Those Defensive Darwinists

THE first court trial over the theory of intelligent design is now over, with a ruling expected by the end of the year. What sparked the legal controversy? Before providing two weeks of training in modern evolutionary theory, the Dover, Pa., School District briefly informed students that if they wanted to learn about an alternative theory of biological origins, intelligent design, they could read a book about it in the school library.

In short order, the School District was dragged into court by a group insisting the school policy constituted an establishment of religion, this despite the fact that the unmentionable book bases its argument on strictly scientific evidence, without appealing to religious authority or attempting to identify the source of design.

The lawsuit is only the latest in a series of attempts to silence the growing controversy over contemporary Darwinian theory.

For instance, after The New York Times ran a series on Darwinism and design recently, prominent Darwinist Web sites excoriated the newspaper for even covering intelligent design, insulting its proponents with terms like Medievalist, Flat-Earther and "American Taliban."

University of Minnesota biologist P.Z. Myers argues that Darwinists should take an even harder line against their opponents: "Our only problem is that we aren't martial enough, or vigorous enough, or loud enough, or angry enough," he wrote. "The only appropriate responses should involve some form of righteous fury, much butt-kicking, and the public firing and humiliation of some teachers, many school board members, and vast numbers of sleazy far-right politicians."

This month, NPR reported on behavior seemingly right out of the P.Z. Myers playbook.

The most prominent victim in the story was Richard Sternberg, a scientist with two Ph.D.s in evolutionary biology and former editor of a journal published out of the Smithsonian's Museum of Natural History. He sent out for peer review, then published, a paper arguing that intelligent design was the best explanation for the geologically sudden appearance of new animal forms 530 million years ago.

The U.S. Office of Special Counsel reported that Sternberg's colleagues immediately went on the attack, stripping Sternberg of his master key and access to research materials, spreading rumors that he wasn't really a scientist and, after determining that they didn't want to make a martyr out of him by firing him, deliberately creating a hostile work environment in the hope of driving him from the Smithsonian.

The NPR story appalled even die-hard skeptics of intelligent design, people like heavyweight blogger and law professor Glenn Reynolds, who referred to the Smithsonian's tactics as "scientific McCarthyism."

Also this month, the Kansas Board of Education adopted a policy to teach students the strengths and weaknesses of modern evolutionary theory. Darwinists responded by insisting that there are no weaknesses, that it's a plot to establish a national theocracy — despite the fact that the weaknesses that will be taught come right out of the peer-reviewed, mainstream scientific literature.

One cause for their insecurity may be the theory's largely metaphysical foundations. As evolutionary biologist A.S. Wilkins conceded, "Evolution would appear to be the indispensable unifying idea and, at the same time, a highly superfluous one."

And in the September issue of The Scientist, National Academy of Sciences member Philip Skell argued that his extensive investigations into the matter corroborated Wilkins' view. Biologist Roland Hirsch, a program manager in the U.S. Office of Biological and Environmental Research, goes even further, noting that Darwinism has made a series of incorrect predictions, later refashioning the paradigm to fit the results.

How different from scientific models that lead to things like microprocessors and satellites. Modern evolutionary theory is less a cornerstone and more the busybody aunt — into everyone's business and, all the while, very much insecure about her place in the home.

Moreover, a growing list of some 450 Ph.D. scientists are openly skeptical of Darwin's theory, and a recent poll by the Louis Finkelstein Institute found that only 40 percent of medical doctors accept Darwinism's idea that humans evolved strictly through unguided, material processes.

Increasingly, the Darwinists' response is to try to shut down debate, but their attempts are as ineffectual as they are misguided. When leaders in Colonial America attempted to ban certain books, people rushed out to buy them. It's the "Banned in Boston" syndrome.

Today, suppression of dissent remains the tactic least likely to succeed in the United States. The more the Darwinists try to prohibit discussion of intelligent design, the more they pique the curiosity of students, parents and the general public.

"Could it be that the 'junk DNA' found in the genome is actually meta-DNA that can 'think' and design useful, instead of random, mutations?

No. From a prior post of mine:

Also be prepared to point out that contrary to bone-headed (and unsupported) claims that "it probably never was 'junk'", the fact remains that even though rare cases have been found of specific pieces of "junk DNA" (i.e. non-coding DNA) having some use, only an idiot would leap from that to the conclusion that "it probably never was 'junk'" on the whole, because a) the vast majority of "junk DNA" is non-conserved (e.g. "Comparative genomics has revealed that approximately 5% of the mammalian genome is under purifying selection.", leaving 95% of the genome "inconsequential" from a survival standpoint), a clear indication that it is, indeed, not used in the genome, among many other lines of general evidence supporting the same conclusion (is your correspondent ignorant of these, or just dishonest?), and b) specific tests of "junk DNA" have shown that if it's used at all, the use is extremely rare or subtle, because giant whacking swatches of it can be removed entirely without any kind of obvious harm to the animal.
For example: Megabase deletions of gene deserts result in viable mice. In short, the researchers snipped over 2.3 *million* basepairs of apparently "junk DNA" out of mouse DNA, then produced offspring mice which were entirely missing that DNA. The resulting mice were normal in all respects. As a press release states:

