Unintelligible Redesign - This is the way creationism ends. Not with a bang, but with a whimper.

According to scientists, teachers, and civil libertarians, the Taliban has invaded Ohio. Creationists have devised a theory called "Intelligent Design" (ID) and are trying to get Ohio's Board of Education to make sure it's taught alongside Darwinism. Unlike creationism, ID accepts that the Earth is billions of years old and that species evolve through natural selection. It posits that life has been designed but doesn't specify by whom. Liberals call ID a menace that will sneak religion into public schools. They're exactly wrong. ID is a big nothing. It's non-living, non-breathing proof that religion has surrendered its war against science.

Creationism used to be assertive and powerful. Darwinism wasn't allowed in schools. As Darwin gained the upper hand, conservatives fought to preserve creationism alongside evolution. They lost the war on both fronts. Courts struck down the teaching of creationism on the grounds that it mixed church and state. Meanwhile, scientific evidence discredited the belief that the Earth was created in six days and was only 6,000 years old. Like the Taliban, creationists were washed up. Their only hope was to flee to the mountains, shave their beards, change their clothes, and come back as something else.

What they've come back as is the Intelligent Design movement. Gone are the falsifiable claims of a six-day creation and a 6,000-year-old Earth. Gone is the God of the Bible. In their place, ID enthusiasts speak of questions, mysteries, and possibilities. As to whether God, the Force, or ET created us, ID is agnostic. "We simply ask the question as to whether something can form naturally or if there must have been something more, a designer," Robert Lattimer, an ID proponent in Ohio, told the Columbus Dispatch. "Our main contention is that [evolution-focused curriculum] standards are purely naturalistic and leave no room for the possibility that part of nature can be designed."

This soft-headed agnosticism matches the soft-headed arguments for including it in the curriculum. They're the same arguments leftists have made for ebonics. According to ID proponents, the committee in charge of Ohio's science curriculum is too "homogenous" and lacks "diversity." It marginalizes alternative "points of view" to which students should be "exposed." A conservative state senator says some people "think differently, and all those ideas should be explored." A conservative member of the state education board says Ohioans deserve a science curriculum "they can all be comfortable with."

Behind these pleas for diversity is the kind of educational relativism conservatives normally despise. "Biological evolution, like creationism and design, cannot be proved to be either true or false," writes one ID enthusiast in Ohio. Since evolution is an "unproven theory," says another, "belief in it is just as much an act of faith as is belief in creationism or in the theory of intelligent design."

The response of liberals, teachers, and scientists has been hysterical. They accuse the ID movement of peddling "intolerance," fronting for the Christian right, and trying "to force a narrow religious ideology into our schools." If Ohio lets ID into its curriculum, they prophesy, the state will become an "international laughingstock," triggering a corporate exodus, a decline in property values, and the collapse of Ohio's standard of living. They refuse to acknowledge a difference between ID and creationism. "This is just a new paint job on the same old Edsel," says an Ohio University physiologist.

The analogy is inside out. Creationists haven't repainted their Edsel. They've taken out the engine and the transmission. Without distinctive, measurable claims such as the six-day creation, the 6,000-year-old Earth, and other literal interpretations of the Bible, creationism no longer materially contradicts evolution. The reason not to teach intelligent design isn't that it's full of lies or dogma. The reason is that it's empty.

Advocates of ID do offer interesting criticisms of Darwin's theory of evolution. They argue that natural selection doesn't account for the rise and fall of species, that many biological mechanisms wouldn't make organisms more fit to survive unless those mechanisms appeared all at once, and that the combinations necessary to create life are so complex that it would be statistically impossible to generate them by chance. My colleague Bob Wright answered these criticisms in Slate last year. I don't know whether they stand up to his rebuttal or not. But I do know this: They don't add up to a theory.

A theory isn't just a bunch of criticisms, even if they're valid. A theory ties things together. It explains and predicts. Intelligent design does neither. It doesn't explain why part of our history seems intelligently designed and part of it doesn't. Why are our feet and our back muscles poorly designed for walking? Why are we afflicted by lethal viruses? Why have so many females died in childbirth? ID doesn't explain these things. It just shrugs at them. "Design theory seeks to show, based on scientific evidence, that some features of living things may be designed by a mind or some form of intelligence," says one ID proponent. Some? May? Some? What kind of theory is that?

