Posted on 09/01/2003 5:46:19 PM PDT by Tribune7
Generations of American schoolchildren have been taught that Darwin's theory of evolution is the explanation for the origin of life -- regardless of what they might have learned in Sunday school. Yet according to law professor and author Phillip E. Johnson, this modern-day mantra of science classes is little more than a dogma of materialism. In his books "Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds," "Darwin on Trial," "Reason in the Balance" and others, Johnson defends the truth with the intellectual clout that earned him a prestigious seat at the University of California, Berkeley, yet with a humility that can only come from knowing the Creator one-on-one. Here, he talks candidly with "Decision" on the topic he is most passionate about -- dismantling Darwinism.
Q: The Ohio Board of Education recently ruled that public schools in that state can now discuss controversies surrounding the theory of evolution. Why do you think so many leading educators fought to keep such debate out of the classroom?
A: It's a good question. You would think the Darwinists would be glad to teach the controversy as a matter of educational policy. According to public opinion polls, most of the nation has serious doubts about the truth of the evolutionary theory. Why don't the educators want to address those doubts seriously? They are afraid to acknowledge that there are any doubts that matter. Real scientists, they say, believe without any doubt in the theory of evolution. But in Ohio we had petitions signed by dozens of well-credentialed scientists saying that this area of study should be opened up to freedom of thought. Science should not be committed to a dogma -- much less a dogma that is in serious trouble with the evidence -- but should freely acknowledge areas of doubt and should address them honestly.
Q: Through your books and lectures, you've become known as someone who has worked hard to bring together different factions of the creationist movement.
A: My policy is to concentrate on the first issue: What scientific evidence points toward or away from the need for a Creator? Does the evidence of science really show that Darwin's force of natural selection is so powerful that nature can do its own creating and that there is no need for God? That's the philosophical doctrine the Darwinists propose, but my colleagues and I have shown that it is not true. The evidence, as opposed to the scientific imperialism, points to the fact that natural selection has no creative power and that the Creator is very much needed. So if we concentrate on that issue first, then we can get to other issues that are somewhat divisive within the Christian world. I have done that by saying, "Let's be careful that we start with the correct Scripture."
(Excerpt) Read more at billygraham.org ...
I think that it is false to call Darwinian evolution a theory. A scientific theory has to have a scientific basis and there is none for Darwinian evolution. I would thus call it a hypothesis which has been proven to be false.
Further, that Darwinists are totally unable to show how the intricate systems which we know are essential to life developed, renders the theory as mere story telling, not science.
Mmmmm, not only do evolutionists postulate death as a creator, but also cancer as improving the species. Don't you see how laughable that is?
I find it difficult to call such radical changes, observed and documented, as "a hypothesis that has been proven to be false".
Destruction is the opposite of creation. There is no evidence for the random creation of anything worthwhile. For evolution to be true it has to show the creation of new organs, new intricate systems, new functions, completely new genes. No such thing has ever been shown.
Either way, his not speculating on that first step matters little. He brought a much older theory to a new level of acceptance and somehow got his name attached to it. His theory was in rebellion to what the bible says about the origin or the various life forms on the earth.
It also implies intelligence to me, implying design -- a sort of "program" or instruction set. For RNA to have been able to evolve a new function -- from information carrier to catalytic function -- requires some 'splaining. But so far I don't see that Darwinist theory really explains this.
I think Walter Dembski shows why this is so:
"...the Darwinian mechanism requires a selectable function if that mechanism is going to work at all. Moreover, functional pieces pulled together from various systems via coevolution and co-option are selectable by the Darwinian mechanism. But what is selectable here is the individual functions of the individual pieces and not the function of the yet-to-be-produced system. The Darwinian mechanism selects for preexisting function. It does not select for future function. Once that function is realized, the Darwinian mechanism can select for it as well. But making the transition from existing function to novel function is the hard part. How does one get from functional pieces that are selectable in terms of their individual functions to a system that consists of those pieces and exhibits a novel function? The Darwinian mechanism is no help here. Darwin himself conceded this point. Writing in Origin, he noted: 'Unless proftable variations do occur, natural selection can do nothing.' To say that those profitable variations are random errors is to beg precisely the point in question." [Emphasis added]
Darwinism completely glosses over "the hard part."