"In these studies, we were looking particularly for sequences that might not be essential," said Eddy Rubin, Director of the JGI, where the work was conducted. "Nonetheless we were surprised, given the magnitude of the information being deleted from the genome, by the complete lack of impact noted. From our results, it would seem that some non-coding sequences may indeed have minimal if any function."
A total of 2.3 million letters of DNA code from the 2.7-billion-base-pair mouse genome were deleted. To do this, embryonic cells were genetically engineered to contain the newly compact mouse genome. Mice were subsequently generated from these stem cells. The research team then compared the resulting mice with the abridged genome to mice with the full-length version. A variety of features were analysed, ranging from viability, growth and longevity to numerous other biochemical and molecular features. Despite the researchers' efforts to detect differences in the mice with the abridged genome, none were found.
Another specific piece of evidence is that the genome of the fugu fish (as well as other fish in the blowfish family) is remarkably "clean" compared to that of other fish (or other vertebrates), even other fish which are rather closely related. It's *missing* most of the DNA that other fish (and vertebrates) have that are collectively known as "junk DNA", and as a result has a genome that is nearly "pure" genes (i.e. coding regions) stripped of most non-coding regions. And the fugu gets along just *fine* without them. How and why its genome got "streamlined" by "cleaning house" of most of its "junk DNA" is a fascinating question which is being looked into, but the fact remains that if this "junk DNA" is all that critical and "actually" used for something after all, on the whole, then how does the fugu do so swimmingly (sorry, bad pun) without it at all?
So I repeat -- there are very good reasons, based on testing and on the evidence, that "junk DNA" on the whole really is "junk". And that doesn't change even if a *few* specific non-coding regions end up being involved in gene expression or whatnot. Finding a few discarded items of value in the city dump doesn't magically change the whole thing into a mountain of pearls.

Another example was in an editorial I read recently:

"Even the most hard-core junkologists admit that a significant portion of human DNA is probably dispensable. For instance, Ohno, now semi-retired from City of Hope, points out several reported cases of people born with millions of bases missing from their X chromosome. And yet, these people lead perfectly healthy lives, an indication that the lost bases probably add nothing to human life."

That said, however, there has been a trend to rename such DNA to something other than "junk", since that is a somewhat misleading term, given how active some of it is, and the role it often plays in evolutionary novelty. Instead some have suggested the "genomic scrapyard" or some similar more evocative term.

A complicating factor is that evolution is adept at making use of, and building upon, things that start out as "random junk". For example, from Perspective: transposable elements, parasitic DNA, and genome evolution: "Of particular interest are transposable element traits that early evolve neutrally at the host level but at a later stage of evolution are co-opted for new host functions."

Furthermore, it's clear that the noncoding DNA has not been "designed" as such, because the evolutionary origins of most kinds of noncoding DNA are understood, and their evolutionary histories can be traced through cross-species genome comparisons. For example: A detailed look at 7 million years of genome evolution in a 439 kb contiguous sequence at the barley Hv-eIF4E locus: recombination, rearrangements and repeats .

Going to the core of your question, however, there *are* features in the genome which actually assist in increasing the efficiency of mutational improvements in the genome, but they hardly rise to the level of "thinking" or "designing", they just do things like raise mutation rates in response to environmental stress (e.g. times when the species might need to genetically adapt or die), or keeping redundant or obsolete copies of genes around as grist for the mill of recombination. All these methods of boosting the effectiveness of evolution are themselves well within the realm of features that could themselves have evolved, they don't look at all "designed" or "preplanned" or "irreducibly complex" or whatever.

To put things in perspective, the argument is not whether General Evolution or Intelligent Design offers a better explanation for the way things are. The argument is whether ANY THEORY OTHER THAN DARWINISM will be permitted to make even a token appearance in our public schools.

If you can *name* another scientific theory of the diversity of life, feel free to provide a curriculum for it.

Until then, stop whining. "ID" does not even rise to the level of a scientific hypothesis, much less a scientific theory. It's merely a propaganda campaign.

In other words, Darwinists want a permanent monopoly, and no dissention permitted.

Paranoid much? Feel free to dissent all you like. And we'll feel free to point out how your dissent is ignorant and fallacious.

They wouldn't even sit still for an agreement that the science teacher, almost certainly a Darwinist himself, could mention to the kids if he really felt like it that there was a stupid book in the library by some kook, if they really wanted to take the trouble to go look at it and risk getting a D in the course.

...because the "mention" was scripted to be deeply dishonest, the "stupid book" grossly misrepresented the facts on nearly every page, and the people pushing the "mention" were revealed time and time again to be pushing not science, but their religion.

