The ID Report

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

This question started out as "science and religion" at another list but the religion part got lost somehow, not because I am unreligious but because I wasn't sure how much religion, as such, you can learn from a serious exposition of the reasons for thinking that design is a feature of our universe.

All you can really learn from books about design is that materialist atheism is nuts.And, not surprisingly, all the materialist atheist mooches and tax burdens do everything they can to try to sink such books in the ratings. Don't usually succeed, of course, but can't blame 'em for trying.

Anyway, here are my five top picks (exempting any book for which - so far as I know - I had anything to do with the text):

1. Michael Denton's Nature's Destiny: Denton discusses the world I know, all the more authentically because he addresses the southern cone, not my beloved northlands. I first got interested in design issues about a decade ago, and Denton's book was a key reason. I was sitting in a bookstore cafe in a northern city, and my brother saw I was interested, so he bought me a gift certificate so I could buy the book. The book just made so much sense. It describes the world I know, where things do not happen simply by chance or survival of the fittest.

2. Michael Behe's Darwin's Black Box. When I first encountered the book, I was flush with the success of having landed a science and faith column in a Canadian Christian publication (since, abruptly cancelled). When I first read Behe's book, I was astonished to discover that there is a lot of evidence against Darwinism and little for it - despite endless local obsequious coo's from bible school profs that "there is no conflict between science and religion (even though I knew of theist profs who were at that very time under serious threat.).

The "no conflict" profs really meant, of course, that there is no conflict between Darwinism and Christianity, as the Biologos Institute would have us believe. But, of course, "survival of the fittest" and Christianity are irreconcilable, as I noted when I saw former Biologos golden boy - and still a golden boy in many Christian circles - beaming with joy over human embryonic stem cell research.

I myself was astonished to discover, in interview, how foolish Christian women abandon live human embryos (their early stage children) in fertility clinics, so the kids end up getting processed for - whatever.

And if that is the "religion" part of "no conflict between ...", deal me out right now! Elsewhere, it is called being a "useful idiot." But you will see a lot of it in the Christian press these days.

3. Phillip Johnson's Darwin on Trial: Still a classic in asking the right, serious questions, principally about the way in which Darwinism became popular culture's icon, and what that actually means.

You can see it if you travel the subway in a major city today - full of tattooed, pierced, unemployable people, absolutely convinced that the "government" owes them a living, because they are the somehow surviving apes. It is hard to know where to begin, in countering this view because it is implicit in their education. Johnson was especially good at skewering "theistic evolution" (= how to sell out to atheism without openly admitting it).

4. Steve Meyer's Signature in the Cell (Harper One, 2009). Meyer explains how new information about the cell shows that Darwinists and "Christian" Darwinists are simply wrong in supposing that Darwin's ingenious "survival of the fittest" explanation shows how intricate machinery can occur with no design at all. Darwin's claim is a complete imposture, and should have occurred to anyone who works for a living, but many British aristocrats like himself in his day and many civil servants and lobbyists today never did practical work, and wouldn't really know why we cannot create intelligence from mere matter by accident.

5. Alfred Russel Wallace's Theory of Intelligent Evolution was one of those books everyone heard of - if they work this beat - but no one had read. After all, Darwin's mob did a pretty good job of wasting his co-theorist Wallace, right? And Wallace's only serious crime was not to be a materialist atheist.

In the world according to Darwin, you are either a materialist atheist or a useful idiot for same.

Wallace understood the world I know much better - not at all surprising, because he was a much better naturalist than Darwin. In the world I know, co-operation matters.

Eighty-five years ago, my devout grandmother told my five-year-old father to follow a turkey hen up into the hills and find out where she was caching her eggs. The trouble was, a coyote could get them. The boy - not much taller than a turkey hen himself - had to follow the hen discreetly, because she would turn around and look at him. But he found the eggs, and his mother promptly put them under a broody chicken hen, in the henhouse, so they could be safely hatched.

(Note: Obviously, I have avoided speaking of any book with which I was in any way involved - so far as I know. Because I work in publishing, it is always possible for some Darwinist sponge or tax burden, with no more useful activities to occupy his time, to pretend some case for my involvement with a book, but, as I always say in such cases, ... pffft.

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 am pleased to announce this book by Jane Harris-Zsovan on the Canadian eugenics scandal. I tried to cover it in the 1970s, from Ontario, but couldn't get very far - literally. It took someone like Jane, who went through box loads of archives in her home province of Alberta, to start putting the pieces together.

It is NOT a pretty picture. People here were all too willing to just accept the beliefs of important Darwinists, with disastrous results.

So what happened? Why did so many professionals believe Darwinism and act on it? The Canadian experience was pretty scandalous.

