The ID Update

The Galapagos Islands have long been recognised as the home of numerous endemic species, stimulating questions about how such species came into being. Those responding with answers have supported their views more by theory than observation. But Peter and Rosemary Grant are different, because they have pioneered longitudinal studies of the Galapagos finches, particularly on the small (and relatively isolated) island of Daphne Major. A newly reported study of an immigrant male ground finch (Geospiza fortis) covers the period 1981 to the present.

"We have followed the survival and reproduction of this individual and all of its known descendants, here termed the immigrant lineage, for seven generations (F0 to F6) spanning 28 years."

This finch's odd beak and song make it unpopular with the locals. (Credit: Peter Grant/PNAS, Source here)

The Grants have observed a clustering of male territories of the immigrant lineage and have established that these birds formed a new, albeit small, breeding population. The story is one of interbreeding followed by inbreeding. The authors consider they have gained an "important insight into the process of speciation" - although they hasten to add that they do not regard these birds as a new species.

"How many generations of exclusively within-group mating are needed before the group is recognized as a separate species that deserves taxonomic status? There is no nonarbitrary answer. We treat the endogamous group as an incipient species because it has been reproductively isolated from sympatric G. fortis for three generations and possibly longer."

This is not a story involving new mutations, or any significant genetic change outside the normal range of groundfinches. It is relevant to discussion of sympatric speciation, because the new population coexists with other medium groundfinches on the same island and interbreeding did take place in the earlier generations of the lineage. So what factors are associated with a barrier to interbreeding? The Grants identify two factors: one is morphological (immigrants have larger beak dimensions) and the other is song (immigrants differ from residents lower maximum frequency and higher note repetition rate).

"Our observations provide insight into speciation and hence, into the origin of a new species. They show how a barrier to interbreeding can arise behaviorally and without genetic change in sympatry. A necessary condition was prior ecological divergence, and introgressive hybridization was possibly another. Evidently it takes only a single diploid immigrant to start the process by breeding with a resident, and tolerance of the effects of inbreeding is needed to complete it."

These observations, and the emerging ecological perspective on speciation is interesting - but how does it relate to the broader issues faced by evolutionary biologists? In particular, does it help to understand how innovation occurs? The answer must be - no. There are no genetic changes that can be associated with novel characteristics and although this population is currently reproductively isolated, a few environmental traumas could easily lead to unification. Darwinism is exactly where it has always been - explaining the origin of complexity by appealing to theory and the imagination.

On the other hand, these data can be understood readily in terms of speciation by gene pool reduction. Although normally presented in terms of allopatry, this model considers the possible loss of alleles when a breeding population is split. The resultant populations may not have the genetic diversity of the parent population, and whilst this may be workable in the short-term, environmental change may reveal that the daughter population(s) are unfit and the end result may be extinction. Clearly, this perspective on the data has nothing to give Darwinism but it is compatible with several non-Darwinian perspectives on speciation.

Science reports of stories relevant to evolutionary theory can degenerate to the level of cheer-leading for a favoured cause. One account of the Grants' research refers to "a real-time record of evolution in action. In the PNAS paper, they describe something Darwin could only have dreamed of watching: the birth of a new species." For more, please refer to Jonathan Wells comments here.

The secondary contact phase of allopatric speciation in Darwin's finches
Peter R. Grant and B. Rosemary Grant
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Early Edition, Nov. 16, 2009 | doi 10.1073/pnas.0911761106

Abstract: Speciation, the process by which two species form from one, involves the development of reproductive isolation of two divergent lineages. Here, we report the establishment and persistence of a reproductively isolated population of Darwin's finches on the small Galapagos Island of Daphne Major in the secondary contact phase of speciation. In 1981, an immigrant medium ground finch (Geospiza fortis) arrived on the island. It was unusually large, especially in beak width, sang an unusual song, and carried some Geospiza scandens alleles. We followed the fate of this individual and its descendants for seven generations over a period of 28 years. In the fourth generation, after a severe drought, the lineage was reduced to a single brother and sister, who bred with each other. From then on this lineage, inheriting unusual song, morphology, and a uniquely homozygous marker allele, was reproductively isolated, because their own descendants bred with each other and with no other member of the resident G. fortis population. These observations agree with some expectations of an ecological theory of speciation in that a barrier to interbreeding arises as a correlated effect of adaptive divergence in morphology. However, the important, culturally transmitted, song component of the barrier appears to have arisen by chance through an initial imperfect copying of local song by the immigrant. The study reveals additional stochastic elements of speciation, in which divergence is initiated in allopatry; immigration to a new area of a single male hybrid and initial breeding with a rare hybrid female

See also:

Cressey, D. Darwin's finches tracked to reveal evolution in action, Nature News (16 November 2009) | doi:10.1038/news.2009.1089

ENV reports that Stephen Meyer's Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design is being named one of the top books of 2009 in the prestigious Times Literary Supplement (TLS) annual "Books of the Year" issue.

The selection was made by prominent philosopher (and noted atheist) Thomas Nagel at New York University. The books issue is not online yet, but the TLS website has posted a preview of Nagel's endorsement of the book.

More...

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

It's the ultimate branding strategy. Just slap "neuro" before a word and the goofiest speculation becomes respectable science." Here:

Unfortunately, neurotrash may not always be harmless nonsense in marketing departments about what color of car people choose. Increasingly, in the form of neurolaw, it is catching on in the legal profession, in the same way that lie detector tests did decades ago. What happened there was that some people learned to fake results - people who may well have committed serious crimes. Who knows how many others were damaged by false results when they were innocent?

A serious ethical question also erupts as to why the accused's brain should be scanned anyway. It is not a crime to think about a crime, only to act outside the law. Even if a brain scan showed the accused was thinking about it, that would never prove he did it. Lots of employees hate their boss and wish the boss would just drop dead. If you scanned their brains... well, let's say it's better not to go there. Very few employees actually commit a violent crime against the boss, so the brain scan evidence - even if reliable, which it probably isn't - is not worth gathering.

Also, we must consider traditional principles of law. Under English common law, if a person cannot be convicted on the external evidence of their intent and actions, that person cannot be convicted. Period. It is too bad if the prosecution team loses, even when morally certain that the accused is guilty. But that is an incentive to improve their procedures in normal ways.

Yes, it matters. Your family doctor should be reading this.

Go here for more.

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).

A lawsuit has been filed against the California Science Center by the American Freedom Alliance (AFA) for cancelling the AFA's contract to screen the Darwin's Dilemma documentary on October 25th.

More...

The TimesOnline reports that two children chosen to front Richard Dawkins's latest assault on God could not look more free of the misery he associates with religious baggage. With the slogan "Please don’t label me. Let me grow up and choose for myself", the youngsters with broad grins seem to be the perfect advertisement for the new atheism being promoted by Professor Dawkins and the British Humanist Association.

Except that they are about as far from atheism as it is possible to be. The Times can reveal that Charlotte, 8, and Ollie, 7, are from one of the country's most devout Christian families.

More...

Stephen Meyer op-ed appears on CNN's Web site.

Click HERE to read...

A first edition of Charles Darwin's "On the Origin of Species," which had been kept in a bathroom bookcase in England for years, fetched 103,250 pounds ($171,000) at auction Tuesday, around twice its pre-sale estimate.

Christie's auctioneer offered the book at a sale held in London on the 150th anniversary of the evolutionary work's original publication.

The copy was bought by the family of the current owners for "a few shillings" (dollars) over 50 years ago, the auctioneer said.

----------------------------------------------------

It will be interesting to see what else is underneath their "Holiday Tree" this December 25th.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

At the Mail Online, Allan Hall reports (November 23, 2009) on the case of a man who was conscious for 23 years, but no one knew because he was paralyzed.

A car crash victim has spoken of the horror he endured for 23 years after he was misdiagnosed as being in a coma when he was conscious the whole time.
Rom Houben, trapped in his paralysed body after a car crash, described his real-life nightmare as he screamed to doctors that he could hear them - but could make no sound.

'I screamed, but there was nothing to hear.

Read more here.

I think doctors should be much more careful with the "persistent vegetative state" (PVS) diagnoses than they sometimes are - if consequences follow. Some people - like Rom Houben, above - can be conscious without being mobile. We aren't even sure what consciousness is , after all, so why be definitive about who has it?

Here are some more articles about persistent vegetative state:

Is the patient vegetative or minimally conscious?

Neuroscience: Can locked-in sufferers tweet, using brain signals alone?

Another "human vegetable" turns out to be wired for thought

Also just up at The Mindful Hack is my blog on neuroscience and spirituality issues, which supports The Spiritual Brain:

Sociology: Should you add Satan to your Board of Directors?

Neuroscience and popular culture: Reasons not to buy "neuronovels" for people for Christmas

Neurolaw: Confusing intent with motive is a threat to civil rights

Neuroscience: "The Young and theBureau"

Spiritual Brain: Me 'n YouTube: Discussing my "Hot Apple Cider" essay

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

At Britain's Telegraph (November 04, 2009), Tom Chivers advises that "Darwinian evolutionary theory will help find alien life, says Nasa scientist.

