The ID Report

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In "Critics take aim at NASA 'arsenic life' study" (May 27, 2011), CBC News tells us

Eight articles questioning a controversial study claiming that some bacteria can use the normally toxic substance arsenic to build DNA have been published in the journal Science.

The study, published last December in Science, was led by NASA scientist Felisa Wolfe-Simon and claimed that bacteria from a lake in California were able to substitute arsenic for phosphorus, normally an essential ingredient in DNA, fats and proteins.

At issue was a new strain of a new strain of Halomonadaceae bacteria from Mono Lake, Calif., that seemed to use arsenic instead of phosphorus, which is essential for DNA, fats, and proteins. This fact, if it is a fact, was immediately drafted as an origin of life theory. Then, in an unusual move, scientists began to ask questions as if an OOL theory deserved to be taken seriously, at which point ...

Real possible significance of story: Is this the first time one of NASA's flight-by-seat-of-pants origin of life theories took a big hit from within the establishment, and not just from incredulous peasants? Perhaps so, to judge from NASA's reaction:

At that time, NASA said Wolfe-Simon would not be responding to those criticisms, as the U.S. space agency did not feel it was appropriate to debate the science using media and blogs. Instead, it said, the debate should occur in scientific publications.

Well, they got their wish. But would that have happened if it were not for the media and blogs?

File under: NASA discovers the Internet.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

"A Psychopath Walks Into A Room. Can YouTell? (NPR May21, 2011) Arresting title, that, for an interesting proposition:

"Robert Hare, the eminent Canadian psychologist who invented the psychopath checklist, ... recently announced that you're four times more likely to find a psychopath at the top of the corporate ladder than you are walking around in the janitor's office," journalist Jon Ronson tells Guy Raz, host of weekends on All Things Considered.

Of course, some allowance should be made for the fact that bosses are noticed/hated much more than other folk, and big bosses are larger than life.

The effect one comes away with is that psychiatry has not done a better job than traditional wisdom in explaining things like: Why do the wicked prosper? Also, diagnosis about personalities is not better than judgment about actions in deciding how to think about such problems.

Put another way, what's the point of saying "Hitler was a psychopath" as if that explains something that the catalogue of his known atrocities doesn't?

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

I’ve suggested it's a strategy on the part of people who trash ID-friendly books unread: The reviewer who fails to read the book is not, in a Darwin-obsessed community, held responsible for spreading misinformation. Indeed, the community wants him to do it, to avoid conflict between with their worldview and reality.

The problem is, that only explains why he isn't censured for his action. A more critical question is why would a scientist or scholar actually volunteer to do it? And, for a free copy of The Nature of Nature , that’s our contest question.

Enter in the comments box here.

Second award offer: Yes, this contest riffs off "What do you call a guy who reviews/trashes a book without reading it?" Some good suggestions there, and because Discovery Institute's "Ayala-ing" won't make the New Urban Lexicon, we must come up with something catchier.

So a second, separate award will be made, of Don Johnson'sProbability's Nature and Nature’s Probability for the best single word term to refer to such a reviewer.

here.

It you put your suggestion for a name here, not to worry. It'll be considered along with the ones entered in the combox below.

Contest judged: Saturday June 4, 2011.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

“Child-sized depictions of Charles Darwin to grow on” (May 23, 2011) are discussed by Katherine Pandora, who researches & teaches about science, the public & popular culture at the University of Oklahoma:

I was most amused to find that, despite the fact that the voyage figured extravagantly both in content and in the illustrations of the pile of children's Darwin books that I had brought home to study, the picture my daughter chose to draw owed nothing to the rainforest theme which would supposedly transfix childish imaginations, but instead depicted a much more sedate locale, fitting comfortably within the domestic backyard setting of a local neighborhood in the northern hemisphere. And here the influence I think of the second unusual Darwin book, The Humblebee Hunter by Deborah Hopkinson kicks in, for in this author's story the science literally does take place at home, as Darwin's daughter Henrietta and other family members join her father to investigate how many times a bee will visit a flower in a minute.

Once again, this story has fictional elements (while Darwin investigated creatures in his home environment, and the children sometimes assisted, we have no record of the observational study Hopkinson sketches), and the fictionalization allows for a girl "naturalist" to take center stage.

Yes, fiction.