As Wright explains, Darwinian theory makes predictions that can be tested. It predicts that the average difference in size between males and females will correspond to the degree of polygamy in a species, and that in species in which females can reproduce more often than males, females will be more sexually assertive and less discriminating about their sex partners than males will be. These predictions turn out to be true. Darwin claimed that humans had descended from apes. If fossils unearthed since his death had exhibited no such connection, his theory would have been discredited. What empirical predictions does ID make that, if proven untrue, would discredit the theory?

John Calvert, the country's principal exponent of ID, answered that question in a treatise he presented to the Ohio board. Calvert described the "methods" by which scientists can "detect" design in nature.

That, in a nutshell, is ID. It offers no predictions, scope modifiers, or experimental methods of its own. It's a default answer, a shrug, consisting entirely of problems in Darwinism. Those problems should be taught in school, but there's no reason to call them intelligent design. Intelligent design, as defined by its advocates, means nothing. This is the way creationism ends. Not with a bang, but with a whimper.

I'm sorry Jazz, this is pure foolishness.

Why?

Back to proofreading topic; here from a PNAS search:

Genetics
Mutants in the Exo I motif of Escherichia coli dnaQ:
Defective proofreading and inviability due to error catastrophe
(fidelity of DNA replication / dnaQ and dnaE genes / mutD5 mutator / dnaE antimutators / saturation of mismatch repair)
Iwona J. Fijalkowska* and Roel M. Schaaper
Laboratory of Molecular Genetics, National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, Research Triangle Park, NC 27709
Communicated by Maurice S. Fox, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, December 11, 1995 (received for review October 27, 1995)
The Escherichia coli dnaQ gene encodes the proofreading 3' exonuclease ( subunit) of DNA polymerase III holoenzyme and is a critical determinant of chromosomal replication fidelity. We constructed by site-specific mutagenesis a mutant, dnaQ926, by changing two conserved amino acid residues (Asp-12Ala and Glu-14Ala) in the Exo I motif, which, by analogy to other proofreading exonucleases, is essential for the catalytic activity. When residing on a plasmid, dnaQ926 confers a strong, dominant mutator phenotype, suggesting that the protein, although deficient in exonuclease activity, still binds to the polymerase subunit ( subunit or dnaE gene product). When dnaQ926 was transferred to the chromosome, replacing the wild-type gene, the cells became inviable. However, viable dnaQ926 strains could be obtained if they contained one of the dnaE alleles previously characterized in our laboratory as antimutator alleles or if it carried a multicopy plasmid containing the E. coli mutL+ gene. These results suggest that loss of proofreading exonuclease activity in dnaQ926 is lethal due to excessive error rates (error catastrophe). Error catastrophe results from both the loss of proofreading and the subsequent saturation of DNA mismatch repair. The probability of lethality by excessive mutation is supported by calculations estimating the number of inactivating mutations in essential genes per chromosome replication.

So there is evidence that without a proofreading function, error rates for bio-chemical self-replicators are too high to provide survivability, and therefore evolvability.

Because questions like "Why?" and "How?" are intrinsic to the observation that nitrogenases are oxygen sensitive. Julie Thomas, after playing twister for a while, arrives "by design" at the very question that is the starting point for the naturalist.

This is not a satisfying response to me. The Thomas paper is 30 pages or so, half of which is dedicated to the discussion of nitrogenase; it’s role for the organism, it’s role in terraformation (whether foreseen or not), evolutionary explanations for its existence, problems with those explanations, nitrogenase from a design perspective, and problems with that perspective.

