Posted on 01/28/2005 4:28:41 PM PST by metacognative
Panicked Evolutionists: The Stephen Meyer Controversy
The theory of evolution is a tottering house of ideological cards that is more about cherished mythology than honest intellectual endeavor. Evolutionists treat their cherished theory like a fragile object of veneration and worship--and so it is. Panic is a sure sign of intellectual insecurity, and evolutionists have every reason to be insecure, for their theory is falling apart.
The latest evidence of this panic comes in a controversy that followed a highly specialized article published in an even more specialized scientific journal. Stephen C. Meyer, Director of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture, wrote an article accepted for publication in Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington. The article, entitled "The Origin of Biological Information and the Higher Taxonomic Categories," was published after three independent judges deemed it worthy and ready for publication. The use of such judges is standard operating procedure among "peer-reviewed" academic journals, and is considered the gold standard for academic publication.
The readership for such a journal is incredibly small, and the Biological Society of Washington does not commonly come to the attention of the nation's journalists and the general public. Nevertheless, soon after Dr. Meyer's article appeared, the self-appointed protectors of Darwinism went into full apoplexy. Internet websites and scientific newsletters came alive with outrage and embarrassment, for Dr. Meyer's article suggested that evolution just might not be the best explanation for the development of life forms. The ensuing controversy was greater than might be expected if Dr. Meyer had argued that the world is flat or that hot is cold.
Eugenie C. Scott, Executive Director of the National Center for Science Education, told The Scientist that Dr. Meyer's article came to her attention when members of the Biological Society of Washington contacted her office. "Many members of the society were stunned about the article," she told The Scientist, and she described the article as "recycled material quite common in the intelligent design community." Dr. Scott, a well known and ardent defender of evolutionary theory, called Dr. Meyer's article "substandard science" and argued that the article should never have been published in any scientific journal.
Within days, the Biological Society of Washington, intimidated by the response of the evolutionary defenders, released a statement apologizing for the publication of the article. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, the society's governing council claimed that the article "was published without the prior knowledge of the council." The statement went on to declare: "We have met and determined that all of us would have deemed this paper inappropriate for the pages of the Proceedings." The society's president, Roy W. McDiarmid, a scientist at the U.S. Geological Survey, blamed the article's publication on the journal's previous editor, Richard Sternberg, who now serves as a fellow at the National Center for Biotechnology Information at the National Institute of Health. "My conclusion on this," McDiarmid said, "was that it was a really bad judgment call on the editor's part."
What is it about Dr. Stephen Meyer's paper that has caused such an uproar? Meyer, who holds a Ph.D. from Cambridge University, argued in his paper that the contemporary form of evolutionary theory now dominant in the academy, known as "Neo-Darwinism," fails to account for the development of higher life forms and the complexity of living organisms. Pointing to what evolutionists identify as the "Cambrian explosion," Meyer argued that "the geologically sudden appearance of many new animal body plans" cannot be accounted for by Darwinian theory, "neo" or otherwise.
Accepting the scientific claim that the Cambrian explosion took place "about 530 million years ago," Meyer went on to explain that the "remarkable jump in the specified complexity or 'complex specified information' [CSI] of the biological world" cannot be explained by evolutionary theory.
The heart of Dr. Meyer's argument is found in this scientifically-loaded passage: "Neo-Darwinism seeks to explain the origin of new information, form, and structure as a result of selection acting on randomly arising variation at a very low level within the biological hierarchy, mainly, within the genetic text. Yet the major morphological innovations depend on a specificity of arrangement at a much higher level of the organizational hierarchy, a level that DNA alone does not determine. Yet if DNA is not wholly responsible for body plan morphogenesis, then DNA sequences can mutate indefinitely, without regard to realistic probabilistic limits, and still not produce a new body plan. Thus, the mechanism of natural selection acting on random mutations in DNA cannot in principle generate novel body plans, including those that first arose in the Cambrian explosion."
In simpler terms, the mechanism of natural selection, central to evolutionary theory, cannot possibly account for the development of so many varied and complex life forms simply by mutations in DNA. Rather, some conscious design--thus requiring a Designer--is necessary to explain the emergence of these life forms.
In the remainder of his paper, Meyer attacks the intellectual inadequacies of evolutionary theory and argues for what is now known as the "design Hypothesis." As he argued, "Conscious and rational agents have, as a part of their powers of purposive intelligence, the capacity to design information-rich parts and to organize those parts into functional information-rich systems and hierarchies." As he went on to assert, "We know of no other causal entity or process that has this capacity." In other words, the development of the multitude of higher life forms found on the planet can be explained only by the guidance of a rational agent--a Designer--whose plan is evident in the design.
Meyer's article was enough to cause hysteria in the evolutionists' camp. Knowing that their theory lacks intellectual credibility, the evolutionists respond by raising the volume, offering the equivalent of scientific shrieks and screams whenever their cherished theory is criticized--much less in one of their own cherished journals. As Dr. John West, Associate Director of the Discovery Institute explained, "Instead of addressing the paper's argument or inviting counterarguments or rebuttal, the society has resorted to affirming what amounts to a doctrinal statement in an effort to stifle scientific debate. They're trying to stop scientific discussion before it even starts."
When the Biological Society of Washington issued its embarrassing apology for publishing the paper, the organization pledged that arguments for Intelligent Design "will not be addressed in future issues of the Proceedings," regardless of whether the paper passes peer review.