From the books, I bet we’d never know that Darwin’s family were big on the eugenics movement. Speaking of kids, how about kid Carrie Buck, raped and then sterilized on the order of Oliver Wendell Holmes, a Supreme Court justice that American secular materialists practically worship? To get her sterilized, they had to falsely paint her as an imbecile .... and her own lawyer was working against her.

What about the fact that Darwin’s granddaughter wrote this vile, supercilious tripe - and was properly riposted by a famous Catholic writer (who wrote a book against Darwinism).

Why are these awful people a model for anyone?
Okay, so the Darwinists never seem to want to leave the kids out of it. Indeed, they’ll use the law to force the kids into it. Does anyone out there care about their own kids and want to do anything about that?

Question: Why don’t more people see that the fate of Carrie Buck is more likely than the fate of “Twee Bumblebee Darwin”?

Hat tip: Pos-Darwinista

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In The New York Times (May 22, 2011), Justin E. H. Smith raises for discussion, "The Flight of Curiosity" from philosophy, noting that today's budding philosopher may not even find curiosity an asset, compared to showing colleagues "how perfectly focused she has been in graduate school,” and how little she knows of anything "that does not fall within the current boundaries of the discipline." A far cry, he says, from the days when science was called, for good reason, "natural philosophy":

... tellingly, among the articles in the Philosophical Transactions of 1666, the first year of the journal’s publication, we find titles such as "Of a Considerable Load-Stone Digged Out of the Ground in Devonshire," and "Observations Concerning Emmets or Ants, Their Eggs, Production, Progress, Coming to Maturity, Use, &c." Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, researchers studying the properties of magnetism continued to refer to their area of interest as "the magnetical philosophy," and as late as 1808 John Dalton published "A New System of Chemical Philosophy." A year later Jean-Baptiste Lamarck brought out his "Philosophie zoologique." Yet by the early 20th century, this usage of the word philosophy had entirely vanished. What happened?

Smith himself had the misfortune to be dismissed as a "post-modernist" because he was writing about a false theory of medicine - and someone at the journal must have assumed that he could only be writing about it if he thought it was true or that everything is true or that nothing is. His defense, as readers will see, is that what's true is that the man believed it and that fact had consequences. Perhaps that isn't a truth for these censorial times.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

One of philosopher Robert Pennock's arguments for methodological naturalism (which rules out evidence for design in nature in principle, because it cannot be considered) is that "we cannot control the supernatural:"

Experimentation requires observation and control of the variables. We confirm causal laws by performing controlled experiments in whichthe hypothesized independent variable is made to vary while all the other factors are held constant so that we can observe the effect on the dependent variable. But we have no control over supernatural entities or forces; hence, these cannot be scientifically studied.

Monton, author of Seeking God in Science: An Atheist Defends Intelligent Design (Broadview Press, 2009), replies,

For the moment let's grant experimentation reqires observation and control of the variables. A problem arises when Pennock attempts to infer that, because we have no control over supernatural entities or forces, these supernatural entities or forces cannot be scientifically studied. What Pennock is ignoring is the distinction (standardly made in philosophy of science) between experimental science and historical science. Consider paleontology: what scientists who are engaging in this practice are doing is making observations and drawing inferences based on those observations. We can't do a controlled experiment to determine whether the dinosaurs died out as the result of an asteroid impact - we can't vary an independent variable while holding all other fators constant. Nevertheless, we can make lots of observations in the world (of dinosaur bones, geological strata, asteroid craters, and so on) and we can make scientific inferences on the basis of these observations. Also, consider cosmology: we can't do a controlled experiment to find out whether the universe started with a big bang, but we can make astronomical observations and make scientific inferences on their basis. I conclude that we can scientifically study aspects of reality that we can't experimentally control. Thus, it doesn't follow from the claim that we have no control over supernatural entities that we can't study them. (p. 67)

(Readers may recall that Pennock was the philosopher who went after emeritus philosophy of science prof Larry Laudan in the controversial issue of Synthese. David Tyler has a look at Pennock's style of argument here.)

Meanwhile, note: Monton will be guest authoring a post at Uncommon Descent on whether the universe has infinite spatial extent and how that might affect intelligent design theory. Physicist Rob Sheldon will reply. In addition to reading Monton's book, he is delving into cosmology and transfinite numbers. Details TBA.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Yup. In other news: "Woman is detained in NASA moon rock sting,"according to MSNBC (5/20/2011):

Tried to sell treasure for $1.7 million in Southern California, authorities say

It is illegal to sell moon rocks, which are considered national treasures.