Charles Darwin's theory of evolution may give pointers in the search for alien life, says a Nasa astrobiologist." Here, we learn two competing views:

And so the limits of Darwinian evolution will define the range of planets that can support life - at least Earth-like life."

but

... alien life may not be entirely Earth-like. Dr Baross said: "I'd like to point out there are many different ways for non-Earth-like life to not use light or chemical energy but use some other form like radiation energy, wave energy, or ultraviolet energy."

. And then how can we know that the way they proceed is by Darwinian evolution?

We also learn

"I think all of us really believe that rocky planets, like Earth, are going to be found at some point," said Baross.

Well, lots of people have really believed lots of things that never happened. I happen to agree with him re rocky planets, because in a galaxy the size of ours, we will doubtless find lots of things, possibly extraterrestrial life ...

I am a little more concerned about the underlying agenda in some cases. NASA could be undermining its chances via Darwin worship.

Some more exoplanet stories:

Does our solar system occupy a unique position in the universe or just an ordinary one?

Rare? Solar systems like ours are rare?

Astronomer argues that we can test whether Earth is fine-tuned as a science lab

Serious push to find more exoplanets

Exoplanets: Will intelligence be common or rare?

Also just up at Colliding Universes:

Cosmology: We have now identified the "evil" alternative universe Stand by to open fire

Large Hadron Collider: If this "backwards time travel" is not a joke, it
should be

Coffee!! Bird drops piece of bread: Adds to Large Hadron Collider (God Machine) woes

Exoplanets: The recent pilgrimage to Darwin's shrine

Cosmology: If you needn't worry about paying the rent Friday, you can worry about this stuff

Colliding Universes is my blog on competing theories about our universe.

Hat tip The Mustard Seed.

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
ARN Correspondent

The search for extra-terrestrial life has been a passionate focal point of space exploration for decades. While the idea of aliens eking out an 'other-world' existence continues to fuel scientific and religious debate, most recently with the Pontifical Academy of Sciences' astrobiology conference (1), a similarly concerted search for life has focused on primitive unicellular organisms (2). Astrobiologist Richard Hoover and others have long advocated the idea that simple life exists outside of our own earth (3-4). Since NASA's Galileo spacecraft flyby mission to Jupiter's moon Europa in 1998, there has been no end to discussions over whether or not this ice-bearing moon might today harbor bacteria (5-6).

The notion that life could simply evolve wherever appropriate environmental conditions are to be found is of course one that entails an enormous 'leap of faith'. It is a notion that pushes aside a multitude of critical factors not least of which is the origin of some sort of information-rich genetic material. As Stephen Mojzsis from the University of Colorado analogized, just because the stage is set in a theater does not mean that the actors are present and ready to play their respective roles (7). What processes would have been operational to take a maelstrom of chemical compounds to the required level of minimal function upon which Darwinian natural selection could get a hold?

Paleontologist Niles Eldredge captured the pertinence of this question in his discourse on evolutionary tempos when he wrote how "there is a tremendous difference between a collection of organic molecules unable to abstract the energy needed to catalyze their own replication and an organized system that can do precisely that" (8). Prominent thinkers such as Paul Davies have made their appeal to chance by espousing the idea that life was able to begin precisely because it 'managed' to liberate itself from the shackles of physical laws and the deterministic, algorithmic world (9). Davies argues that for genomes to become as information-rich as they are, life would have had to have originated from random polymers since, according to Davies, an initial randomness is the only way that we could have arrived at specified biological complexity (9). Still, how could chance-generated polymers that lacked any functional and replicative activities have gained such activities purely through random events?

The last twenty years have given us some interesting avenues of research in the field of catalytic RNA. Experiments in the late 1980s and 1990s revealed that certain types of RNA had intrinsic catalytic activities (10). Renowned RNA biochemists such as Tom Cech, Dan Hershlag, Luc Jaeger and Anne Marie Pyle provided key details on how RNA could fold into catalytically active forms (10-12). With the demonstration of its enzyme and information-bearing capabilities, RNA became a hot candidate for the molecule that might have kick started the beginnings of life (13). The message promulgated by supporters of the much-publicized 'RNA World' was that through Darwinian natural selection random mutations might have produced catalytic activities that were further improved through successive generations of replication (13).

Perhaps to the disappointment of 'RNA Worlders', Duke University chemist David Deamer and others convincingly discredited such a message on the grounds that those processes necessary for the formation of RNA polymers would have been highly inefficient on a lifeless earth. Their conclusions were profound:

"It is now clear that an RNA world (or even its molecular precursor, pre-RNA) would be difficult to achieve directly from simple organic molecules dissolved in a global ocean (Joyce, 1991). Even if it were possible to generate chemically activated nucleotides capable of polymerizing into RNA in solution, in the absence of some concentrating mechanism these would be greatly diluted, and no further reactions could occur...[Such] inherent inefficiencies would seem to be inconsistent with moving beyond the initial stages of generating monomers and perhaps random polymers." (13)

My own research during my time at the University of Strasbourg served to further strengthen my own skepticism over the role of RNA in biological origins (14). Using RNA folding algorithms, I worked with others to design special catalytic RNAs called ribozymes that would target and cut highly defined mRNA sequences within the cell (See Figure Below; Ref 15). As I soon found out, not only did these molecular 'scissors' have to meet strict sequence requirements if they were to discriminate between target and erroneous mRNAs but they also had to be short enough so as to free themselves from their reaction products and become available for further rounds of cutting (16). This latter point is of critical importance if catalytic RNA is to exhibit what enzymologists call 'multiple turnover' behavior- that is, the ability to repeatedly catalyze a given reaction (17).

FIGURE: 12% Polyacrylamide Gel showing: Lanes 1,3- target RNA; Lanes 2,4- ribozyme RNA; Lanes 5-7- Time course of in vitro ribozyme digestion (note the cleavage products in the lower half of gel)

One could hardly claim that my meticulous crafting of RNA into functional catalysts paralleled the Darwinian process of selection. Had I not chosen my sequences carefully I would not have obtained the desired effects when I introduced these RNAs into the cell. My own findings echoed the sentiments of protein structuralist Thomas Creighton who commented how "the primary difficulty with the scenario of the RNA world is that it is difficult to explain how RNA molecules could have been synthesized chemically in the primordial soup" (18).

While several types of activity have now been identified in synthetic ribozymes including peptide bond formation and RNA ligation, the range of such activities pales in comparison to the extensive repertoire of known protein functions (19). To what extent can we therefore consider catalytic RNA to be sufficient for the formation of components that might later assemble into the simplest forms of life? Moreover, achieving such activities in the laboratory is only possible through the directed guidance of random RNA molecules towards pre-determined functional end points (19, 20).

Writing in the 1970's, Richard Dawkins cooked up the following 'requiem to naturalistic causation':

"[The Primeval Soup] must have become populated by stable varieties of molecules; stable in that either the individual molecules lasted a long time, or they replicated rapidly, or they replicated accurately. Evolutionary trends toward these three kinds of stability took place in the following sense: if you had sampled the soup at two different times, the later sample would have contained a higher proportion of varieties with high longevity/fecundity/copying-fidelity. This is essentially what a biologist means by evolution when he is speaking of living creatures, and the mechanism is the same- natural selection." (21)

Thirty years on we still have no meat on the bones of Dawkins' dreamy peregrinations. From an RNA World perspective at least I remain thoroughly unconvinced.

Literature Cited
1. Tom Chivers (2009) The Vatican Joins The Search For Alien Life, See http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/6536400/The-Vatican-joins-the-search-for-alien-life.html

2. David Malin (2004) Heaven and Earth: Unseen by the Naked Eye, Phaidon Press, UK 2004, p.284

3. Kate Tobin (2009) Extremophile Hunter: The search is on for extremophiles that may provide insights about life elsewhere in the cosmos, See http://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/science_nation/extremophile.jsp

4. Jeff Hecht (2001) Life will find a way, New Scientist, 17th March, 2001, p.4

5. Patrick Barry (2009) A Tale Of Planetary Woe, See http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2009/06nov_maven.htm?list207640

6. Clues To Possible Life On Europa May Lie Buried In Antarctic Ice (1998) See http://science.nasa.gov/newhome/headlines/ast05mar98_1.htm

7. Stephen Mojzsis spoke on the origins of life in a NOVA documentary that aired on PBS on the 28th of September 2004, entitled "Origins: How Life Began"

8. Niles Eldredge (1987) Life Pulse: Episodes From The Story of The Fossil Record, Facts On File Publications, New York, p.30

9. Paul Davies (1999) The Fifth Miracle, The Search for the Origin and The Meaning of Life, Simon & Schuster, New York, pp.250-257

10. T. R. Cech and D. Herschlag (1997) Group I Ribozymes: Substrate Recognition, Catalytic Strategies and Comparative Mechanistic Analysis, Nucleic Acids and Molecular Biology, Vol 10 pp.1-17

11. L. Jaeger, F. Mitchel, E. Westhof (1997) The Structure Of Group I Ribozymes, Nucleic Acids and Molecular Biology, Vol 10 pp.33-51

