In the Darwin Debate, How Long Before the Tide Turns in Favor of Intelligent Design?

Casey Luskin January 19, 2015 4:36 PM | Permalink

A student emails me to ask how long it will be before the "tide turns from Darwinism to ID." He follows the debate over intelligent design and is aware that the Darwin lobby's rhetoric typically fails to address ID's actual arguments (which are scientific in nature), instead focusing on personal attacks or trying to claim ID is religion. This student feels it is obvious that ID has the upper hand in the argument, but wonders when the majority opinion will also recognize this.

I agree that in the long-term, the position of the anti-ID lobby is simply not sustainable. You can't keep claiming forever that ID is just "religion" or "politics" when the ID camp is producing legitimate science, and even non-ID scientists keep making discoveries that confirm the predictions of ID. Or I suppose you can keep claiming whatever you want, but it will become increasingly difficult to get people to believe you.

What are my reasons for optimism? One of the strongest signs is that in head-to-head debates over ID and Darwinism, the ID proponent generally wins hands down. In that respect, we've had many key intellectual victories in recent years, including:

Lots of pro-ID peer-reviewed scientific papers being published.
Experimental peer-reviewed research coming out showing the unevolvability of new proteins.
Theoretical peer-reviewed papers taking down alleged computer simulations of evolution, showing that intelligence design is needed to produce new information.
A major ID research conference at Cornell leading to the publication of the volume Biological Information: New Perspectives.
Huge victories for ID in the area of junk DNA, thanks to the ENCODE results.
Data supportive of ID coming out all the time as the epigenetic revolution proceeds.
ID pretty much shut down the competition in debates relating to Stephen Meyer's book Darwin's Doubt. The book was appraised by one of the world's top two science journal, Science, (in a tellingly weak review).
Brown University biologist Kenneth Miller's No. 1 argument in the Dover trial has now been shot down as the beta-globin pseudogene was found to be functional.
The Darwin brigade's favorite argument against Michael Behe was refuted as chloroquine-resistance turns out to be a multimutation feature.
Major concessions from leading atheists like philosopher Thomas Nagel that ID arguments have merit and should be taken seriously.
Concessions from influential evolutionists that neo-Darwinism indeed faces serious criticism in biology.
In recent years, many peer-reviewed articles in the mainstream scientific literature have critiqued Darwinism .
And revealingly, the more that victories for ID multiply, the more the Darwin lobby tries to suppress free speech for ID proponents, and in turn is forced to squelch their own criticisms of the orthodox evolutionary paradigm.

I could list many more successes, as well as ways that we could be hoping for more and doing more, but the point is this: ID has had plenty of intellectual "wins" of late, and the future is bright. The problem is that much of the public isn't hearing about these wins for ID.

For the time being, ID critics control the microphone. They generally determine what students hear in the classroom, what the public reads in the media, and what scientists read in the journals. They can often prevent the public, students, and scientists from hearing the facts about ID. This has a major impact on the way many people perceive this debate because they can't make a fair evaluation when they are only hearing one side of the issue, dominated by spin and caricature. This is one of the biggest obstacles facing ID.

That's why a lot of our energy in the ID movement is devoted to "getting the word out," broadcasting the facts and correcting misinformation from our critics. ID blogs like Uncommon Descent and Evolution News & Views do a great job of this (if we do say so ourselves). There are other good sources out there as well.

The Summer Seminar on ID, organized by Discovery Institute's Center for Science & Culture, has now graduated some 250 students, many of whom are going on to get PhDs and seed the next generation of scientists. There's a lot to look forward to.

Don't expect a revolution overnight. We are in this for the long haul, recognizing that it can take time for the truth to slip past the checkpoints that the Darwin lobby sets up to keep the public uninformed. In the end, though, I'm optimistic because the fundamentals of ID -- the science underlying the inference to design in nature -- are sound. The truth will win out, though it may tarry in doing so. Or to put it another way, the tide of ID is already well on its way in. We need to focus on telling people about it.

Bray: "Oh please, that is the most ridiculous dodge ever.
We have not seen or have evidence of a single mutated animal that changed species.
They may mutate, but there is no evidence of an actual change of animal species. "

No "dodge" from me, but your ridiculous argument is the very definition of "dodge".
In fact, every animal is a "mutated animal" which has often "changed species" over many millions of years.
Or to put it another way: no animal today is the same as its ancestors were millions of years ago.

So let us begin here: the very word "species" is a total construct, which means only what scientists say it means, and has itself, uh, "evolved" over time.
If you look up the term "biological classifications" you will find that they begin at the top with Domain, Kingdom, Phylum, Class and at the bottom end: Genus, Species, Sub-Species & Breed.

