Science Literature

By Robert Deyes
ARN Correspondent

If we look close at cell's own schemes,
precision work, inte-gral teams.
Protein domains that play their role,
so specified, a common goal.
It's hard to think how bits mixed up
like random tea leaves in a cup
could make up schemes of grand design,
so tailor-made, so clocked, so fine.

And so the cells they specialize,
with jobs to do, new tissues rise,
cells work together unified,
communicate both far and wide.
Neuron- impulse forth it sends,
muscle then contracts, leg bends,
lymphocyte- the fort defends,
liver cells the body cleanse.

Cells and tissues form a whole.
Each cell it knows its place, its role.
The body works incessantly.
A stomach, heart, a mind that's free.
From whence did come that thoughtful brain
that takes decisions, loss or gain?
Through inner soul it comes to life,
through stress and strain, through joy and strife.

And creatures learn to live, adapt,
territorial boundaries mapped,
ecosystems grow, divide,
scatter seeds both far and wide.
So who did make such symphony,
so caref'lly planned it seems to be?
Our minds do tell of higher mind,
an earth so purposef'lly designed.

By Robert Deyes

See also:
Biology's Big Bang http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/Arts/Arts-idx?type=article&did=ARTS.SBREEDSBURG.I0014&isize=M

Jim, Old Jim http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/Arts/Arts-idx?type=article&did=ARTS.SBREEDSBURG.I0015&isize=M

It is well known that the keystone in a stone arch is crucial for the stability of the arch. Indeed, without a good keystone, the arch will collapse. For many years. Theodosius Dobzhansky has been quoted to affirm that evolutionary theory provides the infrastructure that integrates the whole of biology. This is what he said: "Nothing in biology makes sense, except in the light of evolution." Sometimes, the reference to "evolution" relates specifically to Darwinism/neo-Darwinism, and sometimes the reference is to the concept of evolution rather than any particular mechanism. The imminent Bicentennial of the birth of Charles Darwin and the 150th anniversary of his magnum opus is bringing Dobzhansky's words to the fore and applied to Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. This is the inference to be drawn from a recent editorial in Scientific American and its accompanying illustration.

Darwinism is said to be a theory that everyone ought to learn (Image source here, Credit Matt Collins)

A major application of this message relates to education. Students need to know about Darwin's theory - indeed, everyone needs to know! The editors conclude:

"One way to celebrate Darwin's birthday is to contemplate how evolutionary studies can achieve broader adoption in secondary and higher education. Natural selection and the complementary idea of how genes, individuals and species change over time should be as much a part of developing critical thinking skills as deductive reasoning and the study of ethics."

It may surprise the Editors of Scientific American, but no one is arguing that natural selection and "how genes, individuals and species change over time" should not be taught. The differences are about how these topics are presented to students and what students are expected to learn. It would have been a welcome contribution to this particular discussion if Glenn Branch and Eugenie Scott had addressed it in their article in Scientific American.

However, instead of engaging with the issues, they devote over three thousand words to a polemic against the supposedly subversive activities of creationists. They bemoan the fact that the Louisiana Science Education Act has become law.

"On its face, the law looks innocuous: it directs the state board of education to "allow and assist teachers, principals, and other school administrators to create and foster an environment within public elementary and secondary schools that promotes critical thinking skills, logical analysis, and open and objective discussion of scientific theories being studied," which includes providing "support and guidance for teachers regarding effective ways to help students understand, analyze, critique, and objectively review scientific theories being studied." What's not to like? Aren't critical thinking, logical analysis, and open and objective discussion exactly what science education aims to promote?
As always in the contentious history of evolution education in the U.S., the devil is in the details. The law explicitly targets evolution, which is unsurprising - for lurking in the background of the law is creationism, the rejection of a scientific explanation of the history of life in favor of a supernatural account involving a personal creator."

They are saying, in effect, that the letter of the law sounds fine, but the letter is a front for creationism, lies and deceit. They do not believe that all teachers will abide by the letter. They expect some to promote unwarranted doubts about evolution:

"Allowing teachers to instil scientifically unwarranted doubts about evolution is clearly beyond the pale. Yet that is what the Louisiana Science Education Act was evidently created, or designed, to do."