As you know, ID does not dispute evolution. It disputes that Darwinist theory is "complete"; i.e., that it explains everything that needs explaining. And I think this is an eminently reasonable point, well verified by observation, experience, and just plain common sense.
This is provably false, at least on a limited scale. A monoclonal culture of bacterial cells, exposed to mutagens, will develop resistance to entirely new antibiotics. That's a 'future function', from the perspective of the culture before exposure, according to the above definition.
I guess the answer turns on what is happening at the point of exposure, Professor. For if bacteria is altered by exposure to mutagens, I don't think it's fair to simply assume that the alteration is a purely "random" event. Rather, the alteration may well proceed according to "rules" -- information. The transformation of the bacteria in adaptation to new conditions can be seen as an instance of self-(re)organization in response to changing conditions, a/k/a ("rule-based") emergent behavior. Function may likely be altered commensurately. It is conceivably this new, "novel function" that is the key to understanding changes in the bacteria's resistance to the antibiotic.
I'm not clear on why you make the distinction "new" antibiotics. The above statements refer to bacteria that were not resistant to a given antibiotic prior to exposure to the mutagen, and then were found to be resistant to the same antibiotic afterwards. At the level of the bacterium, there is new function, but not future function -- from the standpoint of the bacterium, the altered function is the "new now." The subsequent finding that the altered bacterium was resistant is the future event that "discovers" the change in function. This is not a "future function," strictly speaking, but a recognition that an existing function has been modified, at some time after the alteration occurred.
In other words, the antibiotic was "looking for" the preexisting function, but did not find it, and so could not do its expected "work." A new antibiotic would have to be found to address the altered functional picture.
Just a speculation...in the manner of an IDer, I suppose.
The investigators took a monoclonal culture of a bacterium which was penicillin resistant, thanks to the enzyme penicillinase. They exposed the culture to a mutagen and to another antibiotic, I think erythromycin, to which the bacterium was originally not resistant. Most of the bacteria died off, but the remaining living and multiplying bacteria were found now to be erythromycin resistant. Note that the monoclonality means there were no resistant bacteria originally there in the population; all of the original, pre-mutagen bacteria were genetically identical.
When they investigated the penicllinase gene of the newly resistant bacterium, what they found was a single DNA base change, located at the site of the antibiotic binding pocket of penicillinase, which 'loosened' the pocket, allowing it to bind erthyromycin, which was then hydrolysed. This change somewhat lowered the activity towards penicillin, but a few more cycles of exposure to both antibiotics introduced another mutation which gave a 'better' pocket, as active as the original enzyme to penicillin, but able additionally to hydrolyse erthyromycin. The second mutation was located and identified.
The bacterium had clearly evolved a new functionality, without loss of the old one, by mutation and natural selection. There is no doubt the same change would have happened, albeit much more slowly, by natural mutation; there is no doubt the selection would have happened in the wild if the bug were exposed to two different antibiotics. Development of new antibiotic resistance in the wild is well-documented, and it follows the same pattern of point mutation as was described in this paper.
As it happens, it is likely most new functionalities don't follow this pattern; they more likely happen by gene duplication. Once you have two identical genes, one can mutate and go do something else, while the other maintains the original function.
Well I guess that just goes to show you, Professor, that among the population of monoclonal (genetically identical) bacteria, for whatever reason, perhaps some of these "critturs" were more successful information processors than others. Perhaps something in the cloning process (an "artificial" albeit human intelligent intervention) may account for this -- do we really know whether or not this might be the case? I mean, sone rather unexpected things have been observed to have happened to "monoclonal" higher-order animals -- check out the history of the famous Dolly. And because they were (hypothetically) better/more efficient readers of the "code" than the ones the intervention destroyed, they then became subject to the Darwinist selection mechanism -- meaning they improved their chances at survivability because they managed to acquire new functionality -- resistance to erythromycin -- while not losing old functionality -- resistance to penicillin. There is nothing that I know of that argues that "new" functionality must come at the expense of losing "old" functionality. Isn't this what evolution is supposed to be all about?