12. A.M. Pyle (1997) Catalytic Reaction Mechanisms and Structural Features of Group II Intron Ribozymes, Nucleic Acids and Molecular Biology, Vol 10 pp.75-107

13. David Deamer, Jason Dworkin, Scott Sandford, Max Bernstein, Louis Allamandola (2002) The First Cell Membranes, Astrobiology, Vol 2 pp.371-381

14. Robert Deyes (1998) Unpublished observations, Work done at LPCCNM-UPRES 2308, Faculte De Pharmacie, Universite Louis Pasteur, Illkirch, France

15. Michael Zuker (2003) Mfold web server for nucleic acid folding and hybridization prediction, Nucleic Acids Res, Vol 31 pp.3406-15 (this is an update on the version I used in my research)

16. Daniel Herschlag (1991) Implications Of Ribozyme Kinetics For Targeting The Cleavage Of Specific RNA Molecules In Vivo : More Isn't Always Better, Proc. Natl, Acad, Sci. USA, Vol 88 pp.6921-6925

17. Thomas Creighton (1993) Proteins, Structure and Molecular Properties, W.H. Freeman and Company, New York, p.387

18. Ibid, p.107

19. Michael P. Robertson and William G. Scott (2007) The Structural Basis of Ribozyme-Catalyzed RNA Assembly, Science, Vol. 315 pp.1549-1553

20. Gordon C. Mills and Dean Kenyon (1996) The RNA World: A Critique, Origins & Design 17:1, See http://www.arn.org/docs/odesign/od171/rnaworld171.htm#note4

21. Richard Dawkins (1989) The Selfish Gene, 2nd Ed, Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK, p.18

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

For Uncommon Descent Question 12: Can Darwinism beat the odds?, we have declared a winner, and it is Philip W at 11.

Philip W must provide me with a valid postal address* via oleary@sympatico.ca, in order to receive the prize, a free copy of the Privileged Planet DVD.

Philip W tells me that he is a pilot, and I liked his analysis of issues around flight:

Darwinian evolution can not possibly explain the life which we find on this planet. Let's explore one of these methods by asking the question "How, and why, did flight originate?" Before any creature took to the air there was nothing there to eat and so why would any creature, even an intelligent creature, want to fly. There could have been no powerful survival benefit in flight beyond perhaps escaping a predator to recommend it. Also, there are many other and far simpler ways to escape a predator. Flight is perhaps the most complicated and sophisticated activity that any creature possesses which means that it would have taken an extraordinary number of attempts by random evolutionary methods to make it a reality. There is another and even more fundamental question which underlies biological flight. Did nature, completely unguided by intelligence, just somehow know that flight was even possible or achievable? Humans, with their intelligence, were able to make gliders and toy airplanes long ago but they had an objective and they also had the model of the birds to follow. Even at that it took a long time to achieve human flight despite the huge cost in time, effort, and treasure which they were willing to expend. No amount of tinkering, especially without a conscious objective, could possibly account for biological flight. There are simply too many things which would have had to happen all at once for that to be possible. Remember that nature had no way of knowing that flight was possible and it certainly had no previous conception of flight. Without having an objective how can random tinkering achieve anything?

Go here for more.

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).

According to James Pusey, writing in Nature, "Charles Darwin's banner was first unfurled in China during the Reform Movement of 1895-98, in response to China's defeat in the Sino-Japanese War." There were two groups seeking change: the reformers, who were loyal to the Manchu Qing Dynasty, and the revolutionaries, who wanted a clean break with the past.

"The watchword of the reform movement was 'bianfa', meaning 'change our institutions'. But the very word 'change' was anathema to the conservative officialdom of China. So reformers turned to Darwin as a foreign authority on change, presenting him not first and foremost as a natural scientist who had discovered an amazing fact of life, but as a political scientist who had discovered a cosmic imperative for change."

Some today see Darwin as inspiring revolution (Source here)

This led to a change in the way intellectuals approached ethics: reform meant that traditional codes of conduct were fast losing their appeal.

"Meanwhile, the Europeans waved Darwin's banner to justify imperialism. Dubbing themselves 'the fit', they declared their right to rule the 'unfit'. And some Chinese accepted this argument. Liang Qichao, one of the leading reformers, said in 1898: "If a country can strengthen itself and make itself one of the fittest, then, even if it annihilates the unfit and the weak, it can still not be said to be immoral. Why? Because it is a law of evolution.""

The reformers were very interested in democracy, but realized the people were totally unprepared to handle it. Their solution was to emphasise the step-by-step gradualism of Darwinism with direction and stability provided by an appeal to natural law. The revolutionaries also embraced Darwin, drawing inspiration from the thought that the "superior survive and the inferior are defeated". "The man who introduced Darwinian evolution to the reformers of 1895 was Yan Fu."

"Yan wanted democracy for China - even anarchic democracy, without presidential rule. In Whence Strength? his call for reform was revolutionary: "Establish a parliament at the capital and let each province and county elect its own officials." But 'Darwin' held him back from real revolution. Yan believed that step-by-step progress was a fixed natural law, so stages had to be taken in order. America had skipped constitutional monarchy and gone straight to democracy, but a resulting class war, he felt, would be their undoing. "Should we, then, now throw away all loyalty to our ruler?" he asked in his essay. "We most certainly should not! Because the time has not arrived. ... Our people are not yet ready to rule themselves.""

The reformers and the revolutionaries debated vigorously "with both sides wildly waving Darwin's banner" The leaders of these movements imbibed the message of scientific racism coming from America and Europe and presented themselves as 'fit' to rule.

"Sadly, both camps also accepted the pervasive Western view that Darwin had proven races unequal - that one race was 'fitter' and therefore better than another. The reformers had originally done so to disassociate themselves from those who had fallen prey to the imperialists, such as the Africans and Indians. But in their exile in Japan, reformers and revolutionaries alike turned angrily on the Manchus as scapegoats, labelling them evolutionary low life, whose 'unnatural' conquest of the Han Chinese was responsible for China's peril."

The tensions after the end of World War I were extreme. The traditional pacifist Chinese philosophies were perceived as weak and this led to a philosophical and political vacuum. In their place came Marxism: this "seemed to them the fittest faith on Earth to help China to survive".

"This was not, of course, all Darwin's doing, but Darwin was involved in it all. To believe in Marxism, one had to believe in inexorable forces pushing mankind, or at least the elect, to inevitable progress, through set stages (which could, however, be skipped). One had to believe that history was a violent, hereditary class struggle (almost a 'racial' struggle); that the individual must be severely subordinated to the group; that an enlightened group must lead the people for their own good; that the people must not be humane to their enemies; that the forces of history assured victory to those who were right and who struggled.
Who taught Chinese these things? Marx? Mao? No. Darwin."

Ideas have legs and ideas walk. These developments are possible because Darwinism is more than a scientific theory: it is fundamentally a philosophical stance about the nature of reality. The materialism that underpins the Darwinian worldview has spawned scientific racism + eugenics in the West, and revolutionary fervor in the East. We should help the next generation understand and recognize the significance of such matters, and encourage them to ask questions about the philosophical roots of science.

Global Darwin: Revolutionary road
James Pusey
Nature 462, 162-163 (12 November 2009) | doi:10.1038/462162a (Restricted access link)

In China, under the threat of Western imperialism, interpretations of Darwin's ideas paved the way for Marx, Lenin and Mao, argues James Pusey in the third in our series on reactions to evolutionary theory.

The American Freedom Alliance will sponsor The Origin of Life Debates at the Saban Theatre in Beverly Hills, California on December 30th.

This will be a Public Debate featuring...
Stephen Meyer, Rick Sternberg, Michael Shermer and Don Prothero

Two advocates for Intelligent Design; Two advocates for Evolution

More here...

The audio of this interview is on this LINK.

And Stephen Meyer will be on the Dennis Miller Show again on December 2nd. Here's the LINK.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

For Uncommon Descent Question 11: Can biotechnology bring back extinct animals?, we have declared a winner, and it is binary! Twins!

Aussie ID and Nakashima.

I loved Aussie ID's information about the specifics of attempts to restore the thylacine - he calls it a Tasmanian tiger. Possibly due to culture issues, I am more familiar with hearing the animal called a Tasmanian wolf. But anyone interested should review his information.

I'd love to know what a staked out* sled pack in northern Canada would make of the marsupial Tasmanian. He doesn't look to me like he has three coats of hair, so he might need to work in the office.

I also appreciated Nakashima's thoughtful reflections on the question of how behaviour might not follow the physical recreation of an animal. I suspect he's right; it's an open question indeed.

Each of you must provide me with a valid postal address** in order to receive the prize, a free copy of Steven Meyer's Signature in the Cell (Harper One, 2009).

If you go here, you will get a bit of background on the contest, and read many interesting contributions, but for now, here is the skinny:

This one's a bit of fun, but there is a serious purpose behind it.

In "A Life of Its Own: Where will synthetic biology lead us?" (September 28, 2009 New Yorker mag), Michael Specter reports, "If the science truly succeeds, it will make it possible to supplant the world created by Darwinian evolution with one created by us."