From the perspective of panicked evolutionists, the Intelligent Design movement represents a formidable adversary and a constant irritant. The defenders of Intelligent Design are undermining evolutionary theory at multiple levels, and they refuse to go away. The panicked evolutionists respond with name-calling, labeling Intelligent Design proponents as "creationists," thereby hoping to prevent any scientific debate before it starts.
Intelligent Design is not tantamount to the biblical doctrine of creation. Theologically, Intelligent Design falls far short of requiring any affirmation of the doctrine of creation as revealed in the Bible. Nevertheless, it is a useful and important intellectual tool, and a scientific movement with great promise. The real significance of Intelligent Design theory and its related movement is the success with which it undermines the materialistic and naturalistic worldview central to the theory of evolution.
For the Christian believer, the Bible presents the compelling and authoritative case for God's creation of the cosmos. Specifically, the Bible provides us with the ultimate truth concerning human origins and the special creation of human beings as the creatures made in God's own image. Thus, though we believe in more than Intelligent Design, we certainly do not believe in less. We should celebrate the confusion and consternation now so evident among the evolutionists. Dr. Stephen Meyer's article--and the controversy it has spawned--has caught evolutionary scientists with their intellectual pants down.
_______________________________________
R. Albert Mohler, Jr
Does that mean you are going to study some real text instead of that creationist website?
I'm not about to tutor you on entropy. How can you be so sure evolution doesn't contradict if you don't understand the principle?
The evolutionist house of cards is collapsing as I type this. It is happening to them as it happened to the liberals and CBS. The internet and free discorse has allowed alternative viewpoints that actually have merit, like the unique superscript for example, to see the light of day for discussion they deserve.
Once reasonable people are able to see the evolutionists and their theories and hypotheses for what they are, evolution will be put back where it belongs. That is a good thing and can actually open up scientific discovery that was impossible as long as that dogmatic belief system had a stranglehold on the whole discipline.
It is somewhat amusing to watch them twist in the wind however. It is one of those things I rack up as a "guilty pleasure."
I got you on that one! You don't know. You give me a link and you have no idea how to explain the central equation in that link.
Oh, really? Where has evolution been pulled from schools? Hasn't The Church accepted evolution?
>>Hasn't The Church accepted evolution?<<
What church? What evolution are you talking about? The evolution of the Corvette? The evolution of the democratic party?
"Where has evolution been pulled from schools?"
Heh, heh. You think schools operate in a cultural vacuum? My youngest is a Senior in high school. Do you honestly think her friends and she don't chuckle about the things said in "science" class? She likes to point out the "evolution claims" in her school books. Some of them are downright dogmatic in their goofball assumptions and scientific support or lack thereof.
Remember, Dan is still at CBS. For just a little while longer.
8^>
Was there a question?
The Church.
But the earth is an open system, and that is the topic of discussion.
Do you "believe" in your keyboard?
Please cite.
>>Please cite.<<
Not here. I prefer to fight each battle only once. Those who have been paying attention know exactly what I am talking about.
8^>
No offense, Ma'am, but your posts so far haven't even been dimensionally correct. And Meyer, while being a bit more polished, is every bit as clueless. You can't lawyer or philosophize entropy; it's a physical quantity we can measure.
The entropy of an object is a simple thermodynamic state function, which can be measured or estimated. A human being does not have significantly more entropy than the same mass of bacteria. Let me prove it.
Let's say that to put a 200 lb human together, we had to assemble the body from atoms in the gas phase. We'll let the gas atoms initially occupy a volume of 10 m3, and we'll say to get a human built correctly, we have to specify the position of each atom precise to 1 Angstrom. This is a gross overestimate because we're ignoring the indistinguishability of particles (i.e. we can use any hydrogen atom in place of every other one, etc.). We'll just use Boltzmann's formula. We'll therefore get a value of W of 1031 per atom, or (1031)N for N atoms. Let's say we have 1029 atoms in a human. Then the entropy required to assemble the body from gas atoms is S = kBln W = 1029*kB*ln(1031), or about 98 MJ/K.
The entropy to assemble the same mass of bacteria. assuming the bacteria to be indistiguishable, would be smaller by kB times the natural log of the factorial of the number of bacteria. If we say each bacterium weighs about 1018 kg, and the human 100 kg, the mass ratio is 1020, and the difference in entropy is therefore 0.063 J/K; one part in 109 or so of the entropy of the human. This, if you like, is our 'evolutionary entropy' (actually, a big overestimate of it.)
And, of course, since the sun's surface is at 104 K and heat is re-radiated from the earth into interstellar space at 2K, the entropy involved in cycling 1 J of energy through the earth is about 0.5 J/K. Terajoules of energy fall on the earth from the sun per second. So in one second, you have trillions of times more negative entropy provided by the sun than needed to evolve from a bacterium to a human.
False, even stipulating that 'CSI' has some meaning.
I'm uncertain why you pinged me. I'm not a creationist, I just think Darwins's theory of natural selection is almost certainly wrong. Assuming the changes in species over the millenia are due to alteration of DNA, the theory of many random mutations, competition (battle for the "survival of the fittest") and emergence of a dominant "winner" has very little support in the fossil record as the agent for that change in DNA. As one paleontologist once put it to me, we know that change has occurred, we just don't know yet what the change agent was. Your post really doesn't address this issue.
A good understandable honest view of research from the view point of a scientist. Thanks. MRN.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.