The ID Report

“The evolution of sex is a major puzzle in modern evolutionary biology.”

So reads Wikipedia’s opening sentence on the topic “Evolution of Sex”. This wonderful understatement masks a gaping hole in Darwinian theory: how to explain not only one purposefully complex living being, but a mating pair. Look it up for yourself; search the Darwinian scriptures to find a plausible evolutionary explanation for male and female, and you are likely to discover, as did Darwin’s devoted disciple Richard Dawkins, “There are many theories of why sex exists, and none of them is knock-down convincing.”

Understatements abound, and not surprisingly, because “why sex exists” is one fact unexplainable by materialist theories of origins such as Darwinism. Another fact, one for which Darwin didn’t even attempt an explanation, is the origin of life in the first place. Like bookends to bulging volumes of evolutionary human history, the origin of life and the origin of sexuality stubbornly resist materialist explanations. With no plausible alpha or omega in their evolutionary story of human existence, Darwinists are left to fanciful imaginations to keep their neatly shelved fiction from tumbling down.

Darwinists know that the requirement of male and female to produce offspring is evolutionarily inefficient and costly. Selfishly maximizing progeny is greatly hindered by rendering one half of the species incapable of reproduction and imposing energy-expending searching requirements on both sexes, including the cost of attracting the opposite sex by being attractive in very evolutionarily-unattractive ways. It seems that sex, whether noun or transitive verb, is a very anti-evolutionary thing.

But beyond the evolutionarily costly aspects of sexual reproduction, the fact of a male and female of virtually every race and kind presents a much more difficult problem for Darwinists. Mating pairs of a species mean that for any given species, both a male and female of that species are required for the continuation of the species. One of species is useless. Two of a species is useless unless they are opposite sexes and happen to appear at the same time in the same place (and decide to mate). Three of a species is impossible without that first mom and pop dating, mating and successfully creating number three. Can Darwinism really account for this?

Think of it this way: before the third human being could breath the air of this earth, there had to be the first two, male and female. This simple fact may be the only truly unifying principle of biology, unifying because it is a fact of evolution on which we can all agree. Everyone—materialists, Darwinists, creationists, and even atheists—everyone believes that if you rewind time and go back to the beginning of the human race there must logically and inescapably have existed at the same time and in the same place the first common mother and father of all six billion human beings on earth today. Not the first male only or the first female only, but both. After that first tango the race was on and the rest is history: we all evolved from that first pair. On this we are all evolutionists.

Darwinists and designists simply disagree over how the first male and female got here in the first place. Designists rely on the clear evidence for design, the astronomically impossible odds of unguided processes to achieve purposefully mating pairs, and a good dose of common sense to infer purposeful intelligent design. Darwinists, on the other hand, deny the clear evidence for design (dismissing it in question-begging dogma as “apparent” design), largely ignore the staggering odds associated with evolution of the sexes (the above-mentioned disciple willing to “tackle” the problem only after he can “summon the courage”), and suppress common sense to refute purposeful design. After all, they reason, we are here so “evolution happened” somehow. But the “somehow” of sexuality is not so easily explained if details are to replace “just so” stories. Consider Darwin’s tree of life. According to this tree all Homo Sapiens descended from a common ancestor not only of apes, but of every living thing, plant or animal. Darwin says we have a common ancestor with snakes, ferns, stinkbugs and seaweed—yes, if you trace your ancestry back far enough you will find a common Gramps (or Grammy) with seaweed. Sometime between most recent ancestral fork in the branches and today there had to evolve two human beings contemporaneously, one male and one female. Evolving these necessary beings at the same time in history has not been explained in Darwinian terms; it is at best highly improbable. In fact, by any reasonable estimation, it is impossible.

And that’s the point: In real life mating parts of a working whole are always and without exception designed purposefully, each intelligently crafted with the other in mind. Imagine Thomas Edison going door-to-door hawking his new light bulb to candle-lit households. Without a mating socket in the house, Edison would be sent packing, his invention worthless. For this reason Edison set to work inventing not only the light bulb but a suitable socket along with a multitude of other supporting necessities. By design the light bulb and socket work together to provide light to millions. Either bulb or socket alone is useless, and neither would have survived long in the absence of the other. Neither would even have been invented without a compatible mate in mind. Of course, this is real life, not the imaginings of Darwinists.

Darwin’s “descent with modification” explains the great diversity in the human race. Not only do we have great variation in external appearance, we also have different levels of resistance to bacteria, different susceptibilities to disease, and different physical adaptations related to continued survival. In this sense evolution is an uncontested fact. Again, everyone believes that both the third and the six billionth human being trace their ancestry back to that first human couple, and the odds that number three looked much like number six billion are slim. This is “evolution” of the kind on which we can all agree.

But Darwinism’s strong claims of “atoms-to-Adam” evolution of the human species from the first living organism is hardly believable based on the evidence, and practically reaches fairy tale status with the recognition of the requirement of a contemporaneous “atoms-to-madam” evolution. Imagining the first human to evolve by unguided, purposeless processes of nature from a non-human ancestor is difficult enough to believe. But that poor collection of atoms would no doubt be lonely; struggling to survive long enough to find a date, with its only chance being among non-humans. Assuming Adam arrived first, his union with a non-human would then have to produce “madam” and he and she would quickly need to produce number three. Believable? Hardly.

But belief is what it’s all about. No one of us was there; all we have is the present-day evidence from which to build a historical narrative. One such narrative holds that the present-day evidence of purposeful design actually suggests neither, and this non-intuitive notion drives an unreasonable reliance on astounding chance and astonishing probabilities. Boy (and girl), are we ever lucky. Another narrative holds that the present-day evidence of purposeful design is just that—purposeful design—and this intuitive notion drives a reasonable reliance on material evidence and common sense. Like a lock designed with a key in mind, the female appears designed for the male, and together the first mates unlocked the entire human race.

Both narratives require a first pair, male and female, from which we all evolved. Both provide evidence on which to base belief. At some point, the “puzzle” of human sexuality can be solved only by an evidence-based appeal to reason: Between unguided, purposeless chance or design, which is more reasonable to believe? Discard reason and truth can only be chanced upon, and chance is a very inefficient puzzle solver. But depend on reason and puzzles are largely temporary, because reason is to puzzles as keys are to locks.

Roddy Bullock is the Executive Director of the Intelligent Design Network of Ohio (www.idnetohio.com) and is the author of The Cave Painting: A Parable of Science, available from Access Research Network. Send comments to: roddybullock@idnetohio.com.

Copyright 2006 Roddy M. Bullock, all rights reserved. Quotes and links permitted with attribution.

References:
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_sex

Richard Dawkins, Climbing Mount Improbable, (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1996) p. 85.

Regarding the term "designists" (and "adesignists") see, http://idnetohio.cinti.net/pages/designist-or-adesignist.php

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Working my way through my inbox here, from the bottom up:

■ I can't help quoting again, if I have already done so, from one of the best summaries I have seen of the difficulty in covering the intelligent design controversy.

There's another point in this. Try as I may, struggling with selfish genes, alleles and the rest, I cannot find any Darwinist argument which doesn't in the end rely on conjecture, backed up by the argument that it is the majority view. Well, a majority cannot make a falsehood true, and all kinds of things have been the majority view, from the idea that blood didn't circulate to the idea that iron ships would sink (and the idea that Anthony Blair was a refreshing and brilliant new feature in British politics). As for majority medical orthodoxies which have been totally mistaken, someone should write a book about them, as there have been so many. Unlike Darwinism, these ideas could be - and were - exploded by experiment and discovery. But Darwinism is all about events that happened when there was nobody there to witness them. And it is also about events which - if happening now - are happening too slowly for anyone to live long enough to see them. It is amazing how many supporters of this theory cannot see the difference between the micro-evolution of adaptation or alteration within species, and the far more ambitious developments of macro-evolution, in my view qualitatively different, which Darwinists believe in.

It's nice to know that the tradition of responsible skepticism in journalism is not dead.

■ Over at the Huffington Post, Deepak Chopra is taking a big risk in attacking materialism.

Currently most neurologists and philosophers contend that the brain produces consciousness. For them, wanting to eat a banana is a subjective impulse that is responding to brain activity. This defies common sense, of course. To say that my brain is making me eat a banana seems absurd. I want to eat a banana, and once I do, my brain carries out the necessary action (buying a banana, peeling it, putting it in my mouth, etc.) Mundane as this example may be, it's actually an astonishing feat of mind over matter. How in the world do our thoughts manage to move the molecules in our brain?
Some very famous neurologists adopt the common-sense approach, declaring that the mind is real and precedes the brain. I would point readers to Wilder Penfield and Sir John Eccles (the latter won the Nobel Prize for his work on synaptic activity). He is the author of the famous phrase, "God is in the gap." In other words, molecules aren't the source of intelligence; something we can't see operating in and among our brain cells is.

I wonder if the lefties realize that it is quite possible Chopra actually doesn't believe in materialism, that that isn't just a pose he is striking against Da Man?
■ A guy with a science background and a career in business, Carl Gunter, has just published a book in which he makes some interesting non-materialist arguments:

Chapter 5 - The Brain
Modern physiologists attempt to explain the brain and the mind as a computer. The renowned neuropsychologist, Karl Lashley, spent his life cutting into rats’ brains in a futile quest to decipher the brain’s neural wiring and locate memory. It has yet to be found. Looking at the brain’s activity, we see that the brain’s fluid organization of forces is diametrically different from a computer’s rigidly imprisoned forces. Again we find life’s mysterious force of molecular organization. In a little acknowledged theory, the Nobel Prize neurophysiologist, Sir John Eccles, proposed that the brain’s operation is directed by the nonphysical mind.

Chapter 6 – The Mind
The eminent microbiologist, Herbert Jennings, in his studies of bacteria, paramecium, and amoebas found that their responses to stimuli were strikingly similar to those of large-brained animals. He concluded that if these tiny, one-celled creatures were enlarged to the size of dogs, we would readily see them to possess conscious choice, perception, memory, intelligence, and emotion. The fact that these mental qualities are present in minute bags of slithering protoplasm strongly supports Eccles’ view that the conscious mind does not “emerge” from the brain but is an independent, nonphysical force.

I recall a passage in Gordon Rattray Taylor's The Great Evolution Mystery, making the same point about the capabilities of one-celled animals. There's a story there, I am sure, but only one cell of a guy could tell it ...

■ A friend notes that a recent article in Science begins,

"The old notion of natural selection as an omnipotent force in biological evolution has given way to one where adaptive processes are constrained by physical, chemical, and biological exigencies."

What happened to the "overwhelming" confirmation of Darwin's theory of natural selection? (Note: You have to pay for the article.)

■ Apparently, a new fossil challenges century-old concepts of tetrapod evolution:

The fossil skeleton shows the fish's skull had large holes for breathing through the top of the head but importantly also had muscular front fins with a well-formed humerus, ulna and radius - the same bones are found in the human arm.

"This new fossil proves that features of land-living tetrapods (four-legged vertebrates) evolved much earlier in their evolutionary history than previously thought," Mr Fitzgerald, a researcher in the School of Geosciences, said. "This means that humans can trace their evolutionary roots, and adaptations for life on land, further back in time, to more than 380 million years ago.

Interesting, how things seem to spring full-grown in the history of life.

■ Human evolution as it probably ain't: Here's a genuinely retro item: A claim that the human race will diverge by the year 3000:

The descendants of the genetic upper class would be tall, slim, healthy, attractive, intelligent, and creative and a far cry from the "underclass" humans who would have evolved into dim-witted, ugly, squat goblin-like creatures.

The theory is fronted by evolutionary theorist Oliver Curry of the London School of Economics. I can't make out why he thinks this is supposed to happen, but it certainly reminds one of the Eloi and the Morlocks in H.G. Wells's The Time Machine. And we all know that life imitates art. A friend tells me that the article was more worthy of April Fool's Day than the BBC, where it originated. Just why this is supposed to happen is unclear, but of course we all know that all our progeny will always belong in the beautiful group. Glad that's settled then.

■ A number of ID types have complained about the ridiculous bias against ID in Wikipedia entries. I must say, I think it is scandalous, and detracts from the value of Wikipedia. This entry about ID math boffin Bill Dembski is a big improvement on a recent one that broke just about every rule in how to write a useful bio entry. After all, if I want to hear anti-ID stuff, I can always go to NCSE . One expects a more objective tone from a reference resource. However, there may be a competitor for Wikipedia. The new Citizendium claims,

The Citizendium (sit-ih-ZEN-dee-um), a "citizens' compendium of everything," is an experimental new wiki project that combines public participation with gentle expert guidance. It has begun life as a "gradual fork" of Wikipedia. But it has taken on a life of its own and will, perhaps, become the flagship of a new set of responsibly-managed free knowledge projects. We will avoid calling it an "encyclopedia," because there will probably always be articles in the resource that have not been vouched for in any sense--and because the sheer size of the resource actually changes the nature of the beast.

I hope the project thrives. The public could use bios of ID guys and anti-ID guys - no hagiography, no slams, just verified stuff you'd want to know if you had to write on the subject and did not have a big emotional or political need to prove them right or wrong.

■ A note about the recent humorous Flock of Dodos, a film that purports to be* about the ID controversy: From The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design (sidebar, p. 28):

Turn the flock back: Darwin's Dodos. At the Tribeca Film Festival in April and May 2006, evolutionary biologist-turned-filmmaker Randy Olson premiered Flock of Dodos, a film that claims Haeckel's embryos haven't appeared in biology textbooks since 1914. Yet Olson knows that many recent textbooks DO contain Haeckel's faked drawings. Although Flock of Dodos pretends to be a documentary, it is actually a pro-Darwin propaganda film.

Well, yes, maybe, but it is hard to imagine a typical filmmaker today actually questioning materialism and Darwinism. You see, even if he knew that the faked drawings appear in texts today, he must say that they don't because that is the answer that causes the least stress.

*Why do I say, "purports to be"? No film can be about the ID controversy whose producers simply cannot conceive of the idea that materialism might be wrong, and therefore Darwinism might be superfluous as a creation story... But I predict that a number of such films will in fact be made. Indeed, as materialists become more nervous, the pace will likely increase.

■ At Phi Beta Cons Carol Iannone asks,

I hold no brief for ID, but why isn’t it scientific to say, as IDers do, that certain biological mechanisms are irreducibly complex (i.e., inexplicable by random mutation and natural selection)? Why aren't the probability models that show that the components of life would take a trillion times the age of the earth to evolve by chance, why aren't they science?

Carol, you don't need me to tell you that such thoughts are forbidden because they do nothing to prop up materialism.

■ Cleaning up my files here, I see where Nature announced via an editorial last summer,

After a federal court ruled that intelligent design could not be taught in schools in Dover, Pennsylvania, many thought the idea would fade from public view ...

Well, the "many" who thought that should have read this.

■ American Association for the Advancement of Science put out a book in 2006 aimed at convincing people that there is no conflict between traditional spiritual beliefs and Darwinism, though obviously many committed Darwinists disagree. Any bets on whether AAAS will go after those folk instead of the ID guys? Until they do, it would be silly to give their claims any consideration. Just so you know,

The book features a narrative about the personal dilemma of a fictional college student, Angela Rawlett, as she struggles to reconcile her Christian upbringing with her keen interest in biology. Her story is rooted in reality, according to Bertka. Students from some conservative Christian backgrounds sometimes approach biology professors with concerns that the study of evolution will conflict with their religious beliefs.

Clearly, they read the papers, and that shouldn't be allowed.

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 forthcoming The Spiritual Brain (Harper 2007).

O'Leary's recent columns of interest : On neuroscience implications/applications of intelligent design

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

For links to all go here.

1. A recent ChristianWeek column: Faith@Science: The God gene? Spot? Circuit? Okay, maybe a Module?

(Note: This is the column I wrote shortly after finishing my work on The Spiritual Brain, explaining why notions of a God spot, gene, module, or circuit in the brain are completely ridiculous.)

For more go here.

2. Another recent ChristianWeek column:"Made in the image of God"? What does that mean?

Ever hear of a "humanzee"? Some would hail the hybrid of a human and a chimpanzee as a crowning achievement.

Because chimpanzees are our closest genetic relatives, hybrids have been attempted. According to recently unearthed documents, Joseph Stalin hoped to produce half-man, half-ape super-warriors, but the project came to nothing. The disgraced chief scientist died in the vast Soviet prison system.

But just as often, anti-religious motives fuel the wish for a humanzee. Zoologist Richard Dawkins, who promotes atheism from his chair at Oxford University, has proclaimed that such a hybrid would shake up all our value systems. He argues that differences between the human mind and the chimpanzee mind are only a matter of degree, not kind. Indeed, Spain has been considering giving great apes human rights, and some have argued seriously for reclassifying chimpanzees in the same genus as humans.

For more go here.

3. A third recent ChristianWeek columns: Faith as one of the healing arts

According to an article in Jewish World Review (October 3, 2006) hospitals in the United States have finally begun to pay attention to patients' religious beliefs. "The last thing you want to worry about while somebody is sick is that they might have to transgress on something they believe in," says Zahava Cohen, Englewood Hospital's patient care director (New Jersey). Cohen is surely right; and we can only hope that this trend spreads.

[ ... ]

The way in which we receive health care makes a huge difference to its ultimate effect. This reality has long been disguised under the misnamed and misunderstood "placebo" effect. Literally, the word means "I will please." Originally, it referred to sugar pills given to a patient who believes that they are potent. Over one third of patients get better simply because they think the placebo is a powerful medicine. The placebo effect probably underlies traditional shamanism. The reason so many tribal Christians continue to surreptitiously visit shamans is not that they are deluded into believing that shamanism works but because it so often does work. Unfortunately, the shaman typically attributes the healing to specific bizarre practices rather than to the power of belief to trigger healing processes.

For more go here.

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 forthcoming The Spiritual Brain (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Of course, I have forgotten or omitted lots of worthy titles, but fundamentally it was much easier then than now to rhyme off the key titles you would need to read to really keep up with the ID controversy. Today, you need a library shelving cart and a budget to match.

The pace of publishing new books about the intelligent design controversy (and accompanying DVDs), has grown significantly, as has the degree of specialization of their topics. When I first started studying the subject in depth in 2002, while writing my overview of the controversy, By Design or by Chance?, only a few key books out there argued one thesis or another on ID.

In 1991, the worthwhile titles suitable for the lay person included law prof Phillip Johnson's Darwin on Trial (which really brought the question about whether one was allowed to believe that Darwin might be wrong to the lay public). End stop. That was about it. In 1996 Darwin's Black Box laid out biochemist Mike Behe's argument for irreducible complexity, and then in 2000 Icons of Evolution, embryologist Jonathan Wells sset out at book length the often shoddy arguments that prop up textbook Darwinism. Basically, he made it clear that if you learned your Darwinism from a mid-90s textbook and if the subject of evolution is in any way important to you, well, you've been snookered in defense of a philosophical cause. Of course, if you wanted to risk the wilds of information theory, you could try mathematician William Dembski's The Design Inference (1998) or No Free Lunch (2002).

The anti-ID titles I recall were Robert Pennock's Tower of Babel (2000), Ken Miller's Finding Darwin's God (2000), and John Haught's God After Darwin (2001). Michael Ruse's The Evolution Wars was especially helpful for the excerpts from various older works that many lay readers might not be able to get from the local public library.

In the meantime, Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay Richards' Privileged Planet , whose DVD was the subject of the 2005 second Smithsonian uproar, and journalist Lee Strobel's Case for a Creator , and - on the anti-ID side - Barbara Forrest's Creationism's Trojan Horse (2004).

Of course, I have forgotten or omitted lots of worthy titles, but fundamentally it was much easier then than now to rhyme off the key titles you would need to read to really keep up with the ID controversy. Today, you need a library shelving cart and a budget to match.

Publishers who might have avoided the ID controversy in the past do not seem as afraid to touch it any more. My own By Design or by Chance?, for example, was published by a liberal, not a conservative Christian book house. A liberal house might have been expected to produce a dull rant against ID by a process theologian rather than an examination of the roots of the growing controversy. (Note: Lots of dull rants have been published all across the board, but presumably you, gentle reader, are only interested in hearing about books that could conceivably be of interest to a lay public.)

So where are we now? We have arrived at the point where titles about the ID controversy clearly and obviously sell well, over a fifteen-year period. And therefore I must now write my first ever year-end book list on ID. The following are certainly not the only important books/DVDs published this year, but they are the ones I have read, on which I can offer some thoughts. The books are in alpha order by author; they are too disparate to rank in any order of excellence or usefulness.

■ Mike Behe's publisher, Free Press, has put out a tenth anniversary edition of Darwin's Black Box, featuring an Afterword, in which Behe reflects on the uproar that followed the 1996 publication and addresses some of his critics:

... although the cultural dynamic is still playing itself out, a decade after the publication of Darwin's Black Box is stronger than ever. Despite the enormous progress of biochemistry in the intervening years, despite hundreds of probing commentaries in periodicals as diverse as The New York Times, Nature , Christianity Today , Philosophy of Science, and Chronicle of Higher Education, despite implacable opposition from some scientists at the highest levels, the book's argument for design stands.

For a book that was supposed to sink out of sight amd catcalls, DBB did pretty well for Free Press (a Simon and Schuster division). Apparently, Behe is publishing a new book with Free Press in 2007, answering his critics in more detail. So contrary to rumors I have heard, FP is still interested in ID titles. (And they'd be fools not to be.)

■ Recently, I created something of a flap over at the American Scientific Affiliation public list (which provides a wonderful window into the views and character of scientists who are anti-ID and - for the most part - also profess some state of Christianity). A number of people with time on their hands have expressed annoyance that I said that their poster child, genome mapper Francis Collins, is an intellectual lightweight, at least to judge from his recent book, The Language of God. I had previously only hinted at that. Collins' anti-ID take on the ID controversy sounds shallow and derivative, but that is certainly not the reason I regard him as a lightweight. After all, the ID controversy is not germane to his book, the key subject of which is his personal conversion to Christianity. In any event, I have spoken well of scientists such as Alister McGrath and Simon Conway Morris who are anti-ID but whose books certainly do not come across as lightweight.

No, the reason I think you should give Collins only to people who need to be reassured that a scientist can indeed be a Christian - but are not expected to think too hard about what that might actually mean - are

(1) He should have said way less about ID and found much more space for some questions directly relevant to his position, like the problem of patenting and commercialization of human gene sequences, a problem which caused his atheist predecessor Watson to walk out on principle. There is room here for a detailed ethical approach, one that will take us into the next few decades.
(2) As I noted elsewhere, he seems not to grasp that finding testable gene sequences, as he did for cystic fibrosis, mainly results in the abortion of babies who end up in the Medical Waste bucket because they are personally rejected by their parents for not having the right genes. Obviously, Collins has the right to do the research, but if he is going to walk away from a detailed examination of that issue and sing folk songs about making CF "history" instead, I cannot advise taking him very seriously. In other words, he talks about all kinds of issues, including origin of life and the universe, but not much about the issues that are germane to his position as a Christian physician and genome mapper.
(3) Most damaging, he never properly addresses the "evolutionary psychology" challenge to his claims about religious experience and the nature of the human being, mainly because he seems not to have updated his knowledge base from when C.S. Lewis was writing in the mid-twentieth century. Those challenges can, of course, be addressed and refuted, but Collins does not seem to be the man to do it.

In fairness to Collins, he is not alone in failing to grasp the significance of this last point: David B. Hart, reviewing Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell in First Things, writes, amazingly,

Certainly the Christian should be undismayed by the notion that religion is natural "all the way down." Indeed, it should not matter whether religion is the result of evolutionary imperatives, of an inclination toward belief inscribed in our genes and in the structure of our brains, or even (more fantastically) of memes that have impressed themselves on our minds and cultures and languages. All things are natural. ...

Hart then goes on to talk about ... God.

One wonders how he can possibly get this so wrong. IF religious feelings can be accounted for by an evolutionary adaptation or accident, they do not testify to any truth about the universe or God. They provide information only about a given state of the life form that experiences them.

Religious beliefs can testify to a truth about the universe or God only to the extent that they correspond to actual information from the outside. That is the one and only reason why atheists are so anxious to find an evolutionary explanation such as Dennett offers - and why Christians, among others, do not generally accept it. Hart was certainly missing a step when he wrote that!

Still, many people will read Collins' book and coo over the fact that a scientist can be a Christian because they won't ever think too hard about it, which is why I have elsewhere recommended the book - but not to you if you are indeed a sharp cookie.

■ Earlier this year, I reviewed Norbert Smith's Passive Fear: Alternative to Fight or Flight, detailing Smith's research into the way many animals such as alligators may choose to neither fight nor flee a threat; they may simply reduce their metabolic rate. Animal lovers will find Smith's work of considerable interest, as it shows that much may be learned from moving a little off the broad highway of conventional ideas about animals, like "fight or flight."

■ "Annoy a godless liberal; buy this book!", says Ann Coulter of Jonathan Wells' new The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design. The book is in many ways an update of Icons of Evolution (2000), but the furore was a story in itself. The cover is much more fun, and the book uses sidebars, of which I am a great fan.

■ In a recent book, Darwinian Conservatism, Larry Arnhart argues that American conservatives should embrace Darwinism as their salvation. John West, a Discovery Institute senior fellow, argues the contrary inDarwin's Conservatives: The Misguided Quest. It would be a great idea to read both books together. Personally, I think the answer depends on what you mean by "conservatism." Currently, there seem to be about four different conservative currents: family values conservatism, free market activism, libertarianism, and old-fashioned toryism. The latter three can probably at least support Darwinism, but the family values activists not only oppose it, they contribute heavily to the fray. So promoting faith in Darwinism would probably split a conservative movement and deprive it of most of its foot soldiers.

■ Benjamin Wiker and Jonathan Witt, also Discovery Institute fellows, have written a book, A Meaningful World: How the Arts and Sciences Reveal the Genius of Nature , that set me thinking about my school days. I used to think I was so lucky, studying classical literature instead of stocking shelves in the family business (as one of my brightest classmates had to rush back home to do, after his father suddenly dropped dead). contrary to the self-serving memoirs of Sixties radicals, in the mid-60s, many of us assumed we were lucky to be in school and that classical literature had something to teach us. Actually, it did and does, but you would never know that from current courses in chimp footprint art, creative profanity, or whatever. This book links ID ideas with art and literature, offering some interesting observations on Shakespeare.

