Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Programs, cells and letting God be God (A concluding reply to the Smithy)

I would like to thank Dr. Sullivan for his recent post, Nature, Artifacts, Meaning and Providence which has helped to clear the air enormously. In his closing comments, Dr. Sullivan calls for calm in the debate over life’s origin, and urges that the origin of life should be examined dispassionately, in an atmosphere free from theological bias. He is of course quite right, and in this post, I intend to engage him on precisely those terms. What I propose to do is address some general issues raised by Dr. Sullivan in his latest post on ID.

Life – an agreed definition?

While our views on the formal conditions for something’s being alive are somewhat divergent, I think we can now agree on the finalistic conditions.
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Correction re Veritas Forum

I reported here that, since 2005, the Veritas Forum seems to have gone exclusively theistic evolutionist. I’ve been reliably informed that this is not so. Names of people who have done Veritas events since 2005 include: Michael Behe Alvin Plantinga Fritz Schaefer Walter Bradley Guillermo Gonzalez Jay Richards Scott Minnich Fazale Rana

Coffee!! More completely ridiculous news, courtesy tax-funded or legacy broadcasters:

The longer I live, the more stupid stuff I hear in legacy mainstream media whose only possible value is to front Darwinism. Here’s a good one:

Chimpanzees eat their dead?

“Researchers may have witnessed it, but been unwilling to report it for fear of drawing undue attention to cannibalism among our close relatives, he says. ”

If there is any remaining doubt that tax-funded Darwinists are nuts, let it be laid to rest.

When was the last time you were at a funeral where the reception lunch was in fact the deceased?

Oh, wait, this just in: “Chimpanzees and humans share about 99% of their DNA, and are so closely related that some academics have suggested they should be given rights similar to human rights.

PS: and, did you know, “Chimps feel death just like humans? (BBC)

Dr Anderson suggests the treatment of death marks another similarity. “

What utter rubbish, honestly. Chimpanzees do NOT know that they will all die.

For animals like them, that is a mercy. For humans, it is the beginning of philosophy.

That animals may mourn their dead is no surprise. Read More ›

Adaptation as Proof of Evolution

In 1831 Charles Darwin boarded the HMS Beagle to gather biological information from around the world. It was a wonderful opportunity for the young naturalist, and Darwin saw many fascinating wonders. The voyage is best known for its stop at the Galápagos Islands off the coast of Ecuador. There Darwin observed finches, mockingbirds and tortoises that varied distinctly from island to island. Some finches lived in coastal areas on the ground, others lived in forest trees, yet another lived in bushes. And the diet of these varieties varied considerably. One of the species ate buds and fruit, another prickly pear, others ate seeds and others were insectivores. And one of the insectivores even used a twig to fish out insects Read More ›

How Evolution Explains a Complex Immune Response

Fascinating new research suggests that the mere sight of a sick person can trigger an immune response. When test subjects viewed photos showing symptoms of infectious disease, their immune systems responded more aggressively compared to test subjects who viewed other types of photos (including photos of people bearing firearms). It is the first hard evidence that visual cues alone can influence the immune system. Evolutionists have no difficulty explaining this new finding, but that may not be a good sign for Darwin’s theory.  Read more

Living things, Machines and Intelligent Design (Part Two of a Response to the Smithy)

First, I would like to thank Michael Sullivan for taking the time and trouble to comment on my post, In Praise of Subtlety, after successfully defending his dissertation. I look forward to reading future articles by Dr. Sullivan on issues relating to teleology and design.

I would also like to thank Sullivan for his courtesy and his honesty. He admits that he has not read any ID books, and because he has no preconceived ideas as to how the first life-forms might have originated, he generously acknowledges that the first living cell might have been assembled, one piece at a time. For my part, I would entirely agree with him when he writes that the answer to the question of how the first cell originated is an empirical one.

I’d just like to make a few numbered comments on various issues raised by Sullivan in his posts, Nature, Artifacts and Machines 1, Nature, Artifacts and Machines 2 and ”Intelligent Design” and Scotism.

