Posted on 12/18/2004 5:56:30 PM PST by PatrickHenry
Professional danger comes in many flavors, and while Richard Colling doesn't jump into forest fires or test experimental jets for a living, he does do the academic's equivalent: He teaches biology and evolution at a fundamentalist Christian college.
At Olivet Nazarene University in Bourbonnais, Ill., he says, "as soon as you mention evolution in anything louder than a whisper, you have people who aren't very happy." And within the larger conservative-Christian community, he adds, "I've been called some interesting names."
But those experiences haven't stopped Prof. Colling -- who received a Ph.D. in microbiology, chairs the biology department at Olivet Nazarene and is himself a devout conservative Christian -- from coming out swinging. In his new book, "Random Designer," he writes: "It pains me to suggest that my religious brothers are telling falsehoods" when they say evolutionary theory is "in crisis" and claim that there is widespread skepticism about it among scientists. "Such statements are blatantly untrue," he argues; "evolution has stood the test of time and considerable scrutiny."
His is hardly the standard scientific defense of Darwin, however. His central claim is that both the origin of life from a primordial goo of nonliving chemicals, and the evolution of species according to the processes of random mutation and natural selection, are "fully compatible with the available scientific evidence and also contemporary religious beliefs." In addition, as he bluntly told me, "denying science makes us [Conservative Christians] look stupid."
Prof. Colling is one of a small number of conservative Christian scholars who are trying to convince biblical literalists that Darwin's theory of evolution is no more the work of the devil than is Newton's theory of gravity. They haven't picked an easy time to enter the fray. Evolution is under assault from Georgia to Pennsylvania and from Kansas to Wisconsin, with schools ordering science teachers to raise questions about its validity and, in some cases, teach "intelligent design," which asserts that only a supernatural tinkerer could have produced such coups as the human eye. According to a Gallup poll released last month, only one-third of Americans regard Darwin's theory of evolution as well supported by empirical evidence; 45% believe God created humans in their present form 10,000 years ago.
Usually, the defense of evolution comes from scientists and those trying to maintain the separation of church and state. But Prof. Colling has another motivation. "People should not feel they have to deny reality in order to experience their faith," he says. He therefore offers a rendering of evolution fully compatible with faith, including his own. The Church of the Nazarene, which runs his university, "believes in the biblical account of creation," explains its manual. "We oppose a godless interpretation of the evolutionary hypothesis."
It's a small opening, but Prof. Colling took it. He finds a place for God in evolution by positing a "random designer" who harnesses the laws of nature he created. "What the designer designed is the random-design process," or Darwinian evolution, Prof. Colling says. "God devised these natural laws, and uses evolution to accomplish his goals." God is not in there with a divine screwdriver and spare parts every time a new species or a wondrous biological structure appears.
Unlike those who see evolution as an assault on faith, Prof. Colling finds it strengthens his own. "A God who can harness the laws of randomness and chaos, and create beauty and wonder and all of these marvelous structures, is a lot more creative than fundamentalists give him credit for," he told me. Creating the laws of physics and chemistry that, over the eons, coaxed life from nonliving molecules is something he finds just as awe inspiring as the idea that God instantly and supernaturally created life from nonlife.
Prof. Colling reserves some of his sharpest barbs for intelligent design, the idea that the intricate structures and processes in the living world -- from exquisitely engineered flagella that propel bacteria to the marvels of the human immune system -- can't be the work of random chance and natural selection. Intelligent-design advocates look at these sophisticated components of living things, can't imagine how evolution could have produced them, and conclude that only God could have.
That makes Prof. Colling see red. "When Christians insert God into the gaps that science cannot explain -- in this case how wondrous structures and forms of life came to be -- they set themselves up for failure and even ridicule," he told me. "Soon -- and it's already happening with the flagellum -- science is going to come along and explain" how a seemingly miraculous bit of biological engineering in fact could have evolved by Darwinian mechanisms. And that will leave intelligent design backed into an ever-shrinking corner.
It won't be easy to persuade conservative Christians of this; at least half of them believe that the six-day creation story of Genesis is the literal truth. But Prof. Colling intends to try.
Not only do I speak English as a first language, I can write it, too.
Like when I responded to Junior's assertion that biologists don't use the word "devolution."
Again, in English and slowly, I'll state that until Junior or you talk to every biologist on earth you do not know that ALL biologists refrain from using the word.