■ Lastly, in Darwin Strikes Back, historian of science Thomas Woodward advances the thesis that the mid-decade is a crisis point and that the battle is shifting in favor of intelligent design. He is likely right about the crisis point. For one thing, ID is spreading to many countries worldwide. One difficulty for people attempting to assess the field and determine who is winning is that contemporary popular media are nearly useless as sources of information.

Case in point: North American mainstream media report that the vast majority of Americans do not believe Darwinism, with the clear implication that there must be something wrong with them. It is almost inconceivable that media boffins, for whom materialism is the normal way of thinking, would actually be interested in knowing why so many who are at liberty to doubt take up that option. And the media boffins are not likely to change. The media they govern are more likely to simply decline in importance as a source of information.

As a result, assembling any clear picture of the struggle requires more than an average amount of trouble. But Woodward provides arguments worth considering for his position that the tide is shifting in favor of ID.

Merry Christmas, Season's Greetings, Happy Chanukah, and Happy New Year.

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 forthcoming The Spiritual Brain (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

(Note: I haven't posted much recently because of computer failure. Back now. - d.)

I have blogged on this new atheist Christmas campaign (blaspheme the Holy Spirit at YouTube, etc.) here at the Post-Darwinist, noting, for example,

Darwinism is itself a failing god. The intelligentsia believe with all their hearts but the sullen proles largely will not budge. If anything, some who once tramped along with the sodden mass may be plodding back home even now.

But you cannot have a revolution without foot soldiers and tank fodder. So a recruitment drive is in order, all the more so because atheists tend not to produce many children. (Whether this is because atheists are better or worse than the common run of humanity, I waive; at the end of the day it means that the church of atheism won't need fundraising barbecues for a Sunday school wing.)

For more, go here.

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 forthcoming The Spiritual Brain (Harper 2007).

Today (and yesterday) at Denyse O'Leary's new blog on the neuroscience controversy over the real existence of the mind, Mindful Hack:

http://mindfulhack.blogspot.com/

1. Freudian analysis "not science": In real science, things are given names because they have value- hence the words "atom" and "molecule." In Freudian psychoanalysis, things have value because they are given names "Oedipus complex," "castration anxiety" - and only because enough people have been convinced of their value.

2. ""This is anti-science," says Anita L. Nelson, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of California at Los Angeles. No, she is not talking about ID here, but about a women's health clinic that combines high tech methods with respect for the teachings of the Catholic Church. Remember this when materialists claim that they are not "against" other faiths. They are.

3. John Searle on the hard problem of human consciousness (hard if you are a materialist): "We know from high school physics that in presenting an equation you have to be referring to the same dimension on both of its sides. The equation one dollar = one hundred cents can work because both sides are sums of money. But you couldn't have one hundred cents = one month, because cents and months are in different dimensions. Mind and brain appear to be in different dimensions, because mind has qualitative subjectivity and brain does not."

For more go to http://mindfulhack.blogspot.com/

4. Thinkquote of the Day: Psychiatrist Theodore Dalrymple on a fundamental error of materialist psychiatry. For more go to http://mindfulhack.blogspot.com/ and use the archives on the left hand side.

I reciprocate your kind prayers for the protection and blessing of the common Father and creator of man, and tender you for yourselves and your religious association, assurances of my high respect & esteem.
-- (signed) Thomas Jefferson, Jan. 1, 1802

Thus ended the only letter of Thomas Jefferson’s so enduring that every atheist, agnostic, and self-proclaimed protector of civil liberties knows a small portion of it by heart. And not only the overtly profane, secular, and worldly among us, but various Unitarian Universalists, United Methodists, Episcopalians, American Baptists, some Lutherans and even a few Mennonites thank their God or god for the lasting result of a few strokes of Jefferson’s presidential pen: the wall of separation between church and state. Responding to the plea of a religious minority fearful of reproach because their state government played religious favorites, Jefferson sought to assure his readers of the limits imposed on the powers of government. Wishing to be kind, Jefferson’s private assurances of high respect and esteem to a few churchmen has evolved today into anything but. What hath Tom wrought?

We are beyond wondering if Jefferson’s literary well-wishing is a fixture of constitutional law. It is, and it got there the same way every other questionable principle and precedent of constitutional law arose: by the intentions (good and bad), of people (good and bad), using and abusing the judiciary to protect, and if possible, establish their legal interests (for better or worse). It’s the American way. Over two hundred years of conflicting intentions have turned the Constitution’s legitimate “religion clauses” into an entanglement of confusing instructions, three-part tests (and tests within tests), each case often confirming the maxim of the unprincipled bench: good decision, bad law.

Virtually everyone agrees that Jefferson’s (and now our) metaphorical wall makes sense: the state should not entangle itself in the business of establishing churches. Of course, the First Amendment Establishment Clause of the Constitution ensured just that in plain language restraining the state from certain actions. In this sense the “wall of separation” is proper and desirable. But the “wall of separation” as practiced differs fundamentally in a way that undermines the First Amendment’s restraining character. Unlike the “shall make no law” restrictive language of the First Amendment, the “wall of separation” is prescriptive and implies something must be separated by someone. Particularly when extended to the realm of religious ideas in the marketplace of ideas, the separation metaphor suffers from an inherent structural flaw: the state is no longer to be restrained; the state is the separator! The state ends up on both sides of the wall, and the passive wall of separation devolves into an active wall of state-mandated segregation, the distinction being one of cause and effect: segregation being the separation for special treatment of individuals from a larger group. In the hands of the judiciary, the noble-sounding “wall of separation between church and state” has become the ignoble “wall of segregation between churches by the state” with the god-like black robes of government sorting the sheep of acceptable religious expression to one side and the goats of unacceptable religious views to the other. We like this one; we don’t like that. Done.

Ironically, it is with respect to Jefferson’s “common Father and creator of man” that the wall of separation can best be seen as a wall of state-mandated and government-endorsed segregation of religious ideas. There are two possible explanations for the existence of man, and both have scientific support and both have religious implications. Either we are necessarily “occurrences” of unintelligent physics and chemistry or we are the result of intelligent manipulation of physics and chemistry. Each explanation has natural, observable, scientific evidential support, and each is, in one form or another, developed as a scientific theory consonant with a religious viewpoint. Naturalistic, unintelligent “bottom up” occurrence of life, for which Darwinism is a leading example, is a central tenet of Religious Humanism and is consistent with the religious beliefs of Buddhism, Taoism, Ethical Culture and various religions of witches, pagans and Earth Religionists. Not surprisingly, the opposite viewpoint, “top down” creation by intelligent design, for which Biblical creationism is one view, is a central tenet of various theistic religions, including Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.

Two scientific explanations of origins, each a tenet of sincere religious beliefs, and both important in the field of origins science. Each explanation also has far-reaching cultural implications, including, not in a small way, for government and law. What is a wall of separation to do? A true wall would separate both views from any entanglement of the state, thereby permitting free inquiry into a topic of great interest. But this is not a true wall; it is but a legal fiction, and a very convenient legal fiction at that for those opposed to all things remotely Christian. The wall of separation-cum-segregation between churches by the state permits the government to separate favored religious ideas (such as materialistic naturalism) for special treatment, the special treatment being state protection from any disfavored challenger. Darwinism, where evidence is interpreted based solely on religious naturalism (or scientific naturalism—there’s no difference), acceptable. Anything else, including Jefferson’s “creator of man”, unacceptable. Done.

Were Thomas Jefferson himself to jump back into public life today, he would not be permitted to suggest to public school science students that the “creator of man” was any other than unguided, purposeless, random variation and natural selection. Jefferson would no doubt be shocked to see his private letter waved like a divinely inspired trump card to compel his own government to censor his view of creation—the very government he helped form to protect certain inalienable rights endowed by this self-same creator. Such truths were then, as now, self-evident. But teaching them today has been declared illegal by court order. An illegal self-evident truth! Only a thoroughly post-modern mind (or brain, to be careful with terms) cannot grasp the stark discontinuity of thought wrought by a one-sided view of religious expression and philosophically-laden science.

One year ago this month a federal judge in a small corner of William Penn’s former colony cemented the latest brick in the wall, perhaps even a load of bricks. In this case the establishment of religion feared by our Founding Fathers was thought to be imminent by a few offended mothers and fathers because a local school board in Dover, Pennsylvania decided to inform their teenage students about one book in the library—a book on the scientific evidence for intelligent design. Such a blatant attempt to educate, literally instructing students to keep an open mind, cannot be tolerated in today’s public school classes, and the ever-vigilant ACLU was shipped in to fight the latest battle on behalf of one group of religious people intolerant of the differently-religious. In a damning, self-defeating admission that should have been dispositive of the case, the plaintiffs (those opposing intelligent design) claimed that intelligent design should not be taught because it forces their children to confront challenges to their religious beliefs at school. We like our religion, we don’t like yours. Start sorting, judge.

All judges face difficult decisions, and all judges make bad decisions. But the aftermath of the Dover litigation has shown that in this case it seems U.S. District Court Judge John E. Jones, III found a chance to push the limits of judicial restraint for a once-in-a-lifetime chance at history-making. Like a present day Clarence Darrow, he recognized the chance for media-driven immortality—the lights, the cameras, the high-powered attorneys, even Charles Darwin’s great-great-grandson was at his trial. Dispensing with subtlety or nuance, in the opinion of Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District Judge Jones seemed determined to single-handedly win the culture war based on a set of facts suitable only for a skirmish. Knowing his scolding of a few religious folk would make him a darling to those he clearly holds in higher esteem, he took great delight in detailing the “breathtaking inanity” of the local school board. If only he had stopped there he might have retained some judicial dignity; but he felt it necessary to hold as a legal ruling that intelligent design is not science, and apparently lifted large portions of the ACLU briefs to prove it.

Realizing on page 137 of his 139-page opinion that the slip of his judicial activism was showing, the judge awkwardly pulled down his worked-up robe by sternly assuring us “this is manifestly not an activist Court.” As if his self-serving denial of activism were not confirmation enough of, well, his activism, Judge Jones has spent the last year on the sawdust trail doing what judges rarely do: explaining and justifying. Obviously enjoying his new cult following, he assures fawners everywhere how importantly epic was his decision (while patronizing critics with a “a badly needed civics lesson”). To prove beyond doubt that he could not be more pure of heart, he wants us all to know that he really is religious. Really. While the record shows he thought little of his religion prior to becoming a judge or thereafter, progressive reports (from him) since the Kitzmiller opinion have built him up to practical sainthood. Doesn’t he pastor his dear Lutheran church?

The star-struck judge thought he was doing good. And in a way he didn’t anticipate, he may well have. By expounding on issues that go beyond the facts of the case, the Kitzmiller opinion inadvertently succeeded in proving that the wall of separation (which Judge Jones effortlessly invoked as being “mandated” by the Establishment Clause) can easily become a judge’s private tool of religious segregation. Is intelligent design science? Of course it is, but it sure looks like a religious idea. Better put it on the “church” side of the wall. Is Darwinism science? Of course it is, and it does not look (to me) anything like a religious idea (never mind that the complaint from parents was that intelligent design interferes with their kids’ own religious views!). Better put it on the “state” side of the wall.

And that’s the point: in Dover, Pennsylvania the United States government acted to segregate one scientific theory with religious implications (Darwinism) from a competing scientific theory with religious implications (intelligent design). Judge Jones may be pure of heart, but he failed to understand the broader issues he faced, and thereby wielded the wall like a blunt sword, a sword temporarily mightier than Jefferson’s pen, to give government endorsement of one religious expression over another. Thus the Dover lawsuit brought clarity to an issue long stressed by those in the intelligent design movement: Darwinism has clear religious implications and can only be defended by insulating it against any criticism or alternative theory having theistically religious implications. Atheistically religious implications? That’s OK with the state. Atheistic religious humanists have free reign to promulgate their creation beliefs as science, and the differently-religious must march lockstep and be silent against their own conscience. Why? Because now the United States government through the Jones judiciary has mandated religious favoritism in the Dover public schools; religious naturalism is favored and protected, and any denigration of Darwinism, whether scientific or otherwise, is now banned. According to Jones’ opinion in Kitzmiller it is a violation of the United States Constitution to disparage Darwinism, much less challenge it on any ground that is not consistent with naturalism, which is the foundation of religious humanism.

Celebrity Jones fancies himself a protector of liberties, if not the Constitution. But we know protection when we see it, and most Americans would rather enjoy Jefferson’s steady “protection and blessing of the common Father and creator of man” over Judge Jones’ petty protection against a local school board trying, however misguided, to open minds. Most of us would gladly trade Jefferson’s “high respect and esteem” for Judge Jones’ high horse and head of steam. From self-evident truths to government-mandated religious humanism—how far must we go before we see we’ve traded “just powers” for another “long train of abuses and usurpations” that Jefferson once so elegantly rejected. Let the facts be submitted to a candid world: we know Thomas Jefferson, and Judge Jones is no Thomas Jefferson.

Roddy Bullock, an attorney, is the Executive Director of the Intelligent Design Network of Ohio (www.idnetohio.com) and is the author of The Cave Painting: A Parable of Science, available from Access Research Network. Send comments to: roddybullock@idnetohio.com.

Copyright 2006 Roddy M. Bullock, all rights reserved. Quotes and links permitted with attribution.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

So many media outlets have voted themselves the guardians of the bottom-up theory of life and the opponents of the top-down theory of life. Consistent with their mission, they seem to compete for what they can get wrong about intelligent design or any other idea that insists that mind comes first. Evidence has nothing to do with it. The Post-Darwinist skewers the nonsense.

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 forthcoming The Spiritual Brain (Harper 2007).

Here is my review of Francis Collins' The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (Free Press, New York, 2006), with a look at the other reviews. Collins is like a snapshot in time: reassuring everyone that materialist science is no threat to popular piety - on the eve of the big blowout.

Introduction

Part One:How genome mapper Collins became a Christian

Collins owes his conversion to C.S. Lewis, but he typifies the petering out of Lewis' legacy. Too many people have relied on Lewis and too few have followed in his path of rigorous argument.

Part Two: Does it matter that genome mapper Francis Collins became a Christian?

Now, if Collins did not claim to be a Christian, none of that would be any problem at all. He could safely dismiss it all as rot. But he is claiming to be one, and therein lies the difficulty with all these acres of moral squishiness.

Part Three: The key weaknesses, as spotted by reviewers

The country that Collins would like to roam with Lewis no longer exists.

Part Four: The scribbling tribe of reviewers divides into several parts

Collins' book was very widely reviewed, as might be expected, and reactions fell into three broad predictable camps - but also one quite interesting fourth one.

Part Five: But, in the end, what choice did Collins really have?

In the event, here is what he did: He avoided courting the disaster that would ensue if he found design in life forms. He did not find it there, where he works. He says he found it in outer space, where he does not work and will not really be expected to defend the proposition seriously. He is a loyal follower and deserves well of the people who will find no legitimate reason to attack him for anything he has said.

"The University should just flunk the lot of them and make room for smart students who have a chance of benefiting from a high quality education. "

Read more here.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Peer review, also called refereeing, is a decision-making process by which science journals decide which papers are worth the investment of resources to publish. Usually, the editor of a science journal submits the paper an anonymous panel of recognized experts.

Commentators sometimes write and talk as though peer review is science's "Good Housekeeping seal of approval." In fact, it has become a scandal-plagued irrelevance. As Lawrence K. Altman has noted in The New York Times,

Virtually every major scientific and medical journal has been humbled recently by publishing findings that are later discredited. The flurry of episodes has led many people to ask why authors, editors and independent expert reviewers all failed to detect the problems before publication.

Science and medical journals are responding by moving slowly toward a more open and accountable system for identifying the findings that truly advance science.

Sections:

Part One: If peer review always worked before, why doesn't it work now?

Part Two: How bad can it get? Pretty bad.

Part Three: How the system is slowly becoming more open and dynamic, whether anyone wants it to or not

Part Four:How will we know if a more open system works better?

Next: Part One: If peer review always worked before, why doesn't it work now?

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 forthcoming The Spiritual Brain (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Peer review did not really become widely used until the middle of the 20th century, after World War II. As the Editors of The New Atlantis have pointed out in a recent article, "Rethinking Peer Review"(Summer 2006),

In the nineteenth century, many science journals were commandingly led by what Ohio State University science historian John C. Burnham dubbed "crusading and colorful editors," who made their publications "personal mouthpieces" for their individual views. There were often more journals than scientific and medical papers to publish; the last thing needed was a process for weeding out articles.

Albert Einstein's key 1905 papers were published in the German review Annalen der Physik without any review other than the approval of editors Max Planck and Wilhelm Wien. Of course, it can justly be argued that Planck, known for Planck's Constant, and Wien, known for Wien's law, were Einstein's peers. But with the flurry of science publishing that the twentieth century ushered in, that situation could not last. Increasing specialization in sciences meant that by the early twentieth century, journal editors were no longer able to evaluate the merits of all the articles they wanted to publish. They began to direct papers to experts who served on editorial boards affiliated with their journals.

After World War II, specialized science research boomed. Researchers followed up on a number of useful discoveries made during the war (for example, antibiotics and nuclear technology). The subsequent Cold War, and then the space race, kept alive the drive for further military advances as well.

But only specialists could assess the specialized papers that resulted, so editors increasingly deferred to them. The development of the Xerox copier in 1959 made the new system practical, so all the major journals adopted peer review. As the New Atlantis Editors point out, the journal editors were pretty sure they were onto a good thing:

In recent times, the term "peer reviewed" has come to serve as shorthand for "quality." To say that an article appeared in a peer-reviewed scientific journal is to claim a kind of professional approbation; to say that a study hasn't been peer reviewed is tantamount to calling it disreputable.

Indeed, that sounds so reasonable, what could go wrong?

Well, first, as New Atlantis points out, "peer review is not simply synonymous with quality." Physicist Frank Tipler offers a number of instances of landmark papers or major findings on such subjects as lasers and black holes that were rejected by peer reviewers. He also offers:

On the Nobel Prize web page one can read the autobiographies of recent laureates. Quite a few complain that they had great difficulty publishing the ideas that won them the Prize. One does not find similar statements by Nobel Prize winners earlier in the century.

Indeed, Tipler suggests,

Today, Einstein’s papers would be sent to some total nonentity at Podunk U, who, being completely incapable of understanding important new ideas, would reject the papers for publication. "Peer" review is very unlikely to be peer review for the Einsteins of the world. We have a scientific social system in which intellectual pygmies are standing in judgment of giants.

Whereas in Einstein's day, a paper introducing a new idea in physics stood a good chance of being reviewed by a Nobel Prize winner like Planck, today, the researcher would have to write several hundred papers to score a Nobelist as a reviewer. Indeed, the researcher might seldom encounter an original thinker, just dozens of people carrying out the tasks of mainstream "normal" science, as Thomas Kuhn described it.

Major bodies such as the Cochrane Collaboration and the Royal Society, as well as others have added volume to the dissatisfaction with peer review. According to Dr. Altman , "Studies have found that journals publish findings based on sloppy statistics," though

None of the recent flawed studies have been as humiliating as an article in 1972 in the journal Pediatrics that labeled sudden infant death syndrome a hereditary disorder, when, in the case examined, the real cause was murder.

Some have responded that the peer reviewer never gets enough time to look at the statistics, et cetera. While that observation is doubtless true, it hardly restores one's eroded confidence in the system.

Generally, the two most common complaints are that peer review fails to safeguard quality, which was its original purpose and that it punishes new ideas, regardless of merit.

Next: Part Two: How bad can it get? Pretty bad.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Peer review problems went "public" mainly as a result of recent high-profile scandals like Science's peer-reviewed Korean stem cell research paper that turned out be fraudulent. The reaction was interesting. Some sought to minimize the problem by treating the incident as highly unusual, disclaiming editorial responsibility for fraud, and placing their faith in peer review nonetheless. Soothing comparisons have frequently been made to Winston Churchill's characterization of democracy as the worst system - except for all the others.

But the convenient analogy to democracy fails. In the first place, the secrecy in which peer review operates make it a poor analogue to democracy. Second, democracy aims primarily to give every citizen a vote. The fact that some citizens vote for cranks or criminals does not mean that democracy has failed. But peer review's primary aim has been quality control, and it has been failing for decades. It squelches too many good ideas while failing to prevent too many frauds.

Flawed, yes! Fraud, no!

Some argue that the peer review system was designed to detect incompetence but not fraud. Flawed, yes, but fraud, no. Even if the system really worked that way, and - as we shall see - there are grounds for doubt, embarrassing frauds have created a demand for a system thatcan detect fraud.

A host of individual acts of sloppiness (or malice!) can get lost in the smoke generated by a really big fraud like the stem cell scam. Defenders of the system can then safely claim that the Big One is unrepresentative. That is usually not true. It would be more accurate to say that the ensuing uproar is unrepresentative. With scandals, as with rats, if you see one, there are probably a dozen, and the rat that caught your headlights was just unlucky. And a big one always gets more attention than a bunch of little ones.

A minor flurry can be more representative of the system's usual problems than a really big one. For example, according to Paul Greenberg, the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) took five years to correct information regarding the potentially harmful drug VIOXX, which it had first publicized in peer-reviewed research in 2000. In 2001, in response to a pharmacist's questions on a Seattle radio show, the editor explained, "We can't be in the business of policing every bit of data we put out." Then what, precisely, is peer review supposed to do?

Ironically, having helped diminish the value of peer review, NEJM sneered recently at the intelligent design theorists, quoting with approval a recent court decision that claimed that ID, among other things,"has not generated any peer-reviewed publications."

Now, that isn't true, as it happens. There is a modest but growing number of ID-friendly peer-reviewed publications. But - given the woeful state of peer review - papers that support or undermine ID hypotheses would probably be neither better nor worse recommended if they were never peer reviewed, just published, amid cheers and catcalls..

Interestingly, the ID journal, Progress in Complexity, Information, and Design (PCID) has opted to return to the early twentieth century approach, where a senior scholar recommends a junior scholar for publication. Time will tell if this old method can be revived successfully.

The grapes of froth?

Another classic case of questionable peer review was unearthed by mathematician Douglas J. Keenan: A research team published a paper in ther prestigious journal Nature (November 18, 2004), claiming to have pioneered a means of estimating the summer temperature in Burgundy (France) back to 1370, using the harvest dates of grapes. The authors asserted that 2003 featured the warmest Burgundy summer since 1370.

(No one should be surprised if considerable media publicity followed the publication of this paper, as Keenan asserts. During the summer of 2003, thousands of old people in France died of heat prostration, and some blamed the government and others blamed selfish adult children. Psychologically, all surely yearned for someone to tell them that it had indeed been an apocalypse.)

The trouble is, Keenan says, he had to go to a great deal of trouble to get the data to research the problem further,

To study the paper properly, I needed to have the authors' data. So I e-mailed Dr. Chuine, asking for this. The authors, though, were very reluctant to let me have the data. It took me eight months, tens of e-mails exchanged with the authors, and two formal complaints to Nature, before I got the data. (Some data was purchased from Météo France.) It is obviously inappropriate that such a large effort was necessary.

And when he did get a chance to study the data, he concluded that there were serious problems with the work:

In particular, the authors' estimate for the summer temperature of 2003 was higher than the actual temperature by 2.4 °C (about 4.3 °F). This is the primary reason that 2003 seemed, according to the authors, to be extremely warm.

(Note: Events would seem to suggest that that year was extremely warm , though not necessarily as warm as the Nature paper claimed - and not the prophesied global warming apocalypse either.)
Keenan's main issue was with the authors' statistical work. The errors he discovered should not, he argues, have required specialist scientific training to uncover. So why did the peer reviewers not notice them? But he need not have bothered wondering about that, because the lead author told him, "We never sent data to Nature."

A layperson might well be astounded to hear this. Researchers who could successfully estimate the summer temperature back to the 14th century could shed light on a variety of issues in European history, and might well be besieged for data. Unless ... can it be? Just any old nonsense that supports a global warming apocalypse gets a pass? Keenan later wrote about this problem in Theoretical and Applied Climatology (May 2006), and no doubt the controversy will go on.

This incident underlines a general problem with peer review: Findings that support a consensus are too easily accepted - that is the inevitable flip side to squelching new ideas.

So three things have become quite clear in recent years:

1) The Korean human stem cell fraud was certainly not the only peer review scandal, but it was the hottest media story.

2) Peer review in general has not been doing what it was supposed to do - improve the quality of science papers - and it has squelched new ideas while failing to challenge questionable support for accepted ones.

3) Internet-based technologies may enable a more open and dynamic system. In a way, it can be compared to the blogosphere. The blogosphere, for all its faults, has been a breath of fresh air in media. It has restored the original concept of news as what people want to hear about rather than what gatekeepers think they should want to hear about. As a result, "newsroom paternalism" is much harder to enforce than it used to be. Perhaps a similar benefit for science will result in the airing of genuinely new ideas - whether to rise to glory or be shot down in flames.

Next: Part Three: How the system is slowly becoming more open and dynamic, whether anyone wants it to or not

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 forthcoming The Spiritual Brain (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In 1999 British Medical Journal discontinued anonymous peer reviews, and now prints the names of reviewers. Transparency and accountability may result, as hoped. But some question whether juniors would dare openly criticize established scientists' work - whether the established scientist's work deserves criticism or not. However, on balance, most people prefer to actually know who their opponents are.

Two recent developments that may signal deeper changes are:

1. Dynamic open access journals that publish on the Internet. "Dynamic" and "open" are not mere terms of praise. Such journals invite comment from a wide range of responsible parties (open), and opinion can change over time (dynamic). San Francisco-based Public Library of Science (PLoS ONE) uses only cursory peer review.

Alicia Chang, writing for Associated Press, captures the mood:

"If we publish a vast number of papers, some of which are mediocre and some of which are stellar, Nobel Prize-winning work — I will be happy," said Chris Surridge, the journal’s managing editor.

He should be happy, too. Early reviews like Annalen der Physic made do with that, as Tipler notes. At Annalen,

... none of the papers were sent to referees. Instead the editors—either the editor in chief, Max Planck, or the editor for theoretical physics, Wilhelm Wien - made the decision to publish. It is unlikely that whoever made the decision spent much time on whether to publish. Almost every paper submitted was published. So few people wanted to publish in any physics journal that editors rarely rejected submitted papers. Only papers that were clearly "crackpot" papers - papers that any professional physicist could recognize as written by someone completely unfamiliar with the elementary laws of physics - were rejected.