Eugenics? As someone who has late life parents, I can say that having kids is a real smart idea, provided you intend to live a long life and the kids are willing to help you.

Try to imagine what Darwinism meant for a culture like Jane Harris-Zsovan and I grew up in, a culture we can even find today, in Canada. Please stay awake.

I mean a culture where transit drivers quietly put their hand over the fare box if they think you have arrived from out of town to visit a veteran or an elderly mother in hospital. Or, suspecting a similar errand, taxi drivers may return a tip, claiming that they do not have change.

Darwinism means a whole different universe, and not one we like much here, either. It just feels alien to our culture. Makes you wonder, given how long our culture has lasted.

I know, this is NOT the Canada that US hot talk radio hosts rant about.

But it is the real Canada. Trust me, I live here. And we are starting to speak up about what really happened when eugenics and other fancy ideas were tried out here.

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

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Someone tipped me off about this MIT Press book, attempting to explode the "evolutionary psychology" racket:

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.

I say "attempting" because - from its blurb - the book sounds far too timid to me. (Prove me wrong, publisher, by sending me a copy.)

For one thing, evolutionary psychology is right up there with recovered memories as the kind of nonsense that professors of therapy get into because they don't have anything more useful to do. The trouble is, if anyone takes them seriously, they can cause problems.

Frankly, evolutionary psychologists come up with stuff so stupid that it falls beneath mockery.

I am still mad at Bill Dembski for scooping me on the Big Bazooms theory of human evolution, but I forgave him eventually, and in the meantime there is "why middle-aged men have shiny scalps" and "why dad can't dance" - supposedly, except when he can and does. And in many world cultures, he just must.

Whatever we want to call this stuff, it is not science. Science is about fact, not free-floating, idle speculation. But - as noted earlier - I expect this book to accomplish little because the publisher and maybe the author are far too concerned with placating the tenured profs they should just dismiss. Prove me wrong.

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

1. Mayday mayday mayday SoS Darwin! Is it really that bad? Guess so, if you go by BioLogos.

The skinny:

" -you have heard about the “massive evidence” for Darwinism, right? No, that is a confusion cleverly created by Darwinist tax and donor burdens.

What they do is they cleverly confuse two concepts: One is evidence for evolution. Few doubt that, in my experience. Does anyone doubt, for example, that the tyrannosaur is no longer among us? Well, a simple question would be, can anyone produce one?

But the Darwinist always conflates it into evidence for Darwinism: That time and chance alone can produce intricate machinery within cells, which accounts for the life we see around us. That is flatly unbelievable. "

The fat:

Go here for the fat.

By Robert Deyes
ARN Correspondent

In 2001 Stephen Meyer, Paul Nelson and Paul Chien wrote a lengthy discourse that explored the scientific challenges that the Cambrian Explosion of life poses to the Darwinian account of animal origins (1). Central to their arguments was the idea that biological processes in the organismic context are so tightly integrated that changes in one process invariably require compensatory changes elsewhere (1). Their illustration of this basic premise seemed intuitive enough:

"If an engineer modifies the length of the piston rods in an internal combustion engine, but does not modify the crankshaft accordingly, the engine won't start. Similarly, processes of development are so tightly integrated temporally and spatially that one change early in development will require a host of other coordinated changes in separate but functionally interrelated developmental processes downstream" (1)

Drawing from examples cited in the biological literature and comments made by opinion leaders, notably geneticist John McDonald and zoologist Soren Lovtrup, the verdict they arrived at was that "those genes which govern major changes, the very stuff of macroevolution, apparently do not vary, or vary only to the detriment of the organism" (1).

In an effort to model the tight integration of biological processes my sons and I teamed up to assemble a functional multi-component machine better known as the K'Nex Drop-N-Swing. Not only did we successfully demonstrate how the operability of the 'Drop-N-Swing' mechanism was dependent upon the components having precisely the spatial dimensions that they display but we also showed how adjustments to any one of these required concordant adjustments elsewhere in the machine.

The layout of the Drop-N-Swing resembles the sky drop and swing carousel rides one finds in modern amusement parks (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udr-RxcnUFU). On one side a centrally-located motor drives a series of four sequential gears each of which has just enough gear teeth to crank a chain-linked chair lift up a two foot-tall tower. Because a defined portion of the circumference of the largest gear lacks teeth and can therefore not crank up any weight, the chair drops down immediately upon reaching the top of the tower. This 'rise and fall' cycle is made possible through 86 chain links that form a closed chain circuit around two sprockets located at the bottom and top of the tower. The bottom sprocket is connected to the gear system that consequently turns the chain and causes it to lift up the chair.