This message is one we have heard many times before, and there is no evidence that it has any validity. There are legitimate concerns about the way Darwinism should be explored in the classroom. Many of us think that natural selection is being asked to do far too much - way beyond the empirical evidence that demonstrates what it can do. Many of us think that observed natural variations should not be used to argue the transformation of life from a single cell to the diversity of living things we see today. The objections to Darwinism are scientific, and they need to be fairly addressed in the education of students. These ideas have been explored numerous times in this blog. Here are examples over the past few months: Evolution, Museums and Society, Cichlid fish - another textbook example of evolution in action?, Hairless Dogs as an example of deleterious mutations, A call for an end to Pseudo-Darwinian hype, Adaptations affecting dim-light vision in vertebrates, The formidable problem of assembling the bacterial flagellum.

Of particular concern is the polemical way the arguments are presented. There is no interaction with the scientific issues, but only a desperate attempt to prove the infiltration of creationism into the fabric of science and education. No doubt many are familiar with Of Pandas and People - but do published "analyses" of the book by evolutionists ever get serious with the science? The same can be said of many other resources produced by ID scientists - instead of a scientific discourse, we are fed with unappetising polemic.

Will 2009 be any different? Will ID scientists be allowed to raise scientific questions about the validity of Darwinism? Will anyone suggesting that there are serious issues to consider be hounded as betrayers of science? What about our young people? Will they be allowed to question whether the evidences presented in the classroom are adequate to support the evolutionary theory in the textbook? We all want to promote a healthy scientific mindset, but a refusal to address the issues critically does not bode well for the future.

The Latest Face of Creationism in the Classroom
Glenn Branch and Eugenie C. Scott
Scientific American, December 16, 2008

First para: Professors routinely give advice to students but usually while their charges are still in school. Arthur Landy, a distinguished professor of molecular and cell biology and biochemistry at Brown University, recently decided, however, that he had to remind a former premed student of his that "without evolution, modern biology, including medicine and biotechnology, wouldn't make sense."

Why Everyone Should Learn the Theory of Evolution
The Editors
Scientific American, December, 2008

First para: Charles Darwin did not think of himself as a genius. "I have no great quickness of apprehension or wit which is so remarkable in some clever men ..." he remarked in one passage of his autobiography. Fortunately for the rest of us, he was profoundly wrong in his assessment. So on February 12 the world will mark the bicentennial birthday of a scientist who holds a rightful place alongside Galileo, Copernicus, Newton and Einstein.

Scientists and historians have acquired skills of data analysis which are essential for their professional lives. It is therefore strange to find examples of scholars being satisfied with rather superficial conclusions. A recent case concerns the crimes committed by German scientists during the Nazi era. Most of us ask questions like: 'What perverted the thinking of these scientists?' and 'Why were their peers and their leaders not outraged by the experiments?' However, in a review of a history of the crimes committed in the years 1933-1945 by scientists of the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin, the take-home message is banal:

"What is the bottom line? Do not try to write the history of bad scientists when any of them are still alive. Like [the author of the book], do it only when all of those who were involved are dead."

The long shadow of Darwinism reaches far beyond the domain of science (Image source here, Credit: Noma Bar)

The Nazi leadership in 1933 left the Director of the Institute and six group leaders in place, but required the redundancy of 12 staff because they were Jewish. Thereafter, as staff retired, new appointees were "according to the wishes of the Nazis". Sad to say, nothing more is said in the review about the ideology that was enforced at that time and how it affected the thinking and actions of research scientists.

Claus Schilling was a group leader in 1933. He had been a medical doctor in Africa and was "fascinated by malaria". After retirement, he continued research into finding a vaccine.

"[B]etween 1942 and 1945, he used prisoners from the concentration camp at Dachau in southern Germany for his malaria experiments. Of the 1,200 people he infected with malaria, between 300 and 400 died. Schilling was caught by the Allies and executed in 1946."

Eugen Hagen was a virologist who conducted his infamous experiments in a concentration camp in Alsace. In a letter to his group leader, dated 1943, Hagen wrote:

"I contacted the central office of the SS [the Nazi protective squadron] to receive sufficient human material from worthless lives for our purpose."

Here, at least, is a pointer to the ideology that fostered destructive experimentation with human lives. Some people were regarded as "worthless" and dispensable. Medics, whose life's work involved alleviating suffering and curing diseases, degenerated to murder to further their research ambitions. Even when facing the death sentence, Schilling sought permission "to publish the results of his unethical malaria studies".

However, Muller-Hill does not give us any insights into this thinking in his review. There is no highlighting of ideological issues, no analysis of how these scientists came to view fellow humans as "worthless" and no application to the present day where the ethics of scientific research is firmly on the agenda for discussion. If the book is like the review, opportunities to learn lessons have been lost.