NASA agents and Riverside County sheriff's deputies detained the woman, who has not been identified, after she met Thursday with an undercover NASA investigator at a restaurant in Lake Elsinore, about 70 miles southeast of Los Angeles, the sheriff's office said.

They swooped in after the two agreed on a price and she brought out the rock, authorities said.

They don't yet know whether it was really lunar material or whether she herself was stung. About 2,200 samples exist, so it's even money just now.

But why do time when we can win? Remember New Scientist's contest to win a Mars rock (which beats a Moon rock, surely).

And don't forget our Uncommon Descent contest, answering the same question in the combox, for a copy of The Nature of Nature mailed to your home: Tell us what the first person to set foot on Mars should say. Sure, their prize is way glitzier but your odds of winning ours are greater. Enter both. Multiple entries permitted at Uncommon Descent, in case you happen to think of a better line later.
Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

tell New Scientist

... what the first person to set foot on Mars should say.

If you win, and it doesn't impress them, you have the wrong friends.

Mars rocks. So, come to think of it, Uncommon Descent will offer a free copy of The Nature of Nature (which offers Guillermo Gonzalez’s work on the true status of habitability of exoplanets) to the best entry placed here at Uncommon Descent, in the comments box.

Gonzalez's 2001 prediction has held up so far.

Go here to enter. Judging May 28, 2011

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In a general disquisition on death as the final end, he responds to Ian Sample for Britain's Guardian (15 May 2011),

What is the value in knowing "Why are we here?"

The universe is governed by science. But science tells us that we can't solve the equations, directly in the abstract. We need to use the effective theory of Darwinian natural selection of those societies most likely to survive. We assign them higher value.

Who assigns them higher value?

Is there a way of determining what societies are most likely to survive, absent details?

History has frequently produced societies "most likely to survive" that experience little freedom and low quality of life. Why should "we" (?) assign them higher value?

Thoughts? If you have any ideas, you could post them at Salvo.

Note: The interview is very short, and dwarfed by Sample's informative introduction. The piece as a whole suggests that Hawking is struggling in some way. More later.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Last May, the Tevatron particle accelerator in Batavia, Illinois showed a 1 per cent preference for B mesons, 40 times the predicted standard model amount. (Kate McAlpine, "Weird 'unparticle' boosted by Tevatron signal" (New Scientist, 19 May 2011) Proposed explanation here.

Two separate groups now suggest an explanation for this larger asymmetry lies in the unparticle, a hypothetical entity conjured up in 2007 by theorist Howard Georgi of Harvard University. Georgi suggested that a property known as scale invariance - seen in fractal-like patterns that remain unchanged even when you zoom in and out to different scales, like the branching of redwood trees and the jagged edges of coastlines - could apply to individual particles too. The charge and spin of unparticles would be fixed but, counter-intuitively, their mass would somehow vary depending on the scale at which an observer viewed the particle.

Such unparticles could play a role in a popular proposed extension to the standard model, known as supersymmetry.

Unparticle Definition: \un-par-ti-cl\ n. (2007) A particle whose mass is unrelated to its energy. (a href="http://discovermagazine.com/2008/may/16-stupid-science-word-of-the-month-unparticle" target="another">Jocelyn Rice)

Some hope it will explain the prevalence of matter over antimatter in the universe.

Others are prepared to settle for establishing that the unparticle exists.

Unparticle was chosen “Stupid science word of the month” at scimag Discover (May 2008). Not fans of minimalism, apparently.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

According to David Shiga (New Scientist18 May 2011), they've been repurposed after the recent shutdown* when state funds dried up: "Alien-hunters focus in on habitable planets":

Astronomers from the University of California, Berkeley, the SETI Institute of California, and the US National Radio Astronomy Observatory are listening for alien signals from dozens of planets in the so-called "habitable zone" of their stars, the first time a targeted search of this kind has been undertaken.

"We've honed the list to the really exciting exoplanets," says team member Dan Werthimer of UC Berkeley

Essentially, they are looking for planets in habitable zones.

That is, looking for vacant apartments, not tenanted ones. Any apartments at all.

Guillermo Gonzalez might say they were wasting their time but:

File under: Hope springs eternal

* Shutdown: "The SETI Institute's Allen Telescope Array in Hat Creek, California, was forced to stop listening for signals in April because of a funding shortfall."