As my sons toyed around with the Drop-N-Swing they found that they were unable to decrease the chain length and tower height without cutting down on the number of gear teeth. That is, if they were to maintain the rise and fall capabilities of the chair lift, concordant adjustments were needed at more than one location (otherwise the chair would get irreversibly stuck on the top sprocket). Even the tower height could not be facilely altered since the repeating unit of the tower struts did not correspond to an integral number of chain links.

Newsworthy cases in biology testify to the underlying charge brought by Meyer et al that major evo-morphing of structure and anatomy could not have been brought about through random piecemeal changes to already-extant body plans. Famously Nobel Prize winning biologist Ed Lewis elucidated crucial details about the genetics of embryonic patterning in fruit flies (2-4). Focusing on a group of genes known collectively amongst drosophila geneticists as the Bithorax Complex, Lewis built on the pioneering work of his predecessors who had identified homeotic (developmental patterning) mutants in the Bithorax gene that produced insects with an extra pair of wings (2-4). These appeared appended to the front portion of sophisticated flight balance-mediating organs called halteres situated on either side of the flies (2-4). The Bithorax mutant broke thorassic segment identities (ie one segment was replaced by another). But most importantly the mutant larva died early in development (2).

Meyer et al note how this additional wing pair "innovation" was viably unsustainable for the largely self evident reason that "the developmental mutation was not accompanied by the many other coordinated developmental changes that would have been necessary to ensure the production of the appropriate muscles at the appropriate place on the fly's body" (1). Renowned Cambridge developmental biologist Peter Lawrence made his position clear in a review of the overall findings of homeotic mutation research:

"Homeotic mutations are encouraging because they raise the clarifying prospect of a class of controlling genes responsible for large chunks of the body pattern. They also impress because the mutations produce massive anatomical transformations; it was even thought such mutations could allow the sudden generation of new animal groups during evolution - an idea that looks increasingly implausible (individuals produced by such mutations are very unfit!)." (4)

One cannot help but acknowledge the futility of a story that claims that evolution could have brought about beneficial large scale changes to body plan architecture. The evidence speaks for itself. And simple attempts at modeling do nothing less than support the science.

Further Reading
1. Stephen C. Meyer, Paul A. Nelson, and Paul Chien (2001) The Cambrian Explosion: Biology's Big Bang, See http://www.discovery.org/articleFiles/PDFs/Cambrian.pdf, p.36, This article also appears in the peer-reviewed volume Darwinism, Design, and Public Education published with Michigan State University Press

2. Vidyanand Nanjundiah (1996) The 1995 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, Resonance, http://www.ias.ac.in/resonance/Mar1996/pdf/Mar1996ResearchNews.pdf

3. Stephen Jay Gould (2002) The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts, p.1096

4. Peter Lawrence (1992), The Making of a Fly: The Genetics Of Animal Design, Blackwell Scientific Publications, London, p.211

A friend notifies me to look here re neurolaw and the death penalty. He writes,

The threads of the Jeanine Nicarico murder case are too tangled to attempt even a summary. Suffice it to say that an innocent man was sent to death row, and before it was all sorted out police and prosecutors were charged with fabricating evidence and there hasn't been an execution in Illinois in over a decade. The final act played out last November in a suburban Chicago courtroom where the real killer, Brian Dugan, asked a jury to spare his life. To assist, his lawyers ... presented fMRI images -- a first in a U.S. criminal trial. The pictures revealed that parts of the brain that light up in normal people remained cold and dark in Dugan's brain. The defense expert described these areas as regulating impulse control and emotional reactions. In short, Dugan was a classic psychopath, and the fMRI helped to prove it.

Although prosecutors had tried to keep the evidence out by challenging the science behind it, the judge ruled that under the relaxed standards of mitigating evidence in a death penalty case, it should come in. Fearful of "The Christmas Tree Effect" dazzling jurors with colorful snapshots of Brian Dugan's grim interior life, the judge originally ruled no images could be admitted. Later he reversed himself, and Dr. Kiehl, a New Mexico researcher who hauls an fMRI trailer from prison to prison for grant-fueled research on criminals, was able to show the jury the cold, dark spaces that he claimed correlated to the brutal sexual assault and murder of a young girl. Brian Dugan's brain was to blame and they had the pictures to prove it.

Apparently the jury did not appreciate how being a psychopath worked in the defendant's favor. They sentenced Brian Dugan, broken brain and all, to death. .

