The ID Report

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).

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).

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

By Robert Deyes
ARN Correspondent

When it comes to academic triumphs and laudatory honors it can be said that mycologist Paul Stamets has his fair share. Stamets has authored six books on mushrooms, holds over twenty patents, is a winner of the Collective Heritage Institute's Bioneers Award and owns a wholesale business selling alternative medicines. Today he also runs a facility that boasts twenty four laminar flow benches across four laboratories processing between 10-20 thousand kilos of mycelia each week. He has close to a thousand mycelium cultures growing at any given time and is renowned across the world for his view of fungi as the 'grand molecular dissemblers of nature'.

Stamets describes himself in his youth as a hippy with a stuttering habit who could not look people in the eye. He also fondly recalls once telling his charismatic Christian mother that the forest is where he goes to church on Sundays. He spent many years as a microscopist at the Evergreen State College in Washington studying mushroom mycelia with the aid of an electron microscope. There he developed an intense passion for all things fungal even to the extent that he now occasionally appears in public sporting a hat made from Amadou- a fungus that, he boldly maintains, was essential for the portability of fire during man's much-heralded migration out of Africa.

When it comes to mushrooms, Stamets' most radical concept, and perhaps his most attractive one, draws on a human parallel. In fact he proposes that that organized networks of mycelia under our feet form the earth's own 'internet' of sorts carrying antibiotics and enzymes as well as huge numbers of signaling chemicals across trillions and trillions of end branchings. In short, he sees our own Internet superhighway as a mere replica of a highly-successful system that already exists in nature's own backyard. Perhaps surprisingly these networks are not confined to land habitats. Indeed aquatic underwater mushrooms have been discovered in the streams of southern Oregon and mycologists are now busily investigating how these hydrophiles survive and affect surrounding ecosystems.

Agarikon is yet another fungal species that gets mycologists such as Stamets visibly excited. Otherwise known as the 'elixir of long life', this impressively-sized fungus has been used for years as an effective treatment for respiratory diseases such as tuberculosis and is now known to exhibit a very potent effect against the smallpox and flu viruses. There is strong evidence that the active anti-virals in Agarikon might also serve well in the present-day combat against H1N1 and H5N1. In fact so critical to human health are the medicinal properties of this remarkable organism that Stamets has embarked on his own mini-crusade to create the largest Agarikon genomic DNA library in the world.

On a more serious note, many environmentalists claim that today we are fully engaged in the biggest mass extinction event that our planet has ever known. Stamets is not one to shy away from sounding alarm bells and boldly adheres to the claim that 50% of all known species on our planet could become extinct over the next 100 years if swift action is not taken. His use of oyster mushroom mycelia to remove oil pollution is an outstanding example of how we might avert such a bleak endpoint. These saprophytic fungi are gateway species that break down toxic waste through the action of specialized enzymes and thereby allow damaged ecosystems to flourish and rebound. Oyster mushrooms have also been shown to have a dramatic effect on bacterial titers destroying coliform bacteria and Staphylococcus in contaminated waters.

The environmental resiliency of fungi has long fascinated mycologists, and future mycotechnologies might build on this salient property. While Prototaxites- a 30-foot long, 3-foot high mushroom that lived 350-420 million years ago stands as the archetypal giant fungus, the twenty two-hundred acre, one cell thick mycelium mat of Armillaria ostoyae (honey mushroom) now holds the record for the largest organism in the world. Thermo-resilient symbionts such as Curvularia confer a viral-dependent heat tolerance on many grasses allowing them to grow at elevated temperatures, as high as 104 F in some cases.

Fungi can be described as being parasitic, saprophytic, micorrhizal or endophytic in their modes of deriving nourishment. This so-called 'mycological guild' of complementary fungi is what gives rise to a healthy ecosystem. The interactivity of these fungi and other organisms is clearly visible in ant cultivars of the Lepiota mushroom which are used by thatch ants to stop a particularly aggressive parasitic fungus called Escovopsis from invading their nests. In a converse strategy, Metarhizium is a parasitic fungus that kills carpenter ants and is therefore finding application in the protection of buildings from these would-be aggressors. By using the non-sporulating stage of Metarhizium, Stamets has surpassed the carpenter ants' own ability to keep the fungus at bay thereby providing him with an effective treatment against carpenter ant infestations.

Despite such mycotechnological advances, Stamets describes the current state of the field as being under-respected, underappreciated and underfunded. Most importantly he remains steadfastly focused on restoring ecosystems for the enjoyment of generations to come. For those of us actively involved in the evolution/ID debate, Stamets' findings are likewise poignantly relevant. In fact he makes a stunning claim regarding computer and fungal networks noting how "we were destined to create the computer Internet at a time when the earth is in crisis".