Everything old is new again."Publish and be whammed" seems to be back in fashion, and so far it is catching on. Chang notes:

In 2002, the reclusive Russian mathematician Grigori Perelman created a buzz when he bypassed the peer-review system and posted a landmark paper to the online repository, arXiv. Perelman later won the Fields Medal this year for his contribution to the Poincare conjecture, one of mathematics’ oldest and puzzling problems.

New Atlantis describes the proposed new system:

Only weeks (not months) will go by before a submitted article is published, since instead of coming out periodically issue-by-issue, PLoS ONE will be in a state of continuous publication. A more public review process will continue after publication, as readers will be able to rate, annotate, and comment on papers, and authors can respond to their comments. The original paper will remain as such, but comments, revisions, and updates will orbit nearby, an electronic Talmud on every article of significance.

2. Historic science journals such as Nature are currently experimenting with more open systems of review. That is no surprise. They must give the more open system a try because, if they drag their feet and quality findings start appearing in the new electronic journals, the newbies will simply gain an edge over the historic ones.

Next: Part Four: How will we know if a more open system works better?

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 forthcoming The Spiritual Brain (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

The fact that the peer review system broke down was nobody's fault in particular. Rather, it was a classic example of the law of unintended consequences: Actions have unintended as well as intended consequences - and unintended consequences make just as much difference as intended ones.

The overwhelming flaw in the traditional peer review system is that it listed so heavily toward consensus that it showed little tolerance for genuinely new findings and interpretations. The print and postage-based technologies of the mid-twentieth century greatly increased the significance of this flaw because only a few parties could afford to operate publishing systems. A small like-minded cabal can easily get control of such a system and run it into the ground, without significant challenge. By contrast, Internet-based technologies permit widespread low-cost access. The Internet may help to restore a more open and creative conversation - though it certainly won't sound pretty at first.

Tipler recounts the approach of the great quantum physicist Niels Bohr:

..., the great Danish physicist Niels Bohr said, according to Abraham Pais (The Genius of Science, p. 307), that if a physicist has an idea that seems crazy and he hesitates to publish so that someone else publishes the idea first and gets the credit, he has no one to blame but himself. In other words, it never occurred to Bohr that referees or editors could stop the publication of a new idea.

As Yukon gold panners might well say, no pebbles, no nuggets. So here's a test: if the new system really is open and dynamic, expect to hear complaints from all sides that "garbage" is now published that formerly would not be. But so? Before forming a judgement, wait to see if useful new findings and interpretations come forward that would not survive the peer review of Podunk U. That will tell us whether the new system works as intended.

Return to introduction

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 forthcoming The Spiritual Brain (Harper 2007).

TotheSource ("Challenging Hardcore Secularism with Principled Pluralism") offers an interesting item on God as the "First Cause," taking issue with the claim of some atheists (principally Dawkins and Harris) that God must be an infinite regress of causes. (As in "What caused God?", for example, and then "What caused the thing that caused God?", and then "What caused the thing that caused the thing that caused God?".) Of course, even in this world, we encounter causes that cannot be regressed. For example, the facts of arithmetic are final causes as far as math is concerned. There is nothing to look behind for a further cause, though you can in fact surmise an infinite wisdom that creates these facts and holds all things in being. Eugene Wigner has written on the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics,

the enormous usefulness of mathematics in the natural sciences is something bordering on the mysterious and that there is no rational explanation for it.

I think that by "rational" explanation, he means an explanation that appeals to other causes (chaos, a further regress, et cetera). Such is the temper of our times that laws that actually work are not considered a rational explanation.

Discovery Institute notes the following from Douglas Futuyma's Evolutionary Biology (1998, 3rd Ed., Sinauer Associates), p. 5:

Darwin showed that material causes are a sufficient explanation not only for physical phenomena, as Descartes and Newton had shown, but also for biological phenomena with all their seeming evidence of design and purpose. By coupling undirected, purposeless variation to the blind, uncaring process of natural selection, Darwin made theological or spiritual explanations of the life processes superfluous. Together with Marx's materialistic theory of history and society and Freud's attribution of human behavior to influences over which we have little control, Darwin's theory of evolution was a crucial plank in the platform of mechanism and materialism…

This is especially interesting in view of the sometimes-heard claim that ID advocates invented the Marx-Freud-Darwin triad of materialist influences. That was unlikely in principle because, in order to communicate with a broad audience, the ID advocates had to riff off an already accepted cultural pattern. But this instance of the usage by a prominent pro-Darwin and anti-ID source demonstrates that the claim is incorrect. Which doesn't mean you won't hear it again and again - and again. I would be interested to know if this paragraph appears unaltered in the just-released 2006 edition, but Toronto Public Library seems to have nothing later than the 2nd edition.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent
Some argue that Christians and conservatives should embrace Darwinism:

Much of Christian morality has to do with human relationships, most notably truth telling and marital fidelity, because the violation of these principles causes a severe breakdown in trust, which is the foundation of family and community. Evolution describes how we developed into pair-bonded primates and how adultery violates trust. Likewise, truth telling is vital for trust in our society, so lying is a sin. "> Michael Shermer, author of Why Darwin Matters , writing in Scientific American, October 2006

and others argue that they shouldn't:

Contrary to claims by Darwin’s conservatives, Darwinian evolution promotes relativism rather than traditional morality, it fosters utopianism rather than limited government, and it is corrosive, rather than supportive, of free will and religious belief. Finally, and most importantly, Darwinian evolution is in tension with the scientific evidence. (Discovery Institute's John West, Darwin's Conservatives: The Misguided Quest)

I haven't read either book yet, so I won't comment on them. But I must say, I was intrigued by Shermer's account of ethics. He seems to think that the only problems that sleeping around and lying cause are a "breakdown in trust." Presumably, then, if you snuck around and then lied successfully and were satisfied with yourself, you would have no real problems. He also thinks lying is a sin because it breaks down trust in society. (So if you could lie without breaking down the trust of your unsuspecting dupes, then it wouldn't be a sin?)

When I read comments like his, I find myself saying, "No wonder there is a controversy over the reality of the mind." Shermer's account offers no mention of the effect of ethical breaches on the mind and character of the individual who commits the offence, which have generally been regarded as by far their most serious effect.*

It is not hard to see why Shermer makes no mention of that: He traces the origin of morality to the habits of "pair-bonded primates," not to human minds who are aware of each other. Thus, he must account for morality by its alleged affect on society, with society seen as something like a troupe of chimpanzees.

For what it is worth, polygamous, monogamous, promiscuous, cannibalistic, and asocial primates have all been successful in evolutionary terms. We have no real way of knowing how our own primate ancestors behaved, if indeed there was only one successful pattern. Consciousness and the ability to make moral choices, however they happened, mark the beginning of the human race, and the search for wisdom from the apes is futile. They cannot give what they do not have.

Another curious comment from Shermer concerns the support that Darwin's theory might offer the idea, dear to a conservative's heart, of free markets:

Charles Darwin's "natural selection" is precisely parallel to Adam Smith's "invisible hand." Darwin showed how complex design and ecological balance were unintended consequences of competition among individual organisms. Smith showed how national wealth and social harmony were unintended consequences of competition among individual people. Nature's economy mirrors society's economy. Both are designed from the bottom up, not the top down.

Notice the staggering underlying assumption Shermer makes about markets: That the individual human consciousness is a sort of "bottom," like an electron or a quark.

But precisely the opposite is the case. The individual human consciousness which enters the market is far, far more complex than the simple relationships when, for example, one person is trying to buy a car and the other is trying to sell one. Indeed, the primary effect of free markets is that they cut out a number of individuals (bureaucrats, politicians, union leaders, religious leaders, environment activists) who might greatly complicate the transaction. Free markets are a sinmplification, not a complexification, the opposite of building a life form from molecules.

And that said, free markets have sometimes led to national wealth and social harmony - and sometimes to civil war, revolution, and environment destruction. I wonder whether Shermer believes his own argument here?

*Traditional Christians consider the individual immortal, and society as an institution only transient. So the effect of wrong-doing on the wrong-doer may be eternal, but the effect on the society only short-lived.

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 forthcoming The Spiritual Brain (Harper 2007).

We thought, because we had power, we had wisdom. – Stephen Vincent Benét

Unwise person: “I’ll admit it’s art, but it’s bad art.”

Wise person: “But you will agree that it is the work of an artist. Yes?”

Unwise person: “No.”

Such is the state of contemporary opposition to the theory of intelligent design. So intent are some Darwinists on suppressing truth at any cost, they forfeit their intellectual integrity in pursuit of their chosen cause. Believing that the traditional opposition to intelligent design is ineffective, for example, Massachusetts geology professor Donald Wise is credited with this brainstorm:

To combat the Intelligent Design idea, Wise has come up with his own theory: "Incompetent Design." This theory challenges the idea of Intelligent Design with the argument that if the human body were designed, the designer did a terrible job in doing so. (UMass Daily Collegian, October 31, 2005)

What a novel way to combat an idea! Start by admitting the truth of the idea's central premise, then reject the rational conclusion on grounds of pretentious opinion. Apparently the professor sees design in nature (all Darwinists do), but he believes it is incompetent design rather than intelligent design. Is Wise is so smart, that not only can he detect evidence of design (like us mere mortals), but he also can sit in judgment of the designer based on his assessment of the workmanship? By his own theory’s name he admits design is real and evident in nature, but he rejects intelligent design because, in his learned estimation, the evidence shows nothing more than a terrible job. What a dunce, this so-called designer.

Wise is not alone. He and other non-biologists (why are anti-evolutionists always written off as non-biologists, but anti-ID’ers get a pass?) of the Geological Society of America (GSA) decided last year to carry water for their biologist buddies by opining on a strategy to defend “evolution” against “well trained attackers,” specifically those pesky “highly trained professional ID debaters”. In a hand-wringing GSA article aimed in part at raising awareness of the need to stop “nonexistent ‘evidence against evolution’" from being taught in the classroom, Wise is quoted:

So how does a scientist or teacher defend evolution against trained attackers? "Don't," suggests geoscientist Donald Wise from the University of Massachusetts. “Instead, go after the deep flaws in ID. Take the human body, for instance,” he says in his GSA presentation. “It's a great argument against ID. Anyone who has ever had back pain or clogged sinuses can testify to this.” (Donald Wise, Geoscientists and Educators Take On Antievolutionists, 14 October 2005, GSA Release No. 05-40, http://www.geosociety.org/news/pr/05-40.htm)

Of course Wise shouldn’t be taken too seriously on the mysteries of the human body, a topic for which he can no more pretend to scientific credentials than most of us. But his logic is intriguing. Presumably the sagacious geologist would find great difficulty in admiring design in something nearer to his field of expertise: a large stone object occupying a prominent rotunda in perhaps the greatest museum in the world. The blocks of Parian marble permanently housed in the Louvre in Paris are well known the world over as the Venus de Milo, a statue praised by artists and critics as the epitome of graceful female beauty. Recognized as significant immediately upon discovery in 1820, the statue is universally known for a different reason: it is deeply flawed. Standing majestically still as streams of visitors circle around and crowd in for pictures, the commanding figure stands flawed and awed—without arms!

What are modern-day sophisticates, know-it-alls and assorted wise-guys to make of such “deep flaws” in an otherwise remarkably perfect piece of stone? What kind of sculptor (assuming there is one, they must muse), would do such a “terrible job” as to make a statue with no arms? It hardly helps matters to know that portions of Venus’ arms have, in fact, been found. Fragments of a left arm outstretched and a left hand holding an apple—the famed Apple of Discord—were first rejected as being original due to evidence of rough workmanship. Cavalier critics, not being sculptors themselves, might likewise find fault in such shoddy workmanship, thinking no true sculptor would be so crude. But historians now accept that the left arm is original to the work; it was intentionally not as well finished as the rest of the statue because it would have been raised above eye level and difficult to see. Such a technique was a standard practice for many sculptors of the era—less visible parts of statues were often not as well finished since they would typically be invisible to the casual observer. Not knowing this purpose, however, early critics presumed to judge the quality of the work, completely missing the intelligence of the designer.

Critizing design to deny intelligent design in biological forms is great sport among smug and smirking presumers of science, biologist and non-biologist alike. Modern day sniffers and sneerers take great delight in mocking design as “incompetent” design or “unintelligent” design. Referring, as their leaders have, to any supposed designer as “a lowly grease monkey” or “a curiously inept cobbler of species,” no doubt provokes giggles among the sophomores as they elbow one another with “that was a good one!” Unable to comprehend their own impudence, much less their own errors in logic, presumers and pretenders live in a world of self-affirming titters, self-affirmation being the only reliable affirmation of untruths, half-truths, and anything-but-the-truths.

What does all this have to do with the theory of intelligent design? What can the Venus de Milo teach wise people everywhere about design and designers? Drawn from the mythical story, Judgment of Paris, the statue depicts Venus (Greek Aphrodite) holding the Apple of Discord, inscribed with the word Kallisti-“for the fairest one”. The apple had been tossed into a wedding banquet to provoke a squabble among the attendant goddesses by Eris, the uninvited goddess of discord. Three goddesses claimed the apple as their own, so Zeus tasked Paris of Troy, a mere mortal, with judging among the three. Paris awarded Venus the apple, deeming her to be the fairest among her peers. Her stone visage no doubt held the stone apple legitimately, as it was certainly the fairest one—at least at first.

And that is the point: Venus de Milo stands today permanently flawed, but her current condition is not her original condition. From Paris of Troy to Paris, France and from original perfection to time-worn disfigurement, Venus is worse for the wear. But she still inspires those willing to see beauty rather than defect. By criticizing the quality of Venus’ design by focusing on her flaws, one would be committing an error that is grossly obtuse at best, and grossly arrogant at worst. Likewise, to be so pompous as to judge in humans the quality of design by apparent flaws in design smacks of pretentious conceit.

A more humble person might consider more discerning explanations. Perhaps, just as Venus held the Apple of Discord, our human race once held its own apple of discord, and by desiring “fairest one” status perfect design was forever disturbed by this world’s god of discord. At a minimum, on the issue of design flaws, such an explanation permits complete agreement between science and the Bible—something most Darwinists pretend to encourage. Scientific evidence supports continuing discord in all living things, one mutation at a time. With each passing generation an organism’s genetic information can only stay essentially the same or degrade. The notion of increasingly beneficial genetic information occurring naturally over time to, say, grow new arms, is a modern myth. Despite Darwinists’ every effort to show otherwise, the evidence shows that unintelligent, unguided change over time progresses inexorably in one direction: to more and more flaws in a once-good design. Evolution, correctly understood, is therefore a fact and comports perfectly with religion.

We may never know why certain of our features are designed the way they are, but what we do know is that every feature, whether deemed bad design or good, clearly evidences a designer. Such knowledge cannot easily not be known. And, in complete agreement with observed change over time, we can be sure that our current design is not our original design. Ironically, rather than show the shortcomings of the theory of intelligent design, evolutionists who criticize design as being "bad" or "incompetent" inadvertently prove how easy it is to detect intelligent design in the first place, even if it is only to show off with egocentric criticism.

Roddy Bullock, Executive Director of the Intelligent Design Network of Ohio (www.idnetohio.com) is the author of The Cave Painting: A Parable of Science, available from Access Research Network. Send comments to: roddybullock@idnetohio.com.

Information on Venus de Milo attributable to Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_de_Milo

For more information on Unintelligent Design and the position of Donald Wise, see Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_poor_design

Copyright 2006 Roddy M. Bullock, all rights reserved. Quotes and links permitted with attribution.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Check out my new blog on the neuroscience issues that border on the intelligent design controversy, the Mindful Hack:

First two stories:

1. Blindness: Spiritual blindness worse than physical?

2. Sigmund Freud ... fallen so far and so fast?

Note: The Post-Darwinist will continue as before, and I will continue to contribute to this and all blogs I am not locked out of. Mindful Hack tracks my latest co-authored book, The Spiritual Brain, currently in copy editing.

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 forthcoming The Spiritual Brain (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Here are the recent additions to this file of columnists views on the intelligent design controversy.

Bahr, Scott , a freelance writer from Livonia, Michigan, notes in the Detroit News that evolution theory relies on faith, too:

Both creationists and evolutionists have logically derived hypotheses for the origin of our world and its inhabitants. Creationists believe in an Intelligent Designer who set nature in motion, and evolutionists believe that nature itself is the infinite being and the source of all we know.

How theories differ

Both theories cite the same evidence, but they interpret the evidence differently based on their presuppositions. For example, science shows that a wide variety of organisms share an extraordinarily high percentage of DNA sequences. Evolutionists see this as evidence of a common ancestor, but creationists see this as evidence of a common builder.

The problem with answering the question of origins is that neither hypothesis is testable. We can't recreate the scenario to observe the process.

John Derbyshire explains how he gradually ceased to be a Christian, and curiously, ID-related stuff played a role:

I can report that the Creationists are absolutely correct to hate and fear modern biology. Learning this stuff works against your faith. To take a single point at random: The idea that we are made in God’s image implies we are a finished product. We are not, though. It is now indisputable that natural selection has been going on not just through human prehistory, but through recorded history too, and is still going on today, and will go on into the future, presumably to speciation, either natural or artificial. So which human being was made in God’s image: the one of 100,000 years ago? 10,000 years ago? 1,000 years ago? The one of today? The species that will descend from us? All of those future post-human species, or just some of them? And so on. The genomes are all different. They are not the same creature. And if they are all made in God’s image somehow, then presumably so are all the other species, and there’s nothing special about us at all.

This is the first time that I have ever heard anyone claim that being made in God's image implies that humans are a finished product. Few human beings have ever claimed it of themselves.

Dworkin, Ronald offers three questions to America in the New York Review of Books, and one of them concerns the dangers of allowing students to know that Darwin may be doubted in science classes:

If we are to protect dignity by protecting people's responsibility for their own personal values, then we must build our compulsory education and our collective endorsements of truth around the distinction between faith and reason. We need a defensible conception of science not only for the intensely practical reason that we must prepare our children and youth to advance knowledge and to compete in the world's economy but also in order to protect the personal responsibility of our citizens each for his own religious faith. We need an account of science, in our public philosophy of government, that does not make its authority depend on commitment to any set of religious or ethical values. So Senator Frist made a serious mistake when he said that describing intelligent design only as a scientific alternative to evolution doesn't "force any particular theory on anyone." In fact it damages young students, practically and politically, by using the state's authority to force on them a false and disabling view of what science is.

Klinghoffer, David
You can't have both Darwin and
God because

The key point is whether, across hundreds of millions of years, the development of life was guided or not. On one side of this chasm between worldviews are Darwinists, whose belief system asserts that life, through a material mechanism, in effect designed itself. On the other side are theories like intelligent design (ID) which argue that no such purely material mechanism could write the software in the cell, called DNA.

ID supporters find positive evidence of a designer’s hand at work in life’s history. The Discovery Institute, where I’m a senior fellow, has compiled a list of more than 600 Darwin-doubting doctoral scientists representing institutions like Stanford, Yale, and MIT. The bibliography of Darwin-doubting works in peer-reviewed and peer-edited scientific publications continues to grow.

To put it starkly, Darwinism would put God out of business. God’s authority to command our behavior is based on His having created us. By this, I don’t mean that He formed the first person from clay less than six thousand years ago, but that His guidance was necessary to produce the chief glory of the world, life. If the process that produced existence and then life was not guided, then God is not our creator.

Klinghoffer has some pointed things to say about Francis Collins' book, The Language of God, as well, including "sticky-sweet memories of how he accepted Jesus on a nature hike."

Padgett, Jeffrey argues in the Western Illinois University Courier that teaching both sides of the evolution controversy is a good idea:

In truth, I discovered that there is much good, hard scientific evidence supporting and denying the theory of intelligent design, just as there is much that supports and discounts the concept of evolution. The reason public schools do not teach us the theory of intelligent design in science classrooms is because they equate it to teaching religion, and of course we must keep church and state separate.

But if the state is in fact being unbiased, then shouldn't they present the scientific evidence for both sides? This is the only way to be fair, and it certainly isn't forcing a religion on anyone. What is the harm in teaching all of the evidence for evolution and for intelligent design?

Pafford, John M., an adjunct professor of history at Northwood University, Michigan, argues in the Midland Daily News for teaching about the evolution controversy:

What aggravates opponents is that scientists supporting intelligent design rejected Darwinian evolution and determined that the evidence points to a Creator. While it is true that creationism is taught in the Bible, scientists believing in it do study scientific data and scientifically examine the phenomena of the natural world.

Mr. Bufka's advocating the removal of creationism and intelligent design from being considered in public schools leaves Darwinian evolution as the state-established belief system, a serious error and denial of academic freedom. All three of them, creationism, intelligent design -- and Darwinian evolution -- should be taught with each individual free to accept whatever he or she chooses.

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 forthcoming The Spiritual Brain (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

"About 30 percent of community college professors considered intelligent design as a serious scientific alternative. Fewer than 6 percent of professors at elite universities took that position," according to a study by sociologists Neil Gross of Harvard University and Solon Simmons of George Mason University, who surveyed nearly 1500 US profs. This finding tracks other similar findings, and makes one wonder whether universities go out of their way to encourage and reward materialism.

The studies indicate that spirituality affects how professors teach and interact with the world, said Jennifer A. Lindholm, the UCLA project director.

Her study concluded that the more spiritual professors were more likely to use cooperative learning techniques in the classroom; to use their scholarship to address community needs; and to encourage students to perform community service.

Maybe the "more spiritual professors" think they will be judged one day or that they will have to spend eternity with their students or something like that.

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 forthcoming The Spiritual Brain (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

The Discovery Institute (ID Central) notes that
anti-science has become a catch-all term on the American left for any science approach/finding that threatens one of their materialists ideologies, whether about evolution, the use of humans in destructive experiments, or global warming. In doing this, the American left makes perfectly clear that Darwinism is the creation story of atheism, destruction of human embryos/fetuses is its sacrament, and global warming is its apocalypse. I wonder when they will get round to the Books of the Prophets - or is that covered off by the latest speculations from evolutionary psychology?

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 forthcoming The Spiritual Brain (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

A Brazilian friend advises me that Great Errors in Science , which highlights the importance of academic freedom in the sciences, is available in Portuguese. He explains more at his blog. Apparently, three articles were written by Brazilian "Ivy league equivalent" professors that my friend has the good fortune to know.

My friend, who has a copy, quotes,

Science is not only a vital activity for the survival and development of humanity. It is also one of the most beautiful productions of human intelligence. But only the acceptance of its limited character, partial and uncertain can avoid that it transforms itself into a fossilized belief system

But that, of course, is precisely what Darwinism has become, complete with ridiculous hagiography.

By the way, here is an interesting essay on the decline of academic freedom in the United States (in English), featuring Wendy Kaminer. She notes the curious - and worriesome - morph of college students into "young authoritarians."

Come to think of it, the only really vast change I have ever personally seen in a species over time has been the evolution of the rules-challenged college student into the sullen young authoritarian, who aims at suppressing any idea that challenges him. The Darwinists can have them all, in my view. Every one. I will take the rest.

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 forthcoming The Spiritual Brain (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

A. N. Wilson in the Telegraph's World of Books makes the case that Darwin was the father of European fascism:

"Scientific humanism" sounds cosy, but Darwin's Descent of Man is anything but. You have to make allowances for his writing in the past, but in a passage I cited last week Darwin explained why he preferred monkeys and baboons to superstitious savages. You wouldn't say that on a natural history show today.

You can't dismiss such remarks as mere asides. Darwin had spent a lifetime accumulating his evidence and coming to his view of how life on Earth evolved. The indelible stamp of our origin remains with us, and the method by which any of us successful species - pigeons, dogs, birds of paradise, Victorian rentiers - evolved was through struggle. It was through beating off the opposition, through the assertion of our superiority in physical strength, in mental agility, in adaptability.

Darwin's sexism and racism, as we should call them today, are not minor hiccups in an otherwise humanistic nature ramble. They are written into his whole view of humanity: "Woman seems to differ from man in mental disposition," he writes, "chiefly in her greater tenderness and less selfishness; and this holds good even with savages."

He closes with "Darwin, the product of British imperialism, was surely the father, among other things, of European fascism." That's hard to prove, because other candidates make pretty convincing claims, but at least Wilson has got past the ridiculous hagiography of Darwin that characterizes so many materialist sources, and can see him as a man of his time.

Here’s lit prof Terry Eagleton’s review of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, titled "Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching", and with a title like that, you can gather Eagleton did not especially enjoy the read:

Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology. Card-carrying rationalists like Dawkins, who is the nearest thing to a professional atheist we have had since Bertrand Russell, are in one sense the least well-equipped to understand what they castigate, since they don’t believe there is anything there to be understood, or at least anything worth understanding. This is why they invariably come up with vulgar caricatures of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince. The more they detest religion, the more ill-informed their criticisms of it tend to be. If they were asked to pass judgment on phenomenology or the geopolitics of South Asia, they would no doubt bone up on the question as assiduously as they could. When it comes to theology, however, any shoddy old travesty will pass muster. These days, theology is the queen of the sciences in a rather less august sense of the word than in its medieval heyday.

On the other hand, here is a sympathetic portrait of Dawkins and two other atheists, by Jerry Adler in Newsweek arguing

"If Dawkins, Dennett and Harris are right, the five-century-long competition between science and religion is sharpening. People are choosing sides. And when that happens, people get hurt."

Hmmmm. Wonder who Adler had in mind to get hurt? Lots of people who doubt materialism have already got hurt, but that obviously is not stopping them.

The author of the Sim City line of products Is developing a game where you can create new worlds, talks about random evolution vs. intelligent design in relation to his product:

Of course, some of the content of Spore is fanciful. The "DNA points" that players accumulate have no real-world analogue, for instance, and thus far no one — that we know of — has been able to grow a life-sustaining environment on a lifeless planet. "I've had a few people ask me if I think Spore will help teach evolution," Wright said, "and the ironic thing is that, if anything, we're teaching intelligent design. I’ve seen a few games that relied on evolution — I've even designed some of them — and it's just not as fun." But, of course, there's one crucial way in which Spore breaks from intelligent design. The universe of the game is not dominated by a single, all-powerful creator. It's a universe governed by a million intelligent designers, each unleashing his or her creations to be fruitful and multiply, to conquer and befriend, to fly spaceships and fashion planets.

