Category: Evolution
Michael Behe Wraps Up UK Tour Writing About Intelligent Design in The Guardian
Michael Behe has just wrapped up a speaking tour of the UK. Finishing it off over the weekend was a lecture at a conference at the Oxford Brookes University, and now a short column in The Guardian responding to Andrew Brown. My contention is that ‘the purposeful arrangement of parts’ to achieve a specific purpose is the criterion that enables us to recognise design. I argued that the conclusion of design in the bacterial flagellum and in many other biological systems is no different from discerning it for a mousetrap or a Ford Mondeo. So what makes Intelligent Design fundamentally different from Darwinism? The Darwinian view which dominates biology holds that the design we all see in life is merely Read More ›
Regulating DNA Repair Mechanisms
Every once in a while an article comes out on a new DNA repair mechanism or a new feature of a known DNA repair mechanism. There are so many complexities behind DNA repair and there is still more to uncover. Last October, a review article came out in Molecular Cell on regulatory factors for DNA repair mechanisms (Molecular Cell 40(2), October 22, 2010, 179-204). Basically, DNA repair mechanisms are very powerful because they can often replace or remove nucleotide bases. So these powerful mechanisms need something to make sure they do their job properly and not destroy the whole genome in the process. That is where regulators come in. If DNA repair mechanisms are medics flying out to the damaged Read More ›
The Edge of Evolution, as seen by Dave Ussery and BioLogos
In his next installment Professor Ussery complains that I wasn’t enthusiastic enough in my chapter “What Darwinism Can Do.” As an example of common descent I pointed to Baker’s yeast, for which there is good evidence that sometime in the past its genome duplicated. But I also noted that other yeasts with unduplicated genomes have done fine for themselves. The point was that gene or even whole genome duplication is not the powerful tool that Darwinists often claim. That point passed over Dave’s head. His main comment on the book’s next chapter, “What Darwinism Can’t Do” is to tell the reader to search PubMed for the words “cilium” and “evolution.” One gets lots of papers that contain both those words, Read More ›
Response to Edward Max on TalkOrigins Immunity Article
[Editor’s Note: This is the final post in a six-part a series from microbiologist Donald L. Ewert, where he argues that the processes used by our immune system to generate antibodies are anything but “random,” and do not serve as an example of Darwinian evolution. Other posts in this rebuttal can be found at: Part One, Part Two, Part Three, and Part Four, and Part Five. In the first five posts, Dr. Ewert responded to Kathryn Applegate of the BioLogos Foundation. In this sixth post, he responds to similar arguments from Edward Max at TalkOrgins that antibody generation is “evolution in miniature.”] One of the goals of Edwards Max’s post at TalkOrigins is to refute a narrow claim of “creationists” Read More ›
Dave Ussery Ruminates about The Edge of Evolution
The first part of Professor Ussery’s review of The Edge of Evolution on the website BioLogos is mainly an exercise in throat clearing, where he describes his “philosophical and personal perspective,” notes that he and I agree on common descent, and correctly points out that my book concerns the mechanism of evolution. In the second installment Dave begins to show that he somehow just doesn’t get the big points of the book. In writing of the sickle cell and other antimalarial mutations which degrade the genome, I had said that they were “hurtful.” He misunderstands this, writing, “the example [Behe] gives us is not a ‘good mutation.’” But the sickle cell and other antimalarial mutations most certainly are “good” mutations Read More ›