I have an experiment, too, to run by you, for your comment. But it'll have to wait for tomorrow, since I left my source materials at the office today, and don't have as good a memory as you.
True you did not say that cancer improves the species, but the only evidence you offered was of cancer as if it justified evolution. So once you get over the semantic nonsense, my statement is perfectly valid.
As to your two questions the answer that science more than supports the intelligent creation of life can be found at Nobel Prize Design in DNA I and Nobel Prize Design in DNA II
The above is a great point by Dembski, but it really does not go far enough. The reason modern science has totally disproved Darwinian evolution is DNA. Dna is very complex and a single mutation is not even the beginning of a new functionality. It will hardly have any selective value at all. Add to that that any system or organ in the body requires not just a new protein but numerous proteins, numerous genes, lots of controlling and regulating DNA and one can see that until one has it all together, there will be no function at all. So rather than giving selective advantage, it will provide a selective disadvantage until it is complete. Evolutionists could get away with a new function just happening 150 years ago, but they cannot get away with it anymore.
As you know, ID does not dispute evolution.
Some may say that, however, I would say it disproves it completely. If you need the Creator to come and design new features, functions, and to organize them into a coherent whole, then evolution as a theory of the origin of new distinctive functions and abilities is totally false.
IMHO, the amazement that we feel (or not) often has to do with the measure of complexity we have in mind when thinking about the rise of new functions. For instance, I see functional complexity as more meaningful with regard to biological systems today, and Kolmogorov complexity more meaningful when speculating about an RNA world.
IOW, the rise of new resistance function in bacteria today is not as amazing to me as the rise of an entirely new functional system such as eyeness (and the brain to support sight)across phyla – or the rise of complexity through alternating between stable and catalytic states in an RNA world.
Dembski appears to be reluctant to go that far. As he says, ID refuses to speculate about the ontology of design. As he puts it, "For intelligent design the crucial question...is not whether organisms emerged through an evolutionary process or suddenly from scratch, but whether a designing intelligence made a discernable difference regardless how organisms emerged." He writes,
"Intelligent design does not require organisms to emerge suddenly or be specially created from scratch by the intervention of a designing intelligence. To be sure, intelligent design is compatible with the creationist idea of organisms being suddenly created from scratch. But it is also perfectly compatible with the evolutionist idea of new organisms arising from old by a process of generation. What separates intelligent design from naturalistic evolution is not whether organisms evolved or the extent to which they evolved but what was responsible for their evolution."
In the latter case, intelligent design could be thought of as a fully specified "program" (or maybe even an encryted universal code) loaded up-front and all-at-once into the beginning event of the Universe -- that is, at the Big Bang. The program running in time directs the evolution of the Universe and all things in it, ordering apparent randomness into designed forms as contemplated (so to speak) by the program designer.
I think it's important to note, however, that this is not necessarily a deterministic system. I speculate that higher-order (i.e., more complex) organisms have greater freedom/ability to read and process program information than lower-order organisms. DNA specification is presumably what makes the big difference here. But the route to higher complexity -- seemingly an evolutionary path -- may come via the ability to successfully process information. Information processing and natural selection seem to work together dynamically.
All this would seem to imply a teleology -- programs are designed to effect purpose(s). Encrypted messages are designed to be read. Of course, this teleology business gives certain hard-core Darwinists -- like Richard Dawkins -- fits. They insist on a completely purposeless, and thus effectively meaningless, universe. It's all just a random walk to nowhere, or they won't be happy.
As Joshua Smart has pointed out, "ID is in some sense an evolutionary theory. It is a theory about when evolution is inadequate." Generally speaking, it is inadequate when it fails to take into consideration the component of intelligence in all of life -- built into life up-front (at least as potentiality that can manifest in living forms as the program "runs"), and demonstrated in intelligent action by living beings. The information designed into the "cosmic program" is key to the evolution of the system. The "Darwinist mechanism," as Dembski calls it -- that is, natural selection -- is an after-effect of some sort of successful "information processing" event (so to speak) occurring in a living organism.