However, I am reluctant to assume that the book passes over the ideological issues so completely. There may be other factors at play here. An article appeared recently in The Daily Telegraph with this by-line: "The Nazis' gruesome experiments became an accepted part of German medical research, according to the author of a new history". The writer is Richard Evans, Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge, and his new book is The Third Reich at War. After discussing examples of the abuse of science, he writes:

"What underpinned this behaviour was a widespread belief that some people were less than human, relegated to a lower plane of existence by their inherited degeneracy - or their race."

After this tantalising comment, it is frustrating not to have further analysis of the factors leading to these attitudes. The ideological roots are hidden in this piece; all we see are some aberrant outgrowths of the plant. Yet, the author has done more work on the ideological issues and he does know what factors were at work. Here is a paragraph from an earlier book (The Third Reich in Power, p. 259):

"The real core of Nazi beliefs lay in the faith Hitler proclaimed in his speech of September 1938 in science - a Nazi view of science - as the basis for action. Science demanded the furtherance of the interests not of God but of the human race, and above all the German race and its future in a world ruled by ineluctable laws of Darwinian competition between races and between individuals. This was the sole criterion of morality, overriding the principles of love and compassion that have always formed such an important element in the beliefs of the world's great religions."

The diagnosis is clear. The Nazi's had latched on to the Darwinian theory of evolution by natural selection as a scientific justification of their ascendancy claims. They regarded themselves as representatives of the 'fit' humanity and they considered it a 'law of nature' that the fittest had the right, not just to survive, but also to promote the demise of the less fit. To the Nazi's, it made perfect sense to pursue a policy of extermination for that part of humanity that had nothing to offer their brave new world.

There are lessons here for today. It is important that each scientist thinks about his/her personal ideology and the framework of ethics within which they operate. Unfortunately, there is too much of an ethical vacuum today. People adopt principles for personal or pragmatic reasons. All too often, research ethics gets no deeper than gaining ethical approval from the appropriate ethics committee. Too many scientists are post-modernists when it comes to ethical procedures - all is relative. No one is prepared to move from ethics to morality - to say that anything is right or wrong. For previous blogs on this, go here and here.

This situation leaves the scientific enterprise vulnerable to being corrupted by business interests, funding agencies and ideologically-driven researchers. Many would argue that we are seeing warning signs on a regular basis. Social Darwinism is not dead. It continuously comes back to public debate saying that it has learned from mistakes and that Darwinism must be the only valid interpretive framework for understanding society. A recent presentation of this stance is found in The Economist. This is why the agenda of the ID movement includes opening up debate about the ideological influences in modern thought. This is why it is justified to come back again and again to the corruption of Nazi scientists: they have something important to teach us about the role of ideologies in science and the need for robust foundations for ethical practice.

Crimes in the name of research
Benno Muller-Hill
Nature 456, 575 (4 December 2008) | doi:10.1038/456575a

BOOK REVIEWED - Das Robert Koch-Institut im Nationalsozialismus, by Annette Hinz-Wessels. Kulturverlag Kadmos: 2008. 192 pp. (in German)

First para: The Robert Koch Institute in Berlin was founded in 1891 and conducts research into infectious bacteria and viruses. When it celebrated its centenary, the crimes committed by members of the institute between 1933 and 1945 were apparently not of interest, and were not mentioned. Ten years later, after the Max Planck Society and the DFG, Germany's main research-funding agency, had investigated their own histories, this changed. Scientist Annette Hinz-Wessels has written the first history of the institute, concentrating on the years under National Socialism.

See also:

Evans, R. How Hitler perverted the course of science, Telegraph Online, 02 Dec 2008

Weikart, R. From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany, Palgrave MacMillan, 2004

The past few years has seen a steadily increasing awareness of the phenomenon of antisense transcription, but there has been very little insight into what antisense transcription products actually do. As is well known, DNA provides a template for the transcription of RNA sequences that are then used to make protein products. The distinction between sense and antisense transcription is helpfully made here:

"RNA, which is a single strand of nucleotides, is made by enzymes as an exact base-to-base copy of DNA. Since DNA is double-stranded, only one of these strands, the so-called sense strand, encodes for proteins. In normal DNA transcription, the two strands are split apart, and only the sense strand is copied. The other DNA strand, the "antisense" strand, can also be transcribed into RNA. Antisense transcription is the "reverse" expression of genomic DNA. If the same molecule of DNA is transcribed into antisense RNA, then the transcript has the reverse sequence as the original DNA sequence."

