The ID Update

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Michelle Malkin, whose guts I admire, echoes my own view of proposed media bailouts:

I launched a Newspaper Bailout Countdown Clock on my blog after The New York Times Company's bonds plunged into junk territory in October. A few weeks later, columnist Jon Fine published a tongue-in-cheek memo in BusinessWeek outlining a federal newspaper rescue proposal.

The jibes were meant to be facetious critiques of for-profit enterprises demanding massive taxpayer expenditures under the guise of preserving the "public interest." But now, in a rather unfunny turn, the newspaper bailout push has actually come to pass.

I expect we will hear many proposals like the one she documents, as various media find the new online world too much to cope with. Malkin concludes,

How "free" can a "free press" be if it is leveraged with government funding? How free would they be to criticize other corporate enterprises seeking local, state or federal help to keep them afloat in hard times? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? A press beholden to the ruling class -- a press that cannot stand on its own two feet and the strength of its product -- is a press better off dead.

Yes, I would say so. It is merely another burden to the taxpayer.

The original purpose of media was to be a permanent critic of government. That is why we are called the fourth estate. We have privileges, we can display our press cards and rush into newsworthy venues. We also have some serious duties = go to jail rather than name a source to whom we have promised anonymity. That is a classic form of civil disobedience.

The two biggest changes in my lifetime have been

1. The growth of private citizen media

and

2. The way so many big time media have morphed into government media.

In explaining this change, two factors seem key to me:

1. The materialist worldview in which legacy mainstream media grew up is collapsing of its own unpersuasiveness - for a variety of reasons.

Example: When science media are reduced to trying to explain why Texan Marilyn Mock bought a house for Tracey Orr based on selfishness, they are really reaching.

Such views are not renounced, so they can never be retired. They are part of the belief system of the journalist who has bought into materialism. That is why you will hear them recycled in pop science media, again and again = ancestral cave men spread their selfish genes by behaving this way (whatever that way was), so that is why Mock does it today. Yuh. Right. Big enlightenment, that.

2. We will not likely get anything better out of popular science media in the foreseeable future. The critical problem is, as Malkin noted above, media companies may want to force the taxpayer to fund their nonsense, thus delaying a transition to a more responsive media.

For what it is worth, I blog regularly at Future Tense, which covers these issues in detail. If you found this post helpful, you might find this one even more so.

Don't worry, we are not a cult, and you will not be asked for money. We are a group of Canadian Christian writers who are finding a way through the transitions, and we have lots of good links.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

Elisa Sand, writing for the Madison (SD) Daily Leader, reports that two films will be shown at the Madison Public Library to introduce area residents to the concept of intelligent design and create some awareness of a local IDEA chapter that has formed here.

Madison resident Don Parker has chartered a local chapter and is looking for interested individuals to join.

IDEA stands for intelligent design and evolution awareness.

"It's promoting freedom in science to go where the evidence leads," Parker said.

To spark discussion, Parker plans to show two films at the library... "Where the Evidence Leads" (Dec. 4 and 10) and "This Privileged Planet" (Dec. 18 and again in January.) Each meeting begins at 7 p.m.

More...

For I am well aware that scarcely a single point is discussed in this volume on which facts can be adduced, often apparently leading to conclusions directly opposite to those at which I have arrived.
-- Charles Darwin, Introduction to Origin of Species

An open letter to my Darwinist friends:

Good news, Darwinists. The data speaks for itself, and evolution is true. We are all evolving, slowly changing over time, with each generation exhibiting new levels of genetic diversity. And your ruthless (if not sacred) killing machine of natural selection fed by unstoppable random mutations remains intact for the most part. Yes, thanks to your unflagging zeal and devotion we now enjoy an ocean of facts and figures showing the power of unguided, random mutations and their short- and long-term effects on the living genome. Dutifully and invisibly replicating voluminous information day after day in complex cellular machinery designed, oops--that looks designed--to do just that, life does the best it can in its silently tedious task of begetting itself. You free-thinking skeptics of all but Darwin can rejoice with the rest us; we are indeed lucky to be alive.