As to speculating about the designer -- the Creator -- you know as well as I do that this is not a scientific problem, strictly speaking. We have to get outside of science to deal with that issue: Science can deal with the design, for it is observable in nature. The designer, however, is completely out of reach of science, and this is necessarily so. For the "cosmic program" would have had to have been "designed" before space and time began, if it came into effect at the Big Bang -- before which there was no space and no time. This, I imagine, is the reason for the hostility of some biologists and physicists to the idea of ID.
But this doesn't bother me at all. There are limits to what science can do. Some questions are simply beyond its reach. The greatest mistake a thinker can make, IMO, is to believe otherwise.
So much for my little speculations, gore. You know of course that certainty in regard to such questions is completely out of our reach. Thank you for sharing your thoughts with me. I'd enjoy hearing any comments you may have WRT to the above.
Monoclonal means they were descended from one cell by asexual reproduction; it doesn't imply cloning. You plate out bacteria on a petri dish, thinly enough so each single bacterium grows into a single, non overlapping colony, and then grow a culture from that colony. The bacteria are different only in respect of the number of spontaneous mutations they happen to pick up in 30 generations (say) of doubling. That rate is very small and quantifiable.
We know this because we've been doing microbiological experiments of this sort since long before I did them myself as a young lad. Microbial genetics is simpler and better understood than mammalian genetics - the genome is much smaller.
There is a simple and parsimonious explanation for the phenomenon - we expose the bugs to something that causes point mutations in their DNA. We find some develop resistance. We isolate the DNA, and find the ones that have the resistance have a point mutation in the penicillinase gene. We do a crystal structure of the expressed penicillinase, and find the enzyme from those bacteria with resistance has a binding pocket which has been enlarged by the mutation to accomodate the different antibiotic, which we can show using molecular modelling.
In other words, there's a direct chain of evidence, from a mutagen that causes a known chemical change in the DNA, to the mutant protein whose amino acid sequence is completely determined by the changed DNA, to the folded protein whose three dimensional structure is completely determined by the amino-acid seqeunce, to the enzyme activity which depends on the three dimensional structure, to the improved survival of the modified organism, which is a result of the new enzyme activity. You have mutation followed by natural selection, understood on a molecular level.
The new functionality does come at the expense of the old functionality, if you remove the selective pressure to retain the old functionality. However, as I mentioned toward the end of my post, if you maintain the selective pressure (if you expose the bugs to penicillin in addition) a double mutation occurs that retains the first functionality while adding the second.
This is false, and is directly contradicted by posts 349 and 356.
Some references
Predicting the emergence of antibiotic resistance by directed evolution and structural analysis. Orencia, M. Cecilia; Yoon, Jun S.; Ness, Jon E.; Stemmer, Willem P. C.; Stevens, Raymond C. Department of Molecular Biology, The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, CA, USA. Nature Structural Biology (2001), 8(3), 238-242.
Evolution of an antibiotic resistance enzyme constrained by stability and activity trade-offs. Wang, Xiaojun; Minasov, George; Shoichet, Brian K. Department of Molecular Pharmacology and Biological Chemistry, Northwestern University School of Medicine, Chicago, IL, USA. Journal of Molecular Biology (2002), 320(1), 85-95.
Well live and learn, Professor! Thanks for taking the time to 'splain things.
Microbial genetics is simpler and better understood than mammalian genetics - the genome is much smaller.
Much smaller, as in less complex?
Yes.
Right above is the essential difference between intelligent design and Darwinian evolution. Design says that complexity does not arise by chance. Darwinian evolution says that it arises by chance. These are two diametrically opposed views. They cannot be reconciled in any way because according to Darwinists, there being no intelligent designer it is impossible for things to have been designed. It is in their desire to exclude God that the theory is based. This is why the evolutionists will not allow for man to have been created in God's image - because the whole ethos of the theory is to promote atheism.
With that said, while I don't think I have read the same pages of Dembski you refer to here, I think that when Dembski says that ID is not incompatible with evolution, he does not mean that it is compatible with Darwinian evolution. Can you check that out?
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