The ID Report

"This belief, that Darwinian evolution is 'random', is not merely false. It is the exact opposite of the truth" -- Richard Dawkins, in his best selling book, The Blind Watchmaker.

Darwinists are in a pickle, which could explain why they are always so sour. Realizing they have no recourse to intelligence in explaining creation, they place blind faith in nothing but genetic mutations to provide beneficial new life features from which natural selection can mindlessly and blindly select. Not only is there is no evidence that unguided mutations can offer up such a smorgasbord of goodies, there is also no scientific reason to believe that blind natural selection would have the foggiest notion what to do with the first of the necessary legion of mutations required for even one beneficial new change. Even worse is the stifling materialistic worldview that mandates only one politically correct explanation for the origin of species, resulting in very literally the blind leading the blind.

Perhaps the sheer ludicrousness of the thought of blind, unguided evolution creating beneficial new body plans via random mistakes in copying cellular DNA is why very few believe in Darwinism. Here's a simple test of Darwinists' credulity and Darwinism's veracity: with genuine respect to people having genetic birth defects (and their loving families), given the opportunity, would anyone ordinarily choose to have a random genetic mutation induced in their unborn baby? Why in the world, then, do people ordinarily choose to believe that the exact same mechanism has built every beneficial feature of every bodily organ of every life form on earth? Is this not sheer absurdity?

Those heavily invested in the truth claims of unguided, purposeless Darwinism squander their existence hopelessly oblivious to the profound dearth of scientific evidence to explain any more than slight changes in existing species. Look it up: the theory that unguided mutations can provide the information-creating, morphology-changing, cellular factory-building raw material for preservation by unguided "natural selection" is embarrassingly devoid of any evidentiary support. Nevertheless, without even a devil for the details, Darwinists irrationally pin all their hopes and dreams on genetic mutations, necessarily using words like "chance" and "random," knowing that such words naturally make ordinary people think that Darwinism is a highly unlikely chance or random process. And every un-indoctrinated person knows, either intuitively or by experience, that when it comes to gambling on impossible odds the house always wins. Why bet your life on such odds?

Today's most prominent promoter of the Darwinian casino of life, Richard Dawkins, is particularly confusing on the idea of "randomness". Of course, his fault is only in attempting to be articulate, for the great deficiency of Darwinism is its propensity to become hopelessly confounding when squeezed for details. For example, knowing he can't explicitly deny chance, Dawkins nevertheless tries at every turn to dispel "that old canard" that Darwinism is a theory of "pure chance." By carefully choosing his words (such as modifying chance with "pure," not unlike referring to sewer water as "sewage, but not pure sewage"), and focusing on natural selection as non-random, Dawkins wants to deflect the obvious, that Darwinism is at bottom a theory that relies on the unplanned results of randomness--and lots of it.

Dawkins has little patience with those he claims "misunderstand" on "the issue of 'chance', often dramatized as blind chance." Dawkins' objection to "dramatizing" chance as blind is particularly interesting. What other kind of chance is there but "blind" chance? "Peeking" chance, perhaps? And to imply there might be some other kind of chance, or that there might be some deficiency in the ability of blind chance, is especially fascinating coming from the author of a book entitled The Blind Watchmaker. But even Dawkins, officially tasked by Oxford University with the "public understanding of science", on this issue must resort to confusion over convincing, clearly annoyed that thinking people don't think like him: "The great majority of people that attack Darwinism leap with almost unseemly eagerness to the mistaken idea that there is nothing other than random chance in it." Again, Dawkins' lawyerly choice of words works against him. Whether there is "nothing other than" random chance is beside the point. The fact is that at least one of Darwin's steps in the evolutionary process of mutation and natural selection is an event best described as random or chance. One random event in a multi-step process renders the entire process random.

Because words like "chance" and "randomness" are never associated with building increasing, beneficial complexity in any other context, Darwinist hucksters face a dilemma in peddling their snake-eyes oil to suspicious town folk: how to play down the random nature of mutations, the only Darwinian mechanism for creation of new life forms exhibiting increasing, beneficial complexity. (Remember, natural selection can only select from the choices genetic mutations offer up). But ordinary people know that randomness renders Darwinism no more likely to produce a general trend of broad-based life creation than gambling is to produce a general trend of broad-based wealth creation. Imagine a gambler at a craps table trying to convince someone that with enough time he is sure to get rich, since the result of a few thousand lucky random rolls (with no losing setbacks) is a non-random, non-chance, automatic, cash award. Suppose he strenuously argues that because of the automatic payoff gambling is not "pure" chance, and criticizes you for even thinking that there is "nothing other than random chance" in his gambling. This gambler's reasoning is logically equivalent to that of Darwinists who think that because one step (i.e., natural selection) in the evolutionary process is said to be non-random, somehow chance is minimized (if not eliminated) as a factor.

Ironically, Darwinists can successfully remove "chance" or "randomness" from any part of the Darwinian vocabulary, but in doing so they end up in a less believable and less scientifically supportable place than they are already. Consider: the whole point of Darwinism, creationism, intelligent design, or any other theory of origins is to hypothesize the cause of the diversity of life on earth. Yet what is "chance" but merely the probabilistic character of an otherwise deterministic physical cause? The outcome of a flip of a coin is not "caused" by chance; it is caused by physical forces that determine its outcome. Chance and randomness are simply words we use to describe the outcome of an event for which we cannot understand and compute all the causal inputs. But once the coin leaves the fingers, its fate is set under the influence of the determinant forces of nature just as surely as if angels were personally escorting it to its resting place. Chance plays no causal role; randomness is only an illusion.

In the same way, according to mainstream science, our "flip of the coin" occurred with the Big Bang, and since that moment, like billiard balls having been struck with the first cue ball, or dice thrown across a craps table, matter simply moves in motion dictated by the only four known forces of nature: gravity, the weak and strong nuclear forces, and electromagnetic forces. That's it. These four simple forces of nature working in physics and chemistry are all the causal agents Darwinism has from which to draw. Like wind-blown leaves, and gravity-drawn raindrops, in a Darwinian world genetic activity simply follows the deterministic forces of nature; there is no "choice", and "selection" is an illusion.

And Darwinists want us to believe there is some clever watchmaker-force lurking about, blindly and blithely guiding nature on a steady course of design. But Darwinism's "blind watchmaker" is a myth, a modern materialist god-of-the-gaps fiction, thought to ceaselessly, if not inefficiently, tinker about in nature's lavish workshop. But in reality, blindness is too generous a qualifier, for the watchmaker is not merely blind; it is deaf, dumb and senseless, mindless, clueless, unintelligent, worse than stupid, literally dead. In fact, there is no Darwinian "maker" of any kind in a materialistic worldview, but simply atoms in motion, still moving from the first moment of the Big Bang under the unguided, purposeless influence of gravity, the nuclear forces, or electromagnetism. It's really that simple. There are no secret guiding forces, no mysterious designer-substitute causal agents, and no magic self-organizing principles beyond what the four forces can achieve through physics and chemistry. Barring any intelligent intervention, is it believable that unintelligent, unguided forces of nature can drive atoms-to-Adam evolution?

Not a chance.

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, published by Access Research Network. Send comments to: roddybullock@idnetohio.com. For more essays by Roddy Bullock, go here.

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

References:

Richard Dawkins' opening quote: Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1996), p. 49.

Richard Dawkins on "chance": Richard Dawkins, Climbing Mount Improbable (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, Inc., 1996), See, e.g., p. 80.

By Robert Deyes

In an article that appeared in 2003, one of the stalwarts of modern chemistry Emeritus Professor Theodore Brown (Ref 1) provided an elucidating description of the cell in what was an article focused primarily on the use of metaphors in science. For the cell, the metaphor that Brown proposed was of a factory with complex functional relationships and interactions closely reminiscent of that seen in our own manmade production plants (Ref 1). Indeed today we know that the cell shows elements of quality control, energy budgeting, transportation of goods and services, review of process efficiencies and all the wonderful synchronies that one associates with a production line. Science writer Peter Forbes had this to say about the cellular world that until comparatively recently was a 'Blind Zone'- a black box unknown to man

"What exists in the Blind Zone are large molecules of complex non-random chemical composition that are assembled to make the working structures of the cell; pumps and engines and factories for making everything the cells need, including copies of themselves. The contents of the Blind Zone comprise nature's nanotechnology" (Ref 2, p.10)

Francis Crick's own reference to the cell's molecular 'gadgetry' also reflected the sophistication of the cellular world (Ref 3). Nancy Pearcey and Charles Thaxton likened the cell to an enormous factory, noting that if a cell were magnified many times over we would observe, "robot-like machines- tens of thousands of different kinds- in charge of production.....analogues to nearly every feature of our own advanced machines" (Ref 4, p.221). As biochemist Bruce Alberts has made all too clear, contemporary biochemistry has revealed a cellular world so replete with interacting, molecular machines that it most closely resembles a factory with numerous assembly lines each serving different functions in a bigger scheme (Ref 5).