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Well, no one told the life forms about it, and frogs, snapdragons, and snakes, among other, apparently broke it with impunity, such that the "law" is in the process of being retired.*

Now, a research team has, usefully, come up with estimates of the probability of mutations being reversible. From ScienceDaily (May 11, 2011):

Physicists' study of evolution in bacteria shows that adaptations can be undone, but rarely.

[ ... ]

Jeff Gore, assistant professor of physics at MIT, says the critical question to ask is not whether evolution is reversible, but under what circumstances it could be. "It's known that evolution can be irreversible. And we know that it's possible to reverse evolution in some cases. So what you really want to know is: What fraction of the time is evolution reversible?" he says.
By combining a computational model with experiments on the evolution of drug resistance in bacteria, Gore and his students have, for the first time, calculated the likelihood of a particular evolutionary adaptation reversing itself.

They found that a very small percentage of evolutionary adaptations in a drug-resistance gene can be reversed, but only if the adaptations involve fewer than four discrete genetic mutations. The findings will appear in the May 13 issue of the journal Physical Review Letters. Lead authors of the paper are two MIT juniors, Longzhi Tan and Stephen Serene.

[ ... ]

In the late 19th century, paleontologist Louis Dollo argued that evolution could not retrace its steps to reverse complex adaptations -- a hypothesis known as Dollo's law of irreversibility. Gore says his team's results offer support for Dollo's law, but with some qualifications.
"It's not that complex adaptations can never be reversed," he says. "It's that complex adaptations are harder to reverse, but in a sense that you can quantify."

*This from one 2007 paper, “Reversing opinions on Dollo's Law”:

Dollo's Law, the idea that the loss of complex features in evolution is irreversible, is a popular concept in evolutionary biology. Here we review how application of recent phylogenetic methods, genomics and evo-devo approaches is changing our view of Dollo's Law and its underlying mechanisms. Phylogenetic studies have recently demonstrated cases where seemingly complex features such as digits and wings have been reacquired. Meanwhile, large genomics databases and evo-devo studies are showing how the underlying developmental pathways and genetic architecture can be retained after the loss of a character. With dwindling evidence for the law-like nature of Dollo's Law, we anticipate a return to Dollo's original focus on irreversibility of all kinds of changes, not exclusively losses.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In this latest episode of history's longest running soap, human evolution, we learn that remains of Mousterian (Neanderthal) culture have been found in Polar Urals in northern Russia, dated at over 28,500 years old (more than 8,000 years later than Neanderthals are thought to have died out), challenging previous theories.

From ScienceDaily, we learn:

The distinguishing feature of Mousterian culture, which developed during the Middle Palaeolithic (-300,000 to -33,000 years), is the use of a very wide range of flint tools, mainly by Neanderthal Man in Eurasia, but also by Homo sapiens in the Near East. - "Last Neanderthals Near the Arctic Circle?" (May 13, 2011)

The theory had been that Neanderthals were too stupid to learn how to survive so far north. Anyway, in another episode they died out "some 33,000 to 36,000 years ago."

Mystery: " ... the Byzovaya site, in Eurasia, seems only to have been occupied once, approximately 28,500 years ago, which is over 8,000 years after Neanderthals were thought to have disappeared." Perhaps they were nomads and just migrated a lot? Nomad life is almost inevitable in the high latitudes, absent modern technology.

Some hope that the solution is that they were modern humans after all.

Don't forget to enter the contest: For a free copy of The The Nature of Nature mailed to your home: Do you think we understand the human-Neanderthal relationship better than we did twenty-five years ago? In what ways?

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Looks like a worm. Here:

The blind reptile looks like a snake, but it is actually a lizard that has evolved to live underground - losing its legs to enable it to push through the soil by wriggling its body.

[ ... ]

"Also most lizards are able to blink and snakes can't," Dr Daltry continued. "Although this new [underground] lizard has no eyes at all."

- Victoria Gill, "blind legless lizard species discovered in Cambodia" BBC News, May 10, 2011

Rube's kid: My science teacher pinned up a picture of this new lizard on the tackboard and said, There! Darwin was right! New species form all the time, acquiring new traits through natural selection ...

Rube: Just a minute, son. Did she say that blind and legless are "new traits"? She really said that? You sure? Hmmm. Where's that homeschooling mag those people gave me?