Somewhat like India's two hundred and thirty million gods? Hmmmm.

Apparently, philosopher Peter Singer, known for stressing human-animal equality, has written a book, arguing for the viability of a Darwinian left. The Darwinian right has been aound for a while, of course. Nancy Pearcey reviews Singer in First Things:

Does Singer ultimately succeed in crafting a Darwinian left? Not exactly. To begin with, for all his eagerness to be identified as a man of the left, Singer shows a cavalier disregard for the concerns of real leftists. Historically, the left focused on the ownership of the means of production; in today’s "identity politics," the enemy is no longer capitalism but racism, sexism, and homophobia. Yet Singer says nothing about any of these; instead he offers a definition of the left so broad as to be meaningless. "[T]he core of the left is a set of values," he writes. A person of the left sees "the vast quantity of pain and suffering that exists in the universe" and wants "to do something to reduce it." Under this expansive definition, everyone who favors social amelioration—including, no doubt, everyone reading this review—is a leftist.

Pearcey goes on to suggest that Singer isn't really very interested in the left at all, only in promoting Darwinism.

Here are some endorsements for Salvo, that Christian pop sci mag.

"Salvo is arguably the most clever, edgy, intellectually-sophisticated Christian glossy on the market. It certainly is the most fun to read for both visuals and substance. It's a saucy shot across the bow of contemporary culture."

- Greg Koukl, Stand To Reason

"I recommend Salvo with enthusiasm. This stunning new magazine takes direct aim at the destructive consequences that follow from the scientism embraced by some of the cognitive elites of our culture. The hard-hitting and entertaining articles in the premier issue explain what Christians need to understand in order to help restore a balanced rationality to a society that has been seduced into discarding inherited wisdom in order to better pursue faddish notions up to and past the limits of their logic."

- Phillip Johnson, professor of law emeritus, University of California, Berkeley

"Salvo offers the hippest and most provocative articulation of orthodoxy to be found in our culture today. Salvo gets our postmodern moment and has something constructive to say to that moment."

- W. Bradford Wilcox, professor of Sociology, University of Virginia

"Here is a publication that is timely, persuasive, and intelligent. Surely it immediately ranks in the forefront of new and exciting publications."

- Herbert I. London, President, Hudson Institute

"Check out Salvo. It’s hard-hitting and in-your-face without being ponderous."

- William Dembski

"Salvo is setting the pace for intelligent discussion and Christian cultural engagement today." ---Mark Brumley, President, Ignatius Press

Get your own copy soon. I just turned in my article for the second edition, on how the rag trade promotes starvation to women. (No, as a matter of fact, I do not write only about the intelligent design controversy. I was a freelance writer for twenty-five years before I had ever heard of the intelligent design controversy. it takes up a lot of my time right now, but hey.)

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 forthcoming The Spiritual Brain (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

(Note: Unexpectedly, this months-long problem has just got solved, shortly after the bloggers started complaining publicly about it. - d.)

A Web guy at Uncommon Descent writes me to say,

On approximately the 19th of September, the blog operated by Bill Dembski and friends (including me) Uncommon Descent
was delisted from the Google search index. [That means that you can't find items from Uncommon Descent using the Google search engine.]

No reason has ever been given for why the site was delisted, despite requests for reinclusion.

This blog has tens of thousands of legitimate links, especially from trusted institutions of higher education.

This blog had been around for well over a year.

This blog has a Google PageRank of 6/10 (meaning it is considered quite important, even by Google)

The blog is run by a nationally recognized scholar and author [Dembski]

Well, over to you, Google monster. I've heard that the problem might have been caused by some idle fellow who swatches copy from Uncommon Descent, so that he and his friends can beggar around with it. But if that kind of thing has tied up Google, then Google has some glitches to fix.

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 forthcoming The Spiritual Brain (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent
Uncommon Descent has been having trouble (= censorship?) with the Google search engine, so I am posting some links here with a brief explanation, as a stopgap until the problem is sorted out:

- The fur flies as Darwinist and Thumbsman P.Z. Myers is accused of dealing dishonestly with quotations from Jonathan Wells' The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design, and it is still flying as of today.

- College level ID textbook to be released March 2007, with Chapter 1 available online.

- An article in eminent science journal Nature once again highlights the limitations of peer review, as a road to excellence. Responding to "Flawed nature paper on global warming", by Douglas J. Keenan, DaveScot asks "Can you say rubber stamp?"

Yes we can. Global warming is the apocalypse of the secular materialist's creed, so almost any nonsense can be allowed in its favor and no good sense allowed against it. Some warming warnings read like the Left Behind series of secular science - but, you see, it's the science that sometimes get left behind.

It's not hard to understand the limitations of peer review as a fair forum: Peer review submits new ideas to a committee.

Committees tend to lop off BOTH ends of the spectrum - extreme excellence and extreme stunnedness. That's just how small groups tend to work. They attempt to achieve consensus, which is most easily found in the middle.

I suppose an evolutionary psychologist would, at this point, make up a just-so story about how this tendency helped our selfish genes survive the Pleistocene era. But actually, if the entire universe had popped into existence on July 1, 1867, committees would likely work the same way.
Convergence would most often be found in the middle range.

So one way of explaining the problem is that the current procedure suppresses stunned stuff at the price of also suppressing excellence.

As relativity physicist Frank Tipler wrote,

If one reads memoirs or biographies of physicists who made their great breakthroughs after, say, 1950, one is struck by how often one reads that "the referees rejected for publication the paper that later won me the Nobel Prize."

- By Design or by Chance?, page 205.

But rejection was safer, you see.
For all Uncommon Descent posts and comments go here.

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 forthcoming The Spiritual Brain (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent
An boffo evolutionary biologist accounts for altruism:

The mathematical models of population genetics suggest the following rule in the evolutionary origin of altruism If the reduction of survival and reproduction of individuals due to genes for altruism is more than offset by the increased probability of survival of the group due to the altruism, the altruism will rise in frequency throughout the entire population of competing groups. Put as concisely as possible: The individual pays, his genes and tribe gain, altruism spreads. - (E. O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, p. 282 (Random House: Vintage Books, 1998)

From the movie, Gandhi, Gandhi's advice to a fellow Hindu who had killed a Muslim who had killed his son, and now feared he was
going to hell:

Gandhi sees the man's unbearable grief and remorse. He gently tells him, "I know a way out of hell. Find a child, a child whose mother and father have been killed - a little boy - and raise him as your own. Only be sure that he is a Muslim..."
The man's expression changes to one of hope. He suddenly sees a way in can undo what he has done and effect a restitution. He can replace his own son and provide a Muslim orphan with a home and parents. It is a perfect solution.

The man baulks, however, when Gandhi insists he raise the boy as a Muslim, but notice we don't hear anything here about genes or even tribes in the genetic sense. It all turns on ideas.

And then of course, in the immortal words of a Jewish itinerant preacher, "A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho when he fell into the hands of robbers ... " Read the whole thing and ask yourself where altruism means promoting your own tribe?

The major problem with evolutionary biology accounts of altruism is that most people don't even consider the behavior that merely promotes one's own family altruism. Taken to extremes - as it must be, to work the way Wilson needs it to - it is called amoral familism and is widely regarded as a key source of underdevelopment in backward societies.

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 forthcoming The Spiritual Brain (Harper 2007).

controversy
by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent
- The American Darwin lobby, National Center for Science Education tracks the explosion of "creationism" (which could include intelligent design theory or non-Darwinism or doubt about Darwinism) around the world. To understand why, read a few of the following items, for example, Pagel's review of Ruse. The committed Darwinist simply does not comprehend reasons for doubt.

- In a review in Nature you would have to pay US$30 to buy, evolutionary biologist Mark Pagel reviews Michael Ruse'sDarwinism and its Discontents, describing it as a "pro-Darwin toolkit." The review is interesting for its description of the reasons many doubt Darwin:

The book is not a sociological study of the discontents; Ruse does not tell us who they are or even whether they are large in number. Rather, it is a sort of 'battle book', containing facts about evolution and natural selection, and is designed to be instructive in changing people's minds about darwinism. But creationists' disaffection with darwinism may only be cloaked in quibbles about design, the age of Earth, fossils, missing links and the importance of the peppered moth, Biston betularia. These concerns may conceal a deeper affective — indeed a limbic — response to the theory.

So, in case you wondered, There Is No Rational Argument Or Evidence Against Darwinism. Doubt merely arises in the limbic system (emotional center) of the brain. There, that clears that up nicely. Glad you asked. By the way, Pagel also tries to explain away the attempt to use Darwinism to explain everything from human morality to the origin of the universe. But it's too late for that. Too many people know how Darwinism is used, and will not be put off this way.

- Mathematician John Allen Paulos argues against "creationist probability" - that is, he believes that the gradual evolution of complex machine-like structures is not wildly improbable. However, he does not identify by name anyone who is actually making the argument he trashes. A friend wonders whether he constructs his opposition from intuition.

- In Frederick Turner's What's Good about Atheism

Societies that have developed sophisticated theological systems have tended to develop sciences and advanced technologies as well, because of a fundamental theological belief that things make sense and that there is an underlying order to the world. Thus from a strictly Darwinian perspective—the ultimate practical expression of pragmatism (and one to which I subscribe), religion is a powerful, perhaps the most powerful, survival strategy. One can even set aside the statistics that show that religious people tend to be happier, more long-lived, richer, and get better sex. If, pragmatically, by their fruits ye shall know them, and truth is whatever gets you the goodies and continues your germ line, the atheist should try to hypnotize himself into being a believer.

But this is shooting fish in a barrel. There are, actually, many valuable correctives and important questions that are offered by the atheist perspective.

One is here reminded of Satan's fateful question regarding Job,

"Does Job fear God for nothing?" Satan replied. "Have you not put a hedge around him and his household and everything he has? You have blessed the work of his hands, so that his flocks and herds are spread throughout the land. But stretch out your hand and strike everything he has, and he will surely curse you to your face." (Job 1:9-11, NIV)

, which precipitate's Job's wild career of suffering, during which he never did curse God. Turner's attempt to find a natural religion stumbles over this, I think.

- On origin of life, oceanographer Edward Peltzer (UCSD '79) writes to say

1. The structure of DNA (the double helix) and Miller's first experiment were published in the same year, literally months apart, in 1953. In the ensuing 53 years, genetics and molecular biology has made great strides, Miller and cohorts are still trying to make all 20 amino acids plus the 5 nucleobases in a single pot (they can make them all but have to do it in several vessels with different conditions in each = evidence of fine tuning, but that is a different story). Why is one field making daily discoveries and the other is still crawling? Simple: genetics begins with the presumption of a code = intelligence; Miller began with the presumption of random reactions leading to a random walk for the field = wandering in the wilderness with no sense of direction.

2. OoL researchers assert that a few simple reactions is all that is needed to go from a dilute broth to a living organism BECAUSE then they can dismiss an intelligence behind it all. Their investigations are directed by their materialist prejudices. In reality, we already know what the few simple reactions are that come next -- Miller describes a red oily goo coating the insides of his flasks after a few days -- and these are the products of the Maillard reaction. The reaction is well known (look it up on the web) and adequately explains the fact that the amino acid concentrations plateau long before the precursor compounds are consumed. These colored products are known as melanoids (formed by the condensation of reducing sugars with amino acids). They are highly branched, cross-linked, heterogeneous and generally intractable to detailed analysis. Hardly the compounds necessary as precursors of the linear, homogeneous bio-polymers one needs to start building a cell. Only someone with great faith in a materialistic pathway can look at this mess and think that they are on the path to life.

3. An intelligent person can clearly see that each new discovery in biochemistry / genetics raises the bar that they are attempting to jump over.

Yes, but an intelligent person with a whack of grant money and the presumption that they must come up with an accidental origin, no matter how implausible?

- Re ID in the UK A friend notes the following news stories:
ABC - "Widespread creationism teaching would worry Blair" in a story from Reuters that is just breathtakingly wrong.

but

BBC - Blair downplays creationism fears . This story is locally grounded and makes some sense.

However, from New Scientist we learn that in response to a question,

One subject that is of great concern to scientists is creationism. There has been a suggestion that creationism is being taught in some British schools. What are your views on this?

Blair replied,

This can be hugely exaggerated. I’ve visited one of the schools in question and as far as I’m aware they are teaching the curriculum in a normal way. If I notice creationism become the mainstream of the education system in this country then that’s the time to start worrying. As I’ve said, it’s really quite important for science to fight the battles it needs to fight. ...

The whole interview is worth reading. At some point, some legacy media firm's story stencil needs replacing. This is that point, but they might go out of business first.

- Norbert Smith, also known as Doc Gator, on whose recent book on the passive fear response in alligators, marsupials, and placental mammals I have blogged writes me to say that he has been refused permission to use a photo by an Ontario based photographer because he is writing for the Creation Society Research Journal

I KNOW this will not make the Evening News, but thought you might like to know that prejudice in science is alive and well, even in Canada. I am writing a small article for CRSQ about how skunk cabbage can literally melt the snow by non-shivering thermogenesis much like endothermic animals keep warm. I sought permission to use the first in the series of beautiful photos found at Ontario Wildflowers - Skunk Cabbage (Symplocarpus foetidus), but was denied permission to do so.

Well here's the letter:

The goals and values of the organization to which you will be submitting your article do not at all match mine. So I decline to provide permission for use of my photo for this purpose.

Thank you for your inquiry. I respect your point of view and that of CRS, but those views are simply not mine. I wish you all the best with your journey.

The refuser was an Ontario naturalist photographer. I cannot reveal his name, as I have not sought his permission.

I will say this, though: Many Canadians garner a cheap righteousness from dissing whoever they can get away with. Sometimes we do this in order to inflate our own achievements, but more often to preserve our narrow, pristine world which is always under a supposed threat. Smith informs me that he can find another photo. I am sure he can.

- Martin Cothran over at the vere loqui blog points out that:

Richard Dawkin's website is running down Patrick Henry College, questioning its students' ability to think critically. But, apparently, whoever is running the website forgot an important fact: Patrick Henry's debate team has defeated Oxford (where Dawkins teaches) two years in a row. Who is it that can't think critically?

- Todd Norquist writes me to say:

In his debate with Stephen C. Meyer, U. of WA paleontologist Peter Ward announced that $100 million dollars endows Harvard's ''Origins of Life in the Universe Initiative."

Todd, that's a lot of cheese whiz, ... $100 million. Norquist cautions that, er, that cheque may not yet have been cut. He goes on to remark:

Seriously now-THIS IS GOOD NEWS-the more rigorously Harvard designs its OOL science, the more obviously evidences consonant with I D will surface-just as nearly every advance in astrobiology [however strained the project's metaphysics] buttresses the Privileged Planet hypothesis. Somewhere in this project, for example, someone may be honest enough to take a mathematical or experimental crack [or 2, or 90] at one of the information problems. Heck, biologists are commonly ignorant of the even the polypeptide impasse, not to mention chemical hurdles, such as cytosine's synthesis (David Berlinski delightfully surveys OoL research. I recently heard a Gonzaga bio prof publicly declare: "We now know, by the laws of chemistry, how life started." Harvard, yes-by any and all means-do try and get a life. Let the serious bench science-and publishing-begin!

Well, I hope it isn't just a bunch of boondoggles in the Galapagos. We'll see.

- From Muslim ID advocate: Turkish Minister Supports Intelligent Design

In a recent TV debate on the Turkish educational system, the country's Minister of Education, Mr. Hüseyin Çelik** argued in favor of intelligent design and for incorporating the theory into Turkish high school biology textbooks. The debate was aired on CNNTurk* on 17 October 2006, on the popular TV show Tarafsiz Bölge (Neutral Zone), which is hosted by the trendy Turkish journalist Ahmet Hakan Coskun.

During the 2.5 hour-long program, the minister was challenged by another leading journalist, Ismet Berkan, who has previously argued for Darwinism and against ID in his columns. Berkan contended that the vague reference to "creation" in Turkish biology textbooks as an alternative to Darwinian evolution should be omitted, since it presents faith, not science. Minister Çelik responded by pointing that the idea of creation is not necessarily based on religious texts and that it can be based solely on objective evidence and the latter is what Turkish textbooks refer to. Moreover he gave a brief description of ID, by quoting an op-ed piece of mine - that was, interestingly enough, published in the newspaper that Mr. Berkan edits (Radikal) - and argued that it should be in Turkish textbooks as an alternative theory to Darwinian evolution. The 15-min discussion between Minister Çelik and Mr. Berkan is available in audio, albeit only in Turkish.

So, watch out. ID might become a part of science standards soon in unexpected places.

* CNNTurk is a joint-venture of CNN International and the Dogan Media Group, Turkey's no. 1 media empire. It is one of the two most prestigious and popular newschannels in Turkey.
** Mr. Çelik is a member of the incumbent AKP, Turkey's moderate Muslim party.

O'Leary's question: Will we soon see a Turkish franchise of the American National Center for Science Education, just like the British franchise, British Center for Science Education? That should send the controversy right into hyperspace! Those people have a genius for helping ID everywhere they go.

- Thomas Nagel, a top Anglo-American philosopher, slams Richard Dawkins'The God Delusion in The New Republic.

Since Dawkins is operating mostly outside the range of his scientific expertise, it is not surprising that The God Delusion lacks the superb instructive lucidity of his books on evolutionary theory, such as The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, and Climbing Mount Improbable. In this new book I found that kind of pleasure only in the brief explanation of why the moth flies into the candle flame--an example introduced to illustrate how a useful trait can have disastrous side effects. (Dawkins believes the prevalence of religion among human beings is a side effect of the useful trust of childhood.)

I'm getting bored with Dawkins, plus ten, and think he has both peaked and tanked, but thought I should pass this on anyway. A moth that got religion would certainly fly out of the candle and then go on to testify on prophecy TV, right?

- Having listened to arch-Darwinist Richard Dawkins take decades off from his career as a zoologist and professor of the public understanding of science at Oxford to rant against religion, journalist Dines D'Souza reasonably asks, how does atheism survive, when it is so poorly adapted to life?

Russia is one of the most atheist countries in the world, and there abortions outnumber live births 2 to 1. Russia's birth rate has fallen so low that the nation is now losing 700,000 people a year. Japan, perhaps the most secular country in Asia, is also on a kind of population diet: its 130 million people are expected to drop to around 100 million in the next few decades. And then there is Europe. The most secular continent on the globe is decadent in the literal sense that its population is rapidly shrinking. Lacking the strong Christian identity that produced its greatness, atheist Europe seems to be a civilization on its way out. We have met Nietzsche's "last man" and his name is Sven.
[ ... ]
My conclusion is that it is not religion but atheism that requires a Darwinian explanation. It seems perplexing why nature would breed a group of people who see no purpose to life or the universe, indeed whose only moral drive seems to be sneering at their fellow human beings who do have a sense of purpose. Here is where the biological expertise of Dawkins and his friends could prove illuminating. Maybe they can turn their Darwinian lens on themselves and help us understand how atheism, like the human tailbone and the panda's thumb, somehow survived as an evolutionary leftover of our primitive past.

Good question, actually. If the universe is intelligently designed, then the current situation is precisely what you should expect to see insofar as atheists are poorly adapted to it. Thus, you can be a Darwinist only if you are not an atheist. Actually, I have been appealing for years for a social scientist or anthropologist to study Darwinism as a cultural phenomenon. It cries out for that treatment.

For example, I have discovered from experience, that the average Darwinist sees absolutely nothing wrong with taxpayers and parents being compelled to forward money and children to help advance his point of view. Most people in the Western world, of whatever belief system, will tend to pause at that point ... but not the Darwinist. It would make a great trade book after the journal articles were all in print.

- While speaking in Minnesota, columnist Mike Adams, a defender of academic freedom, attracted the attention of PZ Myers, a Minnesotan Darwinist, who had earlier commented on his blog as follows:

Mike S. Adams, columnist for TownHall, Horowitzian shill, anti-feminist, creationist clown, homophobic bigot, warrior for free speech, professional racist, gun kook, academic-by-accident, beauty contest judge, and just generally contemptible far, far right-wing nutcase.

This is average for PZ, an adult toddler who blogs at the Darwinist Thumblog.
Apparently, Myer's subsequent account of the confrontation is at some odds with the videotape, but read more at Adams' column.

- Lamarckian evolution - the theory that life forms can bequeath to their offspring characteristics that developed during their lifetime - has always been anathema to Darwinists, because it suggests that processes other than natural selectin, random drift, or possibly random mutation could play a role in evolution. A study linked on this site argues that there is some basis for Lamarckism, which may well be true. This much I know: The mere fact that Darwinists attack it is no barrier to its truth.

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 forthcoming The Spiritual Brain (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

The learned biologist Stephen e. Jones has provided some very interesting comments from the great origin of life researcher J.B.S. Haldane which antedate the ID movement by decades. Now that Harvard has decided to sink serious money into refuting intelligent design at the origin of life, it may be as well to learn what others have said.

One thing ID is certainly not turning out to be is a science stopper. Here is an edited version of what I told some friends on the subject recently:

So Harvard, at least, has come down on the side of saying that ID is "falsifiable" as opposed to "unfalsifiable."

[One shell game played by materialists over the years is to claim that ID is unfalsifiable but - as it happens - also falsified. If your head is spinning, give it a twist in the other direction, okay?]

If Harvard really gets a ton of money to falsify ID, does that demonstrate that ID is an important idea?

If, as various pundits proclaim, ID is fading away, must Harvard kiss goodbye to the money?

Does the money mean is that Harvard can't afford to let ID die? Have they become co-dependent with it?

Now, here's the money shot: If ID is correct, the Harvard group, spending their own money, will probably identify the specific points at which materialist explanation fails. So won’t that provide an opportunity to work on ID explanations?

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 forthcoming The Spiritual Brain (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Having listened to arch-Darwinist Richard Dawkins take decades off from his career as a zoologist and professor of the public understanding of science to rant against religion, journalist Dinesh D’Souza reasonably asks, how does atheism survive, when it is so poorly adapted to life?

Russia is one of the most atheist countries in the world, and there abortions outnumber live births 2 to 1. Russia's birth rate has fallen so low that the nation is now losing 700,000 people a year. Japan, perhaps the most secular country in Asia, is also on a kind of population diet: its 130 million people are expected to drop to around 100 million in the next few decades. And then there is Europe. The most secular continent on the globe is decadent in the literal sense that its population is rapidly shrinking. Lacking the strong Christian identity that produced its greatness, atheist Europe seems to be a civilization on its way out. We have met Nietzsche's "last man" and his name is Sven.

[ ... ]

My conclusion is that it is not religion but atheism that requires a Darwinian explanation. It seems perplexing why nature would breed a group of people who see no purpose to life or the universe, indeed whose only moral drive seems to be sneering at their fellow human beings who do have a sense of purpose. Here is where the biological expertise of Dawkins and his friends could prove illuminating. Maybe they can turn their Darwinian lens on themselves and help us understand how atheism, like the human tailbone and the panda's thumb, somehow survived as an evolutionary leftover of our primitive past.

Good question, actually. If the universe is intelligently designed, then the current situation is precisely what you should expect to see insofar as atheists are poorly adapted to it. Thus, you can be a Darwinist only if you are not an atheist. Actually, I have been appealing for years for a social scientist or anthropologist to study Darwinism as a cultural phenomenon. It cries out for that treatment.
For example, I have discovered from experience, that the average Darwinist sees absolutely nothing wrong with taxpayers and parents being compelled to forward money and children to help advance his point of view. Most people in the Western world, of whatever belief system, will tend to pause at that point ... but not the Darwinist. It would make a great trade book after the journal articles were all in print.

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 forthcoming The Spiritual Brain (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Gareth Cook's article on the new Harvard origin of life project in the Boston Globe, reads like a press release (except for the very end where he actually quotes Michael Behe). Bill Dembski blogged on it, wondering how seriously they would take any evidence of intelligent design.

Starting with $1 million a year, we are told, Harvard will

bring together scientists from fields as disparate as astronomy and biology, to understand how life emerged from the chemical soup of early Earth, and how this might have happened on distant planets.

On the whole, this "Origins of Life in the Universe Initiative" is good news for the ID guys, first because the Harvard project seems to acknowledge what everyone who looks into the question soon finds out - that origin of life studies have been at an impasse for decades.

Like intelligent design, the Harvard project begins with awe at the nature of life, and with an admission that, almost 150 years after Charles Darwin outlined his theory of evolution in the Origin of Species, scientists cannot explain how the process began.

Many science textbooks fudge this issue, so don't be surprised if comes as news to you. It might come as news to your old biology teacher too.

Why is origin of life difficult to determine?

To understand the nature of the origin of life researchers' difficulties, we must see what Harvard's precise goal is. Chemist David Liu puts it as follows: "... my expectation is that we will be able to reduce this to a very simple series of logical events that could have taken place with no divine intervention."

Or, translating from the theistic idiom, Harvard's proposition is that intelligence is not necessary, that the universe is bottom up, not top down, and that order may be had for free.

Indeed, that has always been the key difficulty in origin of life (OoL) research. Understanding the OoL is not difficult in principle, because our universe appears to be fine tuned for just such a thing to happen.

Put another way, if all the odds were against life, we should indeed wonder that it exists! But the odds are for it. So in principle, the origin is eminently researchable, just as fine-tuning is.

BUT if your project, like Harvard's, is to rule out an intelligence behind the odds, you have a big job ahead, maybe an impossible one.

I don't think Harvard yard will succeed, but here's the difficulty: They will easily persuade themselves that they have succeeded. That is usually the way with such projects.

Taking intelligent design seriously

Why so? Well, in the first place, as reporter Cook's story makes clear, the background to the project is alarm over the idea of intelligent design. Indeed, the story unobtrusively demonstrates how seriously intelligent design has come to be taken. Just as NASA spent billions trying to disconfirm the Big Bang, Harvard will spent at least millions trying to disconfirm ID, where origin of life is concerned. Actually, Harvard has no alternative.

Remember that when some boffo pundit assures you that ID is not taken seriously by scientists.

