed on to the offspring’s offspring, it will gradually spread throughout the population. Darwin was not aware in his time how this might happen, but observed that small, beneficial changes did occur in this manner in his observations in the Galapalos Islands. There is no argument that this has happened throughout history over and over again; this is called ‘microevolution’. Darwin’s next point, however, is a leap of faith that is also crucial, and has been completely disproved by Behe and others – that these random mutations can accumulate to the point where new body structures and even new life forms can be assembled – a process that is called ‘macroevolution’.

The rate at which favorable mutations can build on each other has not been possible to analyze realistically until recently because of the large number of specimens and the large number of generations that need to be followed and studied. The likelihood of a favorable, random mutation (most mutations are unfavorable) occurring and spreading is dependent on the size of the population and on the number of generations there are in the time frame available; the larger the population and the more generations, the greater the likelihood of a favorable mutation occurring and taking hold.

Behe knew, however, that there are organisms with immense populations, which reproduce rapidly and which have been studied thoroughly for many years – such as malaria, e coli and HIV bacteria. One of his contributions is to extrapolate from this knowledge relationships and probabilities that can apply in general. Malaria, for example, develops resistance to drugs fairly rapidly, through random mutations and natural selection, but multiple mutations occur infrequently, and when the time frame is compared to the population sizes and the inter-generational times of other species, like humans, it becomes evident that only minor evolutionary changes have had the time to occur in humans and in other species. The odds against major changes requiring multiple mutations are so enormous as to be impossible.

Behe found that in malaria bacteria, the odds of one mutation that gave resistance to a drug to be about one in a trillion, and the odds of multiple mutations to be about one in a hundred billion billion.

From “The Edge of Evolution”:
“If all of these huge numbers make your head spin, think of it this way. The likelihood that homo sapiens achieved any single mutation of the kind required for malaria to become resistant to chloroquine – not the easiest mutation, to be sure, but still only a shift of only two amino acids – the likelihood that such a mutation could arise just once in the entire course of human lineage is minuscule – of the same order as, say, the likelihood of you personally winning the Powerball lottery by buying a single ticket.”

Don’t lose sight of the fact that Behe is talking here of the odds of a single, complex mutation. The odds of successive mutations creating new body parts or new body forms are incalculable and impossible.

Behe had already shown in a previous work that cells contain minute machines that have several parts working together to some common purpose – and could not possibly have evolved - since the specialized parts had no other function except as a working member of the molecular machine. Those who have tried to show him wrong, like Miller, have fallen far short. Behe, then, has shown us once again that there must be a designer behind the grand scheme of life.

More on Darwinism: Homology and DNA

This is the third in a continuing series of posts on the evils and errors of Darwinism. My first post pointed out that the fossil record showed exactly the opposite of what Darwin had proposed – which was a single “tree of life” (Universal Common Descent) in which every living organism descended on branches from an original, single celled being (LUCA), and that we all descended from LUCA and are the product of random changes. Instead the fossil record clearly shows an orchard with many trees that have some branches and many trees that look like telephone poles because a life form often appears suddenly and then later disappears with no apparent evolutionary changes over its lifespan.

My second post dealt with the harm that Darwinism has done to mankind by providing a rationale for everything from eugenics and unlimited abortion to the starvation of Russian peasants and the slaughter of Germany’s Jews.

Today I want to discuss what the scientists call “homology” – common evolutionary origins, either major forms like arms and wings or similar eyes, or similarities at the molecular level. For years, Darwinists have liked to point out that the similarities of the bone structures and the workings of arms, wings and flippers is evidence of common descent, while skeptics replied that the structures only show that a particular design is best for a particular purpose and does not show common descent any more than an airplane is descended from an automobile because both have wheels.

Although the same can be said of similarities at the molecular level, the discovery of the DNA code and its role in the construction and assembly of the protein molecules that make up all life forms changed everything. In my opinion, the DNA code system, which is basically the same in every living being and has been found to be the same in fossils many millions of years old, is a two-edged sword. An honest skeptic of Darwinism could no longer maintain that the available evidence disproved descent with modification, it only proved that the single “tree of life” proposed by Darwin and steadfastly defended by Darwinists was in error; however the evidence that we are all somehow related, whether on a branch of trees in the orchard or connected to the telephone poles there is conclusive.

The two-edged sword situation, however, arises from the question of how evolution, which relies on the accumulation of small, random changes, can possibly explain the incredible complexity and power of the DNA code, which appears to be both universal and eternal – and which is useless except as a finished, impossibly-sophisticated, information system product. Evolution absolutely cannot account for this. The DNA code proves that there was and is a “designer” whose intelligence and goals we can never understand – but also that we are, in fact, related to the monkeys, but not necessarily through an evolutionary process.

Dr. Francis Collins, the leader of the massive project that successfully decoded the human genome, and formerly an atheist, said that in defining the human genome he had “Seen the mind of God”. He went on to write a book, "The Language of God”, in which he writes of his experience and his new faith.

We still have to examine what the subjects of embryology, natural selection and mutation, and irreducibly complex machines can tell us, but so far we have seen that Darwin was only partially correct about common descent, that similarities in anatomy seem to prove nothing, and that the DNA code (which was unknown to Darwin) has to be the product of intelligent design. More to come in future posts.

Darwinism and the Dehumanization of Us All

In my last post on Darwinism and on the evils that have flowed from its tenets, I received many comments from people who disagreed with me on the merits – and also from those who felt it was foolish to blame Darwinism for some of the major evils in the world. Some had never considered the connection, and others thought that there was no connection between Darwinism and such occurrences as the deliberate starvation of millions of Russian peasants or the slaughter of six million Jews by Hitler. Some who commented were driven to absolute distraction that anyone would question Darwinism or make these connections.