1. The perils of Aristotelian science Read More ›

New DNA Damage Repair Mechanism Must Have Arisen Early

DNA damage repair is a fascinating topic in cell biology. Fascinating because the cell’s repair mechanisms are so incredible. What’s more the mechanisms are coordinated in a sophisticated control network. As one researcher put it, “it’s almost as if cells have something akin to a computer program that becomes activated by DNA damage, and that program enables the cells to respond very quickly.”  Read more

Homochirality and Darwin

One of the smaller mysteries of life is that it is built out of asymmetric building blocks. The amino acids that are chained together to make proteins are asymmetric, as are the sugars that are chained together to make starch, cellulose, and other useful polysaccharides. The standard way to show this, is by making a solution of the specific molecule, shining polarized light through it, and demonstrating that the “plane of polarization” has rotated. Those that rotate the light counter-clockwise are “left-handed” and those that rotate it clockwise are “right-handed”. Using the letters “l” for left, and “d” for right, we now can label the mirror-image molecules with their appropriate chirality. (The amino acids are labelled L or D not Read More ›

What a living thing is, what an artifact is, and why the first living thing would have been one (Part One of a Response to the Smithy)

The Smithy, a Web site devoted to the life, times, and thought of the Subtle Doctor, the Blessed John Duns Scotus, has recently weighed in on the ID controversy, with three recent posts by Michael Sullivan in response to my post, In Praise of Subtlety. Before I continue, I would like to congratulate Michael Sullivan for successfully defending his dissertation on Friday, April 23.

Reading Michael Sullivan’s latest blog posts, I realized that I had not been precise enough in my definitions of what a living thing is, and of what an artifact is. It would be a terrible thing if we ended up talking past each other in what promises to be an interesting philosophical exchange, so I shall do my best to prevent that happening.

The views I present below are my own, and I take full responsibility for them. In formulating them, I have endeavored to marry the best insights of Aristotle’s philosophy and modern science.

What is a living thing?

Specifically, I claim that: Read More ›

Some Good News for Biology Students

Evolutionists have complained bitterly that some states are requiring biology classes to present evolution from a theory-neutral perspective–that is, the evidence should be presented without first presenting evolution as true. And evolutionists have mounted an offensive against such efforts.  Read more

Hawking’s Unobtainium

Recently Stephen Hawking finished a video series with the Discovery Channel which, in his paralyzed state, took him 3 years to finish. According to the news releases, he insisted on rewriting large sections of the script. One wonders how long it took a man who communicates to his computer through eye-blinks to write a new script. But however long it took, we are now blessed with yet another “science for the common man” video. My college-aged children all have a “Great American Video” waiting for them to make. When I was in school, everyone wanted to be the “Great American Garage Band”. And as far as I can tell, the previous generation all had a “Great American Novel” that was Read More ›

designer

The “Designer-of-the-universe-is-not-God” error

designer
Some people who are impressed by the arguments of the intelligent design movement will finally admit that an intelligent designer may have created the universe. However, they simply refuse to believe that this designer could have been God. Although the question of the Designer’s identity goes beyond Intelligent Design theory, and belongs to the domain of metaphysics and theology, it may be worth considering why their position is fundamentally inconsistent. Read More ›

A “Malfunction” That Helps: Induced Adaptation in Yeast Cells

When yeast cells face environmental stress, such as exposure to hydrogen peroxide, their internal operations can begin to malfunction. For example, a particular protein misfolds and no longer functions as well. This hardly seems surprising, but as usual there is more to the story. It seems that the misfolded protein normally helps to terminate the synthesis of new proteins. But when it is misfolded, some of the newly formed proteins end up a bit longer, with more information added. And the added information is not just random garbage–it helps the cells adjust to the environmental stress which brought about the change in the first place.  Read more

It’s Not Just Science

The influence of evolutionary thought reaches far beyond science. Consider, for example, the histories we are given of how the theory of evolution arose. Charles Darwin and co-founder Alfred Wallace were deeply influenced by non scientific considerations and these influences have, to a certain extent, been explored. Janet Browne, Peter Bowler, Michael Ruse, Keith Thomson, Neal Gillespie, Adrian Desmond and James Moore are but a few of those who have elucidated the cultural, political and other non scientific forces that influenced Darwin and Wallace. As Bowler explains, historians are now far more concerned about the social environment within which scientific knowledge was generated, and far more willing to admit that the development of science is not the inevitable triumph of Read More ›