In a landmark paper Marc Vidal and colleagues from the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School took the factory analogy yet further by demonstrating how groups of proteins called 'hubs' are essential for establishing protein networks within the cell in what is now known as the protein 'interactome'. Proteins that make up the interactome interact closely with each other (Ref 6). Rather like big international airports that interconnect with other smaller national airports, hubs can be thought of as the backbone of the cellular communication and transportation network. Because of their importance the removal of these hub proteins would have disastrous consequences for the cell. It turns out that the cell has two kinds of hub protein- the 'party' hubs that interact with many proteins simultaneously and the 'date' hubs that interact with many proteins but only at different times and at different locations within the cell (Ref 6).

The identification of such organized modularity provides no basis for supposing that complex systems such as the cell could simply come into existence without any guidance or design. Proteins have specific enzymatic properties that invariably require them to be at specific locations within the interactome. To appreciate the magnitude of the vast number of interactions involved we need only consider that the simple worm C.elegans has an interactome map containing approximately 3,000 proteins linked by nearly 5,000 potential interactions(Ref 7). Indeed one review compared the interactome to the engine in a car

"At first the jumble of boxes, wires, circuitry and hoses that meets your eyes more likely will confuse than inform. Careful examination, however, exposes an intricate order, in which modular processes interact with each other to build ever-larger systems culminating in a working automobile. A cell presents an equally confusing array of parts. But like the car, the cell can be analyzed as a series of interacting systems working together to build a whole greater than its parts" (see Ref 8)

The enzymes that make up much of the interactome are critical for cellular reactions if they are to occur at anywhere near the speed that is required by the cell (Ref 9, p. 1). Enzyme complexes like the proteasome- the cell's own garbage disposal unit (Ref 10, 11, 12)- and the chaperonins that fold cellular proteins into the right conformation (Ref 13) tell of a world chock-full of machines and motors that not only resemble but in some cases exceed the products of human invention. Reminiscent of Jonathan Swift's recounting of Lilliput in Gulliver's Travels (Ref 14), our knowledge of cell biology and biochemistry has opened up a realm of very small, interacting machines that give every indication of having been designed.

References
1. Theodore Brown (2003), The Art of the Scientific Metaphor, The Scientist, Volume 17, issue 21 p.10

2. Peter Forbes (2005), The Gecko's Foot: Bioinspiration- Engineering New Materials From Nature, W.W Norton, New York

3. Crick's reference to the 'gadgetry' of the cell appeared in Episode 1 of the DNA Series aired by PBS, Episode 1: "The Secret Of Life" see: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/dna/episode1/index.html

4. Nancy R. Pearcey and Charles B. Thaxton (1994), The Soul of Science, Christian Faith and Natural Philosophy, Crossway Books, Wheaton Illinois

5.Bruce Alberts (1998), The Cell as a Collection of Protein Machines: Preparing the Next Generation of Molecular Biologists, Cell Volume 92 pp.291-294

6. Jing-Dong J. Han, Nicolas Bertin, Tong Hao, Debra S. Goldberg, Gabriel F. Berriz, Lan V. Zhang, Denis Dupuy, Albertha J. M. Walhout, Michael E. Cusick, Frederick P. Roth, Marc Vidal (2004), Evidence for dynamically organized modularity in the yeast protein–protein interaction network, Nature 430, pp.88-93

7. "Mapping the C.elegans Interactome", Poster appeared in The Scientist, Volume 18, Number 12, June 21st, 2004

8. Jeffrey M. Perkel (2004) Validating the Interactome, The Scientist, Volume 18 (12) pp.19-22

9. Thomas Creighton (1993), Proteins, Structure and Molecular Properties, W.H. Freeman and Company, New York

10. Michael Groll, Lara Ditzel, Jan Lowe, Daniel Stock, Matthias Bochtler, Hans D. Bartunik, Robert Huber (1997), Structure of 20S proteosome from yeast at 2.4A resolution, Nature Vol 386 pp.463-471

11. Sherwin Wilk (2003), "The Search For Neuropeptidases And The Discovery Of The Proteasome". Seminar held at Promega Corporation, Madison WI on the 19th of November, 2003

12. Kenneth Chang (2004), Study of Cell Breakdown Captures Nobel, New York Times, October 7, 2004

13. Tatsuro Shimamura, Ayumi Koike-Takeshita, Ken Yokoyama, Ryoji Masui, Noriyuki Murai, Masasuke Yoshida, Hideke Taguchi, So Iwata (2004), Crystal Structure of the Native Chaperonin Complex from Thermus thermophilus Revealed Unexpected Asymmetry at the cis-Cavity, Structure Vol 12 pp.1471-1480

14. An electronic copy of Jonathan Swift's 'Gulliver's Travels', based on the original 1726 Motte edition, can be found at http://www.jaffebros.com/lee/gulliver/bk1/chap1-1.html

By Robert Deyes

Roger Lewin's book 'Complexity- Life at the Edge of Chaos' provides an account of one area of research that claims to explain everything from the rise and fall of cultures to the origins of life (Ref 1). Today the center of this scientific enterprise- the Santa Fe Institute- is located in Santa Fe deep in the heart of New Mexico where researchers from a broad spectrum of disparate research fields regularly get together to discuss the unifying topic of 'emergence'. In its simplest description, emergence encompasses the idea of complexity arising from simplicity, and structure and order coming out of chaos (Ref 1). One of the proponents of the new revolution, Chris Langton, defined complexity as the unpredictable emergence of global properties that arise from the interaction of individual, localized components (Ref 1, p.12). In other words the science of emergent complexity claims to explain not only the dynamics of civilizations but also the origins of biological systems such as the cell.

Physicist M. Mitchel Waldrop wrote of emergent complexity as a science that can explain everything from the sizes of families in Bangladesh to the origin of the first living cell and the long term, million year stability of animal species (Ref 2, pp.9-10). Spontaneous self-organization is the supposedly common feature by which such apparently diverse subjects can be unified under one common umbrella (Ref 2, p.49). Theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman has used computer simulations to demonstrate not only how genes can seemingly settle into stable networks (Ref 2, p.112) but also to show how ecosystems can move from a chaotic phase to one of stability between interacting individuals (Ref 1, p.69). In his model, such a chaotic phase eventually reaches a stable state in which only a small degree of change can be tolerated- a state that Langton calls, "life at the the edge of chaos" (Ref 2, p.230).

While Lewin's and Waldrop's accounts present emergent complexity as a scientific revolution with a bright future, others have told a different story. 1995 was to be a year of celebration for the Santa Fe Institute (Ref 3). The museum of Indian Arts and Culture in Santa Fe hosted a dinner to bring together scientists from all over the United States for a celebratory toast of success. This dinner was attended by all the big names of the Institute- Brian Arthur, Chris Langton, Stuart Kauffman and Nobel Laureate Murray Gell-Man famous for his work on quarks and particle physics (Ref 3). David Liddle, the chair for the board of trustees, ushered in the celebrations with a speech of much optimism and hope. And yet behind Liddle's introductory note lay a growing restlessness over, "the gap between such rhetoric and reality" (Ref 3). Jack Cowan from the University of Chicago was one of those whose feelings of unease had become all too apparent.

Respected throughout the scientific circles as a fine biologist who had done much to reveal the underlying neurochemistry of the drug LSD, Cowan was quoted as saying that much of what the Santa Fe institute was about was nothing more than "tremendous hype" with many of its enthused members displaying a too high "mouth-to-brain ratio" (Ref 3). As Cowan saw things, too many of the institute's members suffered from 'reminiscence syndrome', their computer simulations being mere reminiscences of the biological and physical realities they claimed to represent. Indeed science writer John Horgan wryly commented that had Darwin been at the meeting he would have learnt a lot about computers but very little about nature (Ref 3). Horgan's criticism seemed justified- after all, much of the experimentation at Santa Fe has been about computer simulations and little about real, hands-on studies of nature (Ref 3).

'Fact Free Science', no less, was the phrase used by the late British biologist John Maynard Smith in a review in which he made it clear that natural selection and not emergent complexity, must retain pride of place as the mechanism through which life had evolved (Ref 4). For proponents of complexity theory, "a fact for them", added Maynard Smith, "is, at best, a computer simulation [and] rarely a fact about the world" (Ref 4). As he later commented,

"I do not know what observations complex systems dynamics is trying to explain. It is a theory looking for a question to answer" (Ref 4).

