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Intelligent design vs. Darwinism turns on the centrality of information

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A friend writes to say that, listening to the Steve Meyer vs. Charles Marshall radio debate, he sensed that the message regarding the centrality of “information” to the history of life is starting get across.

Indeed, the reason Darwinian theory is simply wrong is that it attempts to make information appear via the supposed magic of natural selection acting on random mutation. The reason the theory cannot just die is that, quite apart from the fact that a lot of jobs depend on fronting it, it is the creation story of materialist atheism, a point of view highly conducive to people who want power without moral responsibility, as history has shown.

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Anyway, Here’s the debate again:

Stephen C Meyer is the world’s leading Intelligent Design proponent. His new book Darwin’s Doubt claims that the Cambrian fossil record, which saw an “explosion” of new life forms in a short space of time, is evidence for ID.

Evolutionary biologist Charles Marshall of the University of California, Berkeley has written a critical review of the book. He debates Meyer on whether Darwinian evolution can explain the diversity of life in the Cambrian rocks.

Another friend writes to offer Casey Luskin’s Listener’s Guide, which addresses the information issue in detail:

Meyer readily acknowledged that information necessary to build the Cambrian animals might have arisen in the Precambrian period, but that did not solve the central problem posed by Darwin’s Doubt — which is the problem of the origin of that information, not precisely when it originated. Meyer noted several times that Marshall had simply pushed the problem of the origin of the necessary information back into the Precambrian, without offering any explanation for how that information had arisen. Meyer also pointed out that experiments on developmental gene regulatory networks in actual animals have repeatedly shown that perturbing the central components of these networks have catastrophic consequences for animal development.

Meyer noted that there is no empirical support for the idea that dGRNs could have been labile in the past. Meyer made this same point in his response to Marshall review. In support of this claim, Meyer cited the work of Eric Davidson, whom Marshall had earlier accused Meyer of neglecting in his discussion of how body plans are built. In fact, Meyer discussed the importance of Davidson’s work extensively in Chapter 13 of Darwin’s Doubt, which makes it odd that Marshall charged during the debate that Meyer “completely missed” this literature. As Meyer wrote: … More.

No one has completely missed anything, actually. Darwinism is false but is defended for non-science related reasons, as noted above and as Kas Thomas discovered at BigThink.

That in itself would be a problem. A bigger problem is the discoveries Darwinism prevents.

Darwin’s trolls stand ready to attack anyone who expresses the doubts Thomas aired, so few dare to just stop digging a bigger hole.

But not all. Meanwhile:

File under: Not going away.

See also: Viruses created multicellular life forms (accidentally, while doing something else) , for an example of prevalent nonsense.

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