Jurassic Park, anyone?

Additional notes on interesting posts as well.

Go here for more.

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).

Earlier this year, Eugene Koonin published a masterly analysis of the impact of genomics on evolutionary thinking. This proved to be too meaty a study for a concise blog, and my initial draft was abandoned. Happily, a shorter overview has now been published, and this abstracts salient points from the research paper. Koonin notes that the 1959 Origin centennial was "marked by the consolidation of the modern synthesis" but subsequent years have witnessed great changes which have undermined its credibility.

"The edifice of the modern synthesis has crumbled, apparently, beyond repair."

It is time for a paradigm change - but neoDarwinists are stuck because they have so much philosophical baggage holding them down (Image credit: Shaun Curry/AFP/Getty Images, Source here)

Koonin uses the metaphor of "the landscape of evolutionary biology". There are three distinct revolutions have occurred over the past half-century: the molecular, the microbiological and the genomic revolutions.

"[T]his year is the perfect time to ask some crucial questions: how has evolutionary biology changed in the 50 years since the hardening of the modern synthesis? Is it still a viable conceptual framework for evolutionary thinking and research?"

The molecular revolution culminated, says Koonin, in the neutral theory, which means that purifying selection is more common than positive selection. The microbiological revolution brought the world of prokaryotes into the domain of evolutionary biology, but it then became apparent that the concepts of Darwinism and the modern synthesis "applied only to multicellular organisms". The genomic revolution revealed that the living world was "a far cry from the orderly, rather simple picture envisioned by Darwin and the creators of the modern synthesis". In particular, it is now interpreted as an "extremely dynamic world where horizontal gene transfer (HGT) is not a rarity but the regular way of existence, and mobile genetic elements that are vehicles of HGT are ubiquitous".

"The discovery of pervasive HGT and the overall dynamics of the genetic universe destroys not only the tree of life as we knew it but also another central tenet of the modern synthesis inherited from Darwin, namely gradualism. In a world dominated by HGT, gene duplication, gene loss and such momentous events as endosymbiosis, the idea of evolution being driven primarily by infinitesimal heritable changes in the Darwinian tradition has become untenable."

Koonin is serious in saying that all the concepts of the modern synthesis are in need of a fundamental overhaul.

"Moreover, with pan-adaptationism gone forever, so is the notion of evolutionary progress that is undoubtedly central to traditional evolutionary thinking, even if this is not always made explicit.
The summary of the state of affairs on the 150th anniversary of the Origin is somewhat shocking. In the postgenomic era, all major tenets of the modern synthesis have been, if not outright overturned, replaced by a new and incomparably more complex vision of the key aspects of evolution. So, not to mince words, the modern synthesis is gone."

Koonin tentatively identifies two candidates to fill the vacuum left by the discarded modern synthesis. The first of these appears to emphasis the role of chance; the second appears to emphasise law.

"The first is the population-genetic theory of the evolution of genomic architecture, according to which evolving complexity is a side product of non-adaptive evolutionary processes occurring in small populations where the constraints of purifying selection are weak. The second area with a potential for major unification could be the study of universal patterns of evolution such as the distribution of evolutionary rates of orthologous genes, which is nearly the same in organisms from bacteria to mammals or the equally universal anticorrelation between the rate of evolution and the expression level of a gene. The existence of these universals suggests that simple theory of the kind used in statistical physics might explain some crucial aspects of evolution."

It is not difficult to predict that Koonin's analysis will not be received quietly by the very vocal leaders of evolutionary biology. They are still entrenched in neoDarwinism and show no signs of conceding any ground to anyone. From a design perspective, Koonin's analysis of the changing landscape of evolutionary biology is spot on. His two candidates for moving forward the theoretical framework are interesting - but lack any recognition of purposeful design in nature. Dembski's design filter concept is relevant here: there are features in the biological world that are best understood in terms of stochastic processes; there are other features that are best understood in terms of natural law; but there are also features that require a design perspective in order to understand them. It is the latter element, prominent in the thinking of design-orientated scientists, which needs to be part of any discussion of where evolutionary biology is heading.

The Origin at 150: is a new evolutionary synthesis in sight?
Eugene V. Koonin
Trends in Genetics, 25(11), November 2009, 473-475.

Abstract: The 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin and the 150th jubilee of the On the Origin of Species could prompt a new look at evolutionary biology. The 1959 Origin centennial was marked by the consolidation of the modern synthesis. The edifice of the modern synthesis has crumbled, apparently, beyond repair. The hallmark of the Darwinian discourse of 2009 is the plurality of evolutionary processes and patterns. Nevertheless, glimpses of a new synthesis might be discernible in emerging universals of evolution.

Darwinian evolution in the light of genomics
Eugene V. Koonin
Nucleic Acids Research, 2009, 37(4), 1011-1034 | doi:10.1093/nar/gkp089

ABSTRACT: Comparative genomics and systems biology offer unprecedented opportunities for testing central tenets of evolutionary biology formulated by Darwin in the Origin of Species in 1859 and expanded in the Modern Synthesis 100 years later. Evolutionary-genomic studies show that natural selection is only one of the forces that shape genome evolution and is not quantitatively dominant, whereas non-adaptive processes are much more prominent than previously suspected. Major contributions of horizontal gene transfer and diverse selfish genetic elements to genome evolution undermine the Tree of Life concept. An adequate depiction of evolution requires the more complex concept of a network or 'forest' of life. There is no consistent tendency of evolution towards increased genomic complexity, and when complexity increases, this appears to be a nonadaptive consequence of evolution under weak purifying selection rather than an adaptation. Several universals of genome evolution were discovered including the invariant distributions of evolutionary rates among orthologous genes from diverse genomes and of paralogous gene family sizes, and the negative correlation between gene expression level and sequence evolution rate. Simple, non-adaptive models of evolution explain some of these universals, suggesting that a new synthesis of evolutionary biology might become feasible in a not so remote future.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

My concern with "neurolaw" (the attempt to scan brains to identify criminal behaviour) is this: Law is, or should be, concerned with "intent", not "motive."

Yes, yes, in detective fiction, everything hinges on motive: Cousin Harry murdered Aunt Sally to get her fortune; plain Jane murdered pretty Kitty because Kitty got the man; squadron leader Beeder murdered that guy because of a long ago wartime betrayal ....

However, real law depends on design inferences, not speculations about motive. Here is the story I sometimes tell to explain that:

Tom and Dick are enjoying beer and wings in a pub.

Suddenly, the conversation becomes loud and animated.

Tom seizes a dinner knife and tries to plunge it into Dick's chest. He is restrained by burly patron Harry and several others.

The whole thing is caught on videocam.

Mid-uproar, the bartender calls the police, who charge Tom with attempted manslaughter.

The police need not know his motive, only his intent - which was pretty obvious. That's a design inference.

Later, the investigating officer learns how the quarrel began: Dick had informed Tom that he was seeing Tom's girlfriend, so Tom should just buzz off. Tom didn't like that idea.

Knowing a person's motive certainly helps us understand the story. But intent - the demonstrated attempt at murder in this case - is what matters in law.

Here's the difficulty: Suppose Tom had just got up from the table and left, and spent three months fantasizing in the wee hours about killing Dick - without ever seeing either Dick or the former girlfriend again. He has plenty of motive, but the fact is, he never did anything.

Then Tom is of no interest to the law, as it now stands - though his family doctor should be concerned. Tom needs a more constructive way to deal with rejection. (He also needs a more faithful girlfriend, but all in good time.)

However, in a materialist environment, I would hardly be surprised to hear theories about Tom's violence genes and violence neurons, some based on neuroscience techniques - even if all the violence was inside his own head. Some may argue for action against Tom "pre-crime". That's where the threat to civil liberties comes in.

Neurolaw seems like materialism applied to law, hence a threat to civil rights, because it can easily confuse motive with intent - overturning centuries of progress in justice.

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

Intelligently Designed Nanotechnology

As Casey Luskin reveals in this episode of ID the Future, eminent biologists have said that they must continually remind themselves that what they see in biology evolved, and was not designed. But now engineers are turning to biology to replace human technology because biological pathways provide superior solutions to biomedical-technological needs. Is this trend more consistent with an evolved biosphere, or an intelligent designed one? Listen to this podcast and decide for yourself.

Listen here.

Yes, but sometimes people don't see the forest for the trees. The majority of humans think, where it is safe to do so, that there is a God, based on personal experience. No surprise there. If there is a God, he can communicate with humans when he wishes to do so, just as Elizabeth, Queen of England, can do*. And she would be the first to say that her rank is at a fundamentally much lower grade.

The question is, why is this controversial? Why should it be any surprise? Why do I keep running into efforts to prove it is not true?

If that is really science (space aliens, multiple universes), I could not distinguish it from witchcraft or some other foolishness. I think we'd just get more done if we accepted, with Antony Flew , that There IS a God and got on with useful projects in science, like cures for AIDS and non-polluting sources of energy. Oh, and weight loss programs for people who used to suffer from famine but are now afflicted with obesity - an outcome of modern science.