But listen carefully, my friends. Your evolution lobby's biggest problem, and the reason why few but the most heavily invested truly believe, is that at a gut level, that instinctive impression of what makes sense that we all bear deep within us, your evolution story fails to convince. Yes, we are told about the magic wand of natural selection, and we all nod with a look that says, OK, if you say so. But how, we all privately ponder, can random mistakes in the finely tuned genetic code once, much less time after time, provide any beneficially new assembly instruction for unintelligent (that's what "natural" means) preservation from death (that's what "selection" means)? Pardon the rest of us, but this simply doesn't make sense.

Surely even the most surly of you hardened materialists putting full faith in eternal matter must marvel at the marvelously intricate cellular machinery operating like a bustling factory town in high season. And only minds indurate beyond hope can't but harbor a deep, secret wonder at how such deep, secret wonder could really just happen mindlessly. How did the cell's layers upon layers of complex coded instructions for multiple independent yet synergistically cooperating mechanisms come piece by piece from random and unplanned mistakes in a simpler code, with successive minor changes spanning millions of years? By way of crude and insufficient comparison, could the complex instructions of every component and every system of the space shuttle really come from unguided, purposeless mistakes in copying a set of instructions for, say, a little red wagon? Really? Even if we assume a true intelligent selector in place, really? (And, by the way, you've never told us where the instructions for that little red wagon come from.)

What the rest of us will never learn from you Darwinists because it's an inference derived from actual data is that our gut level sense about evolution is absolutely correct. Yes, the data supports Darwinism as far as it goes. Genetic changes, including mutations, appear to be frequent, chance, random events. But the data also confirms that, like everything else in nature, the undirected, randomly changing genome is not exempt from the laws of nature that demand that in the absence of intelligent intervention all natural processes of spontaneous change must tend to degradation and disorder. In nature, it is literally the law: the Second Law of Thermodynamics. And "natural selection," whatever its merits, unless it be super-natural can no more transcend natural law to intelligently code the genome than a river can transcend the law of gravity to flow uphill. In nature, no "theory of upness" can override the law of gravity; everything that goes up (or is up) must (and will) come down. It may fly, float, or get snagged on something for a moment, but it will come down. The same principle applies universally: time is not on the side of "upness" anywhere in nature.

So it's like a fresh breeze in a stuffy room when one happens upon the work of Dr. John C. Sanford, an experienced geneticist with impeccable credentials from Cornell University, who delights the reasonable scientific mind with one of those finally-someone-is-confirming-what-I-always-suspected-must-be-true moments. In his book, Genetic Entropy & the Mystery of the Genome, Dr. Sanford reveals the peer-reviewed studies from experts that show we were right to suspect the mysterious, law-defying "upness" of Darwinian theory all along. Importantly, Dr. Sanford explains the implications of what many Darwinists know but won't tell: the data shows virtually all genetic mutations, the only mechanism you Darwinists have to produce the raw material for new species, are either near neutral or deleterious, and natural selection is incapable of keeping up with all the negative changes. Using the language of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, Dr. Sanford explains the data showing that not only do mutations fail to provide the raw material for novel phenotypic (i.e., bodily) features, but also that genetic entropy (i.e., disorder and information loss) is steadily increasing because natural selection simply cannot stave off the inexorable loss of information in the genetic code caused by mutations. In his words, the "Primary Axiom" of modern biology, i.e., that man is the product of random mutations and natural selection, not only is false, it can be shown false.

Using analogies, including the "red-wagon-to-space-shuttle" example, Dr. Sanford sets out in readable fashion the entropic case against natural selection as a mechanism of beneficial change in the information content of the genome. Consider one problem with natural selection: natural selection acts only at the phenotypic level (on the level of the whole organism) and not at the genotypic level (the molecular level of mutating nucleotides). That is, natural selection can only preserve or kill whole organisms, and cannot detect, much less choose the occassional "good" mutation. Of course this is true, and of course this renders natural selection nothing more than survival of the luckiest, without the necessary sensitivity to truly select for any given nucleotide sequence at the genetic level. Natural selection simply cannot "see" all the near-neutral and slight negative mutations (or even any positive mutations, which have rarely, if ever, been observed). What this means is that not only is natural selection incapable of "selecting" for "good" mutations, it cannot hope to keep up with the continuous torrent of negative mutations sufficiently to stop genetic entropy. According to Sanford, "Unless selection can somehow stop the erosion of information in the human genome, mutations will not only lead to our death, they will lead to the death of our species."