I myself know several who use the word...and quite frequently. In English.
Certainly. And you?
You will be surprised how people can turn on you once a movement gets rolling. Make sure your trust is not misplaced some day.
Especially if you're a paranoid conspiracy theorist.
Really. And what is it?
You guys are a riot. I said nothing personally to you, yet you are insulted, peeved, all atwitter that people might speak against the great gods, Hice and Hermes. It's called "Transference." You shouldn't be so sensitive.
If it's ad hominem attacks you want, check out post #949. You don't find love notes like that on the religion forum.
And it's in English, too.
Google it.
To: VadeRetroI strongly suggest that you either back that up or, if you can't, then do the honorable thing and retract it. If you do neither, you will stand revealed as a delusional maniac.
The leap I am increasingly worried about is when people that think like you do start painting red crosses on peoples homes and businesses.
975 posted on 12/21/2004 7:45:34 PM EST by BJungNanTo: Junior
You will be surprised how people can turn on you once a movement gets rolling. Make sure your trust is not misplaced some day.
984 posted on 12/21/2004 9:06:44 PM EST by BJungNan
989 should have been addressed to you too.
Oh, I know what it is because I'm heavily into Victoriana. I also know that Darwin had nothing to do with it. That you tossed it into a list of things Darwin was supposedly involved in indicates to me you have no clue as to what you speak of.
Why did you think I'd be interested in the same old flawed defense of Behe that we've all discussed numerous times before, simply repackaged by the usual Behe cheerleaders as a "paper" to be read at a conference?
From the paper: Behe argues that natural selection and random mutation cannot produce the irreducibly complex bacterial flagellar motor with its ca. forty separate protein parts, since the motor confers no functional advantage on the cell unless all the parts are present.
As usual, Minnich et al "forget" to mention that flagella exist which *do* still work without "all the parts" as the one Behe uses as an example...
Natural select can preserve the motor once it has been assembled, but it cannot detect anything to preserve until the motor has been assembled and performs a function.
Yet *again*, the Behe-ites are *presuming* that which they are attempting to *prove*. In this passage they are *presuming* that the "motor" had no function or selective advantage until it was fully "assembled" in its current form.
Given that the flagellum requires ca. 50 genes to function,
Unsupported assertion. The fact that Behe and other IDers simply keep repeating it doesn't make it any more true.
Contrary to popular belief, we have no detailed account for the evolution of any molecular machine.
If this had been an *actual* scientific paper, the authors would have actually supported this empty claim with citations, or else the paper would have been rejected by the journal editors. The editors also would have bounced the paper for using the obvious weasel-word "detailed" in this sentence in a vague and undefined way. "But what about the work of Doolittle, and others?", the reasonable reader would ask. "Well, you see, those aren't 'detailed' as much as we'd like to see, so sorry, so we pretended they don't exist", the authors would waffle...
But the really funny part here is the phrase, "Contrary to popular belief"... This is a tacit admission by the authors that the consensus view ("popular belief") in the scientific community is that there *are* valid "accounts for the evolution of molecular machine".
The data from Y. pestis presented here seems to indicate that loss of one constituent in the system leads to the gradual loss of others.
"Seems to" indicate? "Indicates" is a good enough word, but the addition of "seems to" onto an already tentative word really raises some red flags.
But the main problem here is that Minnich et al are repeating Behe's fundamental flaw -- they're only investigating *additive* evolutionary processes, then pretending they've ruled out all others as well. Sorry, wrong answer.
(Here is where your argument comes in)
Actually, that was just one small part of my long list of problems in Behe's thesis -- you make it sound as if it was my whole "argument".
To counter this argument, particularly as it applies to the flagellum, others have used the TTSS. Since the secretory system that forms part of the flagellar mechanism can also function separately, Miller [18, 19] has argued that natural selection could have “co-opted” the functional parts from the TTTS and other earlier simple systems to produce the flagellar motor.
The authors have misspelled "or". Oddly enough, this "mistake" erroneously validates their argument. Curious.
And, indeed, the TTSS contains eighteen proteins that are also found in the forty protein bacterial flagellar motor. Miller thus regards the virulence secretory pump of the Yersinia Yop system as a Darwinian intermediate, case closed.
This greatly oversimplifies Miller's actual position, and is another reason this "paper" would have been booted from a peer-reviewed journal, but then we've come to expect that from IDers/creationists.
