Posted on 01/31/2005 12:15:48 PM PST by Grey Rabbit
WND EVOLUTION WATCH Smithsonian in uproar over intelligent-design article Museum researcher's career threatened after he published favorable piece Posted: January 29, 2005 1:00 a.m. Eastern
© 2005 WorldNetDaily.com
The career of a prominent researcher at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History in Washington is in jeopardy after he published a peer-reviewed article by a leading proponent of intelligent design, an alternative to evolutionary theory dismissed by the science and education establishment as a tool of religious conservatives.
Stephen Meyer's article advocates the theory of intelligent design. (Photo courtesy Discovery Institute)
Richard Sternberg says that although he continues to work in the museum's Department of Zoology, he has been kicked out of his office and shunned by colleagues, prompting him to file a complaint with the U.S. Office of Special Counsel.
Sternberg charges he was subjected to discrimination on the basis of perceived religious beliefs.
"I'm spending my time trying to figure out how to salvage a scientific career," Sternberg told David Klinghoffer, a columnist for the Jewish Forward, who reported the story in the Wall Street Journal.
Sternberg is managing editor of a nominally independent journal published at the museum, Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington. His trouble started when he included in the August issue a review-essay by Stephen Meyer, who holds a Cambridge University doctorate in the philosophy of biology.
Hans Sues, the museum's No. 2 senior scientist, denounced Meyer's article in a widely forwarded e-mail as "unscientific garbage."
According to Sternberg's complaint, which is being investigated, one museum specialist chided him by saying: "I think you are a religiously motivated person and you have dragged down the Proceedings because of your religiously motivated agenda."
Sternberg strongly denies that.
While acknowledging he is a Catholic who attends Mass, he says, "I would call myself a believer with a lot of questions, about everything. I'm in the postmodern predicament."
The complaint says the chairman of the Zoology Department, Jonathan Coddington, called Sternberg's supervisor to look into the matter.
"First, he asked whether Sternberg was a religious fundamentalist. She told him no. Coddington then asked if Sternberg was affiliated with or belonged to any religious organization. ... He then asked where Sternberg stood politically; ... he asked, 'Is he a right-winger? What is his political affiliation?'
The supervisor recounted the conversation to Sternberg, who also quotes her observing: "There are Christians here, but they keep their heads down."
The complaint, according to the Journal column, says Coddington took away Sternberg's office, which prevents access to the specimen collections he needs. Sternberg also was assigned to the close oversight of a curator with whom he had professional disagreements unrelated to evolution.
"I'm going to be straightforward with you," said Coddington, according to the complaint. "Yes, you are being singled out."
Meyer's article, "The Origin of Biological Information and the Higher Taxonomic Categories," cites mainstream biologists and paleontologists from schools such as the University of Chicago, Yale, Cambridge and Oxford who are critical of certain aspects of Darwinism.
Meyer a fellow at Seattle's Discovery Institute, a leading advocate of intelligent design contends supporters of Darwin's theory cannot explain how so many different animal types sprang into existence during the relatively short period of Earth history known as the Cambrian explosion.
He argues the Darwinian mechanism would require more time for the necessary genetic "information" to be generated, and intelligent design offers a better explanation.
The Journal notes Meyer's piece is the first peer-reviewed article to appear in a technical biology journal laying out the evidential case for intelligent design.
The theory holds that the complex features of living organisms, such as an eye, are better explained by an unspecified designing intelligence than by random mutation and natural selection.
Klinghoffer notes the Biological Society of Washington released a statement regretting its association with Meyer's article but did not address its arguments.
Klinghoffer points out the circularity of the arguments of critics who insisted intelligent design was unscientific because if had not been put forward in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.
"Now that it has," he wrote, "they argue that it shouldn't have been because it's unscientific."
Here's my problem. If a mutation is random then the mathmatics of random chance applies and probabilities (against) become significant quickly. It is only selection that gives any reason why a certain mutation should spread through a population (leading to speciation). Anything less than a dominance of the population will not account for the movement of a organism toward speciation rather than simple variation within limits.
Now on the macro scale we have 2 competing pressures. On the one hand if we do not have a large enough population we would not seem to get enough numbers of mutations for any of them to have a significant effect. On the other hand if the environment is friendly enough that an organism can fluorish then darwinian pressure is not sufficient to ensure the deviation of the group toward speciation. Hard times provide the mechanism by which a population would be separated and differentiated. Good times provide the opportunity for a population to gain in number so that a goodly number of mutations occur randomly.
Now, there may be different types of mutations and different types of environmental factors that would provide greater gains in shorter times but these by their more complex nature would be more rare and therefore less useful to a theory of small changes over long times.
So, in hard times a population is whittled down but consolidates its gains. If it takes 100 generations for that population to recover to the point where the population is large enough that significant numbers of random mutations are occuring you then have only 10^4 generation sets (out of 10^6 generations) to accumulate the x number of mutations to lead to speciation. I don't think 10^4 mutations is too high a number for the number of mutations required for speciation and so you see my difficulty.