You see, we are all mutants with many thousands of information-degrading mutations already lodged in our genetic code. And the long-term prognosis is not positive; in short, our species, like all living organisms, continues to accumulate genetic information loss, such that we are evolving downward, not upward. Population geneticists have known this since at least 1957, and yet you Pollyanna's of popular Darwinism, who because you are sold-out Darwinists first and skeptical scientists second, ignore the evidence and believe a lie. Yes, let's speak plainly; it is a lie that natural selection can perform super-naturally simply because, by gosh, supernatural power must be assumed to explain your law-defying, bottom-up design--oops, again, occurrence--of information-rich coded machines. It is a fiction, a modern somehow-it-must-work, gosh-of-the-gaps, push-water-up-hill fantasy, this natural selection of yours.

We have four words for you, Darwinists: show us the data. Show us the data to support your theory that natural selection can prevent extinction, much less make any headway to new phenotypic novelty (much less new species). Then we might be interested in your scientific opinions. But until then, the data presents a more interesting scientific question: just where did our devolving genetic code come from in the first place? What gave us the low entropy of our original "upness"? What theory, perfectly consistent with the data, would support the idea that we (and all living organisms) are not evolving to a higher state, but slowly devolving from some higher state, perhaps a state of perfect genomic information content? Such a fascinating scientific question obviously leads to even more fascinating scientific questions about original creation. But how could any true scientist resist the thrill of such truth discovery?

In any event, in light of the data showing that with each mutation our genome experiences loss of information, we are not only lucky to be alive; we are lucky we are not extinct. It appears that the eventual and inevitable catastrophic "mutational meltdown" predicted by the data is many generations off. In the meantime, can we not use our scientific reasoning to consider the truth of our existence? What, if anything, would the idea of a truly supernaturally created genome that is now slowly degenerating over time imply about our history, our purpose and our existence?

Sadly, most of you Darwinists will react defensively to "facts ... adduced ... apparently leading to conclusions directly opposite to those at which [Darwin] arrived." That's understandable because even though many such facts plainly exist, in all your education you were never exposed to any scientific counter to the lie of natural selection as a positive change agent. And most people cannot admit to contrary facts when in an advanced stage of belief. But for any of you Darwinists who see the writing on the genetic wall and are willing to think outside your imposed consensus box, welcome.

Yes, evolution is the truth; it's just not the whole truth or nothing but the truth. So, (please) help us God.

Roddy Bullock is a freelance writer and the Executive Director of the Intelligent Design Network of Ohio and is the author of The Cave Painting: A Parable of Science, published by and available from Access Research Network.

Send comments to: roddybullock@idnetohio.com.

If you like this essay, go here for many more.

Copyright (c) 2008 Roddy M. Bullock, all rights reserved. Quotes and links permitted with attribution.

Publisher and agent inquiries welcome.

References:

John C. Sanford, PhD, Genetic Entropy & the Mystery of the Genome (Waterloo, NY, 2008). ISBN 978-0-9816316-0-8. Available from Amazon.

Bergman J. (2004). Research on the deterioration of the genome an Darwinism: why mutations result in degeneration of the genome. Intelligent design Conference, Biola University, April 22-23. As stated by Sanford, "Bergman (2004) reviewed the topic of beneficial mutations. Among other things, he did a simple literature search via biological Abstracts and Medline. He found 453,732 "mutation" hits, but among these only 186 mentioned the word "beneficial" (about 4 in 10,000). When those 186 references were reviewed, the presumed beneficial mutations were only beneficial in a very narrow sense and consistently involved loss-of-function (loss of information) changes. He was unable to find a single example of a mutation that unambiguously created new information.