What Miller actually says on that topic is:
By treating the flagellum as a "discrete combinatorial object" he has shown only that it is unlikely that the parts flagellum could assemble spontaneously. Unfortunately for his argument, no scientist has ever proposed that the flagellum or any other complex object evolved that way. Dembski, therefore, has constructed a classic "straw man" and blown it away with an irrelevant calculation.This argument seems only superficially plausible in light of some of the findings presented in this paper.By treating the flagellum as a discrete combinatorial object he has assumed in his calculation that no subset of the 30 or so proteins of the flagellum could have biological activity. As we have already seen, this is wrong. Nearly a third of those proteins are closely related to components of the TTSS, which does indeed have biological activity. A calculation that ignores that fact has no scientific validity.
...which are just repetitions of the same old defenses of Behe which have already been refuted.
First, if anything, TTSSs generate more complications than solutions to this question. As shown here, possessing multiple TTSSs causes interference. If not segregated one or both systems are lost.
...the authors then go on to contradict themselves by admitting that while they do interfere with each other, the systems are not "lost", it's just that "Efficiency of both systems would suffer". Yeah, so? This still doesn't help Behe's claim or invalidate an evolutionary origin for either or both.
Additionally, the other thirty proteins in the flagellar motor (that are not present in the TTSS) are unique to the motor and are not found in any other living system.
WOW! I didn't know what all other living systems have been cataloged! I mean, how *else* could these authors make such a claim? And without even a token citation in support! Idiots... Unicellular biology is still a vast unexplored frontier, outside of the work done on a few "favorite" organisms (E. coli, a few human pathogens, etc.)
Futhermore, exactly how "unique" are they? Biochemical proteins are seldom "exactly alike" each other or "completely unique" from each other. Are the authors truly claiming that these flagellar proteins are NOTHING LIKE any other biochemical protein, period? Or are they waffling again, trying to cover up the similarity (and thus potential evolutionary relationship) between those proteins and other sufficiently *similar* proteins in other biochemical systems, by coyly labeling "close but not *exactly* the same" with the term "unique"?
Without a citation (ooh, big surprise!), there's no way to tell. How... convenient.
From whence, then, were these protein parts co-opted?
Fascinating question, of course, but the authors have it backwards -- in order to rescue Behe, they have to demonstrate that those proteins absolutely were *not* co-opted from anywhere. And good luck with proving *that* negative...
Also, even if all the protein parts were somehow available to make a flagellar motor during the evolution of life, the parts would need to be assembled in the correct temporal sequence similar to the way an automobile is assembled in factory. Yet, to choreograph the assembly of the parts of the flagellar motor, present-day bacteria need an elaborate system of genetic instructions as well as many other protein machines to time the expression of those assembly instructions. Arguably, this system is itself irreducibly complex.
"Arguably" it is, they say. Translation: "We can't actually *demonstrate* that it *is*, but we can *argue* about how it *might* be, and how it might *seem* that evolution might not be up to the task of producing an intricate system, and isn't *that* good enough to "disprove" evolution?
Tell the IDers to come back when they have a stronger case, if ever.
In any case, the co-option argument tacitly presupposes the need for the very thing it seeks to explain—a functionally interdependent system of proteins.
No, it does *not*. The "co-option" argument is that *BEHE* is not allowed to "tacitly presuppose" what *he* needs to make his case -- the allegation that parts of the flagellar motor could *not* have been the result of co-option or other evolutionary processes.
Finally, phylogenetic analyses of the gene sequences [20] suggest that flagellar motor proteins arose first and those of the pump came later. In other words, if anything, the pump evolved from the motor, not the motor from the pump.
Wow, a citation finally! But if they ever attempt to publish this "paper", they're going to have to correct their error in the title of their citation...
In any case, Minnich et al "forgot" to mention that newer research has superceded their citation. That's a *BIG* no-no in *real* peer-reviewed scientific papers (seriously -- as in evidence of incompetence and/or dishonesty), but I see that it's no impediment to the sort of unreviewed "conference papers" that IDers put out in order to try to keep the dream alive.