Antisense transcription is not an easy concept to illustrate, but this is how Nature Reviews Genetics did it.

The number of eukaryotic genes that have antisense transcripts seems to be quite high. This finding is stimulating many research projects, three of which have appeared recently in Science. Seila et al. have looked at the factors affecting transcription initiation. The first thing they noted relates to process.

"Transcription of DNA by RNA polymerase II (RNAPII) is an orchestrated process subject to regulation at numerous levels: binding of RNAPII to the promoter, transcription initiation, and elongation. These phases and their transitions require concerted action by many protein complexes and are accompanied by changes in local chromatin structure."

They noted some short (16-30 nucleotide) RNAs near the transcription start site (TSS) of protein-encoding genes. These were given the name TSSa-RNA. They appear to be intimately associated with promoters.

"Based on their direction and position relative to TSSs, we hypothesize that sense and antisense TSSa-RNAs arise from divergent transcription, defined as nonoverlapping transcription initiation events that proceed in opposite directions from the TSS. Divergent transcription is likely a common feature of mammalian TSSs given the presence of TSSa-RNAs in all cell types examined in this study."

There has been considerable uncertainty about whether these short RNAs and the antisense genes have functionality. Not long ago, they would have been lumped in with other "junk" materials and their production would have been regarded as a side-effect within the cell's complex genetic system. This has now changed. Gene regulation is the favoured role for these genetic elements. In a review published a few months ago, Beiter et al. wrote:

"So far, the regulatory potential of gene overlaps has been demonstrated only in a few selected cases of experimentally characterized antisense transcripts. Facing the large-scale antisense transcription observed in eukaryotic genomes, it still remains an open challenge to distinguish transcriptional noise from biological function of gene overlapping patterns."

All three of the new papers in Science develop our understanding of functionality. Seila et al. suggest a possible mechanism giving functionality to the TSSa-RNAs. Core et al. start their abstract with the statement: "RNA polymerases are highly regulated molecular machines." These authors comment on the need for regulation of the elaborate genetic system that can be found in cells: "Transcription of coding and non-coding RNAs by eukaryotic RNA polymerases requires their collaboration with hundreds of transcription factors, to direct and control polymerase recruitment, initiation, elongation and termination." They identify several possible functions for divergent transcription. In addition, He et al. conclude:

"The distribution of antisense transcripts was distinct from that of sense transcripts, was nonrandom across the genome, and differed among cell types. Antisense transcripts thus appear to be a pervasive feature of human cells, suggesting that they are a fundamental component of gene regulation."

Beiter et al. point out that "the mammalian genome contains a large layer of hidden biological information". Antisense transcription has been revealed to be widespread and these new papers are underlining the message that the transcription products have functionality within the "complex interplay between proteins, regulatory RNAs, and chemical and structural alterations of the genome itself". The DNA molecule has an extraordinary depth of information: one strand carries the instructions for the assembly of proteins whereas the other strand of the same DNA gene feeds transcription products into the regulatory system. ID scientists have always been sceptical of the Junk DNA hypothesis and these new findings confirm that the presumption of functionality is highly beneficial for biological science. The keywords are "information" and "systems biology". The systems that we see are exquisitely designed, not cobbled together by an incremental evolutionary process.

Papers discussed:

Divergent Transcription from Active Promoters
Amy C. Seila, J. Mauro Calabrese, Stuart S. Levine, Gene W. Yeo, Peter B. Rahl, Ryan A. Flynn, Richard A. Young, Phillip A. Sharp
Science Express, online 4 December 2008 | DOI: 10.1126/science.1162253

Nascent RNA Sequencing Reveals Widespread Pausing and Divergent Initiation at Human Promoters
Leighton J. Core, Joshua J. Waterfall, John T. Lis
Science Express, online December 4, 2008 | Science DOI: 10.1126/science.1162228

The Antisense Transcriptomes of Human Cells
Yiping He, Bert Vogelstein, Victor E. Velculescu, Nickolas Papadopoulos, and Kenneth W. Kinzler
Science Express, online December 4 2008; 10.1126/science.1163853

Antisense transcription: A critical look in both directions
T Beiter, E Reich, R Williams, P Simon
Cellular and Molecular Life Sciences, 2008 Sep 15; | doi 10.1007/s00018-008-8381-y

Simulated meteorite impacts have been observed to produce some organic molecules of interest to abiogenesis researchers. A group of Japanese scientists have designed an experiment to see if meteorite impacts could result in "the building blocks of life."