Here’s more from Thomas on nitrogenase:

The more I think about nitrogenase, the more it makes sense in light of design and terraforming. It is often said that one way to show design is to find a biological feature that is useless to the organism that possesses it, but benefits other organisms. This would be unexplainable from the perspective of natural selection. But it would also be a terrible design strategy, as any feature that is useless to an organism is no different from a pseudogene and thus would quickly decay. If you want to design a feature that is useful to other organisms, then the feature must also be useful to the organism that possesses it so that natural selection can be used to maintain and propagate it. Nitrogenase may not be useless, but it is so costly that many bacteria have gotten rid of it. For not only does it cost so much ATP that growth suffers significantly, but cells must also have strategies to protect the nitrogenase from oxygen. Thus, in terms of individual benefit, nitrogenase activity is not overly impressive. But in terms of benefit for the biosphere, it is essential. If, for example, nitrogenase was lost among all bacteria 2 billion years ago, it is quite doubtful life would exist today (or it would exist only minimally as few single- celled organisms). Nitrogenase is at the heart of the ecological nitrogen cycle. Thus, here is an example where a molecular machine seems far more important to the biosphere than any particular organism possessing the machine (organisms can lose it, but the biosphere cannot).
Of course, this costly machine also poses a design problem to terraforming. This problem can be formulated as follows:
How do you design bacteria-like cells, for the purpose of terraforming, so that your costly nitrogenase is not completely lost by all bacteria over time?

From my perspective, do I give more credence to the thoughtful and thorough detailed analysis (that admittedly is a bit over my head) from Thomas, or a one sentence dismissal without explanation from someone whom I respect?

Compare Thomas’ hypothesis, which you call foolishness, to this recent press release:

In years past, scientific speculation about how life began on Earth envisioned primordial soups and slimy goo as the incubators in which the first tiny microorganisms developed, billions of years ago. More recently, microbiologists have examined places formerly seen as too harsh and inhospitable to foster biology, seeking answers about how life developed and adapts.
Hydrothermal vents, for example -- areas on the ocean floor that expel seawater superheated deep in the Earth's crust -- and the exotic creatures that live there have received increased attention.
Now scientists are scrutinizing another location for clues in unraveling some of life's riddles -- deep in the ground, underneath the planet's surface.
"We've pretty much left Darwin's warm little pond in the dust," said David Stahl, a University of Washington professor of civil and environmental engineering whose work focuses on ecology and evolution. "The subsurface is being increasingly viewed as an important and largely unexplored part of the biosphere. Depending on how you calculate it, its biomass may exceed the biomass on the surface of the planet."

Is this speculation just "foolishness" in your opinion? Before you answer, let me give you my take.

This is a prime example of methodological naturalism putting the cart before the horse. Did life start near hydrothermal vents? Did life start deep in the earth's crust? Did life start in the primordial soup? Did life start high in the atmosphere? I’ve read all of these speculations and more.

How about this question: Is it possible for non-cellular protolife to even exist or perpetuate at all? I mean come on! Shouldn't we try to answer this question before taking wild guesses about some origin location? No one has found any protolife. No one has bioengineered any protolife. There's no evidence for chemical evolution. Replicators without proofreading yield to error catastrophe. Simplest cellular life contains dozens of IC molecular machines, which we know cannot evolve in direct Darwinian fashion. Is it just me? If I asked "Does Big Foot prefer the beach or the mountains?" and then had a huge debate with my fellow Big Foot enthusiasts, wouldn't some astute observer break in with, "Do we know if Big Foot really exists?"

The methodological naturalistic assumption requires the conclusion that life came about by abiogenesis. If we assume Big Foot, I guess it wouldn't be so silly to discuss his preference for the mountains over the beach!

The only conclusion I can draw from the abstract is that the E. coli dnaQ gene must not have been the first replicator!

There’s a problem here. In order to avoid error catastrophe, we infer from this that the first replicator must have been a more reliable replicator than proofreadingless E. coli. But if this is so, why evolve proofreading at all? Why not just depend upon Natural Selection to evolve the ideal rate of mutation?

The alternate view is that replicators within the bio-chemical platform are just inherently error-prone . . . too error prone to sustain themselves without proofreading. This view is also supported by my Goodwin quote. (I recall reading somewhere that proofreading improves fidelity by a factor of 50,000! Don’t quote me. This is off the top of my head.)

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