Why you will be told the project is succeeding even if it isn't

Apart from the taxpayer funding that the Harvard project will inevitably attract, it resembles certain fundamentalist efforts to find Noah's Ark. SETI searches come swiftly to mind as well. That is, the seekers have already determined that what they are looking for is really there - whether it is a bottom up origin of life, the good ship Ark, or intergalactic civilizations. Failure to find the prize cannot - by the very nature of the project - serve as a disconfirmation. It can prompt only the most limited reevaluations.

When a project is framed in this way, one outcome is that some findings must not be made and some conclusions must not be drawn, irrespective of evidence.

In an analogous situation, Larry Summers, a key project backer, lost his own presidency last year for nothing more than pointing out that women are not as well adapted to the hard sciences as men.

That fact is massively overdetermined by evidence, but what does evidence matter in the face of a demand to demonstrate a politically correct proposition rather than a factually based one?

Indeed, one phase of Summers' difficulties over his remarks on women in science provides a sobering lesson as to what to expect from the Harvard OoL project.

Biology prof Nancy Hopkins walked out of Summers' talk, proclaiming that his remarks made her sick. Specifically, she told The Globe ,that if she hadn't left, she "would've either blacked out or thrown up."

Now, ... what if a hard science guy announced that challenges from his colleagues cause him to nearly black out or throw up unless he can just walk out on them? Should he be given a demanding chair? For that matter, which of the ID theorists is having a nervous breakdown because of remarks made by the adult toddlers over at the Thumb? People do not have to be tough in order to survive (it often pays better to be nice, actually), but they do have to be tough in order to survive certain types of positions.

In fact, Hopkins was unintentionally providing good evidence for Summer's observations that the requisite types of personality and mental development are more often found in men than women, as several perceptive women columnists (all of them tough as nails, just like me) have pointed out - but (and this is my point) her behaviour was not generally regarded as evidence. You see it had been agreed in advance that no actual evidence for Summers' original position could ever be admitted. So it will be with intelligence and the origin of life.

However, the article is interesting in several other ways: Yes, it actually does quote Michael Behe. After the intrusive sign-up screen (which means few will see Behe's comment unless they think of asking for the printer-friendly screen instead), Cook quotes Behe as saying,

Michael Behe, a biologist at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania and one of the leading proponents of intelligent design, said he was glad that Harvard was going to try to address the issue.

''If, as I suspect will happen," Behe said, ''they fail to find a plausible answer without invoking intelligence, then maybe science will be less hostile to folks who see intelligent direction in the history of life," he said.

Fat chance, actually, Mike. As I have noted above, in the atmosphere such a project generates, boosters easily silence questioners, simply by quoting dogma and questioning loyalty. Remember, the boosters know that bottom up order for free is real, and anyone who cannot so convince himself is a failure.

What we can expect is press releases every so often claiming major breakthroughs that turn out to depend on the acceptance of speculative propositions. Such releases justify the current funding and attract more funding - and very few will have an interest in pointing out the problems.

Well, it's an ill wind that blows nobody good. Press releases are bread and butter for me.

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 forthcoming The Spiritual Brain (Harper 2007).

I may be converted in the course of the meeting, but when writing this paper, I am by no means attracted by the theory of a period of many million years of biochemical evolution preceding the origin of life. It seems to me that any half-live systems - for example, catalysts releasing the energy of metastable molecules such as pyrophosphate or sugar - would merely have made conditions less favorable for the first living organisms, by which I mean the first system capable of reproduction. A protein capable of catalyzing such reactions would not multiply in consequence, any more than an enzyme does.
- JBS Haldane, from The Origins of Prebiological Systems ed. Sidney Fox, p 15).

See also my comments on why origin of life is such a difficult problem.

Level II Chemistry of the popular Real Science-4-Kids science curiculum is now in stock at ARN. This program teaches high-school and college level concepts of chemistry, physics and biology to kids in grades 1-2 (Pre-Level 1) grades 3-5 (Level I) and now grades 6-8 (Level II). The program is designed for homeschool use with complete teacher manual, but many schools are using the curriculum as well. There is no better science program available for this age level. Sample chapters for each level can be downloaded from the catalog page links above.

Here is a comment from one happy parent:

I am a graduate student in Physical Chemistry at The University of Wisconsin-Madison, with three years experience lecturing at the college level, plus seven years as a teaching assistant at the college level. I gave my final exam for RS4K Chemistry I to my own children over the weekend. I've been totally impressed with the program.

I never thought of teaching my kids science because I was always unimpressed with the "Gee, lets throw some baking soda in vinegar and watch it fizz" where you never saw “Why” the soda and vinegar fizzed. I had resigned myself to waiting until my kids knew some algebra before I started teaching science.

My oldest daughter was ready to do pre-algebra so I thought I'd start I was looking for some Jr. High Level science for her. That is when I saw the RS4K chemistry text. I looked at the table of contents and said to myself, "This looks like a Freshman College text book" and then looked at the content and saw "This is grade school level." I was very impressed on how Dr. Keller was able to remove the math from the material without loosing the “Why” things are happening.

When I’ve shown this material to the profs here at UW-Madison, the normal response is an incredulous, “You are teaching this to grade-school kids!??” They are all just as impressed with the quality of this material as I was when I saw it.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Philosopher Kim Sterelny, reviewing Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell for American Scientist, writes on the impossibility of an explanation of religion according to "evolutionary psychology" that is not corrosive of religious faith,

... , secular theories of religion are corrosive. Religious commitment cannot both be the result of natural selection for (for example) enhanced social cohesion and be a response to something that is actually divine. A cohesion-and-cooperation model of religion just says that believers would believe, whether or not there was a divine world to which to respond. If a secular theory of the origin of religious belief is true, such belief is not contingent on the existence of traces of the divine in our world. So although a secular and evolutionary model of religion might be (in a strict sense) neutral on the existence of divine agency, it cannot be neutral on the rationality of religious conviction.

In other words, the universe really is either top down or bottom up. If it is top down, you may have had a revelation. If it is bottom up, you cannot have had a relevation, though - as an animal - you may be motivated to believe you did.

But, like all materialists, Sterelny turns out to have an unfalsifiable viewpoint of his own where materialism is concerned. I noted this in By Design or by Chance?, p. 196, where Sterelny was defending one of Richard Dawkins' just-so stories about Darwinian evolution:

Many have wondered why a creature that is on its way to becoming a stick insect would be more
likely to survive if it looked five percent like a stick rather than four percent like a stick. Surely a purely random process could not fool a predator by generating so small a difference? Dennett quotes philosopher Kim Sterelny in response:

"I do think this objection is something of a quibble because essentially I agree that natural selection is the only possible explanation of complex adaptation. So something like Dawkins’ stories have got to be right."

Essentially, Dennett is saying that we must accept the Darwinist explanation for the evolution of a stick insect not because it is an especially good explanation but because it upholds Darwin's theory. (Sterelny’s review of Dawkins’s The Blind Watchmaker was in the Australasian Journal of Philosophy (1988), vol. 66: 421–66.)

In my experience, materialists see nothing wrong with forcing others to pay for and study from publicly funded textbooks advancing their view - and no other - even when their view is sourced only by its own fanatical assertion. Indeed, dazed by the growing volume of complaints, they warn that objectins mean that the end of all things is at hand.

I have been appealing for years for a social scientist or anthropologist to study Darwinism, the creation story of materialism, as a cultural phenomenon. It cries out for that treatment. Besides, such a study would make a great trade book after the journal articles have been published; just the thing for an up-and-coming young academic.

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 forthcoming The Spiritual Brain (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

The American National Center for Science Education seems to have franchised* the British Centre for Science Education (notice how they thoughtfully used the British spelling of "Centre"), staffed largely by militant atheists, to sell Darwinism in Britain.

This follows on the heels of a group called Truth in Science sending copies of Unlocking the Mystery of Life to all secondary school science departments in Britain.

And of course, a group of liberal Christians and humanists has banded together to oppose Truth in Science. (That the British Humanist Association is shouting "lies, lies, lies" is no surprise, but I would have thought that plummeting liberal church attendance would be more of a concern to the liberals, but hey .... ) And the legacy media of Britain are, true to form, blundering after the Internet, retelling the only story they ever really knew - the need to defend the creation story of atheism (Darwinism), never mind why.

As I have noted elsewhere, contrary to usual practice, journalists never wonder whether current science boffins may be acting from partiality to atheism's grand creation story. Indeed, most would be embarrassed to even consider the possibility that there may be evidence against that particular story. Such evidence does not make other stories true, of course, but it does raise the question of why questioning the evidence for the creation story of atheism should be so controversial.

In some cases, I suspectt hat the reason for not going down that path is simply that it takes only a modest amount of research to discover how self-referential the story is. But that would be a dangerous discovery indeed, too dangerous for most journalists today. When a person starts with the mindset that Darwin's creation story must be correct, it makes so much more sense for them to speculate on the hidden motives of anyone who knows of reasons to doubt it.

(That is one reason why the controversy can only grow. People who would prefer to avoid controversy find that they cannot, because they cannot trust legacy media sources in this area.)

I also find it curious that the militant atheists of BCSE have not considered the possibility that their efforts could backfire. Thanks in large part to groups such as NCSE, belief in Darwin's theory is lower in the United States than it is in Europe. (That, of course, is mainly because some doctrines are never doubted until someone tries too hard to defend them. Enter NCSE ... )

Presumably, BCSE wishes to duplicate the feat in Britain, but wouldn't it be fairer and more honorable of them to let the Truth in Science guys do their own work?

Some legacy media stories are here and here, oh and here too - this last one a classic Brit toff "just doesn't get it" special. But there have been some intelligent letters anyway.

* in BSCE's words, NCSE is providing "active support and advice".

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 forthcoming The Spiritual Brain (Harper 2007).

Courtesy of the McLaurin Institute, I gave a talk Thursday night at the Murphy Building of the University of Minnesota's journalism school.

I answered five questions (that the organizers wanted to know the answer to), as per the next five posts:

Part 1: First, how and why did intelligent design get started and why did it grow so quickly?
Part 2: How do US media interpret the controversy over ID?
Part 3: Why are ID ideas such as specified complexity assumed to be religion rather than science?
Part 4: What assumptions to journalists make about public education?
Part 5: What predictions would I make about how the controversy will develop over the next few years

Go first to Part 1: First, how and why did intelligent design get started and why did it grow so quickly?

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Forget every conspiracy theory you know on the subject.

Either you think the universe is

- top down, in which case mind comes first and creates matter. (Intelligent design, theism, traditional Eastern philosophy, and perennial philosophy are all in this camp.)

or

- bottom up, in which case mind accidentally arises from matter (Darwinism, universal Darwinism, and materialism are in this camp.)

Note that the two positions are not strictly identical to theism vs. atheism. It is true that the great majority of top downers are either theists or adherents of traditional non-theist religions such as Buddhism.

A very high proportion of the bottom uppers are atheists, compared with the general population.

Bottom up has been aggressively promoted since the late 19th century, even though the science evidence is mixed at best.

Note: Go here for the audio.

Atheists who insist that the evidence for bottom up is "overwhelming" are overwhelmed by the force of their own convictions. They mistake rock-like conviction for rock-solid evidence.

Top down has always been viable in science, but in recent decades it has not been popular. It is now making a comeback.

Not surprisingly, interpretations of the history of life that include design are emerging.

The intelligent design (ID) theorists speak the language of information theory , and information is not a material concept. That drives materialists crazy. Their main response from the materialist majority so far has been hostility and suppression.

(Note: You will occasionally hear materialists bellyaching that ID is merely the "new creationism" and that it got started because US courts have ruled that materialism but not fundamentalism can be taught in publicly funded schools. Such an explanation demonstrates the depth of the materialists' conviction that the public school system should finance their views from tax money.

The resultant growth in support for top down approaches to life is thus seen as a conspiracy and not as the natural development that it in fact is.

Go to Part 2: How do US media interpret the controversy over ID?

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 forthcoming The Spiritual Brain (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

The average journalist is a busy bee, with more stories than space, fewer allotted words than needed, and not nearly enough time for research. Oh yeah, and I haven't even got to underpaid, overworked, underappreciated by bosses, and - if well known - widely hated. Sometimes working journalists are arrested or shot or have their homes tossed, or maybe get beaten to death. And I am talking only about the bad luck of professionals in my own country (Canada), not the goof-ups of moonlighting amateurs.

(Note: News anchors whose hair spray contributes more than 5% to global warming are not included in my definition of "working journalist". I propose to talk about real journalists, the people who really get the story - or don't.)

One way that journalists save time is to develop a template to fit stories into so as to turn them out quickly - the good guys, the bad guys, the implicit assumptions and the predictions about how it will all turn out.

When covering the intelligent design controversy, the journalist does not have time to read any books by ID theorists or even any balanced accounts of the controversy.

So the simplest approach is to present the whole story as a subset of the US culture wars.

So, ID guys vs. Darwinists becomes fundie whackjobs vs. right-thinking Americans.

The surprising thing is that it really doesn't matter what the mainstream media do. The mainstream media, bleeding circulation and ad lineage, are toast anyway.

Just as ID is not a conspiracy to usher in a theocracy, the decline of the legacy mainstream media is not a conspiracy by right-wing whackos against righteous liberals. Quite simply, the readership/audience for legacy media is migrating, at least in part, to new Internet-based, interactive technology.

Blogging, podcasting, discussion groups, et cetera, are doing to print media and TV what TV did to radio and what both TV and radio did to newspapers - limiting their scope and changing their function. (Newspapers and TV stations can and do start their own community blogs, of course, but they are competing with a host of start-ups when they do. And interactive is not the world they know best.)

On this particular point, people sometimes ask me, why are North American media overwhelmingly more liberal than most of their readers?

The skew originates in the fact that communities with traditional values encourage young people who are good communicators to go into the clergy and religious organizations. That leaves young people with less traditional values to go into the media.

When North American traditionalists focus directly on media rather than on church-based activities, they typically find a sustainable audience. Consider, for example, Eternal Word Television Network, right wing talk radio, or conservative book publishing and blogging, among other examples.

But now, back to the legacy media for a moment: One outcome of the good-guys/bad-guys template, based on the situation described above, is that legacy media figures are often astonishingly naive about developments in the ID controversy.

Two brief examples:

Mainstream US media had a really hard time believing that the Pope is not a fan of Darwin and his materialist heirs - as if the Pope could possibly be a fan.

North American media have consistently misrepresented the Catholic Church's views as being far more favorable to Darwinian evolution as the explanation for our human origin than it really is.

The current Pope is trying to clarify that - not for the North American media but for the world. So for many months, journalists have been looking for American scientists who are Catholics to reassure them that it isn't so.

What else can they do? They honestly believe that only fundie whackjobs doubt Darwin or materialism in general. The right-thinking people they associate with have never remotely considered evaluating the evidence for Darwin's view of life. Surely there must be some mistake. The Pope was suppose to be safe.

Journalists also lend a ready ear to predictions of the demise of ID theory, based on court judgments such as Dover. They tend to be oblivious to the fact that adverse court judgements are one of the main engines of growth - because such judgments attract more people to find out about it, and therefore more fans, foes, and funding - to say nothing of young scientists who want to pursue ID related research, but are advised to do it very, very discreetly in the present climate.

Go to Part 3: Why are ID ideas such as specified complexity assumed to be religion rather than science?

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 forthcoming The Spiritual Brain (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Once upon a time there was a broadcasting corporation that turned down a chance to do a show on the Big Bang because they couldn't find film footage. The same outfit nixed the origin of life because they couldn't find anyone around then who would make a hot interview. (Being "one cell of a guy" didn't count, apparently ....)

Seriously, science stories can be difficult to cover. Most journalists don't have a background in science and most audiences just want to cut to the chase (= so what's the cure for cancer?). It took me two years and more to figure out what the ID guys were saying, because I had to work through so much that I took for granted but had never really sourced. (It wasn't polite to source things like that.)

Frankly, it is so much easier to repeat platitudes and to assume that everyone who does not agree with the boffins is a fundie nutjob. I am glad I stuck it out - but not surprised that few others did.

But several other factors also help determine how controversies around ID will be covered. Two of them stand out:

1. Journalists are extraordinarily deferential to science boffins, in a way that is quite different from the way we usually treat subjects. Whatever science boffins say tends to be treated as true, no matter that it may fly in the face of evidence. You don't need to venture into the intelligent design controversy to discover that. The latest craze about broccoli or salmon is treated with the utmost seriousness, even though most of it will be disowned a decade from now. Maybe half a decade. We know that, but we seldom act as if we do.

2. To the extent that most journalists are culturally liberal, we conform easily to a materialist worldview. Anything that supports it feels more right than anything that opposes it. In that state of mind, we always assume that whatever we believe will be confirmed and whatever we don't believe will be disconfirmed. If that has not happened - well, we have not waited long enough. That's all. So even if ID is not disconfirmed today (just because some boffin says it is), not to worry - it will be disconfirmed tomorrow.

Part 4: What assumptions to journalists make about public education?

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 forthcoming The Spiritual Brain (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Journalists tend to be big supporters of public education. They are quite sincere and do not mean anyone any harm. They are seldom well informed about why it works as poorly as it does. Because they tend to be materialists, they see nothing wrong with schools inculcating materialism and bottom up theory. Life is unfolding as it should, and anyone who dissents is a fundie nutjob.

Another skew that develops is a curious obsession with the motives and intentions of those who promote top down ideas accompanied by a complete disinterest in the motives and intentions of those who promote bottom up ideas.

It is hardly surprising that the materialists would fight very hard to protect their privileged status in the education system. It is intriguing that so few in the popular media ever question it.

Part 5: What predictions would I make about how the controversy will develop over the next few years

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 forthcoming The Spiritual Brain (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Predicting the past is so much easier than predicting the present. But here is my guess for the next ten years. The intelligent design controversy is already being exported to many venues where it did not previously exist. You can see this by looking at the blogroll of the Post-Darwinist ("Never a dull moment"), featuring blogs in a variety of languages. Further, the Vatican, is distributing prayer cards in many languages throughout Rome, announcing that "We are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution. Each of us is a thought of God."

So the question is bound to grow: Does the universe - and do life forms - show detectible evidence of intelligent design? If so, what does that mean? What futures does it suggest? What futures does it rule out? My own view is that we have only begun to assess the impact of intelligent design. And no matter what happens, the legacy media will be the ID guys' most helpful assets, by demonstrating that the old story templates just do not work any more.
Back to start

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 forthcoming The Spiritual Brain (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Here's a collection of quotations from textbooks, compiled by Casey Luskin of the Discovery Institute, that clearly promote a no-design/purpose philosophy of life to students. Show the following to anyone who claims that it is way overblown and people are making a big fuss over nothing:

- "[E]volution works without either plan or purpose … Evolution is random and undirected."
(Biology, by Kenneth R. Miller & Joseph S. Levine (1st ed., Prentice Hall, 1991), pg. 658; (3rd ed., Prentice Hall, 1995), pg. 658; (4th ed., Prentice Hall, 1998), pg. 658; emphasis in original.)

- "By coupling undirected, purposeless variation to the blind, uncaring process of natural selection, Darwin made theological or spiritual explanations of the life processes superfluous." (Evolutionary Biology, by Douglas J. Futuyma (3rd ed., Sinauer Associates Inc., 1998), p. 5.)

- "Darwin knew that accepting his theory required believing in philosophical materialism, the conviction that matter is the stuff of all existence and that all mental and spiritual phenomena are its by-products. Darwinian evolution was not only purposeless but also heartless--a process in which the rigors of nature ruthlessly eliminate the unfit. Suddenly, humanity was reduced to just one more species in a world that cared nothing for us. The great human mind was no more than a mass of evolving neurons. Worst of all, there was no divine plan to guide us." (Biology: Discovering Life by Joseph S. Levine & Kenneth R. Miller (1st ed., D.C. Heath and Co., 1992), pg. 152; (2nd ed.. D.C. Heath and Co., 1994), p. 161; emphases in original.)

- "Adopting this view of the world means accepting not only the processes of evolution, but also the view that the living world is constantly evolving, and that evolutionary change occurs without any 'goals.' The idea that evolution is not directed towards a final goal state has been more difficult for many people to accept than the process of evolution itself."
( Life: The Science of Biology by William K. Purves, David Sadava, Gordon H. Orians, & H. Craig Keller, (6th ed., Sinauer; W.H. Freeman and Co., 2001), pg. 3.)

- "Of course, no species has 'chosen' a strategy. Rather, its ancestors—little by little, generation after generation—merely wandered into a successful way of life through the action of random evolutionary forces …. Once pointed in a certain direction, a line of evolution survives only if the cosmic dice continues to roll in its favor. … [J]ust by chance, a wonderful diversity of life has developed during the billions of years in which organisms have been evolving on earth."
(Biology by Burton S. Guttman (1st ed., McGraw Hill, 1999), pgs. 36-37.)

- "It is difficult to avoid the speculation that Darwin, as has been the case with others, found the implications of his theory difficult to confront. … The real difficulty in accepting Darwin's theory has always been that it seems to diminish our significance. Earlier, astronomy had made it clear that the earth is not the center of the solar universe, or even of our own solar system. Now the new biology asked us to accept the proposition that, like all other organisms, we too are the products of a random process that, as far as science can show, we are not created for any special purpose or as part of any universal design."
(Invitation to Biology , by Helena Curtis & N. Sue Barnes(3rd ed., Worth, 1981), pgs. 474-475.)

- "The advent of Darwinism posed even greater threats to religion by suggesting that biological relationship, including the origin of humans and of all species, could be explained by natural selection without the intervention of a god. Many felt that evolutionary randomness and uncertainty had replaced a deity having conscious, purposeful, human characteristics. The Darwinian view that evolution is a historical process and present-type organisms were not created spontaneously but formed in a succession of selective events that occurred in the past, contradicted the common religious view that there could be no design, biological or otherwise, without an intelligent designer. … The variability by which selection depends may be random, but adaptions are not; they arise because selection chooses and perfects only what is adaptive. In this scheme a god of design and purpose is not necessary. Neither religion nor science has irrevocably conquered. Religion has been bolstered by paternalistic social systems in which individuals depend on the beneficences of those more powerful than they are, as well as the comforting idea that humanity was created in the image of a god to rule over the world and its creatures. Religion provided emotional solace … Nevertheless, faith in religious dogma has been eroded by natural explanations of its mysteries, by a deep understanding of the sources of human emotional needs, and by the recognition that ethics and morality can change among different societies and that acceptance of such values need not depend on religion."
(Evolution by Monroe, W. Strickberger (3rd ed., Jones & Bartlett, 2000), pg. 70-71)

- "Some even saw in the record of horse evolution evidence for a progressive, guiding force, consistently pushing evolution to move in a single direction. We now know that such views are misguided…" (Biology, by Peter H Raven & George B Johnson (6th ed., McGraw Hill, 2000), pg. 443.)

- "Nothing consciously chooses what is selected. Nature is not a conscious agent who chooses what will be selected. … There is no long term goal, for nothing is involved that could conceive of a goal."
( Evolution: An Introduction by Stephen C. Stearns & Rolf F. Hoeckstra, pg. 30 (2nd ed., Oxford University Press, 2005).)

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 forthcoming The Spiritual Brain (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Marilynne Robinson, author of Gilead, which won both the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and 2005 National Book Critics Circle award, says what needs to be said, and no more, about Oxford Professor of the Public Understanding of Science Richard Dawkins' inane crusade against religion And she says it brilliantly in "Hysterical scientism: The ecstasy of Richard Dawkins". Reviewing his recent The God Delusion for November's Harper's, she notes that "There is a pervasive exclusion of historical memory in Dawkins's view of science,"observing that, while it is true that Jews were persecuted in Christian Europe, ,

... it is also true that science in the twentieth century revived and absolutized persecution by giving it a fresh rationale - Jewishness was not religious or cultural but genetic. Therefore no appeal could be made against the brute fact of a Jewish grandparent.

She notes,

Dawkins deals with all this in one sentence. Hitler did his evil "in the name of ... an insane and unscientific eugenics theory." But eugenics is science as surely as totemism is religion. That either is in error is beside the point.

concluding that

bad science is still science in more or less the same sense that bad religion is still religion.

The fact that Harper's (hardly a bastion of the Religious Right) publishes such a skewering (and it is not the only non-theocon rag to do so), is another one for the files on why the intelligent design controversy grows. Dawkins is a declared and focused enemy of ID as well as religion, but his anti-ID and anti-religious antics are worth almost as much as Michael Behe's or Philip Yancey's next book.

(Note: I can't find this November 2006 edition linked yet. I bought a paper copy in Minneapolis. The link will get you to the site, which will presumably update to November's cover stories shortly.)

Oh, and Terry Eagleton offers in London Review of Books:

Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology. Card-carrying rationalists like Dawkins, who is the nearest thing to a professional atheist we have had since Bertrand Russell, are in one sense the least well-equipped to understand what they castigate, since they don't believe there is anything there to be understood, or at least anything worth understanding. This is why they invariably come up with vulgar caricatures of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince.

If I were Microsoft billionaire Charles Simonyi (an atheist who funded Dawkins' chair at Oxford), I would try to get Dawkins to retire, in favor of a mild-mannered science prof who holds down a pew at the local tabernacle and is firmly convinced that we sin when we look for evidence of God's work in the universe. To be truly faithful, we must ignore evidence in favour of blind faith. Such a scientist would do far more than Dawkins to limit the growth of ID, because he makes it a positive sin among religious believers to wonder whether the heavens really do declare the glory of the Lord.

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 forthcoming The Spiritual Brain (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Arch-Darwinist Richard Dawkins seems to have gotten hammered on Irish radio last week by well-known Irish commentator and journalist David Quinn. One listener remarked, "Dawkins is a formidable debater, but David Quinn absolutely embarrassed him - he had Dawkins on the ropes from the outset. It is a rare moment when Dawkins is left speechless and is well worth listening to." The debate starts at 7min 57 seconds lasts about 18 min. Go here and scroll down to October 9, 2006.

My own view is that, now that Dawkins has chosen to devote his time to producing anti-religious media instead of providing support for ultra-Darwinism, he is of immeasurable help to the intelligent design guys.

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 forthcoming The Spiritual Brain (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

An activist librarian has succeeded in getting the book of essays by fans and foes centred on the impact of Phillip Johnson, the godfather of the ID guys, reclassified from the life sciences section to the religion section in a library, which she and some others consider a big victory.