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Here's Discovery Institute's trailer for the film on the life of Darwin's forgotten/sneered at co-theorist Alfred Russel Wallace, illustrating the work of science historian Michael Flannery:
"He's been called a biological Indiana Jones. He explored the Amazon. He lived with headhunters ... "
But wait. This isn't Indiana Jones. It really happened.

Next time you hear a Darwinist sneer at Wallace, ask yourself, could he do what that guy did? (Okay, she?) Darwin would never have published his atheist-happy theory, if Wallace hadn't written to tell him about natural selection as a mechanism, and not as "the best idea anyone ever had" (key pop philosopher Daniel Dennet's summation).

Enjoy.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In this version of the very long-running human evolution soap opera (Ewen Callaway, Nature News, 9 May 2011), we didn't kill the Neanderthals; they died before we got there. (Episode 4440). In a different episode, they were our squeezes and in-laws - which is probably why we killed them. Anyway, they weren't as stupid as they pretended, either.

Some folk, looking at all this, say "Science, unlike religion, changes its mind in the light of new evidence." That may be so (the evidence is rather mixed on both sides), but many recent episodes sound more like changing fashions in interpretation rather than decisive new evidence.
For a free copy of The Nature of Nature mailed to your home: What do you think? We just don't know and are seeking a range of views.

Contest will be judged Saturday, May 21, 2011

Enter here.

Co-uthor1

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Non-materialist neuroscientists like Jeffrey Schwartz and Mario Beauregard are usually at least sympathetic to ID, just as their materialist counterparts are not. At issue is whether the mind is real or simply an illusion created by the activities of neurons. One argument for the mind’s reality is neuroplasticity, as this recent CBC documentary shows:

For centuries the human adult brain has been thought to be incapable of fundamental change. Now the discovery and growing awareness of neuroplasticity has revolutionized our understanding of the brain – and has opened the door to new treatments and potential cures for many diseases and disorders once thought incurable.

Neuroscience is past viewing the human brain as a machine, as it once did, where, if one part breaks down or doesn’t work properly, the function it performed is permanently gone, in all cases. Indeed, in just the past few years, we’ve built on our knowledge that our brains are constantly changing their structure and function and that the adult brain is not “hard-wired” but plastic – always changing. It applies even in old age – a particularly hopeful note for an aging population like ours.

Yes, and a direct outcome of non-materialist assumptions. Advantage ID?

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Turns up as Heidelberg man. At MSNBC, Jennifer Viegas reports that (5/4/2011) “Heidelberg Man links humans, Neanderthals:
Study of 400,000-year-old fossil may shed light on what species looked like”:

The determination is based on the remains of a single Heidelberg Man (Homo heidelbergensis) known as "Ceprano," named after the town near Rome, Italy, where his fossil — a partial cranium — was found.

Previously, this 400,000-year-old fossil was thought to represent a new species of human, Homo cepranensis. The latest study, however, identifies Ceprano as being an archaic member of Homo heidelbergensis.

Down one species then.

The finding may shed light on what the species that gave rise to both Neanderthals and Homo sapiens looked like.

Caution, more tangles:

Ian Tattersall, curator of anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History, told Discovery News that he agrees Ceprano has been "appropriately assigned to the cosmopolitan species Homo heidelbergensis. But in Europe this species is contemporaneous with the lineage leading to Homo neanderthalensis."

Some complain that it’s a bit like trying to explain the plot of a soap opera to which the “Guide to the Episodes” has been misplaced: Here, for example, at Dieneke’s Antyroplogy Blog:

The type specimen of Homo heidelbergensis is the Mauer mandible. There is considerable controversy about the validity of this taxon, with some "stretching" it to include many different fossils from Europe, Asia, and Africa, while others limiting it to the pre-Neandertal population of Europe. There are also those who want to get rid of H. h altogether. (More on Ceprano follows.)

Shriek from the other sofa: If I hafta watch this show with you, to keep you happy, all I wanna know is, who is she supposed to be with now, and who is she actually with? Next episode, it’ll all be different of course. A lot depends on who’s writing the episode.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Via Important Name endorsements to repeal the 2008 Louisiana Science Education Act ( critical thinking in science education) not to be confused with the 42 Nobel laureates a couple of weeks ago. Repeal would be via SB70.