Their experiments validate a theory first proposed by the American astronomer Carl Sagan in the seventies, says Kakegawa. 'He just mentioned this hypothesis in one sentence in a paper, but he didn't do any experiments. Since then, many people have thought meteorites could produce organic molecules, but we are the first to succeed in showing this.'

Some want meteorites to carry life to Earth, whereas others want them to generate the building blocks of life. (Source here. ©iStockphoto.com/thecarlinco)

The authors simulated chondritic meteorites (thought to be the most primitive) impacting the ocean of the early Earth. To do this they created projectiles and fired them into a substrate to compress and shock solid carbon, iron, nickel, water and nitrogen. They report the production of fatty acids, amines and, when ammonia was added, one amino acid (glycine). They suggest that as impacts were frequent in the early Earth, bombardment led to organic molecules accumulating. This is perceived to be relevant to the origin of life.

The Scientific American report emphasized the tentative nature of the research: meteorites "may have helped spawn life" and "Did heat, pressure and carbon from meteorite impacts create biological precursors?" An astrobiologist is said to fear "that theories of life's origin may never move beyond the hypothetical". Astronomer Donald Brownlee found the research interesting but added: "If the body is too large, generated materials are probably destroyed by impact processes." One of the authors of the paper cautioned that the meteorite-impact theory "is not ready to supplant the vaunted Miller-Urey experiment".

Chemistry World quotes Jeffrey Bada, an expert in prebiotic synthesis at the University of California, San Diego, who doesn't think the results are particularly impressive.

'With the exception of methyl amine and acetic and propanic acid, the yields are very, very small,' he says. 'If glycine is indeed made, the amount that would be present in the ocean from one such impact would be about [10 to the power -30] grams per litre - hardly a meaningful concentration.'

From an ID perspective, the word "supplant" is inappropriate for the Miller-Urey experiments because they cannot carry the burden that people want to place on them. The experiments are a dead-end: there is no route for chemical evolution to proceed. There is a fundamental flaw because of the pre-requisite of a reducing atmosphere (which the meteorite impact experiment avoids), because there is no rationale for chirality to emerge from racemic mixtures, and because no progress has been made in resolving the problem of generating biological information. For more on the problems of building life from chemical precursors, go here and here.

It is worth noting a previous study of impact shocks to produce organic molecules (McKay and Borucki, 1996). These authors confirmed that the elemental conposition of shocked material is important. They based their work on cometary gases: methane, hydrogen cyanide and acetylene. Whilst amine groups were produced, productivity was nil with a carbon dioxide rich mixture. It is possibly significant that carbon dioxide was not mentioned along with nitrogen in the new research.

ID scientists interpret the findings of these abiogenesis scenarios as evidence against life having emerged by this route. It is one thing to generate organic molecules but quite another to label them as "precursors of life". Life does not exist without biological information, and until abiogenesis research takes information seriously, it will continue to explore cul-de-sac avenues.

Biomolecule formation by oceanic impacts on early Earth
Yoshihiro Furukawa, Toshimori Sekine, Masahiro Oba, Takeshi Kakegawa & Hiromoto Nakazawa
Nature Geoscience, 2, 62-66 (January 2009)
| doi:10.1038/ngeo383

Abstract: Intense impacts of extraterrestrial objects melted the embryonic Earth, forming an inorganic body with a carbon-dioxide- and nitrogen-rich atmosphere. Certain simple organic molecules have been shown to form under conditions resembling meteorite impacts, although the link between these events and the development of more complex molecules remains unclear. Ordinary chondrites, the most common type of meteorite, contain solid carbon, iron and nickel - elements essential to the formation of organic chemicals. Here we use shock experiments to recreate the conditions surrounding the impact of chondritic meteorites into an early ocean. We used a propellant gun to create a high-velocity impact into a mixture of solid carbon, iron, nickel, water and nitrogen. After the impact, we recovered numerous organic molecules, including fatty acids, amines and an amino acid. We suggest that organic molecules on the early Earth may have arisen from such impact syntheses. As the natural impacts that were frequent on the early Earth are more sustained and reach higher pressures than our experiments, they may have resulted in the synthesis of a greater abundance, variety and complexity of organic compounds.

See also:

Birch, H. Meteorites hitting oceans may have kick-started life, Chemistry World, 08 December 2008

Matson, J. Rock and Roil: Meteorites Hitting Early Earth's Oceans May Have Helped Spawn Life, Scientific American News, 7 December 2008.