I registered a complaint at the reference desk pointing out that ID is thinly veiled creationism and more appropriately belongs in the religion section or social science. (Unfortunately, the Dewey system does not have section for crackpot theories.) I pointed out that neither assertions of a flat earth nor a swiss cheese moon belongs in the science section.

In the inglorious tradition of activist librarians, she thinks she has done her duty by organizing the library according to her own understanding of the world - narrow, but firm. Activist librarians always fail. They used to hide books on sex, but reshuffling ID books is for those who have moved beyond that, I guess.

An ID advocate friend remarked, on hearing of the librarian's breathless escapade,

"This reveals something deeply troubling about our adversaries. They believe that by merely labeling something such and such makes it so. It's as if putting a skirt on a table can turn it into Reese Witherspoon.

This is not surprising. Those who think that something can come from nothing believe they reverse the favor in the direction of any reality they don't find pleasing.

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 forthcoming The Spiritual Brain (Harper 2007).

“And if you really listen carefully [to scientists arguing with each other about evolution], you're finding they're arguing over how it occurred, not whether.”
-- Eugenie Scott, Eugenie Scott: Nature of Science

Time was that a scientist was of a skeptical bent, reluctant to believe anything that went beyond the data, and holding sure beliefs tentatively. Time was that a religious person was of a dogmatic bent, refusing to believe differently in spite of contrary data, sometimes holding dubious beliefs tenaciously. Time was.

In a strange reversal of roles, in our postmodern times, on the Ultimate Question, Where do we come from?, religion is often liberal while science has become decidedly dogmatic. No longer do many institutions of traditional religion question how we came to be, and no longer do many in mainstream science entertain the question whether we are the result of natural, unguided causes alone. With politics caught in the middle, the debate over origins threatens the end of another topic of polite conversation: the “whether”.

Traditional religions, overwhelmingly theistic, have largely capitulated any position of authority with respect to objective “facts” relevant to the Ultimate Question, being content instead to supply only subjective “values” that may be appropriated as desired by the willingly faithful. Those unwilling or unfaithful need not worry; there is no shortage of values from which they can choose, and by rejecting any objective authority by which to judge, all choices can be the right choices. After all, postmodernists find truth to be a human invention, and no merely human construct can legitimately restrict another’s personal choices. Tolerance and diversity reign over the just and unjust alike, with “choice” being the talisman guaranteed to rationalize most any behavior.

Ironically, in the current gale of tolerance and diversity there is one topic of discussion for which the talisman of choice can be protected only by making one choice taboo – strictly off limits and considered dangerous. Once religion surrendered its cognitive relevance, postmodern society adopted a naturalistic worldview that rejects any ultimate reality beyond matter itself, including any transcendent absolutes. With respect to the Ultimate Question, the unyielding adherence to the philosophy of naturalism predictably yields a scientific method that steadfastly requires one absolute--that only natural causes can be used to explain our existence. Regardless of the actual truth of the matter (and there is an actual truth of the matter), scientific objectivity is jettisoned as the discussion of origins is limited solely to the how of naturalistic processes. We are no longer permitted to talk about the "whether".

Eugenie Scott, an arch-evolutionist described once as the “police chief” of the Darwinian establishment, is not alone in her insistence that the “whether” is out of the question. The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) agrees:

The scientific consensus around evolution is overwhelming. Those opposed to the teaching of evolution sometimes use quotations from prominent scientists out of context to claim that scientists do not support evolution. However, examination of the quotations reveals that the scientists are actually disputing some aspect of how evolution occurs, not whether evolution occurred. (National Academy of Sciences, Science and Creationism: A View from the National Academy of Sciences (Washington DC: National Academy Press, 1999), p. 28 (emphasis in original).

But should we be talking about the “whether”? Is there not a connection between truth and consequences, between belief and actions? Is it surprising that discussion of the “whether” inescapably implicates the value-imposers of both religion and politics precisely because the reality of the “whether” implies something for both? If the scientific conclusion affects legal, social, political, ethical, and, yes, even theological values, shouldn’t institutions of science be eager to permit open and honest dialog on the topic?

We should be talking about the “whether” because, not surprisingly, everybody does something about it. Children growing up learning the “fact” that they are a result of purposeless processes that never had them in mind predictably act in harmful ways. Adults convinced they are mere animals fulfill their role admirably in socially destructive ways. Like thunder following lightning, just a flash of “how, not if” in origins sets off the delayed-but-sure reverberations of “how, not if” in socially detrimental behavior. Precisely because the naturalistic creation story of Darwinism entails a questionable ethic with foreseeable consequences, and the value of these consequences can be rightly questioned, we must permit an open dialog among dissenters to the accepted wisdom of the philosophy of naturalism.

Despite Darwinists who are quick to stress their religious bona fides to appease those who are differently religious, their ban on public discourse of the “whether” in origins science is effectual and absolute. Unfortunately for students of science, when it comes to the important question of their origin, Darwinism has donned the mantle of dogma, its disciples denying any dissenting discussion or differing opinion. Should a scientist make the mistake of talking about the “whether” in public, a storm of invective, ad hominem and insult will be unleashed without restraint. And should more bullying be necessary, self-proclaimed protectors of liberty remain ever vigilant like dark clouds on the horizon, conspicuous reminders of the ubiquitous threat of lawsuits. Add law to religion, politics and science, and in academia, from grade school to universities, when it comes to discussion of the “whether” the forecast is bleak.

But what if naturalism is wrong? Unless the “whether” of naturalistic evolution can be talked about, society will continue to act according to humanistic values dictated by naturalism, with predictably negative consequences. Progress starts by permitting dissenters to our culture’s current creation story a place at the table for a frank discussion about the “whether.” Only by allowing the free flow of ideas—including discussion of scientific evidence that reasonably implies the existence of supernatural intelligence—that explore this question with an honest assessment of evidence-based facts, can we ever expect to advance our understanding in a rationally meaningful manner.

Intelligent design theory supplies evidence-based facts that lead to scientific questions challenging the reigning naturalistic creation story. Asking if one can tell whether an apparently designed thing is an actually designed thing is the stuff of science. Institutions of science today suppress the design question by insisting that all scientists huddle under the tattering umbrella of naturalism. And unless Eugenie Scott, the NAS, and other guardians of Darwin’s flame recognize discussion of the “whether” as legitimately important, thereby liberating science to objective inquiry, science may never come in out of the reign.

Roddy Bullock, Executive Director of the Intelligent Design Network of Ohio is the author of The Cave Painting: A Parable of Science, available from Access Research Network. Send comments or questions to roddybullock@idnetohio.com

Copyright 2006 Roddy M. Bullock, all rights reserved. Quotes and links permitted with attribution.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

When I first started researching the intelligent design controversy, an earnest individual warned me that the ID guys might be fans of a deceased American fundamentalist (?) named Rousas Rushdoony, a guy who really did want to start a theocracy.

As it happens, I knew about Rushdoony vaguely, as a local poli sci prof had written briefly about his "Dominion theology" a decade earlier in a Canadian church press rag. No link panned out, of course, and dying in 2001 probably limited the guy's influence.

Now I see where a Brit anti-ID group is fronting Rushdoony. If they can't raise a better scare than this, ID must be pretty safe.

Debunking the nonsense generally, Rich Lowry writes in Free Republic:

Purveyors of the theo-panic love to exaggerate the influence of the bizarre Christian Reconstructionists who actually want an American theocracy. As New York Times religion writer Peter Steinfels notes in a review of the spate of new books, Christian Reconstructionists play "a greater role in the writings of the religious right’s critics than they ever have in the wider evangelical world." He notes that the flagship evangelical journal, Christianity Today, almost never shows up in these books, because, inconveniently, it is "moderate, reflective and self-questioning."

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 forthcoming The Spiritual Brain (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

December 5, Penguin is coming out with The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Intelligent Design .Author Christopher Carlisle is the Episcopal Chaplain at the University of Massachusetts and W. Thomas Jr.l, is a freelance writer.

Intelligent Design is one of the hottest issues facing parents and educators to day, but it can be hard to separate the facts from the heated rhetoric. This expert and objective guide gets to the bottom of the questions: What is Intelligent Design? Should it replace or complement traditional science? What’s all the fuss about?
• Explains the terms, the controversy, and the involvement of the American courts
• Indispensable guide for concerned educators and parents
• Written by an expert in the field

I wonder which of the two is the expert in the field. The chaplain, I guess. I really hope this doesn't turn out to be the usual snore about how "properly understood" there is no conflict between "faith" (properly understood) and "science" (properly understood). There is still a tiny market for "proper" understanding. I am getting the galleys at some point and will get back on this. I would really be happy to be wrong because trees should not die for that. See the think quote below.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Logically derived from confirmable evidence, evolution is understood to be the result of
an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection.

[ ... ]

Differences exist between scientific and spiritual world views, but there is no need to blur the distinction between the two. Nor is there need for conflict between the theory of evolution and religious faith. Science and faith are not mutually exclusive. Neither should feel threatened by the other.

– 39 Nobel laureates writing writing to the Kansas State Board of Education , via the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity: Nobel Laureates Initiative (September 9, 2005)

Toss this one in the “why the intelligent design controversy isn’t going away” files.

What blows me away is how stupid those people think the rest of us are. I don't think ID is really about religion, but - what kind of faith would be compatible with an unguided, unplanned process? Better not ask.

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 forthcoming The Spiritual Brain (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

■ Intelligent design is of interest only to Jesus-hollering American theocrats, right? This cluster map of hits on a Portuguese language ID- friendly blog has picked up hits widely across Latin America, even from Cuba. I hope no one goes to prison over that. Many journalists are still in the infancy of twenty-year sentences for telling something other than lies. But that’s materialism when it gets to power.

■G.K. Chesterton debated Clarence Darrow,

Ostensibly the defender of science against Mr. Chesterton, he obviously knew much less about science than Mr. Chesterton did; when he essayed to answer his opponent on the views of Eddington and Jeans, it was patent that he did not have the remotest conception of what the new physics was all about. His victory over Mr. Byran at Dayton had been too cheap and easy; he remembered it not wisely but too well. His arguments are still the arguments of the village atheist of the Ingersoll period; at Mecca Temple he still seemed to be trying to shock and convince yokels.

That is all so 2006! I get posts here and elsewhere all the time from persons who announce that they know better than I do and that I cannot have read the materials that persuaded them to join the cult, that I am a fraud, a fool, or a pseudo-journalist. Demographically, the number of yokels is down, which may be part of the reason why most people don;t just take their word for everything.

■ Business school prof Clayton M. Christenson and Press Institute prez Andrew B. Davis argue that newspapers are not doomed.

Newspaper companies have only begun to scratch their innovation potential. To succeed, they have to learn to look at markets in new ways. They must invest to create new capabilities and rethink the way they work individually and collectively.

Trouble is, their thoughts sound like biz school buzz. Nowhere do they address the problem that on key issues these days, people are increasingly better off to find trustworthy sources on the Net.

■ ID guy Jonathan Wells reviews a new book claiming to explain embryo development according to Darwinian evolution, using a hypothesis of "facilitated variations." (The Plausibility of Life by Marc W. Kirschner and John C. Gerhart):

If a century of embryology has taught us anything, it is that we can fiddle with these mechanisms all we want in a mouse embryo, and there are only three possible outcomes: a normal mouse, a deformed mouse, or a dead mouse.

Despite the dubious nature of their theoretical proposal, Kirschner and Gerhart imply that anyone who continues to be skeptical of Darwinian evolution is close-minded. In particular, people who think that intelligent design might provide a better explanation for some features of living things are dismissed as ignorant, religiously motivated, and covertly seeking ways to evade the law. Like many of their fellow Darwinists, Kirschner and Gerhart ultimately resort to personal insults.

But remember, materialism, like the Party, is right, so any thesis that upholds it is better than any criticism of same by definition.

■ Baby hippo orphaned by tsunami turns 130-year-old tortoise into stepfather

Exhausted, confused and extremely frightened, Owen immediately ran to the safety of a giant tortoise when we released him in Haller Park. Mzee, our 130 year old tortoise, just happened to be nearby and he was very surprised by Owen's odd behavior cowering behind him as a baby hippo does to its mother. Mzee quickly came to terms with his new friend and even returned signs of affection.

Here are some touching photos. But remember, the unfeeling reptilian brain does not permit affection of this type.

■ From the newsletter of the Center for Naturalism, in case you thought that the war between naturalism/Darwinism and intelligent design has no political implications, note this brief review of Lee M. Silver's Challenging nature: The Clash of Science and Spirituality at the Frontiers of Life

Silver describes how beliefs in the soul and the sanctity of the natural order affect policy in domains such as abortion, cloning, genetic engineering, biodiversity and the environment. In each case, purists with religious or spiritual agendas attempt to limit the scope of intentional control, which can rule out what many might consider legitimate options, such as terminating an unwanted pregnancy, conducting stem cell research, or designing more resource-efficient varieties of grain and livestock. ...

An argument for death for the littlest among us ...

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

■ Michael Behe, author of Darwin's Black Box is publishing a new book in 2007, The Edge of Evolution, again with Free Press. The blurb reads,

In order to get a realistic idea of the power of Darwinian evolution, it leaves behind most of the popular images—dinosaurs, wooly mammoths, pretty Galapagos finches—to focus mainly on the invisible foundation of biology, the molecular world of the cell. There are two vital reasons for this: First, mutations—the fuel of Darwinian evolution—are themselves molecular changes, where the DNA of an organism is accidentally altered from that of its parents. Second, the most intricate work of life takes place at the level of molecules and cells. Imperceptible molecules are the foundational level of life. So, to locate the edge of evolution, we have to examine life's foundation.

Interestingly, a lit agent told me a couple of years ago that Free Press would not accept a book like Mike Behe's today. They were moving away from all that. Out of the frying pan into the fire.

■ The American Association for the Advancement of Science has put out a book attempting to address the incompatibility between Darwinism and traditional beliefs, noting "grew out of concerns among scientists and some religious leaders that intelligent design is being sold as an integration of science and religion, enticing even some members of mainstream religious communities to question evolution." It sounds dull, actually, featuring a "Christian girl" stereotype, attempting to reconcile her stupid, stereotyped "faith" with reality. The press release proclaims:

Evolution remains one of the most substantiated theories in all of science, it notes, and serves as the essential framework for modern biology. The book discusses recent observations that have led to revisions in the theory since the time of Charles Darwin, including new views on why the giraffe's neck is long. But it emphasizes the underlying principles of evolution that continue to stand the test of time: all species, living and extinct, are related to each other, and the forms of life that populate the Earth have changed over eons and continue to change.

Right away, I can guarantee that AAAS's efforts efforts are wasted, for two reasons: Increasing numbers of people now notice the trick by which Darwin's troubled theory of evolution is seamlessly equated in the press release with "evolution" generally, and then evolution is defined so broadly that few would care to disagree with it. It is Darwin's theory that is under assault. The increasingly sophisticated modern reader will also know that evolution (= Darwin's theory) is NOT one of the most substantiated theories in all of science. There are few observed examples of new species forming. That situation is not the evolutionary biologists' fault, but it is a situation with consequences. Second, as NAS member Phil Skell has pointed out, most scientists do not need Darwin's theory of evolution to do their work. Oh and the reality is that more people are drawn into the subject by the arch-Darwinists like Richard Dawkins than anyone else, yet do you hear AAAS ever actually distancing itself from that sort of thing absolutely directly, in a press release? I wonder when they will get around to taking the problem seriously enough to do anything substantial?

■ Riffing off a recent Time article, promoting the idea that one or two simple ingredients make us human, In "Neo-Darwinism vs. Reason", Fr. Jonathan Morris identifies the follies in the Time reasoning:

The assumptions these authors make are common. They showcase the materialistic, post-modern ideology (not scientific theory) that reigns in the classrooms and in the textbooks of scientific America and Europe. According to this worldview, the idea of a personal God, a creator, or even a clockwork intelligent designer is all together passé and unacceptable. According to them, the problem is not that this is not a scientific question, but that it doesn't fit with their "scientific" theory.

[ ... ]

It is easy to see a similar fundamentalist trend in science and philosophy, especially in the important study of evolutionary processes. Too often the debate is defined by those who, on the one hand, rule out a priori, any possibility of intelligent design, and call everything absolutely random just because they say so, and on the other hand, those who rule out any possibility that the designer is intelligent enough to make use of evolution to create just because they say so.

My opinion? I think the human intellect, through the light of reason, can easily and clearly find a program or a design in the physical world. And some evolutionary theories — free of neo-Darwinian atheistic principles — help us to do just that.

What I love about these priests entering the fray is the way they use the terminology freely: Ah yes, "neo-Darwinism". Thanks, Father, for not acting like we are all stupid now.

■ In Catholic thinkmag Commonweal, Peter James Causton addresses the effort to reconcile Darwinism with authentic Christian theology and concludes that the Christian Darwinist approach (God is so humble that he leaves no evidence of design, purpose, or intelligence in nature) does notwork:

... it remains intuitively difficult to reconcile their loving, power-renouncing, creative God with the picture of Darwinism dominant in popular and scientific literature. Natural selection seems more capricious than the Greek Fates. Richard Dawkins’s selfish gene seems like some brute, dumb materialized version of Nietzsche’s will to power. Stephen Jay Gould’s epic of evolution is all contingency and catastrophe. The twin gods of evolution, as it is currently understood, go by the names of chance and necessity. Considering all this, is nature really where we want to go to find reliable evidence of the Divine? It is unlikely we will find it there unless our hearts and minds have already been illumined by a grace we don’t find in nature itself, but rather in nature’s author.

Yes, but we don't really have hearts or minds, you know; it's only an illusion that favored the survival of the fittest ...

■ I mentioned to ID guy Jonathan Wells, author of Icons of Evolution and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design that Larry Moran (the evolutionary biologist who objected to the term "Darwinist" during my talk at the University of Toronto last Saturday, had left a comment, saying that he also does not like the term "Darwinian evolutionist" and asks to be called an "evolutionary biologist."

Wells wrote back saying,

The problem is that Moran's fellow "evolutionary biologists" deliberately misuse the word "evolution" to peddle materialism in the innocuous guise of "change over time" or "changes in gene frequencies."

In my Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design I define "Darwinism" as the combination of ideas that "(1) all living things are modified descendants of a common ancestor; (2) the principal mechanism of modification has been natural selection acting on undirected variations (originating in DNA mutations); and (3) unguided processes are sufficient to explain all features of living things -- so design is an illusion."

If Moran objects to being called a Darwinist, I would ask him what part of that definition he rejects -- and whether he's willing to do so publicly, in the front of his "evolutionary biologist" colleagues.

In my experience, Darwinists don't like being called Darwinists because they have to equivocate on the meaning of "evolution" to ensure that religious taxpayers continue supporting them in the manner to which they've become accustomed. Funny, too: Darwinists don't seem to have any compunction about referring to ID theorists as biblical creationists, despite the many times we have pointed out their misrepresentation.

Not to worry, after certain recent posts I have received from Moran, I fear that it is all up between him and me, and no reasonable dialogue is possible, but I will blog on that later if time permits.

■ Evangelist Chuck Colson's broadcast pays tribute to ID guys' godfather, law prof Phillip Johnson, by promoting the book in his honor, Darwin's Nemesis.

Through all the controversy—and just plain mud-slinging—that followed the publishing of Darwin on Trial, Phil has maintained his stance, continuing his lawyerly probing and careful research, and he has kept his good humor and graciousness. In these ways, he serves as a magnificent example to all of us involved in worldview teaching.

[ ... ]

And it even includes a couple of articles by critics of intelligent design, including philosophy professor and evolution advocate Michael Ruse—the kind of balance you’d like to see in classrooms. In the contentious debate that surrounds the intelligent design vs. evolution issue, getting the participation of someone like Ruse is a testimony to Phillip Johnson.
There’s no doubt that Phil’s willingness to encourage the work of scientists and help create a network for them has allowed the movement to flourish. This book really shows just how far the intelligent design (ID) movement has progressed in a relatively short time, despite the best efforts of many Darwinists to shoot it down—because, as is becoming clearer and clearer, ID has the evidence on its side.

Having the evidence on one's side is a darn good thing, but in these times having an excellent lawyer - now that is really something.

■ Catching up with the backlog: Regular readers of this blog will recall that Coral Ridge aired a documentary on the relationship between social Darwinism and the rise of Hitler. The Anti-Defamation League recently complained, among other things, that genome mapper Francis Collins was misled:

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) today blasted a television documentary produced by Christian broadcaster Dr. D. James Kennedy's Coral Ridge Ministries that attempts to link Charles Darwin's theory of evolution to Adolf Hitler and the atrocities of the Holocaust. ADL also denounced Coral Ridge Ministries for misleading Dr. Francis Collins, the director of the National Human Genome Research Institute for the NIH, and wrongfully using him as part of its twisted documentary, "Darwin's Deadly Legacy."

After being contacted by the ADL about his name being used to promote Kennedy's project, Dr. Collins said he is "absolutely appalled by what Coral Ridge Ministries is doing. I had NO knowledge that Coral Ridge Ministries was planning a TV special on Darwin and Hitler, and I find the thesis of Dr. Kennedy's program utterly misguided and inflammatory," he told ADL.

Aw come on. Hitler's rendition of Darwin's theory (which was about as sane and virtuous as his other activities) was simply a part of the Nazi scene. ADL should focus on anti-Semites, and stay out of the Darwin wars. Goodness knows, there are enough anti-Semites to keep them busy. For various attacks on Weikart for making some pretty obvious points, go here.

■ Here is a list of Darwin skeptics, of varying degrees of originality and/or usefulness, compiled by Jerry Bergman, who notes,

On this list I have well over 3,000 names but, unfortunately, a large number of persons that could be added to this list, including many college professors, did not want their name listed on the published list because of real concerns over possible retaliation or harm to their careers. Many of those who did not want their names on this list are young academics without tenure, or academics who are concerned about if outing them could damage their career. Many on this list are secure tenured professors, teach at Christian Universities that protect their academic freedom to criticize Darwinism, or are in industry, or in a medical field where less antagonism exists to questioning Darwin exists. Some on this list are now involved full time in speaking and writing on origins, and no longer depend on secular employment to put bread on the family table. Many are also retired, thus no longer face retaliation for their doubts about Darwin. Some consented to include their names only if their current employment was not listed.

I hear rumors that Bergman may publish a book, detailing case histories of what happens if you doubt that Darwin's theory largely accounts for the history of life.

Thinkquotes of the day: Why there is an intelligent design controversy

"The operations of a higher level cannot be accounted for by the laws governing its particulars forming the lower level. You cannot derive a vocabulary from phonetics; you cannot derive the grammar of a language from its vocabulary; a correct use of grammar does not account for good style; and a good style does not provide the content of a piece of prose. . . . it is impossible to represent the organizing principles of a higher level by the laws governing its isolated particulars".
- Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension

It seems to me immensely unlikely that mind is a mere by-product of matter. For if my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true. They may be sound chemically, but that does not make them sound logically. And hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms. In order to escape from this necessity of sawing away the branch on which I am sitting, so to speak, I am compelled to believe that mind is not wholly conditioned by matter.

— John B.S. Haldane, "When I Am Dead", Possible Worlds: And Other Essays

"…evolutionary speculation constitutes a kind of metascience, which has the same fascination for some biologists that metaphysical speculation possessed for some medieval scholastics. It can be considered a relatively harmless habit, like eating peanuts, unless it assumes the form of an obsession; then it becomes a vice."

- cell biologist Roger Stanier, in Organization and Control in Prokaryotic Cells: Twentieth Symposium of the Society for General Microbiology, Cambridge University Press, 1970.

Many biological ideas proposed during the past 150 years stood in stark conflict with what everybody assumed to be true. The acceptance of these ideas required an ideological revolution. And no biologist has been responsible for more - and for more drastic - modifications of the average person's worldview than Charles Darwin.

- Ernst Mayr

also

"Laws and experiments are inappropriate techniques" for explaining evolutionary events and processes."

- Ernst Mayr, "Darwin’s Influence on Modern Thought," Scientific American, July 2000, 80.

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 forthcoming The Spiritual Brain (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

So much is happening nowadays in the ID controversy that I am trying out a new system for posting some of it. I will quickly indicate the nature of the event, with a link, and maybe a comment. I will do a fair bit of this until I catch up with my backlog.

■ ID guy Jonathan Wells explains why he thinks Darwinism is doomed.

"So after 150 years, Darwinists are still looking for evidence – any evidence, no matter how skimpy – to justify their speculations. The latest hype over the "brain evolution gene" unwittingly reveals just how underwhelming the evidence for their view really is."

■God allows the universe to "create itself and evolve, according to Lutheran chemist and physicist/pastor, in article trashing intelligent design. So God was asleep at the switch?

■ Emory U pundits bash ID.

"Seven professors each gave a short lecture, after which they all took questions from the audience."

Listen to them or you're stupid.

■ This French group does not appear to be boneheaded materialists, to judge from greetings by Charles TOWNES and others,

Charles TOWNES, Physicist, Nobel Prize for Physics, Berkeley (USA)
What can be more important than understanding the nature and the meaning or purpose of our universe and our lives, the primary goals of science and religion ? And the nature (science) and meaning (religion) of this universe, if understood thoroughly, must come close together. UIP has generated important interactive consideration of these profound topics. Warm congratulations to UIP for its work and very best wishes on its 10th anniversary !

though I hear that they do not seem to think that the meaning and purpose they see in the universe should apply to life.

■ Russian scientist Anatoly Akimov is convinced that science has found God.

Academician Akimov was baptized at the age of 55. ‘Have you come to believe in God?’ a priest asked him when he came to church. ‘No, I have simply realized that He cannot but exist!’ the scientist answered.

■ Ann Coulter, who had kind words for the ID guys, has been accused of plagiarism, but Talking Points Memo (no friend of hers) did not find the smoking gun, after a staff day working on it.

■ According to an interesting Guardian review of Matt Ridley's biography of double helix discoverer Francis Crick,

at the summit of this career in 1976, Crick simply abandoned DNA research and emigrated to the Salk Institute, outside San Diego, where he devoted the rest of his intellectual life to brain research. Having uncovered the secret of life, he now struggled to reveal the secret of consciousness. He died, in 2003, still pursuing that goal.