If hard times don't apply then any mutation cannot get the traction it needs to out perform the competition and lack of the test of death keeps less mutated individuals in the gene pool and washes out the advances giving us variation rather than change toward speciation.
In addition, the larger the animal, the smaller the population, the less likely the significant mutation, the more likely that significant environmental pressure will cause extinction rather than speciation.
The smaller the animal the more likely that a greater number of creatures would be preserved in the gene pool preventing the isolation neede to solidify mutational gains.
And if the mutations are random and there is no advantage to their preservation than it is not evolution, I wouldn't think.
It really is this simple.
Within what population? A million individuals? Conferring what advantage? I don't care about the neutral or even the deadly mutations. How many beneficial mutations per thousand individuals per generation? How many individual mutations to reach greater muscle strength or better night vision or superior intellect? (If that confers any advantage- sarcasm). Do they need to be reinforced by reproduction with a suitable mate?
How many generations until they spread sufficiently within a population? What if the ideal mutation occurs during a season of low competition? What if the population of the mutated is not isolated before the end of hard times and the "greater strength" returns to its earlier distribution in the population?
How many generations before a neutral mutation (preserved in a population by random chance) is reinforced by a second randomly produced mutation and confers some fractional advantage to an individual? And then again how many generations before this new population is immune to the sort of breeding out that occurs if the given species preserves too many unmutated (but still reproduction capable) individuals? Are all positive (darwinian) mutations dominant or are an equal number recessive?
I appreciate greatly your patient replies to my questions. I fear I have not been clear enough. The problem is not with the mutations that you see. Nor is it with the knife of natural selection. It is the fact that the math doesn't work out. As far as I can tell mutation is too random, selection is too slow and there isn't enough time in the universe for the speciation we see to be produced.
Your theory approaches (or perhaps surpasses) the point where in order to return the desired result all the constraints must operate near optimal conditions. The real world pressure on these constraints however, tends to push them further away from the ideal. The situation of the opposing constraints (micro scale mutation versus macro scale selection, small population versus large population, the age of the universe versus the speed of mutational propagation)also drives the available solutions away from one another in solution space.
This significantly (maybe even completely) diminishes the available window (intersection of the various sets) capable of producing the desired result (establishing evolution as the mechanism of speciation.)
If ,indeed,this evolution has occurred the narowness of the solution set speaks more to the fine tuning of the universe and less to the completely natural event driven, completely creator-less origin of the species.
So long as the chances of beneficial mutation are non-zero, the probability will be non-zero. That's what the math says.
You also have to take into account the exponential growth of populations. The non-zero chance of a beneficial mutation is multiplied by the number of organisms available. This number grows rapidly.
So you have exponential growth combined with non-zero probabilities and over a billion years to work with.
The math may not "support" the notion of change from microbe to man, but it certailly doesn't refute it, either.
Try again "math whiz".
You have captured my attention. Please tell us more about this cosmic event.
You're such a jerk.
Exponential growth acts to create large populations over which beneficial mutuation might occur. So even if the probablility of beneficial mutuation in an individual is small, that probability might become large given a large population.
Consider the total number of prokaryotes (bacteria and archaea). According to William Whitman, a microbiologist at University of Georgia, the number is 5 x 10^30.
Now as improbable as beneficial mutation might be, can you really say that it's statistically zero when multipled by 5 x 10^30 ? Of course not.
So how can exponential growth be considered part of the mathematical problem?
Railroads, now?
Easy, boy! Just put down the crack pipe and back away from the thread.
Okay. Here is a non-zero probabi;ity and what it means in Real world terms.
If you were to attempt to assemble one short prtein of 100 amino acids by random chance (which controls in the case of neutral mutations) it goes like this:
1. all peptide bonds. 50-50 chance in nature. 1 chance in 2^100 or 1in 10^30.
2. All left handed amino acids. Again 50-50 so 1 chance in 10^30.
3. 50% of the amino acids mission critical. Out of 20 amino acids. 1 chance in 20^50 or 10^65.
4. 10^30 x 10^30 x 10^65 = 10^125 or 1 chance in 10^125 of randomly producing a short protein used by life.
5. This is a non-zero probability and seems reachable.
Let's try.
1. Suppose we assembled 1 protein per second since the beginning of time. 13.7 billion years = 4.3 x 10^16 seconds or let's just call it 10^17 seconds. We would need to compare 10^108 proteins per second to get ther.
2. Let's get Blue Gene, IBM's supercomputer to help. It operates at 70 teraflops or 7 x 10^13 floating point operations per second or we'll call it 10^14. So if we had Blue Gene woking since the beginning of time we would still fall a little short.
3. We need more computers. The number of photons in the Universe (per Penrose) is around 10^88. If every photon (10^88) was a blue Gene (x 10^14) operating since the beginning of time (x 10^17) you would still need a million universes fulll of computers to make it all work out.
So non-zeo probability ain't all its cracked up to be.
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