I must be very lucky because the very next day, one of the most insightful websites in existence, “The American Thinker”, posted a column on this very subject. I present it below in its entirety:

The Diamond Anniversary of Dehumanization

By Bruce Walker January 05, 2009 The American Thinker

Seventy-five years ago this month, one of the most insidious laws in human history came into effect in Nazi Germany. The innocent sounding name was The Law for the Prevention of Hereditary Diseased Offspring. It was the ghastly pinnacle of an unholy theory of human eugenics. Darwinism -- not the Theory of Evolution, per se, but the sinister notion that natural selection made God superfluous -- liberated man from his obligation to treat fellow men as special creatures in a divinely ordered universe.

In 1915, Canon McClure in his book, Germany's War Inspirers, noted how Germans slid toward eugenics as a replacement of eugenics for traditional religion. He talks of people openly calling for eugenics having "strong claims to become an orthodox religious tenet of the future" and "Eugenics becoming a religious dogma among mankind." He also noted that the nihilist Nietzsche was a "pioneer of Eugenics."

In his 1943 book, We Have Seen Evil, Rom Landau notes that Germany before the First World War showed a nation that was already close to the brink of spiritual emptiness:

"The antidote to the precariousness of the new present and the hopelessness of the future was sought by experimenting with unending sensual thrills -- from drink and drugs to every form of sexual excess....The license in sexual life revealed a sensual depravity that had always been there but had been kept disguised."

Margaret Sanger, about this time, had advocated treating humans no differently than cattle. She was a member of the Socialist Party in America. Like Hitler and other true socialists, Sanger believed in the perfectibility of man by man. Inextricably linked to this was an embrace of reproductive morality in general as simply a plastic concept of invented principles. This included support of the wholesale practice of "medical" abortions in New York decades before Roe v. Wade, as described in Suicide Bent, a 1945 book by David Goldstein.

Like Sanger, the Germans before Hitler had come to power had adopted the same sort of looseness and apathy about human reproduction and procreation. Pierre Vienot, in his 1934 book, Is Germany Finished? wrote of German society before the Nazis came to power:

"It really represents a moral transformation: the discarding of the notion of morality in sexual matters...sexual life, especially among the younger generation, is no longer regarded in itself from the standpoint of sin...the majority of girls, even in the middle class, look upon themselves as totally free."

The same German people who gave Hitler power, long before that fatal step, repudiated all those values associated with the sacredness of human life, all those Judeo-Christian morals connected to the idea of man as made in the image of God, all those divisions of man from beast. It was an easy step from the irreligious character of pre-Nazi Germany to The Law for the Prevention of Hereditary Diseased Offspring.

Many people around the world applauded this forced sterilization of "Life unworthy of life." It was such a tantalizingly simple shift: We, humans, are both animals and gods; some of us are more animals and others of us are more gods; we, not Providence, make the future; we, the wisest and the best, will be fruitful and inhabit posterity; they, the defective and the worst, will be left behind in our manmade evolution to some manmade Heaven. Why should disease be carried from generation to generation? If we are farm animals, then there is no reason. The Nazis, along with all the other socialists and Leftists on the planet, have always thought of us as just animals.

The Nazis moved, quite logically, along the path of improving the stock of the human race. In his 1941 book, Education for Death: The Making of the Nazi, Gregor Ziemer describes the great care given to the right stock of boys and girls to breed and the forced sterilization of the wrong stock of boys and girls. This was more than simply Nazi policy: It was the almost inevitable consequence of a German people which had long since abandoned all faith in God.

Then quickly followed the most patently horrific aspects of a latently horrific viewpoint: Why not just kill the Jews? Why allow Gypsies to exist? What purpose did Slavic people have? If we are all merely farm animals, one animal must be the farmer. Why not the German people? Why not the Nazi Party? Once the sanctity of life is abandoned, there is no trajectory but free fall to ethical oblivion.

Where are we today? Abortion is so commonplace in the civilized world that only something like postnatal infanticide faintly stirs our conscience. Assisted suicide, human cloning, and every attainable gap that once separated us from the rest of Creation has been breached with delight. We are part of the earth, part of the Animal Kingdom, part of Mother Earth so worshipped by the Nazis.

Ancient Judaism has a beautiful allegory: When the dirtiest beggar walks down the darkest alley in the world, he is preceded by a herald of angels, proclaiming to everything before him: "Make way! Make way for the image of the Lord!"

Christianity believes that man was so special in the universe that God was born as man, walked as man, and died as man. This system of fidelity to human life is the only anchor which we have against the feral mask of nature. God plants, God culls, God brings forth life. When we reject that truth, we reject our own souls. After that always comes vast, numb, black evil.

Bruce Walker is the author of two books: Sinisterism: Secular Religion of the Lie, and his recently published book, The Swastika against the Cross: The Nazi War on Christianity.

As we look around at the rapidly increasing corruption of American society, as seen in our political discourse, in abortion on demand, in our drug use, in the destruction of children and families, in the pornography and violence in our movies and television, etc., etc., we feel an obligation to do something to stop this decline. That ‘something’ always comes back to regaining the moral compass that is based on Judeo-Christian beliefs, and on the concept that mankind is a special creation of God. This is why the discrepancies in the Darwinian theory involving macroevolution must be exposed, and the new scientific discoveries that bear on this question brought to light. Since Darwinism provided the basis for many of the most immense and heinous evils of our time, exposing Darwinism’s falsities is a necessary first step toward a more decent society.