The jury may or may not have discounted the science, but they probably bought it to the extent they understood it. The point is, they refused to split Brian Dugan into a legally responsible entity on one hand, and a broken brain on the other. They may have judged him to be a bad person, but they saw him as a package of damaged goods that was nonetheless a person, and one deserving of the ultimate penalty. Arguably, adding advanced neuroimaging to the proof that Dugan was a psychopath may have actually hurt Dugan more than helped him. There was no suggestion that he could not appreciate the wrongfulness of his acts or keep himself from doing them. Scientific proof that Dugan was a cold, remorseless killer is not considered to be the best mitigation, but the defense lawyers had been dealt a bad hand in a high stakes game and thought the broken brain card was worth playing. One of his lawyers said this case was "unique" and did not foresee frequent use of the technology.

Note that this worked out exactly as I predicted the last time I wrote you about the neurolaw fad in academia. In its first real test, jurors shrugged and voted for death. It will never play in Peoria.

My sense of the situation is as follows:

1. Advanced Western democracies do not generally need the death penalty because we can just keep people locked up until they are no longer dangerous. Of course, societies may want it for political, religious, or other reasons. But dramatic strategies, such as the death penalty, do tend to glamorize crime. To see what I mean, consider the old movie, A Place in the Sun. By contrast, a guy who pounds out auto licence plates for 25 years to earn himself packs of smokes, to get him through the night in prison, is not glamorous.

2. I am not surprised that the jury didn't believe it. The key question is not "what is going on in that guy's brain" but "what steps could he have taken such that he would not have committed a fatal assault? If he did not take them, why not?"

3. I don't think "neurolaw" has anything to contribute. If adults are truly not responsible for their actions, they should be living in a supervised group home. At least, that is the usual approach.

Go here for neurolaw and other neurofads.

Also, just up at The Mindful Hack (my blog on neuroscience and design):

So, if you are French, your neurons run your life?

If you believe in God, is it just because you think you are God?

Proof that there is, or is not, free will is worth what, in money?

Thicker foreheads: Meet thickets of Darwinism

(Note: If you follow me at Twitter, you will get regular notice of new Mindful Hack posts, usually when I have posted five or so stories.)

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).

Coffee!!: A message from "so-called Denyse O'Leary" ...

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Yesterday, I was at the Canadian Science Writers' Association convention, held in Ottawa this year, and noted an evolution display by the British Council..

In its obsequies to Darwin, the Council advises the public that

Darwin gathered a mass of information to support his ideas. The types of evidence he used – from fossils to distribution of species – are all much more developed 150 years later. The proliferation of living forms in the so-called Cambrian explosion around 530 million years ago, for example, has been studied in enormous detail.

What I want to draw your attention to is the use of the term "so-called" Cambrian explosion.

I have usually heard the fossil find in Canada's Burgess Shale called the "Cambrian explosion" - where most phyla of life forms appeared in a short period, some went extinct, and others continued. Darwin, famously, knew it was a problem for his gradualist theory of evolution, and blamed the imperfect fossil record. A more perfect fossil record has not helped much.

The big question is why it is so important for the British Council to defend Darwin's theory of evolution on this and other questions, when other theories of evolution might more reasonably account for this sequence of events.

I think I shall take to calling that organization the "so-called British Council".

Oh, and another piece of misinformation on the page is, "The spread of bacteria that can resist antibiotics is a good example of evolution in action." Yes, if evolution means tossing out working equipment, to avoid detection and destruction. But most people want to know how the equipment was created, and - to the handwringing of Darwinists - find their particular theory unconvincing.

Here is an example: You are a pro-democracy dissident in a totalitarian regime, and you type a newsletter. You get a tip that the secret police are coming, and you row out into the middle of a nearby lake and throw your whole system into it.

Of course, the secret police could arrest you without cause, but they would prefer to have a cause, so that the government-supported and -funded media can trumpet you as a villain.

Now you don't have that system any more. You are reduced to getting unwanted books at lawn sales and writing messages at agreed pages, known only to the person whose page it is. Then you arrange discreet delivery at the homes of democracy supporters, by various covert means. Still, you manage. They really want the messages.

But someone rats, under torture. Now, you are reduced to hiding baggie-wrapped messages in grapefruits, delivered by a sympathetic travelling fruit vendor. Soggy, but not without information value. Until ...

Maybe, messages could be hidden in leafy thickets or in their root systems ... I mean, if you inserted them carefully, in plastic - because they grow variously, so they will not likely be watched. But the recipient must be warned. This works, until ...

Still, the system goes on because there is an intelligence that wants to hear the news about dissent from the Totality.

Okay, this is the evolution!! of a communications system - if you, as a total Darwinist, like the British Council - believe that bacterial resistance shows evolution in action.

Sure it does, Amoeba. Now let me no longer detain you, but dump you quickly into your latest new pond.

Otherwise, read Mike Behe's Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism.

Note: Behe's title is curious, because - if you go by current science guff - Darwinism explains everything, and taxpayers must be forced to fund it.

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