The ID Report
Archives for: November 2008, 18
11/18/08
The difference between mathematics and biology ...
by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent
Earlier, I called attention to this longish but very informative article by Carl Zimmer, "Now: The Rest of the Genome" (The New York Times, November 11, 2008). It pretty much blows the genetic reductionism I grew up with out of the water. The “gene†- that little coil of sugar that ran our lives back then - is a dead idea.
Now here's an exchange that caught my attention:
“The way biology works is different from mathematics,†said Mark Gerstein, a bioinformatician at Yale. “If you find one counterexample in mathematics, you go back and rethink the definitions. Biology is not like that. One or two counterexamples — people are willing to deal with that.â€Actually, the biologists flatter themselves. They underbussed vast discrepancies between their belief system and the evidence - along with the people who insisted on discussing their implications - until finally, the system is collapsing in the gene's "identity crisis" (Zimmer's phrase).More complications emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, though. Scientists discovered that when a cell produces an RNA transcript, it cuts out huge chunks and saves only a few small remnants. (The parts of DNA that the cell copies are called exons; the parts cast aside are introns.)
Thomas Kuhn was right. Old paradigms don't get disproven; they collapse from their own unworkability.
One thing about this article, it is mercifully free of rubbish about evolution. We actually don’t know what most of the stuff in the genome does. So why not wait until we do know before we begin to describe its history? That will save a lot of rewrites down the road, maybe inconvenient ones.
(Note: Re the business about cutting out huge chunks and saving only a few small remnants ... We textbook editors used to do that when we were racing a deadline. We would copy a whole chapter from the master copy of the manuscript to date, and then select only a few pages for which final revisions had been ordered. Then we just recycled the rest of the pages of the chapter. Wasteful? Yes, of paper. But not of time. Under deadline panic, the most important quantity was time, not paper. And we knew from experience that our method was slightly faster. So I would recommend caution to anyone claiming that methods like that cannot be the result of design. When we did it, that's precisely what it was, 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).
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Evolution has become a favorite topic of the news media recently, but for some reason, they never seem to get the story straight. The staff at Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture started this Blog to set the record straight and make sure you knew "the rest of the story".
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A blogger from New England offers his intelligent reasoning.
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We are a group of individuals, coming from diverse backgrounds and not speaking for any organization, who have found common ground around teleological concepts, including intelligent design. We think these concepts have real potential to generate insights about our reality that are being drowned out by political advocacy from both sides. We hope this blog will provide a small voice that helps rectify this situation.
- The Design Inference - The Writings of William A. Dembski
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Website dedicated to comparing scenes from the "Inherit the Wind" movie with factual information from actual Scopes Trial. View 37 clips from the movie and decide for yourself if this movie is more fact or fiction.
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- A Brief View of Time and Those That Live There
Don Cicchetti blogs on: Culture, Music, Faith, Intelligent Design, Guitar, Audio
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Australian biologist Stephen E. Jones maintains one of the best origins "quote" databases around. He is meticulous about accuracy and working from original sources.
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Most guys going through midlife crisis buy a convertible. Austrialian Stephen E. Jones went back to college to get a biology degree and is now a proponent of ID and common ancestry.
- Darwinian Fairytales by David Stove
Complete zipped downloadable pdf copy of David Stove's devastating, and yet hard-to-find, critique of neo-Darwinism entitled "Darwinian Fairytales"
- ID The Future
Intelligent Design The Future is a multiple contributor weblog whose participants include the nation's leading design scientists and theorists: biochemist Michael Behe, mathematician William Dembski, astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez, philosophers of science Stephen Meyer, and Jay Richards, philosopher of biology Paul Nelson, molecular biologist Jonathan Wells, and science writer Jonathan Witt. Posts will focus primarily on the intellectual issues at stake in the debate over intelligent design, rather than its implications for education or public policy.
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A Philosopher's Journey: Political and cultural reflections of John Mark N. Reynolds. Dr. Reynolds is Director of the Torrey Honors Institute at
Biola University.
- NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day
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