"Mutational meltdown" occurs as a population's fitness continually declines and the fertility eventually begins to decline. It is the final phase of "error catastrophe", which is the biological situation where deleterious mutations are accumulating faster than selection can remove them. Unless reversed, error catastrophe leads to the extinction of a population.

On 11 September 2008, a symposium on the theme "Beyond the Mind-Body Problem: New Paradigms in the Science of Consciousness" was held at the United Nations attended by medical doctors and neuroscientists. The organisers spoke of a search for a more comprehensive perspective on the "self" and the workings of the human mind. The speakers at the conference have been engaged in this search and were ready to consolidate and move on. But in order to develop their thinking, they needed to challenge the prevailing paradigm in neuroscience. "Though much remains to be done, their findings to date have shed a more holistic light on our understanding of the elusive mind-body problem." This holistic view opens up new opportunities for research:

"The symposium will also serve as the occasion for the formal launch of The Human Consciousness Project - a multidisciplinary collaboration of international scientists and physicians who have joined forces to research the nature of consciousness and its relationship with the brain."

Materialist critics say of the new paradigm: "This nasty mind-virus piggybacks on reasonable worries."

The prevailing paradigm in neuroscience is materialism. Everything about the brain is interpreted in terms of physics and chemistry: our sense of free agency, our consciousness, our hopes and our ability to appreciate beauty. Yet this paradigm has only limited results to show for all the effort expended and "scientists have yet to crack the great mystery of how consciousness could emerge from firing neurons". The UN conference set out an agenda for going beyond reductionism. Jeffrey Schwartz warned the delegates that what they were doing would be met with heated opposition, because materialism is deemed by many to be of the essence of science:

"YOU cannot overestimate, how threatened the scientific establishment is by the fact that it now looks like the materialist paradigm is genuinely breaking down. You're gonna hear a lot in the next calendar year about. . . how Darwin's explanation of how human intelligence arose is the only scientific way of doing it. . . I'm asking us as a world community to go out there and tell the scientific establishment, enough is enough! Materialism needs to start fading away and non-materialist causation needs to be understood as part of natural reality."

Sure enough, the event has raised alarm! The New Scientist reported it with the headline: "Creationists declare war over the brain". It has become commonplace for the science media to portray every departure from philosophical naturalism as "creationism" as though that were the ultimate crime for a scientists and no more needs be said. There is evidence that some of the conference speakers have links with the ID Movement, and apparently that is enough to shower derision on them. Since scientists are supposed to be able to grapple with complex issues and think rationally and objectively (rather than emotionally), I do not understand why there is so little outcry against the intolerant attitudes of so many science journalists and writers.

Here are some reactions quoted, described as "the voice of mainstream academia":

Andy Clark, professor of logic and metaphysics at the University of Edinburgh, UK: "This is real and dangerous and coming our way." [. . .] "This is an especially nasty mind-virus because it piggybacks on some otherwise reasonable thoughts and worries."

Patricia Churchland, philosopher of neuroscience at the University of California, San Diego: "it is an argument from ignorance. The fact something isn't currently explained doesn't mean it will never be explained or that we need to completely change not only our neuroscience but our physics."

It is instructive to flag up some of the missing ingredients in this report
1. No interviews with the scientists that were at the symposium are reported. This was noted by Angus Menuge in a letter (unpublished) to New Scientist: "I find it very troubling, that while Amanda Gefter took the trouble of interviewing sources who advocate scientific materialism, she did not interview any critics of that position, instead relying on third-hand reports. This does not seem to reflect journalistic best practice."
2. There was no acknowledgement that ID can lead to new research opportunities. This is perhaps not surprising, because science journalists have been programmed to say that ID closes the door on science. This is bad history, because ID science was the trigger for the time known as the scientific revolution and ever since then ID scientists have consistently demonstrated that ID extends the horizons of scholarly enquiry.
3. There is no acknowledgement that the new paradigm has emerged because of evidence. Materialists cannot allow any evidence to count against their paradigm. They are committed to the principle that all explanations of phenomena have to be formulated by reference to "chance and necessity". Consequently, as in the quote from Churchland above, any hint of evidence against their position is opposed as an argument from ignorance.