*I still have my father's commission, courtesy Elizabeth's father, advancing him to the rank of officer.

Also: Chris Mooney's War on Intelligent Design

Listen here.

On this episode of ID the Future, CSC's Rob Crowther interviews Casey Luskin about his in-depth response to Chris Mooney's The Republican War on Science, correcting fourteen major factual and logical errors in Mooney's chapter on intelligent design. How can Chris Mooney be so wrong on this issue? Listen in and find out.

Read the original response to Mooney here.

Yes, well, I don't know why anyone should be surprised. Darwinism has morphed into a major public enterprise and anyone who wants his finger in the pie ... I think we can wait a long time before a guy like Chris Mooney even needs to get anything right.

More stories from the Post-Darwinist:

Interesting design inference concerning a historic photo

Morning coffee!! Bear meets cat ... No! No! Not what you think!

Podcasts in the intelligent design controversy, with comments

Darwinism and popular culture: A tour of the textbooks

(Note: This series may sometimes be interrupted by news from the crisis in intellectual freedom in Canada. If you are not interested, just scroll down.)

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).

Today Amazon.com announced their bestselling books of 2009 and Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design (HarperOne) by Dr. Stephen C. Meyer made the top ten in the science category.

More...

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In Does curiosity kill more than the cat?, prof Stanley Fish wonders

Last Thursday, the new Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities James A. Leach gave an address at the University of Virginia with the catchy title, "Is There an Inalienable Right to Curiosity?"

Taking his cue from Thomas Jefferson's "trinity of inalienable rights: 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,'" Leach reasoned that even though Jefferson never wrote about curiosity, "a right to be curious would have been a natural reflection of his own personality."

Interesting, considering that academic freedom is under huge assault these days.

I have said in private correspondence as follows:

It is good to be curious about the exact cause of Alzheimer syndrome or whether that fellow hanging around in the parking lot has lawful business around here.

It is not good to be curious about whether my neighbour is a closet racist or having an affair with the letter carrier.

I'd say curiosity is an inescapable and necessary human quality that must be steered in an appropriate direction.

Hat tip: Stephanie West Allen at Brains on Purpose PS: I know a bit about cats. Curiosity does kill cats sometimes. But kidney disease is their biggest problem. Cats are obligate carnivores. So they generally last as long as their kidneys - or so a vet once told me, and in my experience it is certainly true.

Also just up at The Mindful Hack, my blog on neuroscience issues:

Do you really need a refrigerator when you have this?

Materialism and popular culture: The human brain as a machine?

Spiritual Brain: Polish translation rights bought

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).

Darwin was a great composer of metaphors, of which "natural selection" is the best known. Today, few are aware of negative responses from scientists uncomfortable with Darwin's imagery. One of these was Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-originator of evolution by natural selection.

"Wallace remarked, in his article Mr Darwin's Metaphors Liable to Misconception (1868), that the Malthusian progressions and struggle for existence were self-evident "facts". Yet because natural selection seemed to personify a perceptive and forward-thinking selector, or god, he urged Darwin to replace the term with "survival of the fittest". [See also here]
Darwin, however, had brushed him off. "Everyone knows what is meant and is implied by such metaphorical expressions," he had demurred. "And they are almost necessary for brevity"."

Does "natural selection" have the dominant role in unravelling Darwin's entangled bank? (source here)

In a perceptive essay, Daniel Todes focuses attention on the reactions of Russian biologists to Darwin's writings. Many of these naturalists "were evolutionists before 1859", so they did not dissent from common ancestry. However, their experiences of the living world were quite different from Darwin and Wallace, who drew their inspiration from densely populated tropical forests and related habitats. They witnessed a struggle for existence that matched the description Thomas Malthus had given of human communities. Using the same logic, Darwin and Wallace were stimulated to think about winners and losers in populations of animals and plants. The Russian scientists lived in a different world.

[They] "investigated a vast under-populated continental plain. For them, nature was not an "entangled bank" - the image Darwin took from the Brazilian jungle. It was a largely empty Siberian expanse in which overpopulation was rare and only the struggle of organisms against a harsh environment was dramatic."

The Russian response to living in a harsh environment was to develop "the language of communalism - stressing not individual initiative and struggle, but the importance of cooperation within social groups and the virtues of social harmony." The analysis of Malthus did not match the biological communities in their part of the world, so Darwin's metaphor of the "struggle for existence" was not, in their view, well grounded.

"Russian political commentators of the left, right and centre reviled Malthus as an apologist for predatory capitalism and soulless individualism." [. . .]
"[F]ew Russians shared Darwin and Wallace's respect for Malthus, and [. . .] many saw the struggle for existence as an infusion of the British enthusiasm for individualistic competition into natural science. Darwin's theory, as Danilevskii put it, was a "purely English doctrine"."

Dissent did not apply just to the "struggle for existence" metaphor. Natural selection was equally controversial. The Russians wanted to give more emphasis to concepts like the "harmony of nature" and "cooperation". Many of them advocated "the theory of mutual aid". Indeed, Todes says that it became a "staple of Russian evolutionary thought".

"Darwin too had called attention to such cooperation, but the theory of mutual aid went further. It held that the central aspect of the struggle for existence is an organism's struggle with abiotic conditions, that organisms join forces in this struggle, that such mutual aid is favoured by natural selection, and that cooperation so vitiated intraspecific competition as to render it unimportant in the origin of new species."

This essay highlights issues which have been discussed often by design-orientated scientists. These are identified below.

1. Scientific criticism of natural selection as an evolutionary mechanism. It will come as a surprise to many that dissent about the role of natural selection comes from within science. Such dissent was present in Darwin's day and it is still significant. This blog has drawn attention to relevant papers here and here. Those who portray requests for a 'critical evaluation of the role of natural selection' as religiously motivated are living in denial of history and are undermining the integrity of science.

2. Scientific analysis of harmony within the natural world. Due to the dominance of Darwinism, ecological studies have been imbalanced. Evidences of populations regulating their own numbers and of cooperative behaviour have been underplayed or reinterpreted in terms of a "struggle for survival".

3. Science is not a culture-free discipline. Objectivity is a worthy aspiration but it cannot be fully realised because scientists are unaware of most of the cultural norms they bring to their work. Since many aspects of culture are linked to religious/secular convictions, it is absurd when individuals and organisations try to set up demarcation arguments to separate science from ideology (whether religious or atheistic).

"Researchers bring their life experiences and culture with them into the field and laboratory, and in the course of their investigations actively originate, interpret, develop and reject metaphorical pathways. As is shown by the reception of Darwin's theory in Russia, the deployment and criticism of metaphors are part of the ineffably human process by which scientists mobilise their experiences and values to explore the infinite complexity of nature."

Global Darwin: Contempt for competition
Daniel Todes
Nature 462, 36-37 (5 November 2009) | doi:10.1038/462036a (restricted access here)

Darwin's idea of the 'struggle for existence' struck a chord with his fellow countrymen. But Russians rejected the alien metaphor, says Daniel Todes, in the second of four weekly pieces on reactions to evolutionary theory.

See also:

Todes, D.P. Darwin's Malthusian Metaphor and Russian Evolutionary Thought, 1859-1917, Isis, 78(4), December 1987, 537-551

Monday, November 16th, Stephen Meyer and Chris Mooney will be on The Michael Medved Show (second hour, 1pm PT/4pm ET).

Mooney is a diehard Darwin defender that various Fellows here at the CSC have debated in the past, and he is someone we have reported about over the years. His view of science is elitist and arrogant, and he has recommended such things as suppressing dissenting views from the media, to spinning science in such a way as to manipulate public opinion.

More...

Casey's op-ed piece in the Washington Examiner.

More...

------------------------------------------------------

Ad hominem attacks do serve as conversation stoppers when the other side has nothing to offer. Well done Casey!

A description of the Craig-Ayala debate was provided by Bradley Monton, moderator of the debate, which you can access HERE.

In Thinking Matters you can access the audio of the debate, and William Lane Craig's take on the debate. Click HERE.

Ask PZ Myers. Next Monday, November 16th in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

Dr. Jerry Bergman and Dr. PZ Myers will be debating the topic: "Should Intelligent Design Be Taught In The Schools?"

This event is sponsored by the Christian Student Fellowship and Campus Atheists, Skeptics and Humanists.

The event is held at the North Star Ballroom, St. Paul Student Center (Buford Ave. near Cleveland Ave.) 7:30 to 9:30 PM, student center, St. Paul campus.

Neuroscience is, unfortunately, increasingly taken over by what I often describe as neurobullshipping. You know, neuroeconomics,, neurolaw ... It basically amounts to determining which regions of the brains of carefully chosen subjects light up when certain propositions are introduced.

Relief at last!

Here, at New Humanist, Raymond Tallis rallies the neuroskeptics ("Neurotrash", Volume 124, Issue 6, November/December 2009). 'Bout time someone did, I'd say. What's really good is that it comes from an unexpected quarter, at least for me.