Ian Stewart's humoring of the purely theoretical approach of emergent complexity likewise carried with it a serious note. According to Stewart, "[Complexity theorists] theorise about games, analyse them,...determine optimal strategies,...[and] advise governments on how to run their economies and biologists on how dinosaurs evolved. What [they] do not do is play games" (Ref 5).

To be fair, those that look at emergent complexity as a way of explaining the origins and existence of life perhaps do so only because they have identified profound insufficiencies in the alternative claims of evolutionary biology. And yet for its most vehement critics, computer models are an insufficient representation of the behavior of complex biological systems. There is clearly much work to be done if the Santa Fe Institute is to convince others of the relevance of its models to real life biology. Its members could not do much better than to start with real life compounds, real life reactions and real life experiments.

References

1. Roger Lewin (1992), Complexity- Life at the edge of chaos, Macmillan Publishing Co, New York

2. M. Mitchell Waldrop (1992), Complexity, The Emerging Science At The Edge Of Order And Chaos, Simon & Schuster, New York

3. John Horgan (1995), From Complexity To Perplexity, Scientific American, Volume 272 p104

4. John Maynard Smith (1995), Life At The Edge of Chaos? New York Review, 2nd of March, 1995, pp28-30

5. Ian Stewart (2000) Game On, New Scientist, 23/30 December, 2000, pp.40-43

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Well, would you prefer it had been arranged like a losing hand in poker?

A recent report by Amanda Gefter in New Scientist, "Galaxy map hints at fractal universe" (June 25, 2008) suggests that matter in our universe may be arranged in fractals, like the shell of a nautilus:

Is the matter in the universe arranged in a fractal pattern? A new study of nearly a million galaxies suggests it is – though there are no well-accepted theories to explain why that would be so.

And therefore,

Many cosmologists find fault with their analysis, largely because a fractal matter distribution out to such huge scales undermines the standard model of cosmology. According to the accepted story of cosmic evolution, there simply hasn't been enough time since the big bang nearly 14 billion years ago for gravity to build up such large structures.

What's more, the assumption that the distribution is homogeneous has allowed cosmologists to model the universe fairly simply using Einstein's theory of general relativity – which relates the shape of space to the distribution of matter.

Well then, it just can't be true, can it?

Score one for Eugene Wigner's " 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.

By "rational" explanation, Wigner may mean an explanation that appeals to causes (chaos, an unexplained further regress, et cetera) that are ultimately irrational in themselves.

It tells us something about our underlying assumptions that laws that actually work are not considered a rational explanation.

At one time - before the principal project in science had been to disprove the idea that an intelligence underlies the universe - the discovery of such laws would be satisfying rather than problematic. They would be considered the obvious rational explanation rather than a challenge to rational explanation.

Well, the universe is what it is - and if it is governed by intelligently framed laws, so much the worse for those whose science can't absorb that.

Also, just up at Colliding Universes:

Serious push to find more exoplanets

Water inferred on Mars

Coffee Break: Scientist discovers two alternative universes

Well now, and what of Berlinski's Devils?

Who reads popular books on cosmology? Well, almost everyone who actually reads, it seems

Teacher: Big ideas without science methods are blank cheque

Note: Colliding Universes is my blog on theories about our universe. (Hey, if a physicist who gets published in a journal somewhere thunk it up, it isn't wonky by definition, m'kay?)

Just up at The Post-Darwinist:

Alarm! Alarm! Critical thinking spotted in vicinity of pop science kludge

Intelligent design and the arts - better that way, actually. Much better.

The Right's war on science? Lot's of ink spilled there, but how about the Left's war on science?

Teacher accused of burning cross on student's arm and (much worse!) of teaching creationism

(Note: The Post-Darwinist is my blog on the intelligent design controversy. It supports By Design or by Chance? .)

Also, just up at The Mindful Hack:

Consciousness: Belated "sublimely ridiculous" award for 2006

When pop science TV wants to hear only one side ...

Psychology: Compassion is an emotion, not a virtue unless disciplined, prof says

Neuroscience: Making sense of uncontrollable itching

Evolutionary psychology: The selfish gene in the art world

Evolutionary psychology: Key concept of "memes" trashed as "one of the bigger crocks hatched in recent decades"

Does a recent discovery in honeybees "prove" that the "selfish gene" exists?

(Note: The Mindful Hack is my blog on neuroscience and spirituality issues. It supports The Spiritual Brain (Harper One, Beauregard & O'Leary, 2007) )

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

By Robert Deyes

Evidence is certainly mounting across most fields of evolutionary biology that the slow turning of a gradualistic clock, in which natural selection produces bit-by-bit changes, does not translate into macroevolutionary change as Darwin might have wished. Indeed with their theory of Punctuated Equilibrium Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge have set the scene for an assault on, what they called, "this idol of traditional Darwinian conceptualizations" (Ref 1 p888). Smithsonian Paleontologist Alan Cheetham, perhaps one of the foremost converts of this new assault, recalls being surprised at seeing how individual species of Bryozoa- coral-like colonial creatures remained virtually unchanged for millions and millions of years (Ref 2). Biologist Timothy Collins from the University of Michigan has likewise identified long-lasting stasis in sea snails (Ref 2) while Santiago Elena, Vaughn Cooper and Richard Lenski also from the University of Michigan have observed stasis in certain strains of bacteria (Ref 3). Neil Shubin and colleagues documented stasis in the salamander which, as recent fossil findings indicate, has changed very little over the last 150 million years (Ref 4, 5). Rather than supporting a gradualistic evolutionary process, the salamander epitomises the relative stasis of form that dominates the fossil record (Ref 4).

Cheetham's collaborator Jeremy Jackson estimates that stasis could be up to 10 times more frequent than the gradual change so heavily promolgated by traditional Darwinists (Ref 2). As Cheetham and Jackson have written, "many fossil species appear in the record fully differentiated morphologically and persist for millions of years with no indication of transitional morphologies" (Ref 6). Science writer Richard Kerr has noted how there is now a growing acceptance that the history of life alternates between what he refers to as, "rapid change and long periods of stasis"- a stasis in which, "the dominant kinds of organism don't change much" (Ref 2).

With its claim of stasis, Punctuated Equilibrium has become a much talked-about theory. It represents a radical departure from the gradualistic foundations of Darwinism (Ref 7). For Darwin gradual change over time at the organism level formed the basis upon which speciation naturally followed (Ref 8, p153). It therefore seems paradoxical that zoologist Richard Dawkins should diminish this major difference in opinion as, "a minor dispute among experts", that has been, "blown up to give the impression that Darwinism's foundations are quivering" (Ref 9, p199). According to Dawkins, the most that could be said of Gould's and Eldredge's theory was that it represented a slight adjustment of ideas not unlike a hypothetical, slight redirection of the Copernican world view upon discovery that the earth was not perfectly spherical (Ref 9, p199).

It is worth noting that Dawkins himself took a radical departure from traditional Darwinian view of evolution. Through his selfish gene theory, he promulgated the idea that genes rather than organisms were the units upon which natural selection acted upon (Ref 10). Dawkins wrote of organisms as mere "survival machines" that served as "lumbering robots" through which genes could achieve their own ends of replicating and surviving (Ref 10, p.19). Genes were the replicators- the 'Darwinian individuals' that have opted for different ways of making a living, with natural selection selecting those genes that were good at making 'survival machines' (Ref 10 p.21-24). Those genes that were most successful at surviving, would go on through successive generations to inhabit new bodies and in the process develop new strategies for survival (Ref 10, p.25). What stood out as the principle feature of Dawkins' thesis and what clearly set him apart from his contemporaries was his rejection of organisms or species as Darwinian individuals (Ref 10 p. 33). Gould himself was highly critical of Dawkins position. As he later wrote:

"No matter how much power Dawkins wishes to assign to genes, there is one thing that he cannot give them-direct visibility to natural selection. Selection simply cannot see genes and pick among them directly. It must use bodies as an intermediary. A gene is a bit of DNA hidden within a cell" (Ref 11)

So why would Dawkins diminish the significance of these crucial differences between himself and his contemporaries? A quick review of his essays reveals one possible reason- his distaste for what he perceived as a creationist distortion of the truth (Ref 9, p.211). He categorically attacked creationists for misusing Fred Hoyle's famous Boeing 747 illustration (which Hoyle used to exemplify how complex biological systems might be assembled in nature- see Ref 9, p.211). He subsequently tried to correct the misunderstanding by concluding that a cumulative step by step construction through natural selection could do it all

"Creationists love Sir Fred Hoyle's vivid metaphor for his own misunderstanding of natural selection. It is as if a hurricane, blowing through a junkyard, had the good fortune to assemble a Boeing 747. Hoyle's point is about statistical improbability. Our answer, yours and mine and Stephen Gould's, is that natural selection is cumulative. There is a ratchet, such that small gains are saved. The hurricane doesn't spontaneously assemble the airliner in one go. Small improvements are added bit by bit" (Ref 9, p211).