Geftner declares that only the materialist perspective is science in her final paragraph. She also throws out the charge that non-materialists are invoking a "God of the gaps" style of argument:

"What can scientists do? They have been criticised for not doing enough to teach the public about evolution. Maybe now they need a big pre-emptive push to engage people with the science of the brain - and help the public appreciate that the brain is no place to invoke the "God of the gaps"."

This "pre-emptive push" seems to be the only response of the materialists! Shout louder! Put more resources into educating the public! Never admit that non-materialist philosophies can lead to fruitful science! Ignore their claims of arguing from evidence and insist that they are using ignorance to invoke the "God of the gaps"!
In a letter of response to New Scientist, Beauregard and Schwartz write:

"We do not question materialist models of the mind-brain complex merely for ideological or political reasons. We want to move beyond them because we have not found them adequate explanations of mind-brain interactions, nor do they point to useful treatment plans. Your writer's attempt to smear scientists who are looking for new directions, while perhaps entertaining, is a poor substitute for thoughtful coverage of a growing area."

Beyond the Mind-Body Problem: New Paradigms in the Science of Consciousness, September 11th 2008, United Nations, New York.

and

Creationists declare war over the brain
Amanda Gefter
New Scientist, 22 October 2008

See also:

Beauregard, M. and Schwartz, J.M. Non-materialist mind, New Scientist, 29 November 2008, page 23.
Go here for the unedited version.

Menuge, A. Unpublished letter to New Scientist, 26 November 2008.

Review Of Alexander Oparin's 'Genesis and Evolutionary Development of Life'

By Robert Deyes
ARN Correspondent

In 1924 the Russian biochemist Alexander Oparin made his mark on 'life origins' debates by proclaiming that life had sprung into existence through natural chemical processes here on earth. In Oparin's assessment, the origin of life on our planet was more than a 'lucky accident'. It was and is a phenomenon that could be studied through objective scientific research. For Oparin, the beginning of life 3.9 million years ago would have required that at least two conditions be met- an absence of free atmospheric oxygen and an abundance of ultraviolet radiation that would have allowed the formation of life-essential hydrocarbons through photochemical processes. In short, conditions would have needed to have been radically different to what they are today. Oparin's conclusions were clearly emphasized in his 1969 book 'Genesis and Evolutionary Development of Life' where he talked about the 'preactualistic era' of the earth's history. He concluded that the existence of life today 'mixed the cards' because the products of metabolism generated by living organisms would not have been present before life began. As he expounded in his book:

"[organisms] could have been formed only on the basis of a lengthy evolution through the gradual perfection of some far simpler original systems isolated from the general homogeneous solution of organic compounds"

According to Oparin, life would have had to have begun through the isolation of portions of a 'primitive soup' containing building blocks such as amino acids and nucleotides. Separation from the ravages of the external environment would have had to have been maintained by some ill-defined boundary or wall made of lipid-protein complexes; perhaps a primitive version of the membrane that forms the outer boundary of cells today. Oparin went further still by speculating that such a boundary would not only have contained a protoplasmic fluid distantly resembling the cytoplasm but would have also provided a 'frontier' for the rapid exchange of components necessary for cellular survival.

To bolster the credibility of his theory, Oparin drew on the chemistry of coacervation- a process whereby large molecules organize themselves into drop-like aggregates or 'coacervates' and which he considered as one possible avenue for the formation of cell-like units on our primitive earth. What most impressed Oparin about coacervates was that they could host simple biochemical reactions when supplied with the appropriate enzymes. Of course the simplicity of these reactions was a far cry from the highly complex network of biochemical signals and metabolic pathways that comprise the dynamics of the simplest of living cells we know of. Nevertheless one of his primary objectives was to show the fluidity of a biochemical reaction occurring within the coacervate drop. This he achieved successfully.