Breeds & Sub-species readily interbreed (i.e., dogs), while species normally do not, and different genera cannot interbreed naturally.
That very generally is the criteria which define those terms.

One of my favorite examples is Zebras, which all look alike to me, but on close DNA analysis turn out to have over a dozen different breeds and sub-species within three different species and two different genera.
DNA analysis shows, and fossils support that those Zebras with the most similar DNA have the most recent common ancestors, and those in different species or genera have very distant past common ancestors.

The general rule is: the more similar their DNA, the more likely they are to interbreed, making them related sub-species.
But the more different their DNA, the less likely to naturally interbreed making them separate species and genera.

Of course, your religious beliefs may force you to refuse to see "evolution" in that data.
But science, by definition, cannot refuse to see what is obviously there.

1010RD: "It would seem that there is some prime actor in that thinking.
As if someone thought to give them feathers against the cold.
What environmental pressure causes feathers?
Instead what would happen is a clutch of dinosaurs is born with one or some all suffering from the same genetic defect - feathers."

First of all, you need to think of tiny pin-feathers such as those in chicken or duck chicks.
Iirc, they are made of the same basic material as fish scales -- so perhaps "feathers" began as modified fish scales.

These early feathers are not flight feathers, they only serve to keep the little critters warm, and do not need much cleaning.
Indeed such feathers are also thought to be precursors of mammalian hair.

So, now we have dinosaurs running around with little pin-feathers to keep warm.
Perhaps when they grow to gigantic sauropods they no longer need, and so lose, those feathers.
But if animals stay small, agile & quick, if they learn to climb trees, then over time, the ability to launch themselves through the air could provide a competitive advantage, and now genetic mutations which enhance that will be naturally selected.

Yes, at some point, birds will need to learn feather-cleaning, but not necessarily from Day-One.

1010RD: "By environmental chance this recessive trait comes during a time of reduced temperature. Allowing the few dinosaurs with featherlike defects (recessive) to survive at a marginally better rate than those with dominant traits. "

I don't know where you get the idea that all mutations are recessive, not certain that's true.
But even recessive genes will get passed on, if they provide a selective advantage -- it will simply require both parents to carry it.
If the advantage is significant, and both parents carry the recessive gene, then their offspring will be stunningly more successful than any others, and the problem of recessiveness will eventually disappear.

1010RD: "I just see this as a major flaw in the currently postulated Theory of Evolution."

But the human genome is "full" of relatively recent mutations adapted because of their selective advantages.
Off the top of my head I can name milk tolerance in adults, high altitude tolerance in Tibetans, and also in South Americans with different mutations, and sickle cells to combat malaria.
Even if these all began as recessive genes, they were quickly adopted by populations which needed them.

So what exactly is your problem with that?

Hutter’s work on abstract intelligent agents anthropomorphizes nothing. It is a description of a general notion of intelligence that can be applied even to processes in a computer (indeed was constructed to describe such).

Again, the problem with ID as usually proposed is that it has no scientific theory of intelligence broad enough to apply to unknown processes which may be very far from anything like human intelligence, seeing that no advocate of ID proposes that human intelligence designed either life or any organism (leaving aside very recent lab work). I have tentatively suggested one, and pointed out that under this definition of intelligence, the dynamics of the biosphere as described by neo-Darwinism arguably fits the definition of an intelligent agent.

Perhaps you should read the rest of my posts to this thread a bit more carefully: The question of why there is a dynamical system that shows the characteristics of an intelligent agent is left unanswered by it — it is there that one should look for the hand of God, not in the construction of molecular machines or eyeballs.

The objection raised by bray turns on time scale and the lack of ability to test interbreeding between ancient ancestors and living descendants. However, there is a phenomenon that shows that small incremental changes in genome can result in different species (though it also in the process calls into question the utility of the notion of species): Rassenkreis (also called “ring species”, though they don’t meet the usual definition of species), as for example Larus gulls and greenish warblers in Asia.

In each case there is a region where the organisms cannot survive (the Arctic Ocean or the Himalayas in the two examples), and traveling around it one finds birds which can interbreed with their neighbors, until one comes to a place where there are two similar sorts of birds which can’t interbreed (two species), though one can interbreed with its neighbors going clockwise and the other with its neighbors going counterclockwise.

bray: Try this on for size: The identification of the Hebrew (and Greek) words in Genesis usually Englished as “kind” with the modern scientific notion of species is a mistake.

The_Reader_David: "The question of why there is a dynamical system that shows the characteristics of an intelligent agent is left unanswered by it — it is there that one should look for the hand of God, not in the construction of molecular machines or eyeballs."