That our understanding of network theory and its importance in fungal bioremediation should coincide with our earth's need for ecological intervention introduces a teleological, purposeful perspective to life that contradicts the contingency of orthodox Darwinism. After all a cosmos that is fashioned towards such an endpoint is incompatible with the random, directionless tenet of natural selection. As for the Christian faithful there is one proclamation that makes sense in our current predicament: Thank God that the forests are where mycologists choose to go to church on Sundays!

For further details on Stamets' work see How Mushrooms Can Save The World at http://tiny.cc/iecmw, (Login: Promega; Password: mushroom)

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

For Uncommon Descent Provide the Code: for Dawkins' WEASEL Program, we have declared a winner - 377 responses later - and it is Oxfordensis:

It seems that Dawkins used two programs, one in his book THE BLIND WATCHMAKER, and one for a video that he did for the BBC (here's the video-run of the program; fast forward to 6:15). After much beating the bushes, we finally heard from someone named "Oxfordensis," who provided the two PASCAL programs below, which we refer to as WEASEL1 (corresponding to Dawkins's book) and WEASEL2 (corresponding to Dawkins's BBC video). These are by far the best candidates we have received to date.

Go here for more.

Note: Apparently, Bill Dembski is taking care of the award.

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).

Review Of The Eighth Chapter Of Signature In The Cell by Stephen Meyer
ISBN: 9780061894206; Imprint: Harper One

By Robert Deyes
ARN Correspondent

In the middle ages, Moses Maimonides debated heavily with Islamic philosophers over the Aristotlean interpretation of the universe. By looking at the stars and seeing their irregular pattern in the heavens, he concluded that only design could have generated the star arrangements he observed (1). In the process he ruled out necessity and the Epicurean ideology of chance. Centuries later Isaac Newton similarly opted for design as the best explanation for the origins of our solar system. Writing in his General Scholium for example Newton left us with no doubt over where his focus lay:

"This most beautiful system of sun, planets, and comets could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being" (2).

Still, with the revolutions in thought brought forth by the likes of Pierre Simon Laplace and of course later Charles Darwin, the stage was set for chance and necessity to become the only players permissible in scientific discourse (1). Today science operates under the conviction that the material world "is all there is, and that chance and impersonal natural law alone explain, indeed must explain, its existence" (3).

So, what of chance? When statisticians refer to chance events what they really mean is that the exact combination of physical factors that cause these events are so complex that their occurrence cannot be reasonably predicted. Implicit in an appeal to chance is the negation of any sort of law-like necessity or Maimonidean-style recourse to design. On the flip side, Stephen Meyer reminds us in Signature In The Cell that that chance hypotheses can be eliminated when "a series of events occurs that deviates too greatly from an expected statistical distribution" (p.180).

A casino player winning 100 bets consecutively while spinning a roulette wheel is an obvious example of such a deviation. But low probability in itself is not enough for detecting design. Indeed fundamental to this particular non-chance alternative is the recognition of some sort of discernible pattern- 100 wins on a roulette wheel for example- that compels us to suspect that an intelligence somewhere is directing the outcome.

For Meyer such insights were seeded through conversations he held with philosopher William Dembski in the hallways of academia as he grappled with questions relating to life's origins. Much to the chagrin of the Darwin-faithful, today Dembski not only contends that design, "is a legitimate and fundamental mode of scientific explanation on a par with chance and necessity" but also argues that there exists a set of criteria for reliably detecting design in biology (1).

Pattern discernment, Dembski asseverates, can be retrospectively applied; that is, to events that have already occurred. Indeed as any spy buff will attest, cryptoanalysts routinely decode signals only after these signals have been generated and transmitted. Intelligent involvement in such cases can either be ruled in or out through a thorough examination of the available probabilistic resources (4).

In Signature In The Cell Meyer builds on Dembski's cornerstone case and uses a seemingly non-ending supply of illustrations to firm up his own supportive arguments. But the reader is nevertheless left pondering over what relevance such illustrations have to the matter at hand, namely demonstrating that the origin of life requires more than just chance. Meyer meticulously alleviates such concerns with a component-by-component breakdown of the probabilistic resources of our cosmic landscape. He writes:

"There are a limited number of opportunities for any given event to occur in the entire history of the universe. Dembski was able to calculate this number by simply multiplying the three relevant factors together: the number or elementary particles (10⁸⁰) times the number of seconds since the big bang (10¹⁶) times the number of possible interactions per second (10⁴³). His calculation fixed the total number of events that could have taken place in the observable universe since the origin of the universe at 10¹³⁰" (pp.216-217).