Through his work on coacervates, Oparin became one of the first proponents of the 'metabolism-first' approach for explaining the origin of life by suggesting that biochemical processes and not some form of genetic instruction provided the seeds for the formation of the first cell (Ref 1). Yet from the onset, Oparin's experiments faced tremendous theoretical as well as practical problems. Most notably coacervation is a process that relies solely on electrostatic attraction between molecules and has therefore very little in common with the plasma membranes of living cells (Ref 2). Moreover, the process of coacervation requires careful control of chemical parameters such as pH, temperature and salt concentrations if the necessary molecular aggregations are to occur (Ref 2)- hardly what one might expect from the chemical maelstrom of a prebiotic soup.

For a primitive membrane-like barrier to have been an effective frontier to the outside world, it must have not only been selectively permeable to molecules needed for intra-cellular biochemical reactions but also must have been capable of maintaining an osmotic equilibrium with surrounding water (Ref 3). Today organisms have active transport systems that allow them to perform precisely this function (Ref 3). These systems involve intricate arrays of transmembrane channels made of defined protein complexes none of which would have been present in a hypothetical coacervate-type cell. Ohio University chemist David Deamer has answered such an impass by asserting that life must have existed in a "low ionic strength lacustrine environment" such as a pond or lake where salts might have been more dilute (Ref 3). Yet unless such lakes were supplied with just the right amounts of water to maintain the status quo, evaporation effects would only have served to concentrate these salts.

Oparin's belief in the significance of coacervates was reflective of the knowledge of the day since during much of Oparin's life, the cell's complexity was a mystery. The molecular biology revolution had not yet occurred and so the detailed role of DNA and the functional diversity of proteins had not yet been uncovered. In keeping with Darwins' theory of evolution, Oparin and the English biochemist J.B.S Haldane inferred that cellular biochemical networks and metabolic processes could have arisen in a gradual bit by bit fashion within the context of primitive coacervate-type cells. Nevertheless they failed to consider the minimal requirements of a functional cell and the enormous jump between a structure as simple as a coacervate drop and the simplest form of life. In his review of the work of biochemist Harold Morowitz, biologist Michael Denton exposed the magnitude of the problem:

"A [self-replicating] cell would necessarily be bound by a cell membrane and the simplest feasible [membrane] would probably be the typical bilayered lipid membrane utilized by all existing cells on earth today. The synthesis of the fats of the cell membrane would require perhaps a minimum of five proteins. Energy would be required, and this might require a further eight proteins for a very simple form of energy metabolism. Altogether, probably a minimum of another hundred proteins would be required for DNA replication and protein synthesis. The size of such a cell, containing perhaps four mRNA molecules, a full complement of enzymes, DNA molecules about 100,000 nucleotides long and bounded by a cell membrane, would be about one-tenth of a micron in diameter. Morowitz comments, "This is the smallest hypothetical cell that we can envisage within the context of current biochemical thinking. It is almost certainly a lower limit, since we have allowed no control functions, no vitamin metabolism and extremely limited intermediary metabolism" (Ref 4, p.309)

In his book Oparin clearly missed the point, assuming so much while at the same time demonstrating so little about how natural processes could have lead to the first cell. Others who have followed his example have done no better.

REFERENCES
1. Richard Robinson (2005), Jump-Starting a Cellular World: Investigating the Origin of Life, from Soup to Networks, PLoS Biol, Vol 3(11), p. e396

2. Charles Thaxton, Walter Bradley and Roger Olsen (1984), The Mystery of Life's Origin Reassessing Current Theories, Published by Lewis and Stanley, Dallas, Texas, pp. 171-172

3. David Deamer, Jason Dworkin, Scott Sandford, Max Bernstein, Louis Allamandola (2002), The First Cell Membranes, Astrobiology Volume 2, pp. 371-381

4. Michael Denton (1998), Nature's Destiny: How The Laws of Biology Reveal Purpose in the Universe, 1st Edition Published by the Free Press, New York

In an informative essay, Janet Browne reflects on three Darwin commemorations: his funeral in Westminster Abbey, the 1909 centennial and the 1959 celebration. Each grasped the "opportunity to push an agenda, and even to adapt the past, so telling us what we like best to hear".