Here's Barbara Forrest's op-ed in support of repeal. UD readers will remember Forrest as the "ID expert" prof who mistakenly slagged Baylor's Frank Beckwith - in a professional philosophy journal - as an ID supporter. (He isn't, and the journal's editors disowned the article.)

Back in the expert's chair again at Houma Today (April 26, 2011), Forrest offers a similar level of evidence for creationism being taught in Louisiana schools:

Fourth, the Livingston Parish and Tangipahoa Parish school board members have discussed using the LSEA to teach creationism. In July 2010, the Livingston Parish School Board instructed staff to study this for the 2011-2012 academic year. The March 15 Tangipahoa Parish School Board minutes show that LFF operative Darrell White approached the Curriculum Committee about the law. School boards are being tempted to risk lawsuits when teachers face layoffs because of budget cuts!

Forrest may be counting on readers not to know that "approached" means that the Curriculum Committee must consider what the person says, so long as he either is or represents a ratepayer, even if they think him a walking wingding.

Also:

The Darwin lobby continues its efforts to make the journal Synthese re-accept Forrest's erroneous paper about Beckwith.

Louisiana has some of the worst performing school districts in the United States, though local charter schools do better.

The Louisiana Coalition or Science folk really do recognize Kitmas, not Christmas. A joke? Maybe ...

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

While explaining how he believes complex biochemical information just happen to arise through random processes, Brown University's Ken Miller dismisses Mike Behe's mousetrap, introduced in Darwin's Black Box. To show that it is not an example of irreducible complexity that points to design, he recounts a childhood recollection of a pupil using a mousetap to fire spitballs, which showed that the mousetrap could be used for something other than killing mice ((pp 54-57)). That is how Miller, whohas just won the Stephen Jay Gould award for promoting Darwinism, knew that ID biochemist Behe was wrong.

An IS prof contacted Uncommon Descent to say,

Ken Miller’s Mousetrap?:

In Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America's Soul (2008), Kenneth Miller devotes several pages (especially pp. 54-55) to the argument condensed below against irreducible complexity. However based on my experiences with mousetraps, his example looks quite suspicious.

I tried the approach he describes but wasn’t able to get a mousetrap to launch spitballs at all. (This is in marked contrast to my experiences with clothes-pin match guns, which did work quite well when I was in the age range of Miller’s story.) However I did manage to snap the trap on my fingers.

Not being very mechanical, I mentioned it to an engineer who I knew to be quite hostile to intelligent design. I asked him if he could demonstrate the validity of Miller’s mechanism. He never got back to me.

Are there any "truth seekers" amongthe readership who'd like to try to make this work, and perhaps even video their efforts for YouTube?

Meanwhile, he offers a "condensed" version of Miller's account:

Soon spitballs began to fly, showering down on the unsuspecting students on the floor of the auditorium.

We were defenseless-until the mousetrap came along. One of my classmates had struck upon the brilliant idea of using an old, broken mousetrap as a spitball catapult ... He fashioned large, floppy spitballs and carefully loaded them onto the hammer, pulled it back, and fired it over his shoulder up at the unsuspecting balcony dwellers. You should have seen the surprised looks on their faces as spitballs came zooming up into balconyland with the force of ballistic missiles.

And now the memory of that device stuck in my mind. It had worked perfectly as something other than a mousetrap. Perfectly.

But how could it have? Weren`t the parts of irreducibly complex machines supposed to be useless until the entire machine had been assembled? … my rowdy friend had pulled a couple of parts - probably the hold-down bar and catch -off the trap to make it easier to conceal and more effective as a catapult.

What was left behind was, most likely, just three parts - the base, the spring, and the hammer. Not much of a mousetrap, but a helluva spitball launcher. And then ... l realized why the mousetrap analogy had bothered me. It was wrong. The mousetrap is not irreducibly complex after all.

While it is absolutely true that my friend's three-part spitball launcher wasn`t going to catch many mice, that’s not the point of the argument from design. The reason that irreducibly complex biochemical machines are unevolvable is that their parts, all their bits and pieces, should have no function until they are fully assembled into the final, carefully designed machine for which they are intended. That’s why natural selection cannot produce such machines - natural selection, as Michael Behe has pointed out, can only select for things that are already functioning. The same is true of the mousetrap. But if the parts of a mousetrap can have functions unrelated to catching a mouse, the mousetrap cannot be irreducibly complex.