He writes,

Hardly a day passes without yet another breathless declaration in the popular press about the relevance of neuroscientific findings to everyday life. The articles are usually accompanied by a picture of a brain scan in pixel-busting Technicolor and are frequently connected to references to new disciplines with the prefix "neuro-". Neuro-jurisprudence, neuro-economics, neuro-aesthetics, neuro-theology are encroaching on what was previously the preserve of the humanities. Even philosophers - who should know better, being trained one hopes, in scepticism - have entered the field with the discipline of "Exp-phi" or experimental philosophy. Starry-eyed sages have embraced "neuro-ethics", in which ethical principles are examined by using brain scans to determine people's moral intuitions when they are asked to deliberate on the classic dilemmas. Benjamin Libet's experiments on decisions to act and the work on mirror neurons (observed directly in monkeys but only inferred, and still contested, in humans) have been ludicrously over-interpreted to demonstrate respectively that our brains call the shots (and we do not have free will) and to point to a neural basis for empathy.

Yes, pop neuroscience is beginning to sound more like "evolutionary" psychology all the time.

Responding to Tallis's article's title, "Neurotrash", I wrote to friends to say, more or less,

What we need is a really big neuro-trash can.

The result of all this nonsense is that neuroscience gets discredited when it is, used appropriately, an immense help in medicine.

Remember, it was neuroscience that established that stroke victims were losing use of limbs through learned helplessness, not irreversible brain damage. Jeffrey Schwartz, Vince Paquette, Mario Beauregard and others have also demonstrated that non-drug, non-invasive treatments of mental disorders actually work - especially important for those disorders that cannot be effectively treated by drugs or surgery. (I am sure there are others whose work I do not know.)

Here's what I know for sure: I remember the rows on rows of beds in the chronic care hospital I used to volunteer at in the 1960s. Compare that to the much more favourable prospects brought about by the Decade of the Brain (1990s)! But it wasn't easy. One neuroscientist all but lost his career introducing the "learned helplessness" concept (why stroke patients, in many cases, lost the use of limbs through simple non-use). Only neuroscience could really have uncovered that.

That's the real story, and Tallis talks about it. We should stick to it.

It's also why I always say neuroscience should stay close to medicine and far from silliness - like which area of the brain lights up if a woman decides to buy the flaming yellow pants with movie star decals instead of the quiet brown pair*.

Seriously, however, in the justice system, neuroscience, inappropriately used, could be quite dangerous. Cf neurolaw.

If we can't convict an alleged perpetrator of a crime on the external evidence, we should not be trying to scan his brain.

Who cares what that guy thinks anyway?

It's not a crime around here to think, only to act in a way that is outside the law. If the prosecution can't prove he did it, then ... they can't make their case, and that's just too bad for them.

And, as I like to say, if you don't like English Common Law (= whose basic principle is that the accused is innocent unless proven guilty), please live in some jurisdiction where no one has ever heard of it. We like it here.

In the meantime, enough with this neurolaw stuff.

(*The Unforgivably Bad Taste region, maybe? Wonder where it is? Not many women could make that work.)

Review Of The Ninth Chapter Of Signature In The Cell by Stephen Meyer
ISBN: 978-0-06-147278-7; Imprint: Harper One

By Robert Deyes
ARN Correspondent

Former Nature editor Philip Ball once commented that 'there is no assembly plant so delicate, versatile and adaptive as the cell" (1). Emeritus Professor Theodore Brown chose to wax metaphorical by likening the cell to a fully-fledged factory, with its own complex functional relationships and interactions akin to what we observe in our own manufacturing facilities (2). In recent years the seemingly intractable problem of explaining how the first cell came into existence through chance events, otherwise known as the 'Chance Hypothesis', has become more acute than ever as scientists have begun to realize that a minimum suite of functional components must exist for cells to be operational. Stephen Meyer's summary of the current state of this so-called 'minimal complexity' research is profoundly insightful:

"The simplest extant cell, Mycoplasma genitalium - a tiny bacterium that inhabits the urinary tract requires "only" 482 proteins to perform its necessary functions and 562,000 bases of DNA...to assemble those proteins...Based upon minimal-complexity experiments, some scientists speculate (but have not demonstrated) that a simple one-celled organism might have been able to survive with as few as 250-400 genes" (p.201).

For renowned biochemist David Deamer the first cell would at the very least have needed a polymerase enzyme to transcribe from a template such as DNA, a constant source of supplementary materials notably nucleotides, amino acids and ATP and enzymes that faithfully carry out DNA replication during cell division (3). To suppose that even a hypothetical first cell would just come together from a gimish of prebiotic compounds undergoing continuous destructive dilution is to appeal to the miraculous (4). Attempts to reconstruct such a cell start off from a fairly elaborate point of departure in which enzymes and other catalysts are already present and functional (5).

Just how important these functional enzymes are was brought to bear in a study led by University of North Carolina biochemist Richard Wolfenden (6). Wolfenden's team was able to demonstrate how a reaction with a half life of 2.3 billion years occurred in milliseconds when supplied with the necessary enzymes. Such spectacular differences are not uncommon. As Wolfenden remarked:

"What we're defining here is what evolution had to overcome...the enzyme is surmounting a tremendous obstacle, a reaction half-life of 2.3 billion years...Without catalysts, there would be no life at all, from microbes to humans. It makes you wonder how natural selection operated in such a way as to produce a protein that got off the ground as a primitive catalyst for such an extraordinarily slow reaction." (6)

Through a molecular technique known as random mutagenesis, scientists have now quantified the amino acid sequence variability that functional proteins can tolerate. Worthy of note in this field is the work of former Cambridge biochemist Douglas Axe whose data forms a pillar for the case that Meyer presents in his book. Using locally-randomized sequence libraries of a portion of the antibiotic resistance enzyme Beta lactamase, Axe calculated that somewhere between 1 in 10exp50 and 1 in 10exp77 150 amino acid-long protein folds form configurations with a Beta lactamase function (7). Of these one in 10exp50 to 1 in 10exp74 form folded structures that might perform any number of alternative functions (7).

Based on the structural requirements of enzyme activity Axe emphatically argued against a global-ascent model of the function landscape in which incremental improvements of an arbitrary starting sequence "lead to a globally optimal final sequence with reasonably high probability" (7). For a protein made from scratch in a prebiotic soup, the odds of finding such globally optimal solutions are infinitesimally small- somewhere between 1 in 10exp140 and 1 in 10exp164 for a 150 amino acid long sequence if we factor in the probabilities of forming peptide bonds and of incorporating only left handed amino acids.

In a 1981 legal challenge involving the Arkansas Board Of Education, astronomer Chandra Wickramasinghe appeared for the defense as an expert witness. Taking on the dogmatic neo-Darwinist view on the origins of life, Wickramasinghe unwaveringly proclaimed that the probability of obtaining the information necessary for making the simplest cell by chance was 1 in 10exp40,000 (8). These estimates not only exceeded by many powers of 10 the total number of atoms available in the universe but also closely matched the minimal complexity predictions discussed above. By pulling together these probabilistic threads of evidence in Signature In The Cell, Meyer has relegated naturalistic life origin models to little more than fanciful speculation. His piece-by-piece dismissal of the chance hypothesis is beautifully executed as is the personal narrative that interconnects the various portions of his scientific story.

Additional Literature Cited
1. Philip Ball (2001) Life's Lesson In Design, Nature, Vol 409 pp. 413-416
2. Theodore Brown (2003) The Art of the Scientific Metaphor, The Scientist, Volume 17, Issue 21, p. 10
3. David Deamer, Jason Dworkin, Scott Sandford, Max Bernstein, Louis Allamandola (2002) The First Cell Membranes, Astrobiology, Volume 2, pp. 371-381
4. Charles Thaxton, Walter Bradley and Roger Olsen (1984) The Mystery of Life's Origin: Reassessing Current Theories, Published by Lewis and Stanley, Dallas, Texas, pp.42-68
5.Tamsin Osborne (2008) 'Artificial Cell' Can Make Its Own Genes, New Scientist,1 April, 2008, See http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13568-artificial-cell-can-make-its-own-genes.html
6. Without Enzyme, Biological Reaction Essential To Life Takes 2.3 billion Years: 2008 UNC Study, See http://www.med.unc.edu/www/news/2008-news-archives/november/without-enzyme-biological-reaction-essential-to-life-takes-2-3-billion-years-unc-study/?searchterm=Wolfenden
7. Douglas D. Axe (2004) Estimating the Prevalence of Protein Sequences Adopting Functional Enzyme Folds, Journal Of Molecular Biology, pp. 1295-1315
8. See Chandra Wickramasinghe's testimony at the 1981 Arkansas trial on creation which can be found at http://www.panspermia.org/chandra.htm

The symposium will take place from 9:30 a.m. to 3:45 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 10, in the Frey Moot Courtroom of at the School of Law, located on St. Thomas' downtown Minneapolis campus.

The symposium, free and open to the public, will bring together scholars to debate and analyze various constitutional and philosophical issues surrounding evolutionism and intelligent design, particularly as they affect U.S. public schools.

Among the speakers will be Casey Luskin of the Discovery Institute.

More...