Applying his calculations on limits to biology Meyer notes:

"the probability of producing a single 150 amino acid protein by chance stands at about 1 in 10¹⁶⁴. Thus for each functional sequence of 150 amino acids there are at least 10¹⁶⁴ other possible non-functional sequences of the same length...Unfortunately that number vastly exceeds the most optimistic estimate of the probabilistic resources of the entire universe- that is the number of events that have occurred since the beginning of its existence" (p.217).

While such a rationale has already been advanced in the peer-reviewed literature (5), it is as profoundly relevant today as it was in its original context. Those design heisters who acrimoniously steal intelligent design away from the realm of biology do so at a tremendous cost to us all. Intelligent design is after all not 'pie in the sky' story telling. It is rigorous science.

Literature Cited
1.William Dembski (2002), No Free Lunch: Why Specified Complexity Cannot Be Purchased Without Intelligence, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc, Lanham, Maryland, pp.1-3

2. Nancy R. Pearcey and Charles B. Thaxton (1994), The Soul of Science: Christian Faith and Natural Philosophy; Crossway Books; Wheaton, Illinois, p.91

3. Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay Richards (2004), The Privileged Planet, How Our Place In The Cosmos Is Designed For Discovery, Regnery Publishing Inc, Washington D.C, New York, p.224

4. For a review of probability as relates to the biological context see Robert Deyes and John Calvert (2009), We Have No Excuse: A Scientific Case for Relating Life to Mind, Intelligent Design Network, See http://www.intelligentdesignnetwork.org/We_have_no_excuse.pdf

5. Stephen C. Meyer (2004), The Origin Of Biological Information And The Higher Taxonomic Categories, Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, Volume 117, pp. 213-239

Review Of The Seventh Chapter Of Signature In The Cell by Stephen Meyer
ISBN: 9780061894206; ISBN10: 0061894206; Imprint: HarperOne

By Robert Deyes
ARN Correspondent

The distinction between historical and experimental science is one that extends back over the centuries and at its core seems easy to grasp. Whereas historical science has as its focus events that have defined the history both of our planet and larger cosmos, experimental science has its eye on the current operation of nature.

The 19th century philosopher William Whewell coined the term 'palaetiological sciences' to describe those fields of science, such as geology and paleontology, that have a historical perspective (1). Whewell's broad application of the term shone through in his two great works, his History of the Inductive Sciences and his Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences (1). Immanuel Kant used a similar distinction contrasting those sciences that describe "relationships and changes over time" with those that deal with the "empirical study and classification of objects...at present" (2).

As part of their analytical process, scientists routinely assess the validity of competing hypotheses to determine which best explain the data they have at their disposal. The late Cambridge philosopher Peter Lipton formally defined such a process of validation in his book Inference To The Best Explanation (3). Put simply, Lipton considered the best explanation for the occurrence of a natural event as one that obviously best identifies a likely cause. Lipton's formalization rode on the back of 19th century geologist Thomas Chamberlin's 'method of multiple working hypotheses' (4) and provided an improvement over Charles Peirce's abductive reasoning- the process through which an established rule is used to explain a tangible observation (5).

Abductive reasoning would have us say that given a rule such as "If it rains the grass is wet", the occurrence of wet grass must invariably lead to the conclusion that rain had fallen at some moment in the past (5). Nevertheless Peirce was quick to identify an inherent fallacy in such a thread of logic- a fallacy known amongst philosophers as the 'affirmed consequent'. According to one review:

"Affirming the consequent, sometimes called converse error, is a formal fallacy committed by reasoning in the form: If P, then Q. Q. Therefore, P. Arguments of this form are invalid in that [they] do not always give good reason to establish their conclusions, even if their premises are true." (5)

In the above illustration, the fallacy is all too evident since rain is quite obviously not the only causal agent that waters our lawns (summertime sprinklers and hose pipes stand out as self-evident alternatives!). The question that naturally follows is, given numerous causally adequate explanations, how might one go about deciding which supplies the greatest explanatory power?

One way is to resort to vera causa ("causes now in operation") as Darwin did when he used animal migration behaviors to explain common descent. According to Darwin "the simplicity of the view that each species was first produced within a single region captivates the mind. He who rejects it, rejects the vera causa of ordinary generation with subsequent migration, and calls in the agency of a miracle" (6). Darwin of course assumed that the 'now operational' variations observed in animal breeding could likewise explain macro-evolutionary changes throughout the history of life.