And yet, in making such an assertion the burden of proof lay clearly with Dawkins. Demonstrating how an airplane could be assembled gradually from scratch, with intermediate functions conferred at various stages through the construction process, should have been his next move. Hoyle may have made a mistake in assuming spontaneous assembly of complex systems. Much more importantly, however, he also drew attention to the conceptual problem of trying to describe the cumulative assembly of such systems in biology through a series of functional intermediates. Dawkins was extremely critical of creationists accusing them of clutching at straws such as the Piltdown fraud simply because of their strong desire to believe in something as silly as a divine creator. Perhaps unknown to Dawkins are the fraudulent claims of missing links that continue to haunt evolutionary biology even in more recent times (Refs 12, 13).

Of course orthodox Darwinists still deny Gould's and Eldredge's conclusions of stasis and punctuation. According to biologist Steven Rose, "punctuated equilibrium made many traditional evolutionists unhappy" some of whom reduced it to nothing more than an outward manifestation of, "Gould's alleged Marxism" (Ref 14). To the critics, Punctuated Equilibrium became known as, "evolution by jerks" (Ref 14, Gould's retort- "evolution by creeps"- was equally amusing). Steven Jones from University College, London, likewise concluded that Gould's revisionism left much to be desired, referring to him as, "a mosquito on the backside of biology" (Ref 15). Yet these marked differences in opinion were always toned down for fear of how others might perceive such a rift in ideas between experts. Some such as Geerat Vermeij from UC Davis took on a traditional Darwinist view to explain the prevalence of stasis by inferring some sort of stabilizing selection in which stasis exists only because any departure from the status quo would somehow be detrimental to the survival of an organism (Ref 2). And yet amidst such suppositions and preconceptions, what has become clear is that the fossil record challenges one of the basic tenets of Darwinism- that of gradual change leading to the diversity of life that we see on earth today.

References

1. Stephen Jay Gould (2002), The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts

2. Richard A. Kerr (1995) Did Darwin Get It All Right? Science Vol 267 pp.1421-1422

3.Santiago F. Elena, Vaughn S. Cooper, Richard E. Lenski (1996), Punctuated Evolution Caused by Selection of Rare Beneficial Mutations, Science Vol 272 pp. 1802-1804

4.The report of the silent salamander appeared in the BBC NEWS under the auspicious title "'Pompeii' salamanders fill fossil gap" on Friday the 30th of March, 2001 and can be found on the following website http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/1251318.stm

5. Ke-Qin Gao and Neil Shubin (2003), Earliest known crown-group salamanders Nature 422, 424 - 428

6. Jeremy B. Jackson and Alan H. Cheetham (1990) Evolutionary Significance of Morphospecies: A Test with Cheilstone Bryozoa, Science Vol 248 pp. 579-582

7. Niles Eldredge, Steven Jay Gould (1988), Punctuated Equilibrium Prevails, Nature Vol 332 pp. 211-212

8. Charles Darwin (1859), The Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection Or The Preservation of Favored Races In the Struggle For Survival, Modern Library Paperbacks Edition (1998), New York

9. Richard Dawkins (2003), A Devil's Chaplain, Published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, UK

10. Richard Dawkins (1989), The Selfish Gene, Oxford University Press, Oxford UK

11. Stephen Jay Gould (1992), The Panda's Thumb- More Reflections In Natural History, Published by W.W Norton and Company, New York

12. M. V. Erdmann, R. L. Caldwell (2000), How new technology put a coelacanth among the heirs of Piltdown Man, Nature Vol 406 p343

13. Rex Dalton (2000), Feathers fly over Chinese fossil bird's legality and authenticity, Nature Volume 403 p690-691

14. Steven Rose (2002), The Guardian Obituaries, Stephen Jay Gould, The Guardian, Wednesday May 22nd, 2002- see full article at http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,3604,719828,00.html

15. James Randerson (2001), Stephen Jay Gould, biologist and writer, dies, New Scientist, 21st May, 2002, see article at http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99992306

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In "What neo-creationists get right" in The Scientist (June 20., 2008), Gordy Slack, an Oakland-based science writer who is not sympathetic to intelligent design theory attempts to explain why it can't be stamped out, and makes a few reasonably good guesses, for example,

When they say that some proponents of evolution are blind followers, they're right. A few years ago I covered a conference of the American Atheists in Las Vegas. I met dozens of people there who were dead sure that evolutionary theory was correct though they didn't know a thing about adaptive radiation, genetic drift, or even plain old natural selection. They came to their Darwinism via a commitment to naturalism and atheism not through the study of science. They're still correct when they say evolution happens. But I'm afraid they're wrong to call themselves skeptics unencumbered by ideology. Many of them are best described as zealots. Ideological zeal isn't incompatible with good science; its coincidence with a theory proves nothing about that theory's explanatory power.

Actually, I hope someday to prove that the most raucous Darwinists have had their bar bills paid by the evil Discovery Institute (intelligent design central) for many years. They have done more to promote intelligent design than many of its strongest proponents.

Unfortunately, Slack confuses science with materialism, which means that most of his other observations are forgettable - but it may be worth the trouble of free registration to view the article.

Also, just up at Colliding Universes:

Science teaching: The peril in the big questions

You heard it here first, or last, or anyway here: The universe is a donut

Could God live in an infinite sea of universes? Depends ...

Colliding Universes is my blog on theories about our universe. (Hey, if a physicist who gets published in a journal somewhere thunk it up, it isn't wonky by definition, m'kay?)

Just up at the Post-Darwinist

Jailed Canuck media mogul Conrad (Tubby) Black endorses ID-friendly Jindal for McCain's veep

From my mailbox ...

Expelled movie's screenwriter - recently demoted from "evil" to "stupid" - regains "evil" status

Brain evolution gene?: Move over already yet, gay gene, fat gene, and God gene!

Just up at The Mindful Hack

The Mindful Hack is my other blog, on neuroscience and spirituality issues. It supports The Spiritual Brain (Harper One, Beauregard & O'Leary, 2007)
Evolutionary psychology: The "meme" generates a fruitful hoax, if nothing else

Sci Phi Show podcast features scholar on near death experiences

Psychology: Jokes help us survive even when we daren't laugh aloud

Psychology: If people were robots, safety devices would abolish most accidents, but ...

Spirituality: Today's students spiritually repressed?

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

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Recently, I read string theorist Leonard Susskind's The Cosmic Landscape (Little, Brown & Co., 2005), so it was fun to hear him explain,

I have been accused of advocating an extremely dangerous idea.

According to some people, the "Landscape" idea will eventually ensure that the forces of intelligent design (and other unscientific religious ideas) will triumph over true science. From one of my most distinguished colleagues:

From a political, cultural point of view, it's not that these arguments are religious but that they denude us from our historical strength in opposing religion.

Others have expressed the fear that my ideas, and those of my friends, will lead to the end of science (methinks they overestimate me). One physicist calls it "millennial madness."

The Landscape (note the upper case), in his words, is an "enormous space of possibilities, whose multiplicity may exceed ten to the 500 power," essentially a multiverse.

This was part of a 2006 "What is your dangerous idea?" schtick at The Edge. Susskind answers the obvious question:

Why is it that so many physicists find these ideas alarming? Well, they do threaten physicists' fondest hope, the hope that some extraordinarily beautiful mathematical principle will be discovered: a principle that would completely and uniquely explain every detail of the laws of particle physics (and therefore nuclear, atomic, and chemical physics). The enormous Landscape of Possibilities inherent in our best theory seems to dash that hope.

What further worries many physicists is that the Landscape may be so rich that almost anything can be found: any combination of physical constants, particle masses, etc. This, they fear, would eliminate the predictive power of physics. Environmental facts are nothing more than environmental facts. They worry that if everything is possible, there will be no way to falsify the theory — or, more to the point, no way to confirm it. Is the danger real? We shall see.

Actually, most of the 2006 Edgy ideas were not dangerous at all, just goofy and probably wrong.

As it happens, according to other cosmologists, string theory is unravelling and coming unstrung.

According to SFGATE, hardly averse to new or wonky ideas (better together, actually), announced breathlessly in 2005:

The most celebrated theory in modern physics faces increasing attacks from skeptics who fear it has lured a generation of researchers down an intellectual dead end.

and ...

... skeptics suggest it's the latest sign of how string theorists, sometimes called "superstringers," try to colorfully camouflage the theory's flaws, like "a 50-year-old woman wearing way too much lipstick," jokes Robert B. Laughlin, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist at Stanford. "People have been changing string theory in wild ways because it has never worked."