(Note: Uncondensed version can be viewed via Search Inside This Book on the word "spitballs" at Amazon but for best results yo may need to sign in.)

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Not if you go by best-known Darwinist, Richard Dawkins:

Note the importance of evidence for reaching Darwinian conclusions. "important as the evidence is, in this article I want to explore the possibility of developing a different kind of argument. I suspect that it may be possible to show that, regardless of evidence, Darwinian natural selection is the only force we know that could, in principle, do the job of explaining the existence of organized and adaptive complexity." [Daw82] "Darwinism is the only known theory that is in principle capable of explaining certain aspects of life... even if there were no actual evidence in favor of the Darwinian theory." [Daw96Bp287-88] "The theory of evolution by cumulative natural selection is the only theory we know of that is in principle capable of explaining the existence of organized complexity. Even if the evidence did not favour it, it would still be the best theory available." [Daw96BP317]

- from Donald E. Johnson's Probability's Nature and Nature's Probability LITE: A Call to Scientific Integrity, p. 87-88.

The first statement, [Daw82], is from a 1982 piece in New Scientist, whose express purpose is to dismiss Lamarckian evolution: “The necessity of Darwinism: There is no evidence for Lamarckian inheritance, but even without evidence we can be reasonably sure that Lamarckian inheritance just won’t do.” Evidence for Lamarckian evolution (horizontal gene transfer) is now commonly noted. Does that affect the necessity of Darwinism? Does it mean that Darwinism must now be evaluated on evidence? What about the right to offer evidence-based critiques of Darwinism in science classes?

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.

Sweden's king decorated molecular cytogeneticist Antonio Lima-de-Faria "Knight of the Order of the North Star" for his outstanding experimental work, which elucidated the molecular organization of the chromosome and its evolutionary path.

And his opinion of Darwinism is here:

Lima-de-Faria does not consider Charles Darwin’s 1859 idea of natural selection - survival of the fittest - a theory. He writes in his classic book, Evolution without Selection. Form and Function by Autoevolution, that Darwinism and the neo-Darwinian synthesis, last dusted off 70 years ago, actually hinder discovery of the mechanism of evolution.

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Suzan Mazur: You've called natural selection "the opium of the biologist for over 100 years," saying it is an abstract concept, and as such it can’t be measured and poured into a vial — and that the term natural selection should be removed from evolution vocabulary because it is a hindrance to the discovery of the mechanism of evolution.

You acknowledge that natural selection exists but say it has nothing to do with the basic mechanism of biological transformation, which is based on physico-chemical and mineral layers of evolution. So why are most biologists and textbooks and scientific academies still embracing natural selection?

A. Lima-de-Faria: Selection is a political not a scientific concept. At the time of Darwin it fitted perfectly the expanding colonialism of Victorian England. At present, Darwinism has been equated with evolution in an effort to convert it into the ideological arm of globalization. For this reason it will remain a powerful force until this system will be superseded by a more humanitarian form of economic development.

Nothing could be better than selection because it can "explain" equally well a given situation or its opposite state. This is why there are as many Darwinist interpretations as there are authors. The result is total confusion.

Consider some feature of the universe, such as its beginning to exist (assuming that it did begin to exist). There are various competing explanations we can consider for such a feature, and one of those explanations will be that the feature was due to an intelligent cause. We may judge this explanation to be the best one but it doesn't follow that the explanation is true. The right account could be that there's no explanation at all for why the universe has the feature that it does.

Thus, if the doctrine of intelligent design is as I've stated above, with the claim that the best explanation for the features is an intelligent cause, then I endorse intelligent design. I can do this, as an atheist, because I reject the inference that the best explanation is true or even likely to be true. My opinion is that it's probably the case that the true account is that there's no explanation at all.

- Bradley Monton, author of Seeking God in Science: An Atheist Defends Intelligent Design (Broadview Press, 2009), p. 36.

However, Monton carefully distinguishes that view from the idea that "the best explanation is that there's no explanation", noting:

If "no explanation" is the best explanation for the event, then "no explanation" is an explanation. But if ''no explanation" is an explanation, then it follows that there is an explanation for the event. But if there is an explanation for the event, then the claim that there's no explanation is false.

Presumably, he feels the way many do about the origin of life, that there may be no explanation, but that does NOT mean that no explanation is the best explanation, just the one we are stuck with.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.