An alternative approach to the causal adequacy question is to seek out additional lines of evidence that either prop up or debunk competing explanations. Stephen Meyer expounds on this salient point in the seventh chapter of his most recent book Signature In The Cell,

"the process of determining the best explanation often involves generating a list of possible hypotheses, comparing their known (or theoretically plausible) causal powers against the relevant evidence, looking for additional facts if necessary, and then, like a detective, progressively eliminating potential but inadequate explanations until, finally, one causally adequate explanation for the ensemble of relevant evidence remains" (p.166)

Historical scientists are of course not the only group to employ such a procedural chain. Meyer's impressive list of distinguished professions- including clinical diagnosticians and forensic detectives- that are 'cause-focused' in their modes of operation, gives us much to ponder over. And his follow-on question is brilliantly relevant- might not intelligent design supply the most causally adequate explanation for the origin of biological information? The answer may surprise some. It turns out that by the same 'vera causa' line of reasoning used by Darwin 150 years ago, intelligent causation in biology remains a distinct possibility. After all, a cornerstone claim in the ID offensive is that we routinely observe intelligent agents as 'causes now in operation' that generate the same type of specified information as we find in DNA.

Meyer goes on to boldly entertain the idea that intelligent design presents us with the only causally adequate explanation for the origin of biological information and spends much of the remainder of his book tying together substantial evidence in support of his position. As for Darwin, one can only imagine how he might have felt coming back to find intelligent design legitimized through his very own criterion. My hunch is that he would have applauded the current state of debate.

Citations Listed
1. For a summary of Whewell's work, see biologist Robert J O'Hara's discussion at http://rjohara.net/darwin/palaetiology

2. Phillip R. Sloan (2006), Kant On The History Of Nature: The ambiguous heritage of the critical philosophy for natural history, Stud. Hist. Phil. Biol. & Biomed. Sci. 37 (2006), pp.627–648

3. Peter Lipton: Philosopher of science renowned for his account of inference and explanation, Obituary appeared in The Guardian, Thursday 13th December, 2007, See http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/2007/dec/13/guardianobituaries.obituaries1

4. For a detailed account of Thomas Chamberlin's work, see http://geology.about.com/od/history_of_geology/a/aa_geothinking.htm

5. See Absolute Astronomy, http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/Abductive_reasoning

6. Charles Darwin (1859), The Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection Or The Preservation of Favored Races In the Struggle For Survival, Modern Library Paperbacks Edition (1998), New York, p.488

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

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

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? Consider this:

... researchers have now resurrected the DNA of the Tasmanian tiger, the world’s largest carnivorous marsupial, which has been extinct for more than seventy years. In 2008, scientists from the University of Melbourne and the University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center, in Houston, extracted DNA from tissue that had been preserved in the Museum Victoria, in Melbourne. They took a fragment of DNA that controlled the production of a collagen gene from the tiger and inserted it into a mouse embryo. The DNA switched on just the right gene, and the embryo began to churn out collagen. That marked the first time that any material from an extinct creature other than a virus has functioned inside a living organism.

It will not be the last. A team from Pennsylvania State University, working with hair samples from two woolly mammoths—one of them sixty thousand years old and the other eighteen thousand—has tentatively figured out how to modify that DNA and place it inside an elephant’s egg. The mammoth could then be brought to term in an elephant mother. "There is little doubt that it would be fun to see a living, breathing woolly mammoth—a shaggy, elephantine creature with long curved tusks who reminds us more of a very large, cuddly stuffed animal than of a T. Rex.," the Times editorialized soon after the discovery was announced. "We're just not sure that it would be all that much fun for the mammoth."

The article discusses both the promise and the peril or reengineering nature.

Personally, I am a bit skeptical that an extinct creature can be resurrected from DNA alone, but ... wait! What I thought was passing traffic turned out to be a herd of tyrannosaurs heading off to eat the McDonalds.

So now to Uncommon Descent Contest Question 11: For a free copy of Stephen Meyer's Signature in the Cell (Harper One, 2009), how likely do you think biotechnologists will be in bringing back the Tasmanian wolf or the woolly mammoth? You can try the tyrannosaur too if you are feeling ambitious.

Here are the contest rules, not an extensive read.

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

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Here's the latest UD Contest Question, so use this link to enter.

Addressing the Inbox, I discovered this most interesting tale about lotteries in Bulgaria, a tale that reminds me of a similar suspicious lotto in my own Canadian province of Ontario.