By contrast, Watson quickly settled for life as a panjandrum, as administrative head of the US Cold Spring Laboratory. But then, the pair were different in many, striking ways. Watson was a royalist anglophile. Crick, by contrast, was a republican, atheist, libertarian, drug-taking womaniser. He once wrote: 'Christianity may be OK between consenting adults in private but should not be taught to young children', while his Who's Who entry for recreation was listed as 'conversation, especially with pretty women'.

No wonder Crick never discovered the secret of consciousness ... no wonder Watson didn't either.

■ Scientists are born not made, according to Greg Blonder of Morgenthaler ventures, writing in BusinessWeek:

... stop teaching chemistry, physics, or biology classes as separate subjects where memorizing nomenclature is the first order of business. Instead, invest a year of classes in experimenting with the world—making batteries, growing algae, for example. Then spend another year learning how to build scientific intuition through estimation, asking such questions as how long the air will last for a person in a sealed room or whether there's enough solar energy for mankind's needs.

Then devote another year to "case studies," comparing, say, risks to costs of building a bridge with ever-decreasing safety margins. Students could even learn how to distinguish between a successful scientific law (such as Darwinism), a failed scientific hypothesis (such as astrology), and a pseudo-scientific fairy tale (such as Intelligent Design).

But what, I wonder, will they do if it turns out that Darwinism does not predict anything or that there is good reason to believe that design is a feature of the universe? Do the case studies allow for such a conclusion - or are they propaganda exercises?

■ Don Cichetti has an interesting post onintelligent design and culture:

But what if Naturalism is simply another belief system? What if Naturalism is not science at all, but a philosophical straitjacket that forces science to only come to conclusions that are acceptable to Naturalism, whether or not those conclusions are actually true? What if Naturalism is simply a faith-based belief system, claiming things that cannot be proven, and for which there are millions of contrary pieces of evidence?

Yeah, what if? Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the intelligent design controversy.

■ Philosopher of science Robert Pennock, whose main claim to fame is opposing intelligent design, kicked off the Sagan National Colloquium at Ohio Wesleyan University in September. According to OWU Online,

Overall, the lecture was informative and well-constructed. Pennock was able to relay a very complex and nuanced case to an audience where biologists were in the minority. Some audience members may have left dissatisfied with Pennock’s discussion of the relationship between intelligent design and biology. He maintained that intelligent design is merely creationism relabeled. He also covered the science of evolution in great detail. In the end, some may conclude that his lecture was short on the specifics of why intelligent decision is not a science.

■ People for the American Way are mad as stink about intelligent design.

Some have even tried to claim that evolution is itself a religion.

But, of course, for some proponents, including Richard Dawkins, evolution clearly is a religion - but PFAW seems not at all concerned that that religion might be taught in schools. Another one for the why there is an intelligent design controversy files.

■ Speaking of Dawkins, he is apparently preaching that traditional religion (not his kind) is the "root of all evil" to the taxpayer-supported Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. A sponsor sensibly remarks

It is a powerful polemic, and makes for some uncomfortable and gripping scenes. But as Dawkins categorically dismisses all people of faith (including moderates) as dangerous dupes, you're tempted to ask whether he himself is demonstrating a certainty that borders on fundamentalism – whether his unshakeable faith in science is just as fixed as the beliefs of those he condemns.

Wow! Jathink????!!! Actually, few Christians - to grab a group - are as ideological as materialist atheists such as Dawkins, because they long ago had to address the fact that many disagree with them. They cannot just persecute people with contrary evidence.

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 forthcoming The Spiritual Brain (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

An evolutionary biologist in the audience at the University of Toronto ID meet last Saturday wrote a most interesting post to the Post-Darwinist, saying, among other things,

I was the person who objected to your use of the term "Darwinist." The word is loaded with all kinds of implications. To those of us who work on evolution it means a person who believes in natural selection as the most important thing in evolutionary biology. This would include people like Richard Dawkins and others who are often referred to as Ultra-Darwinians.

Many of us are not Darwinists in that sense and we would never refer to ourselves as "Darwinists" unless we were specificially referring to our acceptance of Darwin's theory of natural selection. The term "Darwinian evolutionist" is even more objectionable because it labels someone as an evolutionst who tends to side with the Ultra-Darwinian camp.

And to think I had thought I was being polite by carefully referring to him and his colleagues as "Darwinian evolutionists."

Now, after offering to investigate the complaint, I also explained that scads of cranks prophesy Darwin's name these days (examples are offered), so

I am sympathetic to your wish to reserve for evolutionary biology a level of respect due to a serious academic endeavor, and I would be happy to help. I do think, however, that you and others in your field might want to consider clearly distancing yourselves from the Darwin circus. If you don't, no one can do it for you.

For the rest, go here.

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 forthcoming The Spiritual Brain (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Here's my talk from the U of T ID meet September 30, 2006, for the convenience of any who didn't scribble fast enough. As much of it as possible is linked, for handy reference. It is divided into five sections.

Part One: How I got involved in covering the intelligent design controversy as a regular beat

Part Two: Why I decided to write a book about the intelligent design controversy

Part Three: What I learned while writing By Design or by Chance?

Part Four: What I learned while blogging at the Post-Darwinist

Part Five: What I expect to happen in the next ten years and why

Go to Part One

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 forthcoming The Spiritual Brain (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

As a freelance journalist based in downtown Toronto in the mid-Nineties, I was mostly writing auto, insurance, auto insurance, a cat care column, gardening tips, the rag trade, sewer and water, intercity motor coach, and trucking issues - best described perhaps as a utility freelancer.

One day, a political science prof drew my attention to an article in Commentary by a secular Jewish mathematician named David Berlinski, outlining the mathematical impossibility of Darwin's theory.

... the final triumph of Darwinian theory, although vividly imagined by biologists, remains, along with world peace and Esperanto, on the eschatological horizon of contemporary thought.

– David Berlinski, Commentary, June 1, 1996

The poli sci prof asked me to read the article and tell him what I thought. Well, I thought it was clever, but would have long since forgotten it - except for the huge storm of angry replies that it unleashed.

I came away thinking that Darwinism (Darwinian evolution) was a cult whose idol had been spray painted. But I didn't pursue that at the time.

(Note: An evolutionary biologist in the audience informed me that Darwinian evolutionists don't like the term Darwinist, even though they in fact use it, apparently, despite denials (scroll down to Edward O. Wilson) . So in the talk I was very careful to say "Darwinian evolution," wherever I could remember to do so, but was not necessarily consistent. One difficulty is that Richard Dawkins, for example, is quite comfortable calling himself a "Darwinist," thus so am I.

And when it comes to purely conceptual ideas like meme theory (a theory about how ideas spread from one person to the next via Darwinian natural selection), it is not clear that there is any actual evolutionary biology involved. For that reason, I am reluctant to allow evolutionary biologists to determine the terminology in the further reaches of universal Darwinism.)

Later, when I started writing a column at ChristianWeek (which I still do), a reader recommended that I read Michael Behe's Darwin's Black Box (Free Press, 1996).

Michael Behe accepts Darwin's wager

American Michael Behe, a Roman Catholic biochemist, is quite comfortable with the idea of evolution.

That is, he assumes that evolution happened and that common ancestry is a reasonable idea. He has even told me that he thinks that all the design in the universe was probably coded in at the Big Bang.

But he believes that the design of life is actually there, that it is not an illusion, as Darwinist Richard Dawkins argues.

Now, in arguing that all design is an illusion, Dawkins is merely following up on Darwin's wager:

If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.

– Charles Darwin,The Origin of Species (6th ed. NYU, 1988, p. 154).

Anyway, here's what Behe did: As a biochemist, steeped in the complexities of his craft, he took up Darwin's wager. Behe thought he knew of just such a system, the flagellum of the bacterium, a tiny outboard motor.

This tiny motor system, Behe argued, could not work at all unless it were completely assembled first. Behe said that the flagellum demonstrates irreducible complexity - that is, it must be completely assembled before it can work, somewhat like any motor.

Now, what does irreducible complexity mean for Darwinian evolution? Irreducible complexity does not require a creation event, but it does require design. That is, the evolving flagellum must be preserved during long periods of evolution when it is still useless because it will be useful in the future. However, Darwinian evolution has no future tense because it does nto assume a mind behind nature that could intend future events. So irreducible complexity must be non-Darwinian. The flagellum has since become a sort of flag of the ID community, waving teasingly on a variety of ID Web sites.

Now, if such systems exist, they may be few or many. But remember, Darwin had staked his theory on the idea that there are none. Indeed, a fully naturalistic system requires that there be none. It also requires, for example, that mind and consciousness be merely epiphenomena of the brain and that free will be an illusion.

Behe became very widely hated for his acceptance of Darwin's wager in Darwin's Black Box, so much that he was compared in one biology journal to Osama bin Laden.

"Stalin or Osama bin Laden, or Michael Behe, or your favourite villain..."

– Tamler Sommers and Alex Rosenberg, Biology and Philosophy, 2003

If those people were joking, they have an odd sense of humor. Anyway, either this guy Behe was very wrong or very important. Which? Both? Neither?

The difficulty with what constitutes evidence

Jumping a bit ahead, I came to realize later that Darwinism, strongly held, mixes assumption and evidence in a seamless web. That seamlessless very much shapes public discussion of intelligent design (ID).

If you are already completely convinced that there is no mind behind the universe, that the universe and life are a meaningless confluence of matter that has only the illusion of design, then you know that the bacterial flagellum cannot be irreducibly complex.

As a result, any evidence for irreducible complexity, no matter how apparently convincing, must be wrong. Any evidence against it, no matter how weak or sketchy, must be right.

Thus, Behe regularly heard or read that irreducible complexity "has been refuted." What he actually encountered when he checked into it was yet another sketchy idea about how it could possibly be refuted.

For their part, committed Darwinian evolutionists do not understand how anyone could doubt that a hypothesis is just as good as a demonstration because... well, because Darwinism is the only possible history of life anyway.

Of course, this conflict between standards for evidence has led to frequent charges that the other side is "dishonest." Darwinists demand little evidence for Darwinian evolution because they already believe it to be true beyond confirmation - that is to say, it must be true. Intelligent design theorists (hereafter IDists) demand strong evidence because they doubt that Darwin's mechanism plays the creative role that Darwinists claim for it.

So what is Darwinism really?

Looking into ID theory meant, of course, that I had to look more closely at Darwinism, including Darwinian evolutionism. (As I mentioned in the note above, many Darwinist exotica have little to do with evolutionary biology as such.)

Darwinism is basically the industry in science teaching that attempts to assure the public that not only is Darwin's idea - that the life around us is produced by natural selection acting on random mutations - the best idea that anyone has ever had, but indispensable to technological progress.

"I think that Darwin's idea, properly used, is just the best idea anybody ever had. Abused, it can do a lot of harm."

– philosopher Daniel Dennett, interview with Alan Alda, PBS

Now, I knew that Darwinism is not indispensable to technological progress, and it was interesting to see quite recently that a prominent Darwinist agrees with me:

"..., if truth be told, evolution hasn't yielded many practical or commercial benefits. Yes, bacteria evolve drug resistance, and yes, we must take countermeasures, but beyond that there is not much to say. Evolution cannot help us predict what new vaccines to manufacture because microbes evolve unpredictably. But hasn't evolution helped guide animal and plant breeding? Not very much. Most improvement in crop plants and animals occurred long before we knew anything about evolution, and came about by people following the genetic principle of 'like begets like.' (Jerry Coyne, "Selling Darwin", Nature, Vol 442, 31 August 2006 )

Anyway, as I gradually became aware of the immense hold that Darwinism has on the intellectual elite in the Western world, I appreciated the deep challenge that ID theory poses to it. Now that was worth a book, not just a column!

Go to Part Two

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 forthcoming The Spiritual Brain (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

The ID controversy could only grow. That was partly due to demographics. As demographer Phillip Longman has pointed out, religious people have most of the kids.

And, of course, religious people are the ones most likely to noticethis sort of message being taught to their children in the tax-supported school system to which they are compelled to send them:

"Man is the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind. He was not planned." (George Gaylord Simpson [major mid-20th century Darwinian evolutionist], The Meaning of Evolution, revised ed. (Yale University Press, 1967), p. 345.)

And that type of sentiment, by the way, does find its way into biology teaching.

Evolution "has no specific direction or goal, including survival of a species."

– U.S. National Association of Biology Teachers

The conflict was clearly sharpening by the early years of the millennium:

The popular media were under siege from nonsense generated by the supposed new discipline of evolutionary psychology - an attempt to explain human behaviour based on the idea that the way our proto-human ancestors supposedly thought has been transmitted in our genes through evolution.

But the trouble is, no one knows what our proto-human ancestors actually thought, or even if they actually thought, in the modern human sense. The useful information about what our ancestors might have thought comes from periods in which they appear fully human, for example the Lascaux Cave, the Willendorf Venus, and Neanderthal burials. (Neanderthals are a (possibly) separate but now extinct species of modern human.)

So evolutionary psychology is, in the first place, a psychology without a subject.

In any event, the number of early humans who became the common ancestors of humans living today is apparently quite small compared to all who have ever lived. That means that we don't know whether the reaction that a majority of protohumans might have had to this or that circumstance would make any difference today. We don't know if we are descended from a majority or from a minority who did things differently, or from a mixture that eliminates any distinctives. We certainly don't know whether broad human behavior patterns are really coded in our genes. But evo psycho is a favorite with the pop science media, and likely to continue to be so. It is the primary way many moderately educated people learn and practice their Darwinism.

Eventually, and probably sooner than later, people would start to figure this stuff out.

Anyway, I started by writing a 48-page booklet called "Intelligent Design", in which I played a bit with the concepts. Later I found a publisher, the Minneapolis-based liberal Lutheran publisher Augsburg, via a friend in the business, and went to work on the book in the fall of 2002. In May 2004, the Canadian edition appeared, followed hard upon by the US edition, with a second edition to appear, probably some time in 2008. (Note: The two editions are identical, but the US head office wanted to publish a much bigger print run than we Canadians had anticipated.)

Go to Part Three

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 forthcoming The Spiritual Brain (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Obviously, one goes through a vast amount of material while writing a book. I can only touch on a couple of points that seem worth unpacking now. That does not mean I don't think other things one could say are just as important.

Is the universe top down or bottom up? That is, does mind come first or matter?

I was a year and a half into the book before I finally grasped just what ID theory is and what the conflict is about: ID theory simply says that the universe is top down, not bottom up, as George Gilder explains. In that case, intelligence and information are real categories. So a top down theory argues that mind comes first - whether you think of it as a cosmic mind or the mind of God or even a self-organizing principle.

Darwinism and materialism in general say that the universe is bottom up. It is built up from random movements of matter acted on laws that just happen to work that way in the universe - but there are many other, probably flopped, universes that natural selection has weeded out. In this universe, molecules came together by chance to form life and life somehow evolved the illusion of consciousness.

Yet science currently has no way of making information coincide with matter and energy. While writing By Design or by Chance? I came across comments like these:

… the universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a machine. Mind no longer appears to be an accidental intruder into the realm of matter...we ought rather hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter."

– physicist Sir James Jeans, The Mysterious Universe

Information doesn't have mass or charge or length in millimeters. Likewise, matter doesn't have bytes. You can't measure so much gold in so many bytes. It doesn't have redundancy, or fidelity, or any of the other descriptors we apply to information.

– G.C. Williams, Third Culture, 1995

... a century of developments in physics has taught us that information is a crucial player in physical systems and processes.

– Jacob D. Bekenstein, Scientific American, 2003

Now, either the universe is indeed top down or it is bottom up. If it is top down, ID is right and if it is bottom up, Darwinism is right. And information - especially the huge amount of information we f ind in life forms - is the key.

Hostility from many Christians in science toward the ID guys

Now, I was not surprised to discover that scientists who are atheists opposed Behe's and other IDists' contentions and dismissed their research. But I was surprised by the hostility of many Christians in science, who would describe themselves as theistic evolutionists.

Indeed, as law prof Phillip Johnson, the "fearless leader" of the ID guys, has pointed out, Behe is - or should be thought of as - a theistic evolutionist. The fact that he wasn't so regarded - was in fact reviled by many theistic evolutionists, seemed to demand some explanation. Johnson offered one that made a lot of sense to me:

Behe says at one point that he is not a creationist, at least if that term means someone who is concerned about supporting the creation account in the Bible. He also does not challenge evolution, if that term means “common ancestry.” Then why isn’t Behe classified as a theistic evolutionist? He would be if that term meant a theorist who does not rely on the Bible or other religious authority, and accepts gradual development of organisms over long periods of time, but who sees the need for some guiding (i.e., designing) intelligence.

But, says Johnson, that is not what theistic evolutionism really means:

The defining characteristic of theistic evolution, however, is that it accepts methodological naturalism and confines the theistic element to the subjective area of “religious belief.” It is (barely) acceptable in science to say, “As a Christian, I believe by faith that God is responsible for evolution.” It is emphatically not acceptable to say, “As a scientist, I see evidence that organisms were designed by a preexisting intelligence, and therefore other objective observers should also infer the existence of a designer.” The former statement is within the bounds of methodological naturalism, and most scientific naturalists will interpret it to mean nothing more than “It gives me comfort to believe in God, and so I will.” The latter statement brings the designer into the territory of objective reality, and that is what methodological naturalism forbids.

- from By Design or by Chance? pp. 182-83, quoting Johnson's "Reflection 2" in Three Views on Creation and Evolution, pp. 273–74.

Darwinism as the creation story of atheism?

Another surprise was the key role that the specifically Darwinian view of evolution plays in supporting materialism and atheism. That was, for me, an unexpected finding - probably because I just had not thought much about it until I spent two years writing a book.

For example, I discovered that most scientists have religious views similar to those of the general public. According to Edward Larson, a sociologist who studies these things, 41% of American PhD scientists believe in a God to whom one can pray.

However, the picture changes drastically when you consider those who belong to elite academies such as the American National Academy of Sciences (NAS).

When polled by historians Edward Larson and Larry Witham in 1996, only 7% of members expressed personal belief in God and over 72% expressed personal disbelief. The remainder expressed doubt or agnosticism. (By Design or by Chance?, pp 146–47)

The elite scientists' views are radically different from those turned up by typical public opinion polls that show that, for example, 95% of Americans believe in God.

The pollsters' finding about NAS members is significant because organizations such as NAS promote Darwinism to the education system. Their notables freak out regularly about ID, and have done far more to promote it as a result than the ID guys could have hoped to do.

Darwinism, I slowly came to realize, is best seen as the creation story of materialism. It is defended by its fervent supporters not so much as a state of the facts as a transcendent truth - as indeed for them it is.

Living organisms had existed on earth without ever knowing why for 3000 million years before the truth finally dawned on one of them. His name was Charles Darwin.

– Richard Dawkins on Ben Wattenberg's PBS Think Tank (1996)

An important consequence follows from this sort of thing:

When people are absolutely convinced of a view, they see confirmation everywhere. Now, they could be right, but the fact that they see confirmation everywhere has nothing whatever to do with whether they are right. They are bound to see confirmation everywhere.

Here's an example of the kind of problem that their certainty creates: Darwin thought he knew how new species get started, via natural selection acting on random mutation. But the fact is that new species don't get started very often. There have been arguments for many decades over light vs. dark-colored peppered moths.

It's not as if we can take a thousand recent examples of speciation and try to assess the causes according to likelihood. Speciation happens rarely, and evolution only keeps just ahead of extinction by a small fraction.

Nonetheless, the committed Darwinist announces to the world that Darwin's theory is overwhelmingly confirmed, in the same tone of voice as the committed sectarian knows that his sect's scriptural interpretations are overwhelmingly confirmed.

For example, The Washington Post, a loyal friend to Darwin over the years, claimed to see evidence of Darwinian evolution from the success of Ontario black squirrels misguidedly shipped to Washington in the early 20th century. The black squirrels are the same species as the local Washington gray squirrels. The squirrels all breed without regard to coat color, and the black-coated variety thrived in Washington, alongside the local gray-coated variety, just as the two varieties do in Toronto. No speciation event really took place, and if you go by Toronto's experience, none should be expected. But the Post writer knows by faith that Darwinian speciation must be happening.

It strikes me that if Darwin's theory is overwhelmingly confirmed, there should be better evidence than this. But it isn't overwhelmingly confirmed. It is overwhelmingly believed - a different matter.

Now, I was intrigued by the fact that people commonly write books insisting that the ID guys are motivated by traditional religion, but few consider that the anti-ID guys are mostly motivated either by atheism or non-traditional religion. For example, most of the seriously anti-ID theistic evolutionists that I actually ran across espoused non-standard theologies, especially process theology. I am not saying that all do, but so many of them do that it cannot be an accident. I take it as a given that people should be free to espouse what they actually believe, but the philosophical commitments of the Darwinists are just as relevant as those of the IDists.

Just to test out my guess, I advertised on my blog for a committed Darwinist who actually opposes human embryonic stem cell research, and got no takers until just a couple of weeks ago - and that guy says he only thinks that Darwin was mostly right, not entirely right. So I have learned that it is even relatively safe to predict political positions on controversial issues based on degree of support for Darwinism.

Naturally, as I see the controversies unfolding at the school board level in the United States, I find myself asking why materialism and Darwinism should be so privileged over other philosophies.

Popular delusions and the madness of crowds - aka misrepresentations of the issues

Before moving on, I want to touch on two common misrepresentations on this specific aspect of the topic.

First: Sometimes Darwinians/Darwinists try to avoid the implications of their own position. In 1998, Bruce Alberts, then president of NAS, urged the teaching of Darwinian evolution in public schools, claiming that "there are many very outstanding members of this academy who are very religious people, people who believe in evolution, many of them biologists." Larson and Witham commented crisply: "Our survey suggests otherwise." (Ibid.)

Also, some who lobby for Darwinism in the school system use as a poster person the prominent mid-century Darwinian evolutionist Theodosius Dobzhansky, who is reputed to be both a religious believer and a Darwinist. Indeed, there was a sniffy letter in Nature recently, advising the world of this fact.

What was the actual state of Dobzhansky's belief? Well, as I blogged recently,

Dobzhansky was a religious man, although he apparently rejected fundamental beliefs of traditional religion, such as the existence of a personal God and of life beyond physical death.

- Francisco Ayala (formerly his student)

Now, perhaps Dobzhansky is a moral example to us all, but there is no sense in which most of the people who are informed that he was a believer or a Christian or a religious man would actually understand what was meant, just as few would guess whatever Alberts meant when he described his membership as religious. - so this is one of the all-too-common misrepresentations I discovered.

Second: There has been a very large amount of misrepresentation of the Catholic position on this subject. Virtually every pundit could assure me that "The Church supports evolution," based on something that John Paul II said in 1996. What the pundits never told me was that in that document, John Paul II explicitly ruled out the Darwinian idea of evolution that the pundits are usually promoting — Richard Dawkins did, however, get it right and promptly attacked the Pope, understandably, given Dawkins' actual position vs. the Pope's.

In sum, I concluded that

(1) information theory is slowly forging a different way of looking at life and that Darwinian evolutionists are poorly adapted to it (so to speak).

(2) large proportions of Darwinists/Darwinian evolutionists are atheists or process theists who are heavily invested in Darwinism because it provides support for their point of view. They see it as "the Truth." Not only that, but

(3) their commitment to atheism or non-standard theism has often been suppressed in order to avoid exacerbating controversy. Of course, trust and good will are the first casualties when facts such as these become known. Again, no wonder there is a controversy and it is not going away.

Go to Part Four

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 forthcoming The Spiritual Brain (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Because my prediction that the controversy would get really hot by mid-decade turned out to be correct, after By Design or by Chance? was published, a number of key events occurred that I did not get a chance to record in the book.

In spring 2005, I started a blog called the Post-Darwinist, simply to put up news in the ID controversy, which I will use to update By Design or by Chance? in 2008. Meanwhile, about 150 to 200 people a day use the blog as a searchable archive of ID news. (The search box is at the top left.)

It became obvious that the Internet and the blogosphere are having a tremendous impact on shaping many issues, including the ID controversy. What the blogosphere does best is make it very difficult to keep people from finding things out. Anyone can disseminate an alternative view at practically no cost bar one's time. In the past, the sheer difficulty of acquiring information was often a barrier; today, it isn't.

Now, that means a great deal of twaddle and crankery, to be sure, but it also means access to much expertise from people who were not asked for an opinion by the legacy mainstream media. Consider, for example, pajamagate and photogate, to see what a difference that makes. These experts could easily detect the frauds out there, but before the blogosphere, you could not have been in contact with them.

Today, a thoughtful person who is interested in the ID controversy can be as almost well informed about it as a journalist who covers it as a regular beat. (Almost as well informed? Yes, because I won't tell you rumors I have heard, just news I can verify and preferably link to. Sometimes the rumors pan out, but I try not to bother people with them until they do.)

Here are three controversies I covered at the Post-Darwinist where all parties were guilty of the same offence: accumulating evidence against materialism. The Privileged Planet film, fossil expert Rick Sternberg, and astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez all found themselves under the gun for that reason.

And, as I always say at this point, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the ID controversy.

Also, in July 2005 a huge controversy ensued when Cardinal Schoenborn said in The New York Times that

Evolution in the sense of common ancestry might be true, but evolution in the neo-Darwinian sense - an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection - is not. Any system of thought that denies or seeks to explain away the overwhelming evidence for design in biology is ideology, not science.

– Christoph, Cardinal Schoenborn (New York Times, July 2005)

As I have suggested above, this statement is actually best understood as the Vatican attempting to make its true position clear. But of course so many people have such an interest in muddying the question that you will seldom hear anyone other than Schoenborn express the matter so clearly.

For example, some religion writers have recently warned that the Pope is about to embrace ID theory (and ain't that awful?). Well, dear me, ID theory - meaning Bill Dembski's specified complexity hypothesis or Michael Behe's irreducible complexity hypothesis - just is not something that the Catholic Church would even contemplate supporting in particular, as opposed to the idea of design in general. After two thousand years, the Catholic Church has way bigger fish to fry. It looks as though the Church is going after Darwinism in general, and the ID guys can sort themselves out as they wish.

Now mark what that means. It means that the Church's failure to embrace a specific ID theory proves nothing. But you see how a clever journalist can get a big headline either way, right? And it's all just a misrepresentation, really.