Already, the split over string theory has caused tensions at some of the nation's university physics departments. "The physics department at Stanford effectively fissioned over this issue," said Laughlin, now on sabbatical in South Korea. "I think string theory is textbook 'post-modernism' (and) fueled by irresponsible expenditures of money."

Okay, well, let's have another look at intelligent design. The government never funded that - a sure point in its favour in this environment.

On the other hand, should string theorists wait for rescue by the Large Hadron Collider (gateway to other universes)?

By the way, does anyone know what happened to that surfer dude who was supposed to have solved the riddle of the universe last November? E-mail me at oleary@sympatico.ca

Also, today at Colliding Universes

"Privileged planet" astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez: Dissing St. Carl in his own church - my column on line (Yes, he's the one who was denied tenure in that big flap at Iowa State University.)

Murchison meteorite claimed to hold genetic materials ... well, maybe

The Butterfly Effect: Totally wrong? Not even wrong? Not even a butterfly?

(Colliding Universes is my blog on competing theories of how and why the universe came to be the way it is (cosmology) - are there a zillion pointless universes out there or is ours fine-tuned for life?)

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

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Robert C. Richardson, a philosophy prof at the University of Cincinnati, has written a long-overdue critique of evolutionary psychology.

Regular readers of this space will know that I do not doubt evolution, still less that some factors in human psychology are best understood in the light of our evolution. But - like a growing number of people - I have limited patience with the nonsense fronted under the label of "evolutionary psychology" - much of which would be better presented (and perhaps more profitable for its authors) as "Clan of the Cave Bear" fiction.

In Evolutionary Psychology as Maladapted Psychology, Richardson's thesis is,

The claims of evolutionary psychology may pass muster as psychology; but what are their evolutionary credentials? Richardson considers three ways adaptive hypotheses can be evaluated, using examples from the biological literature to illustrate what sorts of evidence and methodology would be necessary to establish specific evolutionary and adaptive explanations of human psychological traits. He shows that existing explanations within evolutionary psychology fall woefully short of accepted biological standards. The theories offered by evolutionary psychologists may identify traits that are, or were, beneficial to humans. But gauged by biological standards, there is inadequate evidence: evolutionary psychologists are largely silent on the evolutionary evidence relevant to assessing their claims, including such matters as variation in ancestral populations, heritability, and the advantage offered to our ancestors. As evolutionary claims they are unsubstantiated. Evolutionary psychology, Richardson concludes, may offer a program of research, but it lacks the kind of evidence that is generally expected within evolutionary biology. It is speculation rather than sound science--and we should treat its claims with skepticism.

Johan J. Bolhuis, reviewing the book in Science ("Piling On the Selection Pressure" Science 320, 6 June 2008: 1293 [PAYWALL]), says,

The study of evolution is concerned with a historical reconstruction of traits. It does not, and cannot, address the mechanisms that are involved in the human brain. Those fall within the domains of neuroscience and cognitive psychology. In that sense, evolutionary psychology will never succeed, because it attempts to explain mechanisms by appealing to the history of these mechanisms. To use the author's words, "We might as well explain the structure of orchids in terms of their beauty." In this excellent book, Richardson shows very clearly that attempts at reconstruction of our cognitive history amount to little more than "speculation disguised as results." The book's title implies that the field is itself subject to selection pressure. Richardson is certainly piling it on.

Piling it on? Actually, I think Richardson better hire a dump truck. A wheelbarrow would be way too slow.

Also at The Mindful Hack:

Real Buddhism scholar to "neural Buddhists": The Buddha does not infinitely morph and would never drop two g's for "meditation gear"

The Spiritual Brain gets Award of Merit at Write! Canada, plus Mario gets tenure

Free will: How can a guy who doesn't believe in free will take credit for writing a book? I mean ...

Evidence? If you are a materialist, trust me, you need never bother with evidence.

Alzheimer helps atheist appreciate God. Yes, really

Evolutionary psychology: Speculation rather than sound science, says new MIT Press book (= Future lies with "Clan of the Cave Bear" fiction)

World's ten worst books?: Read them so you don't end up living them.

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

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

I have been invited to an advance screening of Expelled (the widely denounced #5 political documentary about the attempts to silence the intelligent design guys) on Thursday, June 26, at 7:00pm at The Varsity Theatre - 55 Bloor St. West in Toronto. The film opens the following Friday June 27 (or Saturday June 28) at the Cineplex Odeon.

I wonder who will picket or try to crash? (There was a big hoo-haw over the screening at the Mall of the Americas when "raving atheist" biologist PZ Myers got ejected by line producer Mark Mathis.) Perhaps I will recognize some prominent local figures strutting importantly on the sidewalk.

Picketers please note, there is a wide sidewalk, and plenty of coffee shops nearby. The restrooms in the Cumberland Terrace are usually pretty clean too.

Be reassured, picketers! The government-funded Nanny Monster is always right, and she says that neither the universe nor life forms show evidence of design, despite the evidence. And in our random universe, the biggest Monster should rule, and that is She.

She said it. You believe it. That settles it. Now get out there and give the legacy media some good photo ops, will you? Most of you are supported by my tax dollars, among other things, and I deserve something for that. Don't look too ragged, or people won't believe that you are as important as you believe yourselves to be.

Insufficiently Nannied? Then see clips from the film here.

I understand that somewhere or other, a helpline is available for anyone who - on learning information that is new to them - has (cue menace music) Doubts. You can contact them through ohjustgrowup.com

From the invite,

In the film, "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed," author, former presidential speechwriter, economist, lawyer and actor Ben Stein examines the attempts of scientists to challenge the idea of Darwinism only to be expelled from the academic community.

More, from the presser:

Controversial feature documentary starring Ben Stein - opens across Canada - Friday, June 27, 2008

In a controversial new satirical documentary, author, former presidential speechwriter, economist, lawyer and actor Ben Stein travels the world, looking to some of the best scientific minds of our generation for the answer to the biggest question facing all Canadians and Americans today:

Are we still free to disagree about the meaning of life?

Or has the whole issue already been decided…
while most of us weren't looking?

Toronto) June 3, 2008 — It's a movie that Ferris Bueller would take the day off to go see. What freedom-loving student wouldn't be outraged to discover that his high school science teacher is teaching a theory as indisputable fact, and that university professors oppose any fellow scientists who dare question the prevailing system of belief? This isn't the latest Hollywood comedy; it's a disturbing new documentary that will shock anyone who thinks all scientists are free to follow the evidence wherever it may lead.

If you are from the legacy media and want to see the film before harrumphing that it is false, all utterly false (just like Mark Steyn "isn't" really a good writer):

Toronto Press Screenings:

Friday, June 6 10:00am Scotiabank Theatre (259 Richmond St W)
Monday, June 9 10:30am Scotiabank Theatr (259 Richmond St W)
Friday, June 13 10:00am Varsity Cinemas (55 Bloor St W, 2nd Floor)
Monday, June 16 10:30am Varsity Cinemas (55 Bloor St W, 2nd Floor)
Thursday, June 26 07:00pm Varsity Cinemas (55 Bloor St W, 2nd Floor)

I expect you should contact V Kelly & Associates 416-466-9799, info@vkpr.ca for a press pass.

See also:

The Expelled film (#5 in political documentaries) is coming to 50 screens in Canada, ... plus a surprise in two in store for Americans (Expelled haters, take heed)!

Canadian radio bureau chief: Yes, the campaign to suppress free speech in Canada does affect the United States

Recently, there was a special screening for Members of Parliament.

Other Post-Darwinist stories you can't miss:

Intellectual freedom: Survival is design not chance. O'Leary's plenary address to Write! Canada 2008, for which she received a standing ovation (hey!)

Canadian radio bureau chief: Yes, the campaign to suppress free speech in Canada does affect the United States

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

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Here is Eric Hand for Nature News on the subject:

“We will see organics, for sure, because we’re bringing them,” says Aaron Zent, a mission scientist from NASA’s Ames Research Center in California. Likely contaminants include skin flakes, dead microbes and volatile lubricants. “The problem with an instrument so sensitive is all you detect is your own schmutz,” says Zent.

[ ... ]

The $420 million Phoenix mission, by comparison, is low-budget, built from parts recycled from a cancelled mission — the Mars Surveyor Lander — that had been kept in a warehouse – and how much dust those parts gathered is a worry. “We’re doing a quick and dirty organic analysis,” says TEGA lead scientist William Boynton, of the University of Arizona in Tucson. “We’re kind of doing it on a shoestring.” ("'Dandruff' could contaminate Phoenix landing site" June 6, 2008)

and here Ewen Callaway weighs in for New Scientist, revealing that despite NASA's war on bacteria (to prevent spacecraft contaminating extraterrestrial environments),

Among the bacteria in the assembly room were bugs able to tolerate heat, cold, and salt. One particularly resilient bug called Bacillus pumilus can withstand doses of UV light that kill nearly all other life.