See for example:
Bacterial type III secretion systems are ancient and evolved by multiple horizontal-transfer events, U. Gophna et al. / Gene 312 (2003) 151–163This was published in APRIL *2003* -- what excuse to Minnich et al have for not being aware of it while preparing a paper in LATE 2004? A publication keyword search for either "Type III secretion systems" or "Flagella" (and even more importantly, *both*) would have turned up this paper without a problem. Hell, *I* found it in three minutes with Google *without* using a keyword search, just by Googling for the (correct) title of citation#20 -- it turned up this paper, which cites the Nguyen paper, something that Minnich et all should have done at a *MINIMUM* as due dilegence to find subsequent related research (pro *or* con)... Did Minnich et al not *bother* to research anyone else's findings before they sat down to put together their "paper"?Abstract: Type III secretion systems (TTSS) are unique bacterial mechanisms that mediate elaborate interactions with their hosts. The fact that several of the TTSS proteins are closely related to flagellar export proteins has led to the suggestion that TTSS had evolved from flagella. Here we reconstruct the evolutionary history of four conserved type III secretion proteins and their phylogenetic relationships with flagellar paralogs. Our analysis indicates that the TTSS and the flagellar export mechanism share a common ancestor, but have evolved independently from one another. The suggestion that TTSS genes have evolved from genes encoding flagellar proteins is effectively refuted. A comparison of the species tree, as deduced from 16S rDNA sequences, to the protein phylogenetic trees has led to the identification of several major lateral transfer events involving clusters of TTSS genes. It is hypothesized that horizontal gene transfer has occurred much earlier and more frequently than previously inferred for TTSS genes and is, consequently, a major force shaping the evolution of species that harbor type III secretion systems.
(Also note the passage about "lateral transfer" -- this is YET ANOTHER evolutionary mechanism which Behe's cartoon scenarios of evolution COMPLETELY OVERLOOK.)
This is, unfortunately, all too typical of "papers" by IDers/creationists. Unlike real *scientists*, they're not interested in gathering the best available findings and then seeing the best "big picture" the evidence suggests. Instead they're *starting* with their desired conclusion, and then searching out and presenting *only* the "findings" which would *seem* to support their position when considered IN ISOLATION.
And then you wonder why we claim that ID/creationism isn't real science (at least the way it is invariably performed)?
Again, in English and slowly, I'll state that until Junior or you talk to every biologist on earth you do not know that ALL biologists refrain from using the word.
The word "all" appeared nowhere in his post. Care to try again?
And if you're as conversant in English as you claim, how exactly are you unaware of the concept of generalization?
I myself know several who use the word...and quite frequently. In English.
Name them and state the fields in which they allegedly have experience.
[Thunderous applause!]
You guys should learn to write more concisely.
Sometimes all those words can look like padding.
Oh, my, that's droll.
Perhaps you should extend your frame of reference by several thousand years.
Perhaps you should do the Google search you mentioned. Theosophy was developed by Madame Helen P. Blavatsky in the late 19th century. That she claimed it had roots going back to prehistory does not mean that was actually the case.
Your mind-reading powers are failing you m'dear. I merely pointed out that your post was absolutely 100% irrelevant, and yet you persist in making this some sort of personality issue, as though your failures of rhetoric and logic somehow constitute an insult to me. How can I be insulted by such absurdly weak argumentation? More, I say - more! Every time you try to make this an issue of personality rather than fact, insult rather than reason, you make my case for me. Why on earth would I want you to stop?
You don't find love notes like that on the religion forum.
You know, that hole isn't some password-protected secret clubhouse only accessible to properly-anointed acolytes. Isn't there some awful Arminian, some pusillanimous Premillennialist out there who deserves your righteous flaming, your holy trollin' more than poor old me? Hell, if I wanted to persuade someone to give atheism a whirl, I could hardly wish for more help than I'd get from the fine, fine examples of Christian "fellowship" you find over there. Or maybe the powers-that-be will work up the courage to create a special moderator for you folks - again - so you can draw-and-quarter another one - that was fun, eh?
LOL. Oh, yes - we know exactly the sorts of things you guys are up to in your little snake pit there. You seem to think it's hidden away, but it's hanging out for the world to see, which is why I have to stifle a little laugh when someone wanders over and criticizes the tone on the evo threads.
It was an incorrect generalization. I know many biologists who use the word "devolution" which negates his premise that "biologists do not use the word 'devolution.'"
(Try remembering to remove the italics tags next time It makes your very deep and profound posts even more difficult for us flapdoodles to read.)
I'll name them as soon as you give us your home address and social security number.
1000?
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