This topic forces us to assess the relationship between science and spirituality: is the invisible spiritual realm generated from the material or should it be considered as having a separate existence? Is religion a phenomenon that can ultimately be explained by science in naturalistic ways, or does religion represent a dimension of reality that cannot be directly probed by the methodologies of science? In an essay in Science, Elizabeth Culotta writes:

"[I]n the past 15 years, a growing number of researchers have followed Darwin's lead and explored the hypothesis that religion springs naturally from the normal workings of the human mind. This new field, the cognitive science of religion, draws on psychology, anthropology, and neuroscience to understand the mental building blocks of religious thought."

Neanderthal burial, considered to be 60,000 years old (Kabara, Israel). Material culture analysis can stimulate hypotheses but the interpretations can easily be dominated by researcher presuppositions. (Source here)

Darwin approached the topic from the perspective of his thesis on the origin of species. He looked for evidence that religion itself could be explained by small incremental steps in human cognition and social structure. He started his "story" with the idea that primitive people had no belief system in an all-powerful God. He wrote: "There is no evidence that man was aboriginally endowed with the ennobling belief in the existence of an Omnipotent God. On the contrary there is ample evidence, derived not from hasty travellers, but from men who have long resided with savages, that numerous races have existed and still exist, who have no idea of one or more gods, and who have no words in their languages to express such an idea." But if the enquiry starts at a much more rudimentary level of spirituality, the emerging picture is different:

"If, however, we include under the term "religion" the belief in unseen or spiritual agencies, the case is wholly different; for this belief seems to be almost universal with the less civilised races. Nor is it difficult to comprehend how it arose. As soon as the important faculties of the imagination, wonder, and curiosity, together with some power of reasoning, had become partially developed, man would naturally have craved to understand what was passing around him, and have vaguely speculated on his own existence." (Source here)

Culotta quotes the above passage to illustrate the thought that "to Charles Darwin, the origin of religious belief was no mystery". Yet those following in Darwin's footsteps have been puzzled, because humans put extraordinary resources into "elaborate religious buildings and rituals, with no obvious boost to survival and reproduction". Her article suggests that while there is no consensus yet among scientists, "potential answers are emerging from both the archaeological record and studies of the mind itself".

Archaeology certainly offers some data that is potentially relevant: geometric designs interpreted as an indication of symbolic behaviour; deliberate burials of the dead pointing to "the birth of metaphysical anguish", and carved figurines suggestive of shamanism. The problem with all these is that the metaphysical messages are read in different ways by scholars: these artefacts may stimulate thoughts about belief systems, but they are not hard evidence that reveals the minds of our ancestors.

Cognitive psychologists often start with children, who are said to reflect innate, rather than cultural, biases. It is not difficult to show that "young children prefer "teleological" or purpose-driven, explanations rather than mechanical ones for natural phenomenon". This leads them to perceive nature as purposefully designed by a designer. For children older than age 5, the researchers refer to the "theory of mind" which is our understanding that other humans have intentions, desires and beliefs like us.

"If you suspect that an agent was responsible for some mysterious event, it's a short step to thinking that the agent has a mind like your own. "Higher order theory of mind enables you to represent mental states of beings not immediately or visibly present, and who could have a very different perspective than your own," says Barrett. "That's what you need to have a rich representation of what it might be like to be a god." (It's also what is needed to have a functional religion, because people need to know that others share their beliefs.) As Darwin put it, humans developing religion "would naturally attribute to spirits the same passions, the same love of vengeance, or simplest form of justice, and the same affections which they themselves feel.""

Although these cognitive models are regarded as building on Darwinian foundations, there is a recognition that they have not provided satisfactory answers. One researcher is quoted as saying: "Deriving belief from the architecture of the mind is necessary but not sufficient". What drives all this? What gives religion the fitness to survive? The adaptationist approach of Darwinism comes to the rescue:

[Religion] "promotes cooperative behavior among strangers and so creates stable groups. Other researchers hypothesize that religion is actually adaptive: By encouraging helpful behavior, religious groups boost the biological survival and reproduction of their members. Adhering to strict behavioral rules may signal that a religion's members are strongly committed to the group and so will not seek a free ride, a perennial problem in cooperative groups."
[. . .]
But others [. . .] counter that this adaptationist explanation is itself light on data. "It is often said that religion encourages or prescribes solidarity within the group, but we need evidence that people actually follow [their religion's] recommendations," says Boyer. "The case is still open."

So the "potential answers" Culotta mentions at the outset have the word potential in bold and the rest is in the imagination. What is strikingly lacking in these studies is any questioning of the materialist mindset of the researchers. The most significant way they follow Darwin is in excluding any thought that intelligent design issues need to be addressed before we can properly understand humanity. Indeed, the researchers set up a culture that portrays teleology as anti-science. Culotta reports on the findings of cognitive psychologists working with some undergraduate students:

"When the undergrads had to respond under time pressure, they were likely to agree with nonscientific statements such as "The sun radiates heat because warmth nurtures life." "It's hard work to overcome these teleological explanations," says Kelemen, who adds that the data also suggest an uphill battle for scientific literacy. "When you speed people up, their hard work goes by the wayside." She's now investigating how professional scientists perform on her tests. Such purpose-driven beliefs are a step on the way to religion, she says. "Things exist for purposes, things are intentionally caused, things are intentionally caused for a purpose by some agent. ... You begin to see that a god is a likely thing for a human mind to construct.""

These attitudes are deeply worrying, because the researchers have started with the premise of philosophical naturalism. If a teleological perspective is correct, these researchers have no way of discovering the truth. When we look at the radiation that life needs to be sustained, and then look at the radiation emitted by the sun, the match is superb. It is perfectly reasonable to make design inferences and to test teleological hypotheses.

The real problems are with researchers who say that the material processes that create the physical bodies of animals and plants are no different in essence from the material processes that create religion and morality. We can make a prediction that these researchers will continue to grope around in the dark, looking for a answers but never finding them. In the end, they will conclude that religion, morality and consciousness are spandrels.

On the Origin of Religion
Elizabeth Culotta
Science, 6 November 2009, 326, 784 - 787 | DOI: 10.1126/science.326_784

How and when did religion arise? In the 11th essay in Science's series in honor of the Year of Darwin, Elizabeth Culotta explores the human propensity to believe in unseen deities. No consensus yet exists among scientists, but potential answers are emerging from both the archaeological record and studies of the mind itself. Some researchers, exploring religion's effects in society, suggest that it may boost fitness by promoting cooperative behavior. And in the past 15 years, a growing number of researchers have followed Darwin's lead and explored the hypothesis that religion springs naturally from the normal workings of the human mind. This new field, the cognitive science of religion, draws on psychology, anthropology, and neuroscience to understand the mental building blocks of religious thought.

Today Tom Woodward interviews Dr. David Berlinski on our Darwin or Design radio show. You can listen live via the Internet on Saturday mornings (10AM E.T.) at The BridgeFM. To celebrate the occasion we are offer The "Berlinski Bundle" of books and DVDs by Dr. Berlinski.

The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions by Dr. David Berlinski has just been released in paperback after the hardback edition sold out in weeks. ARN is offering the Berlinski Bundle at a 20% discount off our regular prices which includes Devil's Delusion, his new collection of 32 stunning essays, The Deniable Darwin & Other Essays, and the entertaining and informative interview DVD, The Incorrigible Dr. Berlinski. Individually these items normally cost $70, but you can buy the Berlinski Bundle for a limited time for only $50 which includes free shipping anywhere in the US.

Sooner or later, students of abiogenesis will encounter Darwin's 1871 letter to Joseph Hooker with his speculations on the spontaneous generation of life. He was returning some pamphlets which triggered the reaction: "I am always delighted to see a word in favour of Pangenesis, which some day, I believe, will have a resurrection." The next paragraph has his "big if" dream:

"It is often said that all the conditions for the first production of a living organism are now present, which could ever have been present. But if (and oh what a big if) we could conceive in some warm little pond with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, - light, heat, electricity &c. present, that a protein compound was chemically formed, ready to undergo still more complex changes, at the present day such matter wd be instantly devoured, or absorbed, which would not have been the case before living creatures were formed."

Bon appetit Mr Darwin! (Source here)

When taken alongside other comments Darwin made on this theme, it is clear that his public stance was to be cautious. The science of his day was unable to say anything positive about spontaneous generation. He felt the power of Pasteur's experiments which brought to an end all the earlier speculations about life emerging from non-life. The authors of a paper reviewing Darwin's thinking summarises the "big if" in this way:

"In the absence of any real corroborative evidence, it is impossible to guess what Darwin thought about the nature of the first living beings. In any case, Darwin's remarks should not be read to imply that he was thinking in terms of prebiotic chemistry, but rather that he recognized that the chemical gap separating organisms from the non-living was not insurmountable."