Bluntly, there is no possible way that the Catholic Church can accept Darwinism, but that does not commit it to any competing origins theory. You'd think a point as simple as that would be easy to grasp, but that would be leaving out various parties' obvious emotional involvement in the question.

Go to Part Five.

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 forthcoming The Spiritual Brain (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

I expect ID to grow in scope in the next decade, and to become international, but that is not mainly because of the merits of ID. I do think ID has some merits, but right now the main engine of its acceptance is the problems of Darwinism.

Darwinism, as currently believed and practiced by a great many people, is a vulgar superstition.

Darwin's useful idea in biology (which may or may not describe how most speciation occurs) has morphed into a farrago of nonsense promoted by zealots, comprising opinions on everything from cosmic black holes to religious belief. Opinions that, in their entirety, are shared by few. The more people come to know of them, the more legitimate objections to Darwinism will arise.

Thomas Huxley, Darwin's bulldog, warned that something like this might occur:

History warns us... that it is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions; and, as matters now stand, it is hardly rash to anticipate that, in another twenty years, the new generation, educated under the influences of the present day, will be in danger of accepting the main doctrines of the "Origin of Species," with as little reflection, and it may be with as little justification, as so many of our contemporaries, twenty years ago, rejected them.

–Thomas Huxley on –Thomas Huxley on Darwin's theory

Huxley didn't know the half of it because he probably did not anticipate the extent to which Darwinism would become part of many people's self-concept and entitlements, and therefore defended in the way any doctrine that confers status and rights is defended - ruthlessly.

But, over time, rebellions happen. Years ago, a wise clergyman stickhandling a fearful religious row told me, "Many doctrines are never doubted until someone tries too hard to defend them."

In that respect, the Darwinists' habit of persecution of ID advocates combined with their demands that school systems and museums promote Darwinism helps the IDists immeasurably. The need to stomp all over dissenters and force doctrines down skeptical throats does not spring from overflowing confidence. And nowadays, it is not hard to locate credible reasons for thinking either that Darwin was wrong or that we can't be sure he was right.

Lastly, ours is the age of information, and information theory is much more favorable to ID than 19th century materialist theory could ever be. Information theorists have little to lose in a top down universe. Thus, I am not surprised by the comfort with ID that many software engineers have expressed to me. In that, they echo a physicist:

It might even be fair to observe that the concept that information is fundamental is very old knowledge of humanity, witness for example the beginning of gospel according to John: "In the beginning was the Word."

– physicist Anton Zeilinger, University of Vienna

Well, the next ten years will tell.

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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 forthcoming The Spiritual Brain (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

For Sketch 2, go here.

I'd left the conference early on Friday night. The house was packed out and the U organizer worried about the Fire Marshal's opinion of people sitting on the stair grades, so I ceded my seat. (So much for "ID is dead ..." Not in Toronto, anyway.)

Thus I missed the presentation by emeritus chemist Dr. David Humphrey, in support of the view that the molecules of life give evidence of purposeful design. I bet they do. I also missed the presentation by astronomer Hugh Ross of Reasons to Believe.

When I got back early Saturday morning, there was a distinct buzz because Ross had "witnessed" during his presentation.

Wish now I had taken bets. Friends say he is at heart an evangelist and uses every opportunity he can and any science info he can get hold of to win converts to Christianity.

But in Toronto, witnessing is widely regarded as infra dig.

Well, it will give the local village atheists something to go on about. And on and on and on. But hey.

The Saturday morning lecture was more along the lines of what the organizer had expected. Dr. Robert Mann, chair of physics at the University of Waterloo, and also an affiliate member of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics there, and chair of Canadian Scientific and Christian Affiliation (equivalent to American Scientific Affiliation), discussed "universal Darwinism." A discussion long overdue, in my view.

Universal Darwinism means just what it says. As Mann ably showed, according to universal Darwinism, Darwin's theory explains everything from the operations of the human mind (consciousness and free will are just an illusion and your thoughts are merely "memes" ) through morality (just a way to spread your selfish genes ) all the way to the creation of the entire universe via Darwinian evolution in black holes .

Evolution of species? Aw, that's just small potatoes. The fact that there is very little evidence of the evolution of species via any mechanism (because speciation is not often observed) doesn't really matter after all. The Darwinist, it turns out, has whales to fry, not sardines. There is no evidence for the whales, of course, but the Darwinist can always start yelling about "science" in general and create a whale of a disruption.

Significantly, not one Darwinist present at the meeting suggested that Mann was mistaken, that Darwinism in fact has limited aims.

If I could choose just one thing to get across to the people who want to know why there is an intelligent design controversy, it would be the very topic Mann introduced: The fact that the Darwinist - like the Fascist or the Communist - does NOT have limited aims.

The Darwinist wants natural selection acting on random mutations to explain absolutely everything in the universe, and if he can get hold of your kids in the school system, that's what he will try to do. And force you to pay for it. That is part of the reason why there is an intelligent design controversy.

(There are other reasons, but once people realize what the Darwinist is up to, that alone is a reliable generator of controversy, although many of the actual controversies are stupid and destructive.)

Mann castigated both sides in the Darwinism-ID debate. He castigated the Darwinists for thinking the ID guys stupid. He was weary of hearing that because, he said, whatever the ID guy are, they are not stupid. But he also said the ID guys need to do way more research to demonstrate their interesting ideas.

Mann pleaded for some sort of experimental test of Darwinism vs. ID. I suspect he had in mind the kind of test that decided in favor of the Big Bang over the Steady State universe, which I wrote about in By Design or by Chance?.

I asked Mann over lunch how he thought the ID guys could manage that. Like, if you are denied a PHD or tenure, or booted out of your job for investigating subjects that might generate an ID finding, does that make it easier or harder to do the research?

I got the feeling he has not heard the stuff I have. But a guy who does cosmology for a living probably doesn't hear the down 'n' dirty about what Darwinists do to keep hold of power and money when there is actually very little evidence to support their theory of speciation and none to support its inflation to the entire universe or the human mind.

But, of course, in principle Mann is right - sort of.

The ID guys do need to come up with things that grab people's attention. On the other hand, let's not be under any illusion whatever that, in the short term, that will protect them from Darwinists. Anything they do come up with, they will have difficulty publishing. And they will have difficulty getting or keeping degrees or tenure after they do it. A large number of the non-Darwinist scientists that the Discovery Institute has tallied are safely retired (no surprise there - a whole industry of retired and dead guys doubt Darwinism, safe from its thugs).

Maybe Discovery should provide a clause for scientists' wills saying, "Look, I never agreed with all that crap, but I had a family, you know, and a career. Too bad about the guys who said something while they were alive."

By the way, it was really interesting the way the Darwinists sneered at Mann, who is almost certainly light years ahead of most of them in intelligence, because he is a Christian. That was precisely the sort of thing they do to ID folk in general, a fact that he noted politely in his talk.

Essentially, I have learned that uncivilized and unjustified arrogance is the Darwinists' second key weakness. Their first key weakness is that they apparently do not have the goods.

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 forthcoming The Spiritual Brain (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent
Dan Adelman at New Republic thinks that rejecting a grant for Brian Alters means that Canada's Social Sciences and Humanities Research council is infected with "post-modern drivel" . Ironically, the Council is actually trying to preserve social science standards in denying a grant to a man who is a combatant in the controversy, which means that - whatever his other merits - he is of little value as a researcher.

As I have said elsewhere, if the Council is forced by pressure to cave and give Alters the money, it won't be the biggest waste of funds or the first time such things have happened. Activist research has been the curse of social science in Canada for some time. People are given money all the time to go out and prove all kinds of propositions in which they obviously have a vested interest. It was nice to see the Council taking a stand, however briefly, against an egregious example.

Incidentally, Canadians will recall that the Canadian government has also eliminated the Court Challenges program, by which leftists were given money to challenge traditional values, but the upholders of traditional values had to raise cash from the meagre leftovers from steep taxation.

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 forthcoming The Spiritual Brain (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In a long-awaited move, the intelligent design guys are attempting an end run around the interminable school board controversies by appealing directly to young people.

Can ID can compete with X-boxes and text messages about edgy TV?

Maybe. Young people love excitement. As long as YOU are not the person who is about to lose your tenure, job, teaching position, or access to lab facilities and specimens - the ID controversy is fun and exciting. Even if you are, it is still esciting ...

"Give us your young people . . ., " ID math maven Bill Dembski intones, ironically.

"Progressive" parents, be warned. Censor your children's Internet access meticulously. Just as the struggling atheist sees Bibles open everywhere, your children may see design in nature everywhere, even though you know it is all just an illusion.

The Darwinists have had your young people long enough to shape, subvert, and corrupt. Send them to www.overwhelmingevidence.com and mobilize this sleeping giant! The old guard is not going to change. The hope of the future lies with our youth. The new overwhelmingevidence.com site is modeled on Xanga and Myspace and aimed at concentrating the power of youth to throw off the indoctrination that is being shoved down their throats by groups like the NCSE and enforced by inept judicial rulings like those of Judge Jones (note the image of Jones on the splash page). The NCSE, the ACLU, Jones, etc. have effectively disenfranchised our young people when it comes to the teaching of biological origins. Today’s high school and college students are going to need to reclaim their own freedom.

Truth in advertising: I posted a couple of items at Overwhelming Evidence myself. If I contribute regularly, I will hereafter try to make my posts high school-age oriented. Having been an editor on some of the most interesting textbook projects ever published in Canada, I can safely promise they won't be dull sludge.

Now, I wonder if high schools will be court-ordered to block access to the site? Will the American taxpayer be asked to pay to develop special software for the purpose? See what I mean? Whatever else it is, the ID controversy is not dull.

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 forthcoming The Spiritual Brain (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

ID guy Jonathan Wells tells me,

On Friday evening, September 29, 2006, several of us (Mike Behe, Bill Dembski, Ralph Seelke and myself) spoke to a crowd of almost 4,000 people at the University of South Florida's Sun Dome in Tampa, usually devoted to sports events such as basketball games. The event was sponsored by Physicians and Surgeons for Scientific Integrity (PSSI) . It was organized by some hard-working volunteers.

The audience consisted almost entirely of people seriously interested in learning about ID -- including students, faculty, and parents. There were a few Darwinists present, who contented themselves largely with handing out leaflets ("ID Is Not Science") and shouting "Darwin" as they skulked out of the Sun Dome. True to form, the USF biology department officially boycotted the event, which was carried live on a local radio station.

Ah yes. If I went to interview the bio profs at USF, they would likely castigate the public for science ignorance. But science is not what the public disclaims, but rather universal Darwinsm, and that is not really about science.

Wells is the author of Icons of Evolution and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism.

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 forthcoming The Spiritual Brain (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Demography explains two-thirds of everything, according to Canadian social scientist David Foot.

Okay, he was exaggerating, but only a little.

Demography is the hard edge of social science. That's because it is based on facts that are hard to fiddle:

- A given number of human beings is born in a given region in a given year. No one can go back and change that.

- Humans take nearly twenty years to mature. (Rushing the process leads to poorer outcomes.)

- They grow at a stable rate during that period, usually reaching milestones at predictable times.

- They live - under favorable circumstances - about 70 to 80 years, with slow, gradually increasing, attrition along the way.

- Women are generally fertile between the ages of about 18 and 45, but fertility decreases significantly after about 35.

- Most humans cannot work as hard between the ages of 70 and 85, and they tend to have many more medical problems in their last years.

Follow demography in stable countries, and you can make many successful predictions. People will think you are a prophet, ... a wizard! In reality, they see the same pattern as you do; they just fail to make use of it.

Aren’t demographics upset by unusual events? Not necessarily. Unusual events such as wars, epidemics, and mass migrations can be factored in. Once the losses and gains in each age group are tallied, the basic facts cited above are not altered significantly by upheavals.

But social attitudes can be factored in as well. At present, religious people have significantly more children than others. There are a number of reasons for that, and specific religious beliefs are probably only one. Religious groups tend to form communities, which are better suited to raising children than anonymous environments are. The communities, in turn, tend to give those who have children a higher status than those who don’t. (Consider, for example, Mother’s Day services and politicians’ family photos, and you will see exactly what I mean.)

So, with respect to intelligent design theory, at least a part of the appeal to a broad public can be predicted from the simple fact that, as Phillip Longman (the American equivalent of David Foot) has noted, religious people are far more likely than non-religious people to actually raise children. As he puts it in “The liberal baby bust”

What's the difference between Seattle and Salt Lake City? There are many differences, of course, but here's one you might not know. In Seattle, there are nearly 45% more dogs than children. In Salt Lake City, there are nearly 19% more kids than dogs.

This curious fact might at first seem trivial, but it reflects a much broader and little-noticed demographic trend that has deep implications for the future of global culture and politics. It's not that people in a progressive city such as Seattle are so much fonder of dogs than are people in a conservative city such as Salt Lake City. It's that progressives are so much less likely to have children.

I am not here concerned with ID’s science legitimacy, but rather with the question of whether there is a popular market for ID books and for the political fallout that inevitably results when a conflict in science becomes popularized. Michael Behe and David Snoke, for example, wrote a respectable paper for the journal Protein Science, but I am morally certain that most of the readers of Darwin’s Black Box did not buy or read that paper.)

Religious people tend to care about the intelligent design controversy because they are told in their places of worship that the universe shows evidence of intelligent design, so they notice when science boffins insist that it doesn't . They especially notice when those boffins rely so largely on sneering, jeering, persecution of dissenters, and lawsuits.

As an American liberal, Longman is very concerned about the trend that religious people have more kids, and he would like to reverse it. Now, one problem is, short of a time machine, he can't reverse it. People who had children 25 to 35 years ago simply have a bigger block of supporters today than people who didn't. And, contrary to popular assumptions, children tend to grow up to follow their parents’ attitudes in most matters, not because attitudes are genetic but because they follow naturally from living and working in a given environment. And social environments tend to be fairly stable over time.

For example, if you live in a green belt, you probably care more about trees than if you live in a concrete jungle. So if I wanted to sell memberships in Nation United for Tree Salvation (NUTS), I would study the census data for green belt areas, not for concrete jungles.

Now, note the significance of the fact that I will have much better luck selling memberships in places where trees are not in danger than I will in places where they actually are in danger. Demographics makes a lot of sense, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that people behave rationally.

But assuming Longman could reverse the trend today, and get non-religious people to have more children and religious people to have fewer - and there are certainly two opinions about whether he could - it would take over two decades for the effects to be felt.

That was one of the reasons I successfully predicted in 2001 that the intelligent design controversy would explode by mid-decade. It was easy to be a wizard, using demographics.

(Note: Of course, there are always wild cards in the deck. For example, a rise in the number of unregistered aliens can upset predictions - but usually only by a little. Unregistered aliens will mean more little heads bobbing in the kindergarten than we thought there would be, but those little heads have the same life cycle as anyone else. So adjustments to the estimates need not throw off forecasting altogether. In the same way, wars cause declines in the numbers of marriageable men, leading to more involuntary female celibacy and single motherhood than you might otherwise expect in the same population. But again, deaths in war are normally tallied, so figures can be adjusted as needed.)

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 forthcoming The Spiritual Brain (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Jerry A. Coyne, of the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago, criticizing an author named David P. Mindell in the eminent science journal Nature, for announcing that everything including sliced bread is one of the benefits of believing Darwin, which means believing that the entire history of life after its origin can be explained by natural selection acting on random genetic mutations:

To some extent these excesses are not Mindell's fault, for, if truth be told, evolution hasn't yielded many practical or commercial benefits. Yes, bacteria evolve drug resistance, and yes, we must take countermeasures, but beyond that there is not much to say. Evolution cannot help us predict what new vaccines to manufacture because microbes evolve unpredictably. But hasn't evolution helped guide animal and plant breeding? Not very much. Most improvement in crop plants and animals occurred long before we knew anything about evolution, and came about by people following the genetic principle of 'like begets like.' ( "Selling Darwin" Nature, Vol 442, 31 August 2006 - but you must pay.)

So then why are careers endangered or wrecked over carefully considered refusals to believe in Darwinism (which Coyne, like most Darwinists, merely describes as "evolution")?

Well, readers of this blog will know my own view, that Darwinism is the creation story of secularist atheism. Demands for assent to Darwinism (or, in some tellings, universal Darwinism) are demands for assent to the rule of the public square by that particular body of thought.

Dr. Coyne ends by ridiculing creationists and intelligent design supporters for doubting that Darwinism is the origin of new species, even though there is so little evidence that he is forced to use the analogy that one language can change slowly into another. But, of course, languages are intelligently designed by the groups that use them (working, of course, from a logical base that is innate).

I might be a bit light blogging for a couple of days because I have to go give a talk at the University of Toronto on why there is an intelligent design controversy and why it isn't going away - and why trying to force people to say they agree with Darwin or punish them when they don't - will not make it go away. Thanks to Dr. Coyne for helping me understand.

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 forthcoming The Spiritual Brain (Harper 2007).

* Friday, September 29, 2006 7:00 p.m. - 9:00 p.m.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

- An Evening of Lecture and discussion

7:00 p.m. Science ... and the Quest for Purpose by Dr. David Humphreys

Chemist David Humphreys will present a thought provoking blend of experiments, demonstrations, and scientific insights in his consideration of the way in which the molecules of life can give evidence of purposeful design

8:00 p.m. Have Astronomers Identified the Creator? By Hugh Ross

Astronomer Hugh Ross notes that ours is the only generation that has witnessed the measuring of the Cosmos. What does this mean for our questioning of creation? The current base of astronomical research also permits an ongoing testing of a cosmic creation model based on sacred religious texts.

When/Where?: 7:00 p.m. at Alumni Hall, 121 St. Joseph Street, Room 400

No admission fee for friday night - reservations recommended, Tel 416 926-2247

now, for Saturday:

* Saturday, September 30, 2006 9:00 a.m. - to 5:00 p.m.

- A One Day Workshop: Lectures, Panel Discussions, Group Conversations

A day of Dialogue with Guest Lecturers and Panelists, including

- Dr. Robert Mann, Chair, Dept. Of Physics, University of Waterloo
- Ms. Denyse O'Leary, Journalist, author of By Design or By Chance?
- Dr. James R. Brown, MA, PhD, Professor, Department of Philosophy
- Dr. Dennis O'Hara, Director of Elliott Allen Institute for Theology and Ecology
- Dr. Hugh Ross, Ph.D., Astronomy
- Dr. Sehdev Kumar, Director, Forum for Dialogue between Science and Religion

Topics covered: What is Science? Is there Room for god in Scientific Dialogue? Universal Darwinism and Intelligent Design?
Astronomy and Human Destiny

Fee (for Saturday ) $100.00 (includes lunch) [Remember, Friday evening is free.]

Reservations: 416 926-7254
E-mail: continuinged.stmikes@utoronto.ca
Info: Lynda at 416 229 2399 ext. 125
Get there by TTC: Get off at Bay Station on the Bloor line (one west of Yonge), walk south past St. Mary's Street to St. Joseph's Street. Turn right.
Parking locations and motor vehicle directions here.
Web site: The God Hypothesis: Has Science Found God? (Scroll down.)

A part of the University of St. Michael's College Continuing Education Anniversary Lectures

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 forthcoming The Spiritual Brain (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

No friend to religion, Andrew Brown nonetheless says that Richard Dawkins's "incurious and rambling" diatribe against religion "doesn't come close to explaining how faith has survived the assault of Darwinism,"opening with

It has been obvious for years that Richard Dawkins had a fat book on religion in him, but who would have thought him capable of writing one this bad? Incurious, dogmatic, rambling and self-contradictory, it has none of the style or verve of his earlier works.

It gets better from there - or worse, I guess, if you bought The God Delusion. Which reminds me to come to the point of this blog: When was the last time Dawkins had an original idea in biology? I don't mean an idea that works. Hey, I'm not that fussy. I just mean an original idea. Why is he always writing trash about religion now?

Oh, and here is Dawkins' own comment on his book.

Plus (!) here is further comment from Andrew Brown:

I have just finished reviewing Richard Dawkins' new book on God for someone else and spent a sleepless night wondering if I should really have been so cruel about it. It's rubbish, of course; but why say so? What is it about the jeering, smug atheism so well represented on the internet, as well as in Dawkins' books, that makes me so very angry? Perhaps this is a rage at heresy, since in lots of ways I think he's right, and our disagreements ought to be quite trivial. But the more I think of them, the more serious they become.

Brown - to his credit - realizes that a book is a bomb if he feels forced to say nice things 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 forthcoming The Spiritual Brain (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Apparently, Wilson has decided to quit trashing clergy, and make an appeal to them (as in "Dear Pastor") to help save the planet. Even though the planet has been around for a long, long time, and has been through many cataclysms. Morris hints that Wilson may not be the best available person to spearhead such a move:

Wilson's programme is put forward with the best of intentions, yet it is underpinned by an incoherent metaphysics. Equally important, its scientistic agenda carries the real risk of imposing tyranny. Wilson is famous for his holistic programme, loosely described as 'consilience'. This aims to understand human nature in terms of entirely naturalistic processes underpinned by genetics. As part of his programme for human development, Wilson blithely writes that one of the great goals is to "stimulate the mind with the combination of artificial intelligence and artificial emotion", chosen of course by the wisest of our leaders.

Feel queasy about all that? Well, sure you do, you're just an ignorant fundie.

You'll have to pay to read the rest at the link above, fundie, but you won't be surprised to learn that Conway Morris does not put much faith in Wilson's Dear Pastor letter.

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 forthcoming The Spiritual Brain (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

A key problem with the argument over Darwinian evolution (evolution by natural selection acting on random mutations) is that so few actual examples of speciation (new species forming) have ever been observed that we really have no way of knowing for sure whether Darwin had the right idea. That is precisely why acceptance of Darwinism is so often treated as some kind of loyalty test for science; in reality, the Darwinist is taking a great deal on faith.

As Jonathan Wells noted in his controversial Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design,

So except for polyploidy in plants, which is not what Darwin's theory needs, there are no observed instances of the origin of species. As evolutionary biologists Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan wrote in 2002: "Speciation, whether in the remote Galapagos, in the laboratory cages of the drosophilosophers, or in the crowded sediments of the paleontologists, still has never been directly traced." Evolution's smoking gun is still missing.

- Jonathan Wells, Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design , p. 55, quoting Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, Acquiring Genomes: A Theory of the Origin of Species (New York: Basic Books, p. 32)

(Note: Polyploidy is gene-swapping by the duopubling of chromosomes, from which new species of plants can arise. (But it's no particular help to Darwin's theory because sexual reproduction is not involved.) Drosophilosophers is a humorous coinage for researchers who study fruit flies (drosophilus spp.).)

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 forthcoming The Spiritual Brain (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

It must be considered that there is nothing more difficult to carry out nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things. For the reformer has enemies in all those who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new order, this lukewarmness arising partly for fear of their adversaries, who have the laws in their favor; and partly from the incredulity of men, who do not truly believe in anything new until they have had actual experience of it.
Niccolè Machiavelli, The Prince, Chapter 6

Sure, sure, Machiavelli was immoral, but on this point he was not wrong.

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 forthcoming The Spiritual Brain (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

The 2004 film What the Bleep Do We Know?, from Captured Light/Lord of the Wind was hugely successful, grossing at least $12 million so far, and selling a million DVDs, thus becoming the fourth best-selling documentary in history. And now there is a sequel, What the Bleep, Down the Rabbit Hole, which I haven't seen, so won't comment (but will link to reviews, below).

Why so popular? Why a sequel so soon? Well, two things: First, it's an attempt to enlist quantum mechanics in a non-materialist interpretation of reality. Second, 14 top scientists and mystics have come forward to say that science and religion describe the same phenomena.

I recognize the names of some of the scientists, including Andrew Newberg and Candace Pert.

But do science and religion describe the same phenomena? And if so, what does it mean?

First, if your religion doesn't include God, science and religion may well describe the same phenomena. But surely no one who believes in God thinks that God can be made to serve as a research subject? That said, some religions do not include any idea of God that Western monotheists would recognize.New age may well be one of them, and What the Bleep ... ? is clearly a new age production.

Now, many North American Christians will want to lock, double lock, and triple bar the door - and then go on to pile furniture against it - when they hear about anything to do with new age.

While I understand why they might feel that way, I am personally prepared to give any evidently sane person a hearing. After all, on the materialist side, we can easily find people arguing that free will and consciousness are an illusion because their scheme cannot account for such things. If I have to listen to that stuff, I may as well be patient with other things as well.

The basic topic of the film, shot in Portland, Oregon, is the role of quantum physics in the creation of mind. It should interest people who follow the intelligent design controversy because quantum physics may enable the grounding of a non-materialist view of mind in science.

Well, so let's have a look at the film, shall we?

The big opening announcement, "In the beginning was the void teeming with infinite possibilities, of which you are one" makes the new age orientation clear, as do slogans like "The real trick to life is not to be in the know but to be in the mystery."

Hmmm. Try explaining that to someone who is looking for a correct diagnosis of a painful and disabling medical problem. Many situations in life favor being in the know rather than in the mystery.

Basically, the film concerns a deaf photographer (played by deaf actress Marlee Matlin) who is getting over a painful divorce from a philandering husband. It intersperses interviews with various academics and notables, explaining aspects of quantum mechanics, and episodes in her life (maybe?), including meeting an illuminated little boy who offers to play basketball with her.

She is sent out to cover a wedding and finds that, thanks to her growing understanding of how the universe functions, she can actually do her regular job without pills. So far so great, in my view. We all need to be told that we can get our lives back on track if that's what we really want.

Some have complained that the film misrepresents quantum mechanics, but we need to be a bit cautious here because the quantum world is in fact pretty weird, despite efforts to normalize it. Indeed, in some cases, the materialist agenda is patent.

Dennis Overbye's review in the New York Times is an excellent exposition of the materialist approach:

Having pointed out that

When I first heard that Marlee Matlin had made a movie about quantum theory, I was excited. ... What could be more deserving of wide-screen cinematic treatment than the weirdness and mystery of the laws that sculpture our space-time adventures?

he explains,

But hours and hours spent watching the two films and navigating their splashy Web site have tempered my enthusiasm. These films and the quantum mysticism industry behind them raise a disturbing question about the muddled intersection between science and culture. Do we have to indulge in bad physics to feel good?

Fair eno