So stop lying about the actual events, please. You're sounding like yet another grossly dishonest anti-evolutionist, and we have *more* than enough of those already.

If Darwin's theory is so blindingly and permanently obvious, why not allow some discussion about it?

Go ahead and discuss it all you like. Just stop lying about it, and stop trying to dishonestly push religion into schools in a Trojan Horse with "science" scribbled on the side, when it isn't.

Are we clear now?

All we ask is that the AECreationists and "IDers" STOP LYING, stop lying about their beliefs being actual science, and stop trying to get their lies taught to school students. I would think that wouldn't be too much to ask, but apparently it is, because it sure makes them screech like little girls.

[asked of Conservativehomeschoolmama:] Evidence? Perhaps a quote from one of Hitler's writings?

You'll be waiting a *looong* time, Doc -- "mama" is just another AECreationist liar, making things up and posting them without any regard for the truth, or even any clear notion of how truth is actually determined.

Speaking of truth:

Furthermore, Hitler did indeed lean on *God* as support for his "ethnic cleansing":
"I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.."
-- Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf
Hitler's own handwritten notes, drawing an outline of his philosophy:
Hitler divided his study into five sections:
1. The Bible
2. The Aryan
3. His Works
4. The Jew
5. His Work
Under the first section, "The Bible -- Monumental History of Mankind", he lists these topics (among others): "2 human types-- Workers and drones-- Builders and destroyers", "Race Law", "First people's history (based on) the race law-- Eternal course of History".
So it seems that Hitler was actually basing his racial view of mankind on *Biblical* foundations.

Nazi SS belt buckle, with motto "Gott mit uns [God is with us]":
Nazi propaganda paper:
The headline reads, "Declaration of the Higher Clergy/So spoke Jesus Christ". The caption under the cartoon of the marching Hitler Youth reads, "We youth step happily forward facing the sun... With our faith we drive the devil from the land."

Oops!

The Neo-Darwinist Tool-Kit

	A Ignorance & Lies	B Stupidity & Lunacy	C Topic Switches	D Cluelessness & Misc.
1	ID is creationism	Quote a Bible passage and show it is wrong (pi)	God? Which god (insert FSM or Greek god)	[Quote any Darwinist website as though it’s superior because it supports Darwinism]
2	That's a allegoric story and evolution is not!	Jonathan Wells is a Moonie	You're trying to destroy science	You're no Christian!
3	Mutations are not random	Science-hater	Crusades	Spam thread with drawings of transitional fossils
4	You obviously don’t understand science	You have no proof	Christianity is a form of communism	Forget your meds?
5	Problems with the Bible	ID is liberalism	Religion causes immorality	Look at how many scientists name Steve believe in evolution
6	Quote mining!	He is a charlatan	Liar for the Lord	That is very unchristian
7	It's not even a theory!	You’re a creationist therefore you are stupid	Abiogenesis has ‘nothing’ to do with evolution	You drank the cool-aid
8	You’re stupid - I am superior - here is why…	Were you there?	No dinosaurs on Noah’s ark	Fundamentalist!
9	If you believe in ID you believe space aliens created us	Macro-evolution is only a creationist term	Hitler was a creationist	You want to establish a theocracy
10	Supernatural is not observed	Galileo	Slavery in the Bible	Is a snowflake designed?
11	There was not a Cambrian explosion	I pity you	Morton’s demon	That’s not peer-reviewed
12	Spam thread again with drawings of transitional fossils and call the poster an idiot	[Quote a Jack Chick comic and claim guilt by association]	Who designed the designer?	Luddite!
13	Everything is a transitional	Insert idiotic Placemarker	Inquisition	Bad design is proof ID is false and shows the beauty of evolution

Or you can listen to some of these while playing ‘The Game’ (or simply listen by going to the panda gallery).

from an interview:
Church of the Nazarene
Rev. Ron Moeller, Pastor

"There isn't very much interest here in intelligent design, because we think the most important thing is saving souls for our Lord Jesus. It doesn't matter if people believe in evolution as a way of understanding the flowers and meadows and animals of God's creation. People come to Christ sometimes by the Bible, but just as often by personal experiences of the Holy Spirit and are born again, sometimes by family or friends, sometimes, I hope, by their pastor. Intelligent design doesn't help at all, because it has no foundation in the Bible.

"It has come up a few times in our Adult Study classes, but the 'specified complexity' and stuff didn't attract much interest. Someone asked, "What does this have to do with the Bible?"

The Presiding Bishop said that "ID opens the door to pantheism and every kind of New Age cults. And it does not mention Christ or the soul, so it is not Christian, and doesn't seem to be good science."

"It [Intelligent design] is probably like one of these cults that come along every few years, like New Age. Maybe it will become its own church, like Scientology or Christian Science. I think in two or three years we will hear very little from them."

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