"This is the hardiest organism we have ever isolated," says Parag Vaishampayan, a microbiologist at JPL, who presented the findings this week at the annual meeting of the American Society for Microbiology in Boston, Massachusetts.

- "Could microbes on Phoenix survive on Mars?" (June 6, 2008)

Nice to know. If the space aliens ever invade, pumilus could be our secret weapon.

The hardihood of some bacteria can either demonstrate that life should be common in the universe or that after 4 billion years, bacteria have found a piece of just about every type of action on Earth - whether or not they have ever existed or ever could exist anywhere else.

We shall see.

Also just up at Colliding Universes:

Humanity killing the universe? In the dark dreams of a few physicists ...

Hints of a time before the big bang? Or of reaching for a story?

"Did you imagine that science was a disinterested pursuit of truth? Well, ... "

"Now remind me again why we needed this multiverse theory in the first place?"

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

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

The nautilus, assumed to be a living example of the ancestors of modern octopus and squid, lacks the brain structures of these animals, yet appears to have both short and long term memory:

Training Nautilus pompilus to associate the smell of food with a blue light, the cephalopods eventually learned to respond to a flash of blue light by extending their tentacles. Then the scientists tested the cephalopods memories with a flash of light 3min, 30min, 1h, 6h, 12h and 24h after training. Amazingly, Nautilus remembered their training for up to an hour before the memory was lost, but then the memory returned 6h later, lasting up to 24h. Nautilus has both short and long term memory, just like modern cephalopods, despite lacking the same brain structures. (The Company of Biologists (2008, June 1). Living Fossils Have Long- And Short-term Memory Despite Lacking Brain Structures Of Modern Cephalopods. ScienceDaily. Retrieved June 3, 2008, from http://www.sciencedaily.com? /releases/2008/05/080531074905.htm)

Modern cephalopods (octopus and squid) have complex central nervous systems and coleoid brains, but they must be doing something for the animal other than helping it remember where food is.

Also at The Mindful Hack

Evolutionary psychology: Would you shove a fat man off a trestle to save five people?

Events: New debate on God, atheism, and science on very spot where Samuel Wilberforce
debated Thomas Huxley

The Mark Steyn show trial in Vancouver

Coffee break: The Zen pensioner says ...

Evolutionary psychology: Theological speculation - just what the cave man 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 Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Darwinism is not "evolution". It is a point of view widely espoused in legacy media that purports to explain everything around us by recounting what supposedly happened in evolution. Often, the claims are made without offering any worthwhile evidence, merely a plausible story. This is especially true where human evolution is concerned.

Agnostic mathematician David Berlinski put it best in the March 2003 issue of Commentary:

The term "Darwinism" conveys the suggestion of a secular ideology, a global system of belief. So it does and so it surely is. Darwin's theory has been variously used - by Darwinian biologists - to explain the development of bipedal gait, the tendency to laugh when amused, obesity, anorexia nervosa, business negotiations, a preference for tropical landscapes, the evolutionary roots of political rhetoric, maternal love, infanticide, clan formation, marriage, divorce, certain comical sounds, funeral rites, the formation of regular verb forms, altruism, homosexuality, feminism, greed, romantic love, jealousy, warfare, monogamy, polygamy, adultery, the fact that men are pigs, recursion, sexual display, abstract art, and religious beliefs of every description.

Disbelieving this material is not the same thing as doubting that evolution occurred. It is the mark of a critical thinker.

Also, just up at Overwhelming Evidence

If you read it in a science textbook, it must be true, or anyway ..."correct"!

What would convince Darwin of design? An angel? A brass man maybe?

Intelligent design research: Using Chinese anagrams to model proteins

The Fibonacci series and intelligent design: Returning to grass roots ... and stems

IDEA clubs - student ID clubs - experiment with video advertising

Meanwhile, at the Post-Darwinist:

The God of the Chaps (the ones who should retire soon)

And what's so bad about machines anyway?

Canada Chronicles: Biology in the wrong hands

Changes of last 10 000 years too great to be explained by Darwinianmechanism

Intelligent design research: Using Chinese anagrams to model proteins

The Mark Steyn show trial in Vancouver

The past as if nothing ever changes?

Oh no, Ono! Judge rules, the film about the ID guys can still be shown.

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

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Followers of the intelligent design controversy were taken by surprise by Christoph, Cardinal Schonborn's now-famous op-ed in The New York Times, in which he said,

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.

This was not just a local priest holding forth on threats to the faith of Catholics. Cardinal Schoenborn is Archbishop of Vienna and advisor to Pope Benedict XVI, and the primary editor of the "Catechism of the Catholic Church." He is also the author of "Behold God's Son" and "Loving the Church."

Angry reaction - entirely predictable angry reaction - was not long in coming. Generally, the Catholic Church would be highly regarded in many elite American circles if it told its adherents that our secular betters know us far better than we know themselves, and that part of our betters' knowledge is that we really are just trousered apes and we had better get used to that fact.

It is dangerous to oppose the Gospel According to St. Fluke openly, as Expelled demonstrates - and dangerous not principally to the Catholic hierarchy, but to lay Catholics like Michael Behe and a number of members of the Biologic Institute, who have offered science-based critiques of ideological Darwinism.

Then, of course, there was Guillermo Gonzalez (Christian but not Catholic). His science-based critic of Carl Sagan's "pale blue dot" theory of Earth (a supposedly insignificant planet lost in space) cost him his chance at tenure at Iowa State University. He's soon to be at Grove City, a private university, instead.

A Cardinal like Schoenborn, we must remember, is a "prince of the church." It is part of his duty to be aware of the political and social implications for Catholics of the conflicts into which he and other Cardinals may be drawn - and thus draw the Church. Not surprisingly, therefore, in 2007 he published what I can only describe as a deeply conflicted book, Chance or Purpose? Creation, Evolution, and a Rational Faith, by Christoph, Cardinal Schoenborn (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2007).

In marked contrast to the straightforward style of his "no-dhimmis-for-Darwin!" op-ed, Schoenborn's book is very careful not to say much - without taking it back later. One gets the distinct impression that at least two different people wrote the book - one saying "look, this materialist nonsense is just not compatible with the Catholic faith" and the other saying "no, but, we need to placate the high profile Catholic Darwinists - can we just massage this a bit ..." But it is risky to try to guess how a book was composed. Better just give a sense of what is (and isn't said). And in this case, that is truly a challenge.

Introduction Christoph Cardinal Schoenborn's Chance or Purpose? Flickering light on the ID controversy at best
Part One: Is the proposed distinction between evolution and "evolutionism" legitimate in today's environment?
Part Two: Why is it called "intelligent design" instead of "intelligent intervention"?
Part Three: What Cardinal Schoenborn doesn't like about intelligent design
Part Four: Can the disgraced Teilhard de Chardin evolve into a pioneer of faith?
Part Five: Darwin's ladder knocking over Jacob's ladder?

Next: Part One: Is the proposed distinction between evolution and "evolutionism" legitimate in today's environment?

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

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

The Catholic Church's full, official, teaching authority (the Magisterium ) says very little about evolution. It gives only general guidelines as to how to interpret the Bible's teachings about Creation. But those guidelines do say that nothing can contradict the Nicene Creed, or the doctrine that God created everything ex nihilo, or that sin entered the world through our first parents, or that God Himself creates the human soul. While that would certainly contradict the beliefs of most Darwinian evolutionists, the controversy is relatively new in Catholic terms, being only about 150 years old. The issue will likely be debated for decades or centuries before the Church actually pronounces on it, if at all.

That said, there are many opinions, and Cardinal Schoenborn's is certainly an important one. What then does he say?

Throughout Chance or Purpose?, he distinguishes a scientific interest in how life evolved from an ideological attempt to interpret the whole of life via the theory of evolution, which he calls "evolutionism." He systematically attempts to distance himself from the latter, but in doing so, he calls attention to the obvious difficulty: Anyone familiar with the development of the controversy over evolution in North America will recognize that the whole point of the promotion of evolution to the public and especially to students in school today is precisely to entrench evolutionism, in the Cardinal's sense.

It is obvious why that must be so. Few actually care why the trilobite vanished yet the nautilus blunders on - unless these creatures' differing fates demonstrate something beyond themselves. To the committed evolutionist, they do indeed. They demonstrate the essentially and entirely animal nature of humans.

So, if the Cardinal really means what he says, then - irrespective of how evolution happened - he is actually on the side of the creationists and the ID people, however he may mistrust or deplore them, and against the evolutionists, however he may join them in praising Darwin. Indeed, if the Church really believes that we have "first parents" through whom sin entered the world (whose names are traditionally given as Adam and Eve) and that each human has a soul, then the whole Church is on that side too.