A believer's understanding of God excludes Him from nothing -- neither scientific, nor historical, nor social & ideological.
God's presence can be seen in all, even where science thinks it's found a "law" or "theory" to describe the patterns it observes, and regardless of how "random" or "chaotic" it may seem, God's will operates everywhere.
The "butterfly effect" and "strange attractor" are God's plan in motion.

So no natural-scientific theory can exclude God regardless of how atheistic its proponents might be.
That's the reason why we should make to effort to distinguish one scientific idea from any other based on some mis-guided notion of "religiously correct".

Are we on the same wave-length here?

TRD: "The objection raised by bray turns on time scale and the lack of ability to test interbreeding between ancient ancestors and living descendants."

But you must understand that the whole field of biological classifications has undergone profound changes with the advent of DNA analysis.
It's not just that whole new categories have been created, others deleted, new relationships confirmed which were previously unsuspected, but the very ideas of what constitutes a breed, or species or genus has changed based on new DNA comparisons.

And I think it's critical to our understandings of what makes different species, genera, family, etc., is the degree, or indeed eagerness, with which different populations can interbreed.
And that in turn is clearly a function of similarities in their DNAs.

To pick out just one example: so far as we know, humans and chimpanzees can not interbreed, period, but evidence shows that humans and Neanderthals did, in fact, occasionally interbreed.
This clearly suggests a range for speciation -- six million years of evolution puts chimps into a different biological family, while a few hundred thousand years may keep Neanderthals within the same species as modern humans.

In short, the "testing" which you say cannot be done, was done naturally, and the evidence for it is found in our DNA.

“There appears to be no testable explanation as to how abiotic chemicals “evolved” into molecules, rather than the expression of a belief that such an event must have occurred”

An oldie but goodie ...

The classic experiments of Miller (1953) showed that impressive yields of certain amino acids can be obtained when a mixture of gases (hydrogen, methane, ammonia and water vapor) is exposed to an electrical discharge. This discovery represented a major breakthrough, since amino acids are the monomers that compose all proteins. The mixture was assumed to be a simulation of the original terrestrial atmosphere which, by analogy with the outer planets, would have contained hydrogen, methane, ammonia and water vapor. At sufficiently high energy fluxes, such reducing systems of gases generate hydrogen cyanide (HCN) and formaldehyde (HCHO), which in turn react to produce amino acids. Cyanide and formaldehyde are now considered to be key reactants in simulations of prebiotic chemical pathways (Ferris and Hagan, 1984).

Darwin was certainly not wrong, except in the sense that he knew nothing of genetics, much less DNA analysis.

I would submit that his theory was inevitably and catastrophically flawed from the very beginning - His premise is that 'life changes because it must', whereas the truth lies closer to 'life changes because it CAN'. He envisions a need to exploit resources which stems from the idea that existing resources are insufficient; ergo, modifications over time allow the species to better exploit what it could not exploit before.

What he failed to account for is a myriad of other species better adapted to exploit that very resource (no matter what it is). The specialist species (probably of several varieties) already far exceed the ability of an interloper, by their own established specializations. Hence the interloper, presumed by Darwin to be in desperate straits, cannot compete, and would predictably die out (as we all know species under duress are wont to do)...

This is the thing he missed, and the thing that explains his errata. The adaptation of species happens because it can. An environment has to exist wherein a resource is not being exploited by any specialist species. The profit of adapting drives the adaption, the resource produces a flourishing of the species, and that flourishing drives the adaptation even further. This points to a much faster adaptation than current evolution theory allows for, and is more in line with proofs available to us today in the near past where such adaptation can be observed. This is what the Galapagos Finches demonstrate.

But his basic theory has been confirmed innumerable times: 1) descent with modifications (mutations)[...]

In this I have no argument, with the exception that I will fervently declare that such is restricted to species and does not extend to genre (kind).

and 2) natural selection ("survival of the fittest") accumulating small changes over many generations can result in separated populations which no longer interbreed and are therefore classified as different species.

This I would largely deny. As I said before, I think adaptation is rather quick, and and is driven by an ability to profit from a resource that is not currently being exploited, by a species with enough depth to withstand the change (and provide it by genetic diversity). This is what we can observe in real time, without (too much) extrapolation...

Darwin produced no theories regarding origin of life on Earth, but merely speculated on something possibly growing within a "primordial soup". Today there are several working hypotheses on origin of life, none strongly confirmed, but Darwin's basic evolution idea is considered as much fact as theory.

And in the assumption of 'fact', the error remains. Note that I do not mean Darwin himself any offense (except in that he missed), at least as far as 'Origin of Species' goes - Albeit that many of his comments thereafter bring offense. My backhanded compliment was that at least he took scientific method seriously, and strove to provide errata, something that is lost upon today's generation.

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