Nature's contribution to the anniversary preparations (Darwin 200 index here)

Darwin's religious views became known through his correspondence. He was content to be known as an agnostic and his view of God, if he did exist, was that he is remote from this world. Christian reaction to Darwinism ranged from "it is atheism" (Charles Hodge) to "God guides the process of evolution" (Asa Gray). Opposition to the technicalities of the theory came from contemporary scientists who were not persuaded that Darwin had a strong case. After Darwin's death, several colleagues in the Royal Society lobbied to have him buried in Westminster Abbey. This was to make a statement about Darwinism and faith and also to turn Darwin into an iconic figure. Browne writes that this was:

"valuable propaganda at a time when relations between science and religion were intensely fraught. The men of the Royal Society used Darwin's funeral as a way to reassure their contemporaries that science was not a threat to moral values, but rather was becoming increasingly important in the modern world."

By 1909, genetics was revealing that much of the variation reported by Darwin was innate and this was stimulating fresh thinking about biological change. "Thus, new forms could emerge de novo, without selective pressure and adaptive success." At the same time, palaeontologists were reporting lineages that "progressed" and this seemed to inject teleology back into biology. Darwinism was becoming sidelined.

"The 1909 commemorations, organised by a small group of naturalists and Darwin family members from the University of Cambridge, provided a way to reassert the primacy of natural selection against other evolutionary rivals."

A much bigger event was the celebration of 1959. This was the platform where the architects of the "modern synthesis" asserted their supremacy.

"The delegates at Chicago did more than celebrate a new union of the biological sciences. They in effect created modern Darwinism by emphatically rejecting any form of Lamarkism [. . .] The delegates also rejected the idea that the fossil record shows signs of directed evolution, and expanded Darwinian thought to cover the evolution of mind and behaviour. During the conference, Julian Huxley, the grandson of Thomas Henry Huxley, gave a secular sermon in the style of his grandfather, and provocatively declared that religious belief was merely a biological feature of evolving mankind."

Browne points out that "much of what we know about Darwin and Darwinism, including his celebrity status, is the result of the 1959 celebration in Chicago." This created the illusion of a consensus among biologists, but the reality is that many have serious doubts about the efficacy of natural selection to do what Darwinism claims for it. Many also doubt that gradualism is the way evolution proceeds. But the consensus means that doubting Darwin becomes a serious academic crime, for which the guilty get expelled from positions of influence and sometimes expelled even from being able to pursue a career in science.

Browne asks: "Will [the 2009] activities have a veiled agenda, as did those of the past?" The answer to this question must be an emphatic yes! If you don't want your mind to be manipulated, you had better develop your critical thinking skills. For more on Darwin as an icon, go here.

Birthdays to remember
Janet Browne
Nature 456, 324-325 (20 November 2008) | doi:10.1038/456324a

Summary: Anniversaries of Charles Darwin's life and work have been used to rewrite and re-energize his theory of natural selection. Janet Browne tracks a century of Darwinian celebrations.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

You don't need to pay thousands of dollars a year to hear these profs:

ASTR 160 - Frontiers and Controversies in Astrophysics: Professor Charles Bailyn teaches this course in astrophysics that focuses on black holes, dark energy and extra-solar planets. [Open Yale]

PHYS 200 - Fundamentals of Physics: Those who have a good background in math and physics can get a great review from this course offered by Professor Ramamurti Shankar. [Open Yale]

String Theory, Black Holes, and the Laws of Nature: String theory provides promise in unraveling the mysteries that surround the laws that govern the universe and Professor Andrew Strominger discusses his insights into this theory and its relationship to black holes in this lecture. [Harvard @ Home]

Socks Before Shoes: Unraveling Cell Division: Professor of molecular and cellular biology at Harvard, Andrew Murray, explains the process of cell division in this video lecture and offers some insights into what might cause abnormalities. [Harvard @ Home]