But the Cardinal writes like a man who is in no position to simply say so and be done with it. Indeed, it is not always easy to tell who he has in view when he is looking over his shoulder. Early in his book, he avers,

"There is no doubt that Darwin's principal work was a stroke of genius, and it remains one of the truly great works in the history of ideas. With an incredible gift for observation, and a great deal of hard work and prodigious mental powers, he produced this seminal book which is among the most influential works in the history of ideas." (p. 26)

But for what reason is Darwin's work so highly regarded? Darwin argued that the differential survival of stronger life forms over weaker ones is a vast creative force that births the entire variety of life that we see around us. The evidence for his idea, which has now morphed into a dogma, has always been limited to a few minor transitions, rather than the major ones that would truly support the theory. Darwinian evolution, in that sense, resembles Marxist economics. It survives on its strength as an organizing ideology, not on its true explanatory power. So why precisely does Cardinal Schoenborn hold Darwin's theory to be a stroke of genius?

Again, Schoenborn talks about the importance of "reason" as a guide to truth (p. 30). In so doing, he seems entirely unaware that one of the most important Darwinian projects in recent years has been to demonstrate that reason, in his terms, does not exist. As Francis Crick writes in The Astonishing Hypothesis, "Our highly developed brains, after all, were not evolved under the pressure of discovering scientific truths but only to enable us to be clever enough to survive and leave descendants."

Similarly, Harvard cognitive scientist Steve Pinker asks, "Why do people believe that there are dangerous implications of the idea that the mind is a product of the brain, that the brain is organized in part by the genome, and that the genome was shaped by natural selection?", and then seemingly answers his own question, "Our brains were shaped for fitness, not for truth. Sometimes the truth is adaptive, but sometimes it is not."

Similarly, in arguing for his extravagant cosmology of multiple universes, respected cosmologist Max Tegmark cheerily announces that we are all evolved from lower life forms, and most of us are not adapted to comprehend the truth. He explains: "Evolution provided us with intuition for the everyday physics that had survival value for our distant ancestors, so whenever we venture beyond the everyday world, we should expect it to seem bizarre."

Of course Schoenborn is quite right to hold, in contradiction to these fatuous and self-serving claims, that the mind and its reasoning powers really exist. But his proposed distinction between evolution and "evolutionism" will not avail him in doing so. What evolution means today, for all practical purposes, is principally the content of claims such as these. Take them away, and evolution is nothing more than the public exposition of the remains of the long-departed trilobite and learned speculation on the sex life of the vanished tyrannosaur. Not really the stuff of serious public controversy, at any rate.

A similar problem arises when the Cardinal discusses Darwin's rejection of "intervention" in nature.

Next: Part Two: Why is it called "intelligent design" instead of "intelligent intervention"?

Note: References for the three quotations above are: Francis Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis, p. 262 Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works, p. 305, Max Tegmark, Parallel Universes.

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

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Cardinal Schoenborn quite properly stresses the traditional Christian view that God did not wind up the universe and just let it go, like an elastic band. He remains actively involved.

Yet Schoenborn or his amanuensis also makes clear that intervention was "quite rightly" rejected by Darwin. (P. 29) Why quite rightly?

Obviously, there are good reasons for rejecting divine intervention as an explanation for specific events. But which events? Why? God does not intervene to make the moistened seed sprout, but did he intervene to produce life? The human mind? The soul? Revelations given to the prophets and the saints? For that matter, does the human soul exist in a literal sense, or is that merely our way of saying that people matter to each other in some way? The growing controversy turns specifically on issues like this. And it is on issues like this that Chance or Purpose? provides no clear answers, unfortunately.

Here is a specific example: On page 43, the Cardinal defends methodological naturalism - the view that science should proceed as though atheistic materialism is true. Acknowledging that some call it "methodological atheism," he indicates that he himself sees it as "a straightforward method of natural science." Yet a few sentences later, he says that God can, for example, "heal a cancerous growth in sovereign fashion." In that case, the "straightforward method of natural science" will hardly appear straightforward to the oncologist.

Now, medical doctors are much more skeptical of Darwinism than university scientists. Familiarity with the very real world that the Cardinal describes is doubtless one reason for their skepticism. Indeed, the oncologist will hardly mind being puzzled if she can confirm that the patient is in remission. But then why is the Cardinal so anxious to defend the worldview that underlies the "evolutionism" he so deplores?

Tellingly, he writes,

Darwin, in his most famous book, argued against having recourse to individual acts of creation so as to explain the variety of species. He wanted to work out as much of a "natural explanation" for the origin of species as possible. Even if Darwin had the impression of committing a "murder" here, because he believed he had in some sense to overcome his inherited religious beliefs, this kind of notion is entirely legitimate. The method of natural science looks for natural causes, and it tries to explain situations as completely as possible by natural causes. ... The danger lies, however, in people forgetting the limitations of this method. It shows a narrow segment of reality with great clarity, but we should not regard it as being the whole of reality.
(p. 58-59)

So, what are the limitations, precisely? Specifically what segment of reality doesn't the method show, and why not?

Actually, Darwin was not simply trying to get rid of intervention, he was trying to get rid of design in nature as well. And why not take him at his word?

On this point, I think Schoenborn simply misunderstands Darwin. If Darwin and his heirs succeed, Schoenborn's own views can be accounted for by brain glitches. Darwin knew very well what was at stake, and that was precisely the "horrid doubt" despite which he decided to proceed. Against the horrid doubt Schoenborn offers no clear defense. Indeed, one scans Schoenborn's (and surely whoever he should share the credit with's?) book in vain for any awareness that the horrid doubt is a central point of the controversy.

So, in the end we must ask, is design in nature one of the natural causes or is it not? If so, then intelligent design is correct. If not, then Darwin's interpretation (or one very much like it) is correct.

If there is design, there may also be intervention, but if there is no design, then there is no intervention.

Next: Part Three: What Cardinal Schoenborn doesn't like about intelligent design

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

When he gets around to addressing intelligent design, Cardinal Schoenborn says,

The never ending debate, as to whether there is something like a "design" in creation, thus goes round in circles, perhaps because nowadays, whenever people talk about "design" and a "designer," they automatically think of a "divine engineer", a kind of omniscient technician who - because he must be perfect - can, equally, only produce perfect machines. Here, in min view, lies the most profound cause of many misunderstandings - even on the part of the "intelligent design" school in the U.S.A. God is no clockmaker; he is not a constructor of machines, but a creator of natures. The world is not a mechanical clock, not some vast machine, nor even a mega-computer, but rather, as Jacque Maritain said, une republique des natures", "a republic of natures."

Now, there are two things to be said in response to this astonishing statement. First, as a matter of literal fact, our bodies are composed of hundreds of billions of machines. Indeed, biologists cannot avoid using the terminology associated with machines when describing the activities inside our cells, however they assume that the microscopic machines originated. In other words, to the extent that God is a "creator of natures," the natures he creates are composed of machines. Our billions of bodily nano-machines do not, of course, rattle or clunk, but that is because they are sophisticated, not because they are not machines.

Second, the intelligent design theorists do not call God a "divine engineer"; they argue, quite simply, that God's design in nature is detectible, rather than merely an irrational leap of faith. It is a bit difficult to figure out exactly why Cardinal Schoenborn indulges in this "slam", but it may be because the political risks of saying the obvious - that if the Bible is believable, design in nature should in fact be detectible - are simply too high at present, given the number of Catholic pundits who have built careers on alternative explanations.

But there are other risks besides the political ones. Leading up to talking about intelligent design in Chance or Purpose?, Cardinal Schoenborn gives considerable attention to a medical computer expert whose faith was severely challenged over the "muddle" that the human genetic code is supposed to be. The Cardinal responds,

One misunderstanding is widespread. It proceeds from the assumption that when God created this world, he can have created it only in complete perfection. Every failing, then, that we observe appears to weigh against the idea of a rational Creator and his intelligent plan. The "muddle" in the genetic code is just such an example.

But this raises a question that is not really addressed in any detail in Chance or Purpose? Is there in fact a muddle in the genetic code?

Here is where an intelligent design perspective could probably help Cardinal Schoenborn: All actual design in this world is at best optimal rather than perfect. That is because all actual design occurs within constraints. Life forms, including humans, are limited and mortal; we die, and others take our place. And in that forum, how are we doing? Very well indeed, it would seem. The fact that so many public intellectuals have obsessed loudly and urgently about a supposed population explosion of humans demonstrates that there is in reality no muddle of any importance in the human genome.