Also to be considered is the reference to a "Creator" in the last sentence of all the editions of his magnum opus bar the first:

"There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved." (Source on page 490 here)

Does this mean that Darwin was a Deist, invoking the Creator to explain the first cells that can be called living? What is this "breathing" he refers to? Is it a link with the biblical account of origins? Why was the "Creator" absent from the 1st edition but present thereafter? The authors draw attention to Darwin's own explanation, contained in an 1863 letter to Hooker and shortly afterwards another to the Athenaeum, based on the profound ignorance within science of any route for life to have emerged from non-life:

"[to Hooker] But I have long regretted that I truckled to public opinion & used Pentateuchal term of creation, by which I really meant "appeared" by some wholly unknown process. - It is mere rubbish thinking, at present, of origin of life; one might as well think of origin of matter."
[to the Athenaeum] "Now is there a fact, or a shadow of a fact, supporting the belief that these elements, without the presence of any organic compounds, and acted on only by known forces, could produce a living creature? At present it is to us a result absolutely inconceivable. Your reviewer sneers with justice at my use of the "Pentateuchal terms", "of one primordial form into which life was first breathed": in a purely scientific work I ought perhaps not to have used such terms; but they well serve to confess that our ignorance is as profound on the origin of life as on the origin of force or matter."

In the light of these comments, it is curious that Darwin did not drop the word "Creator" in subsequent editions. Whatever regrets he expressed in 1863, they were not deep enough to excise the injudicious word. The authors note the consistency in Darwin's view that science did not have any insights into spontaneous generation. They show from his comments to Haeckel, from the apochryphal account of Darwin's encounter with fossils in a meteorite, and from several other comments made in letters, that Darwin was publicly silent because he could find no basis in science for making any positive statements.

"As for myself I cannot believe in spontaneous generation & though I expect that at some future time the principle of life will be rendered intelligible, at present it seems to me beyond the confines of science." (Letter 5282, 1866)
"I have met with no evidence that seems in the least trustworthy, in favour of the so-called Spontaneous generation. I believe that I have somewhere said (but cannot find the passage) that the principle of continuity renders it probable that the principle of life will hereafter be shown to be a part, or consequence of some general law; but this is only conjecture and not science." (Letter to Wallich, 1882)

This being said, the authors are also at pains to point out that Darwin was consistently predisposed to the origin of life being a wholly natural phenomenon. "Although he insisted over and over again that there was no evidence of how the first organisms may have first appeared, he was firmly convinced it was the outcome of a natural process that had to be approached from a secular framework."

"The intimate relation of Life with laws of chemical combination, & the universality of latter render spontaneous generation not improbable." (2nd Notebook, 1837)
"Though no evidence worth anything has as yet, in my opinion, been advanced in favour of a living being, being developed from inorganic matter, yet I cannot avoid believing the possibility of this will be proved some day in accordance with the law of continuity. [. . .] If it is ever found that life can originate on this world, the vital phenomena will come under some general law of nature." (Letter 13711, 1882)

The "secular framework" of Darwin resulted from his adoption of philosophical materialism. He was a child of Enlightenment rationalism, along with Lyell, Huxley and Hooker. He knew that some others wanted to put his ideas into a theistic or a deistic framework, but Darwin always resisted this. His explanation of using the word "Creator" ("I truckled to public opinion") simply reinforces the conclusion that Darwin's science was wholly secularised. It is surprising, therefore, to read this comment of the authors about people who misread Darwin:

"Indeed, a careful examination and critical reading of his public and private writings shows that what appear to be contradictory opinions on the problem of the emergence of life are the result of texts read out of context, sometimes maliciously, as shown by some publications of creationist groups and advocates of the so-called intelligent design."

It is remarkable how often such comments appear in scholarly work, nearly always unsupported by references or quotes. On this occasion, as is generally the case, the charge is erroneous and entirely misplaced. By and large, creationist and ID scholars have exactly the same understanding of Darwin's secular framework as the authors of this paper. Where they differ is in thinking that this secular framework is profoundly wrong and is an inappropriate foundation for science. Here is an example of an ID advocate who gives the same interpretation of events as the authors:

"Nor should we be misled by a sop Darwin attached to later editions of his Origin of Species. The first edition ended with the famous flourish: "There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one [. . .]" To smooth ruffled feathers, later editions read: "There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one [. . .]" Some are fooled by this sop even to this day. But what did Darwin himself say about this little addition? "I have long regretted that I truckled to public opinion & used [a] Pentateuchal term of creation, by which I really meant 'appeared' by some wholly unknown process."" (Wiker, B. 2009)

Those who should be accused of taking Darwin out of context are the Theistic Evolutionists, who do not want to acknowledge Darwin's philosophical materialism. They generally refer positively to Darwin's reference to a Creator and try to suggest that Darwinism can be harmonised with Theism. Examples include Richard Aulie, Darwin and spontaneous generation, Journal of the American Scientific Affiliation, 22, 1970, 31-33 (cited by the authors!), William Phipps, Darwin, the Scientific Creationist, Christian Century, 1983, 809-811, Denis Alexander, Creation or Evolution - do we have to choose? Monarch Books 2008, and Nick Spencer, Darwin and God, SPCK 2009. The latter two names are associated with the "Rescuing Darwin" project, funded by The Templeton Foundation, which seeks to find a harmony between Darwinism and God's creative process. For some Christian comment on the project, go here.

As a final thought, Darwin was intellectually honest enough to see the difference between his philosophical materialism (which demanded some form of spontaneous generation) and empirical science (which gave no support for it). My question is: when does it become reasonable to use the findings of abiogenesis research as evidence against spontaneous generation? We have a large body of evidence today and it is telling us something! Some of us have concluded that the materialist paradigm cannot succeed because it fails to recognise the importance of biological information. The question (When does it become reasonable?) is never asked by philosophical materialists because they cannot entertain the notion that causation may be intelligent.

Charles Darwin and the Origin of Life
Juli Pereto, Jeffrey L. Bada and Antonio Lazcano
Origins of Life and Evolution of Biospheres, 39(5), October, 2009, 395-406 | doi 10.1007/s11084-009-9172-7

Abstract: When Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species 150 years ago he consciously avoided discussing the origin of life. However, analysis of some other texts written by Darwin, and of the correspondence he exchanged with friends and colleagues demonstrates that he took for granted the possibility of a natural emergence of the first life forms. As shown by notes from the pages he excised from his private notebooks, as early as 1837 Darwin was convinced that "the intimate relation of Life with laws of chemical combination, & the universality of latter render spontaneous generation not improbable". Like many of his contemporaries, Darwin rejected the idea that putrefaction of preexisting organic compounds could lead to the appearance of organisms. Although he favored the possibility that life could appear by natural processes from simple inorganic compounds, his reluctance to discuss the issue resulted from his recognition that at the time it was [not] possible to undertake the experimental study of the emergence of life.

See also:

Dawkins, R. There is Grandeur in this View of Life, The Edge (30 September 2009)

Wiker, B., What were Darwin's Religious Views? Discovery Institute (1 May 2009)

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Sometimes, when discussing the much misunderstood Scopes Trial, I have referred to the textbook from which Scopes was teaching, Hunter's Civic Biology, which seems to have been an amalgam of civics and biology, with a dose of eugenics thrown in, and smug assertions about "highest" or "lowest". Bad idea. Enough already with total subject confusion, ecological misunderstanding, and useless social conflict. Here's an interesting site where Ron Ladouceur gives us a tour of exotic textbooks of our storied past.

I am glad my own biology teachers focused on the cell theory of life, the germ theory of disease, and the life and times of the endangered ribbon snake (= ecology).

There is only so much students will take away when they graduate (if they do) , and you want it to be something they can make sense of in dealing with their own life and 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).

A reminder that the Indiana University debate between Dr. William Lane Craig and Francisco J. Ayala will place on Thursday, November 5th.

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Sophia Lee, of the USC Daily Trojan, reports that with nothing but a projector screen and folding chairs, the tiny Embassy Auditorium of the Davidson Conference Center is a far cry from the 50-foot-high IMAX theater where Darwin's Dilemma was originally scheduled to be screened. Even though the California Science Center recently backed out of its contract to host the film's Los Angeles premiere, the tensions created by the controversial documentary's release followed the event to its new location.

The final installment of Illustra Media's long-planned Intelligent Design trilogy, this documentary brings to light the contradiction between the fossil record and Darwin's theories. It focuses on the Cambrian explosion, a time period in the earth's history in which there was a sudden "explosion" of complex species without any ancestral trace.

Though unmistakably pro-intelligent design, Darwin's Dilemma takes on a purposefully secular stance. The word "God" is never mentioned. Instead, less threatening euphamisms like "information source" and "designer" are used. In fact, post-screening panelist and anti-evolution activist Jonathan Wells emphasized that intelligent design is not creationism or natural theology.

"Intelligent design is not a random, convenient solution to evolution," Wells said. "In fact, it actually opens more doors to scientific research and investigation."

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What I consider a fair and balanced report on the Castle Rock Intelligent Design Conference was offered by Bradley Monton.

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In ENV, Casey Luskin writes on the landmark Epperson v. Arkansas, the first case regarding the teaching of evolution to reach the U.S. Supreme Court. The decision was handed down in 1968, where the Court effectively declared it illegal to ban the teaching of evolution.

An informative summary and commentary can be viewed by clicking HERE.