A COMPLETE Search for New Suns: The COMPLETE project aims to map 1,000s of light years of star forming material in the Milky Way and you can learn all about it from Alyssa A. Goodman, Professor of Astronomy at Harvard in this lecture. [Harvard @ Home]

Observing the Birth of the Universe: Lyman Page, Professor of Physics, delivers this video lecture on the origins of our universe, using humorous and accessible means to explain complex concepts. [Princeton]

Sequencing the Human Genome: Want to learn more about the process of sequencing our genome from start to finish? This lecture from Craig Venter can help you to become more informed on the subject whether you’re interested for fun or scholarly exploration. [Princeton]

Einstein's Biggest Blunder: A Cosmic Mystery Story: Alex Filippenko from the University of California, Berkeley delivers this lecture on one of the best-known thinkers and theorists of the 20th century. [Princeton]

Also, just up at Colliding Universes (and a chance to vote for Colliding Universes in the Canadian Blog Awards):

Not just aliens - the multiverse has gotta be out there too! (vote through a link here!)

Extraterrestrial life: Here's a story you could only read in New Scientist ...

The universe has the hallmarks of design and what can anyone do about it?

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

Anna Patty, in the Sydney Morning Herald, reports that the state school registration and curriculum authority has investigated the teaching of creation theory in science classes at a Christian school.

The Board of Studies responded to a complaint about Pacific Hills Christian School in Dural, Australia.

The board referred the complaint to Christian Schools Australia, asking it to investigate.

The head of Christian Schools Australia, Stephen O'Doherty, said his organisation had found no reason for Pacific Christian School to lose its registration. "The whole thing is a complete furphy," he said. The school did not teach intelligent design or "creationism" - creation as scientific theory. He said the school had met the Board of Studies syllabus requirements in teaching evolution theory as science.

Interesting that a Christian school gets in trouble for alledgedly teaching ID.

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Peter Williams' ID.Plus blog reports on Bradley Monton's position on ID. Bradley Monton is a philosopher of science at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He has specialised in the philosophy of physics and the anthropic fine tuning argument. Prof. Monton thinks that Intelligent Design theory is science, and that its arguments have some force, although he is more impressed with ID arguments in physics than in biology. He is also an atheist.

Monton recently took part in a series of audio interviews with Casey Luskin of the Discovery Institute Centre for Science.

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by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

GATTACA, I keep telling you it's all over between us, we are not just our "genes." It's not even clear that there is a gene, in that sense.

But you are just so not listening ...

If you want to predict how tall your children might one day be, a good bet would be to look in the mirror, and at your mate. Studies going back almost a century have estimated that height is 80–90% heritable. So if 29 centimetres separate the tallest 5% of a population from the shortest, then genetics would account for as many as 27 of them1.

This year, three groups of researchers2,3,4 scoured the genomes of huge populations (the largest study4 looked at more than 30,000 people) for genetic variants associated with the height differences. More than 40 turned up.

But there was a problem: the variants had tiny effects. Altogether, they accounted for little more than 5% of height's heritability — just 6 centimetres by the calculations above. Even though these genome-wide association studies (GWAS) turned up dozens of variants, they did "very little of the prediction that you would do just by asking people how tall their parents are", says Joel Hirschhorn at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who led one of the studies3.

[ ... ]

There could be scarier and more intractable reasons for unaccounted-for heritability that are not even being discussed. "It's a possibility that there's something we just don't fundamentally understand," Kruglyak says. "That it's so different from what we're thinking about that we're not thinking about it yet."

Still the mystery continues to draw its sleuths, for Kruglyak as for many other basic-research scientists. "You have this clear, tangible phenomenon in which children resemble their parents," he says. "Despite what students get told in elementary-school science, we just don't know how that works." (Personal genomes: The case of the missing heritability by Brendan Maher, Nature News (Published online 5 November 2008 | Nature 456, 18-21 (2008) | doi:10.1038/456018a)

See also:

Farewell, fat gene ... goodbye gay gene ... so long, sloppiness gene. And can someone please text Lamarck and tell him ...

Goodbye GATTACA: Environment and lifestyle affect which genes are actually expressed

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).