In Money Matters, at Australia's news.com, we learn that "Lottery numbers the same in consecutive draws in Bulgaria" (correspondents in Sofia, Agence France-Presse, September 16, 2009)

Here are the bullet points, and you can read the rest yourself.

- The numbers 4, 15, 23, 24, 35, and 42 were drawn two weeks in a row / File
- Same numbers picked in consecutive draws
- Review of the national lottery is ordered
- Probability is 4.2 million to one

Hmmmm. If these charges are true, I'm glad I am not in charge of that investigation. I would hardly want to hear all the lies people would probably try to tell me. Our Ontario premier, faced with a similar situation, fired the chair and the whole board of the lottery corporation and decided to start fixing the problem from scratch. I would recommend looking for statisticians and tough cops, not just anyone with the "power from behind" to sit through an endless board meeting.*

But here's the question that this and other questionable lottery stories leaves me with: The intelligent design theorists emphasize probability issues. Their chief knock against Darwinism is that it appears improbable. In the same way, an accidental origin of the fine-tuned values of our universe appears improbable. If I understand the matter correctly, the universe is assumed to be over 13 billion years old, or so, and Earth over 4 billion years old. (I assume these values for convenience as I believe them to be generally accepted.) So we can assume a basis for computing probability.

So, for a free copy of the Privileged Planet DVD, which addresses the fine tuning of the universe:

Uncommon Descent Contest Question 12: Can Darwinism beat the odds. If not, why not? If so, how?

You might want to look at Bill Dembski's No Free Lunch.

(Note: Thanks to Ilion Troas for alerting me to this story.)

*One alternative: Don't have a lottery at all. Lotteries attract vast moral hazard and corruption because they look like free money. I never supported the idea and don't buy tickets, and think that worthy causes should be funded in the usual ways, through taxes, donations, memberships, sponsorships, premiums, etc. But this mini-editorial is unrelated to the point of the contest question.

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

Earlier this year Johan Bollen and colleagues from the Los Alamos National Laboratories unveiled a much-publicized 'Connections Map' that shows how researchers navigate online between science journals and those of other academic disciplines (1). With access to as many as 1 billion 'user interactions' from 35,000 journals in the natural sciences, social sciences and humanities, the study was unique in its sheer scale (1,2). Furthermore, unlike other such studies that have mined inter-article citations data (papers that cite each other) to map connections, the work carried out by Bollen and colleagues relied on up-to-date internet usage and navigation information supplied by reputable online publishers such as Elsevier and Thomson Scientific (2).

The work of Bollen's group appeared to be in every sense revolutionary. In their paper to PLOS One, for example, they drew attention to the rather biased nature of studies that use inter-article citations data, concluding that, "existing citations databases over-represent the natural sciences" (2). Other factors, such as the lengthy time that it takes for papers to get published, lent support to the claim that internet navigation provided a more temporally-accurate picture of traffic between journals. In contrast to citations data that focuses only on published authors, internet navigation information also reflects the activity of 'a larger community' that includes practicing scientists who do not necessarily publish (2).

In order to maximize the accuracy of their study Bollen and colleagues selected only those user interactions that involved requests for article abstracts or fully-published articles (2). The overall distribution of the interactions that they mapped ranged from 47 and 41 percent in the social and natural sciences respectively to 8 percent in the humanities (2). Bollen and colleagues were able to access individual 'click streams'- that is, temporal sequences that show how researchers navigated between journals. The resulting Connections Map classified journals into 'course-grained disciplines' such as cognitive science, architectural design, international studies, religion, music, geology and plant genetics to name but a few (2).

While the timing of interactions in such maps are accurate to the second, some still question whether internet navigation-based connections really provide valuable information on the future trends of cross-discipline navigation. Anthony van Raan, director of the Leiden Centre for Science and Technology Studies suggested that Bollen's approach may do nothing more than supply snapshots of current navigation fashions (1). Nevertheless data on such fashions can in itself be valuable for tracking "contemporary trends in scientific activity" and monitoring how such trends vary over time (1).

Bollen and colleagues admit that there is much work that can still be done (2). Future projects might include comparing connections maps with inter-article citations data, deconvoluting the different navigation patterns through which researchers move between journals and identifying the most influential journals in given areas of research (2). Indeed, if used correctly there is no denying that data from connections mapping could help improve the way online journals are made available to the research community.

Literature Cited
1. Declan, B. (2009) Web Usage Data Outline Map Of Knowledge. Nature News (accessed 3/23/3009).

2. Bollen, J. et al. (2009) Clickstream Data Yields High-Resolution Maps of Science. PLoS ONE 4, e4803.