McKay, C.P. and W. J. Borucki, W.J., Organic Synthesis in Experimental Impact Shocks, Science, 276, 18 Apr 1996, 390-392.

The advice is this: when you have dug yourself into a hole, stop digging!

Secularism is undermining science, but secularists just keep digging (Source here)

Many who speak for science will say that there is apparent design in the physical universe and, since Darwinian mechanisms are not applicable to non-reproducing matter, there are "only two explanations: a benevolent designer or a multiverse." The multiverse concept has a reproducing cosmos, with an infinity of universes - of which ours is just one where the conditions happen, by accident, to favour the emergence of intelligent life.

Amanda Gefter of New Scientist does not welcome this analysis. Her thoughts were triggered by an article by Tim Folger in Discover (blogged here) which took a strong position on the matter, as is evidenced by the title: "Science's Alternative to an Intelligent Creator: the Multiverse Theory". She was alarmed because the article effectively concedes that there is evidence for intelligent design in the physical universe. She writes that this:

"lends credence to creationists' mistaken claim that the multiverse was invented to serve as science's get-out-of-God-free card. Indeed, Folger's article was immediately referenced on creationist websites, including the Access Research Network, an intelligent-design hub, and Uncommon Descent, the blog of the Seattle-based Discovery Institute's William Dembski."

Gefter's first response is to deny the need for a dichotomy. Actually, this is a valid point at the level of principle. It is good practice in science to work with multiple hypotheses, otherwise testing hypotheses is methodologically weak and the pitfall is to continually validate the favoured hypothesis. This is why educationalists need to be concerned about teaching Darwinism only as the mechanism of evolution, because students emerge thinking that there is no evidence against the theory. Anyway, here is Gefter:

"Pitting the multiverse against religion presents a false dichotomy. Science never boils down to a choice between two alternative explanations. It is always plausible that both are wrong and a third or fourth or fifth will turn out to be correct."

The reason why this is not a good response is that the argument goes much deeper than specific hypotheses. In my earlier blog, I suggested that this was a good case study for the use of Dembski's design filter, with explanatory approaches based on Law, Chance and Design. In the context of the Multiverse, we are not dealing with specific theories, but contrasting paradigms: Law & Chance versus Design. This does lead to a dichotomy, not between science and religion, but between secularist science and theistic science.

Gefter does not realise she is in a hole, so she keeps digging. She wants to break through the dichotomy barrier. She draws on some speculations of some physicists which suggest that observing is a creative force.

"What might a third option look like here? Physicist John Wheeler once offered a suggestion: maybe we should approach cosmic fine-tuning not as a problem but as a clue. Perhaps it is evidence that we somehow endow the universe with certain features by the mere act of observation. It's an idea that Stephen Hawking has been thinking about, too. Hawking advocates what he calls top-down cosmology, in which observers are creating the universe and its entire history right now. If we in some sense create the universe, it is not surprising that the universe is well suited to us.
That's speculative, but at least it's science."

"Speculative"? Yes, certainly.
"At least it's science"? - No, it is science fiction.

These ideas are science fiction because there is no mechanism for observation to affect the fabric of the universe; because no one has suggested a way of testing the hypothesis that "we somehow endow the universe with certain features by the mere act of observation", and because everything we have learned about the universe as a material entity and ourselves as observers goes against the idea that observation affects the object. The only exception involves quantum physics, but no linkage between this scale and that of the universe at large has been made. The next step here is the abandonment of realism, long regarded as a hallmark of the scientific enterprise. If ID scientists are correct in their analysis of contemporary science (i.e. that it is suffering by having to wear the straitjacket of philosophical materialism), then we can make sense of these wild speculations. We can understand them to be driven by the need to force-fit the universe into a conceptual model where design has no place. By contrast, what ID scientists seek is to legitimise design-based explanations within science and to allow the evidence to be evaluated without the need to comply with the secularist worldview.

Why it's not as simple as God vs the multiverse
Amanda Gefter
New Scientist, 4 December 2008

First para: What would you rather believe in, God or the multiverse? It sounds like an instance of cosmic apples and oranges, but increasingly we are being told it's a choice we must make. Take the dialogue earlier this year between Richard Dawkins and physicist Steven Weinberg in Austin, Texas. Discussing the fact that the universe appears fine-tuned for our existence, Weinberg told Dawkins: "If you discovered a really impressive fine-tuning . . . I think you'd really be left with only two explanations: a benevolent designer or a multiverse."