If one wanted to address the faith-challenged doctor's point, it would be best to begin by picking a life form that is going extinct due to muddles in its genome. But how many such examples have there ever been? Don't most life forms go extinct because their environment changes radically and they cannot adapt? And if we argue that extinction demonstrates poor design or lack of design, we must first establish that on a well-ordered planet, the brontosaur and the tyrannosaur would dominate the landscape today. As the film Jurassic Park demonstrated, that case is very far from a slam dunk.

Very well then, what theory of origins does the Cardinal wish to sponsor? Now comes the controversial part of his book.

Next: Part Four: Can the disgraced Teilhard de Chardin evolve into a pioneer of faith?

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 new book The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In Chance or Purpose?, the Cardinal does not want "evolutionism" but he also does not want evidence-based design. What's left?

One thing that is left is the works of the Jesuit paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. A number of readers have picked up on Schoenborn's praise for him: "We have to mention here Father Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, whose controversial work has for quite a while been intellectually and spiritually fascinating." (132)

Fascinating, all right. Essentially, Teilhard reimagined Christianity - which is essentially about divine intervention - as a sort of faith in "evolution." The Catholic Church condemned his teachings in 1962 and in 1981: "Prescinding from a judgment about those points that concern the positive sciences, it is sufficiently clear that the above-mentioned works [of Teihard de Chardin] abound in such ambiguities and indeed even serious errors, as to offend Catholic doctrine."

Yet on page 141, Cardinal Schoenborn writes, about Teilhard,

His fascinating vision has remained controversial, and yet for many it has represented a great hope, the hope that faith in Christ and a scientific approach to the world can be brought together "under one head", under Christ the "evolutor".

Christ the evolutor?

Schoenborn makes clear that there are problems with the views of Teilhard, the "mystic of evolution", but insists that he "dared a venture that was full of risks and yet necessary." (pp. 142-43)

But what, in Schoenborn's view, were the problems? And why was the venture necessary?

Often, this book feels as though one is reading the notes of a person who knows what he is trying to respond to, but does not realize that others need some orientation.

For example, why replace faith in a God who intervenes directly (as in the accounts in the Bible) with Christ the "evolutor"? Most Catholic Christians would think that far more was lost than gained. But the key question is, why even consider it? The Darwinists have never had powerful enough evidence to compel such terms.

Next: Part Five: Darwin's ladder knocking over Jacob's ladder?

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 The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

The rest of Cardinal Schoenborn's Chance or Purpose? is, I am afraid, a further quiet letdown. We are told that Darwin-based evolutionary psychology cannot explain "the character of unconditional moral imperative attaching to care for a newborn human child." (p. 159) But that is precisely what it does claim to explain, and if it doesn't explain, we need to know in detail why. To clarify, your reviewer thinks that evolutionary psychology (EP) is an almost entirely worthless discipline and has often said so. But like any claim, EP must be countered specifically.

Near the end of the book, the Cardinal acknowledges the fact with which non-materialist educators struggle daily:

"We have to realize clearly that everywhere today evolution is recounted as the valid history. As a form of history, it is dominant in school books, the media, and public debate as well as in advertisements, caricatures, and so on. And it is presented as claiming to tell us how things really happened. What is left to the biblical story is at best the narrow freedom of saying something about the meaning of human life." (P. 168)

But all he offers in response is the presumed co-existence between Darwin's ladder of life and Jacob's ladder to heaven. No coexistence is possible, of course. The point of Darwin's ladder, as Darwin well knew, is to eliminate Jacob's.

And the Darwinists do not rest from their endeavour; indeed they cannot. For one thing, their ladder has lost most of its rungs. The history of life is simply not in any realistic sense a ladder. But if they can console themselves by overturning Jacob's ladder, they certainly will.

Overall, I found Cardinal Schoenborn's book profoundly disappointing. It sounds as though, when he began to challenge Darwinism, the Cardinal simply had no idea how entrenched it is in the academy - beyond the reach of any evidence whatever. So he is trying to placate pundits that, if only he realized, he could merely dismiss.

Other Resources:

Cardinal Schoenborn on Book TV

"Cardinal Schoenborn argues that science and religion are not incompatible and that dogmatism on either side is unsupportable. He spoke at an event hosted by the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology in Berkeley, California. "

"Science studies nature, and God is not a part of nature", a review by Frank Wilson, the Books Editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer. Wilson drew attention to Schoenborn's attraction to Teilhard de Chardin:

What is perhaps most interesting is the extent to which Schoenborn is sympathetic to the views of the controversial Jesuit paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, whose 1960 book The Phenomenon of Man (boasting a foreword by no less an evolutionist than Julian Huxley) gave a Christological spin to evolutionary theory (Christ "becomes the visible center of evolution as well as its goal, the 'omega-point' ").

Catholic Church A summary of the Catholic Church's teachings on evolution

From The Post-Darwinist:

"Catholic Darwinists to congregate in Rome?"

"No, the Pope is not a Darwinist, but what sort of evolution does he support?"

Return to Introduction Christoph Cardinal Schoenborn's Chance or Purpose? Flickering light on the ID controversy at best

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

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Christian mathematician John Lennox and atheist public understanding of science prof Richard Dawkins will continue in October 2008 their 2007 discussion on the spot where Thomas Huxley and Samuel Wilberforce duked it out a century and a half ago:

At 6:00 p.m. on the 20th of October, Fixed Point Foundation will host a public DVD screening of last year's God Delusion Debate between Professor Richard Dawkins and Dr. John Lennox, both of the University of Oxford. The screening will take place in the Main Hall of the Oxford Town Hall and is free and open to the public. For more information about the debate, click here.

The following night, Fixed Point will sponsor a discussion between Dawkins and Lennox on the main floor of the Oxford Museum of Natural History at 7:00 p.m. Both scientists will discuss atheism, the Christian faith, and the claims of their respective books: The God Delusion and God's Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? The building marks the historical site of the famed evolution debate of 1860 between Thomas Huxley and Bishop Samuel Wilberforce.
General admission tickets for the October 21st discussion with Dawkins and Lennox are available through Tickets Oxford and can be purchased online at www.oxfordplayhouse.com/ticketsoxford or by contacting the box office at (Tel) 01865 305305 (Fax) 01865 305335. Only 500 tickets are available. They are £15 each and £10 for students.

Richard Dawkins and John Lennox met for the first time in Birmingham, Alabama this past October for another event sponsored by Fixed Point, The God Delusion Debate. The debate, moderated by United States Federal Judge William H. Pryor, examined six theses from Dawkins' book The God Delusion. Garnering the attention of Fox News, Wall Street Journal, London Times, and BBC Radio, the event took place in front of a sold out crowd of almost 1,400. Fixed Point is seeking to generate further public interest on this topic by taking the two men back to their hometown for another event.

Got to hand it to Fixed Point for knowing how to frame a discussion!

Also, just up at The Mindful Hack:

Would you shove a fat man off a trestle to save five people?

The Mark Steyn show trial in Vancouver

Coffee break: The Zen pensioner says ...

Brain: Octopus develops advanced brain, but what does it do?

Theological speculation - just what the cave man 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 Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Darwin's theory of natural selection has never been established as a creative force and is under threat as the Big theory in biology as a result. Surprisingly, however, it has developed a life of its own n cosmology, the science that looks at the universe as a whole. For example,

New Universes Sprout Only in Black Holes?

Cosmologist Lee Smolin ... speculates that new universes might erupt—but not just anywhere that a particle goes one way rather than the other. Perhaps only in the middles of cosmic black holes. The new universes are disconnected from our universe, because the laws of physics break down in black holes. That is why we don’t know about them. Smolin believes that the eruption of new universes in black holes follows the principles of Darwinism (natural selection). He explains:

"It seemed to me that the only principle powerful enough to explain the high degree of organization of our universe—compared to a universe with the particles and forces chosen randomly—was natural selection itself. The question then became: Could there be any mechanism by which natural selection could work on the scale of the whole universe?"

In other words, natural selection (the outcome of law acting on chance), lurking in a black hole, organizes a complex universe, excruciatingly fine-tuned for life. Smolin does not claim that the black hole spouts millions of them.

Alternatively, he is attracted to the idea that the universe organizes itself:

"I believe more in the general idea that there must be mechanisms of self-organization involved in the selection of the parameters of the laws of nature than I do in this particular mechanism, which is only the first one I was able to invent."

All these universes popping up in the clouds in our coffee, in the torment of a black hole, in the futility of an escaped balloon—their existence guarantees that our universe is a product of chance. If only they would exist . . . if only they would exist . . .
- from By Design or by Chance?, pp. 34-35

Also, just up at es

Multiverse theory: Replacing the Big Fix with the Sure Thing?

But then maybe the entire universe is just a wave function?

Neutrino: Advised by media consultant to remain elusive?

Hello, God. This is the Big Bang. Okay, look, I done it. What do I do NOW?

Newton: Does every genius need a tincture of crackpot?

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