I am posting this mostly so I remember it later on - this is a great article on UD about the relationship between taxonomy and the concept of common descent. The point is that what the nested hierarchy shows is specifically *not* Darwinian. Excellent post with excellent argumentation followed by an excellent discussion.
For any of you with questions about creationism, I encourage you to come and ask questions at Creationism Q&A Day on Facebook with Creation Nation X. Our friend Ian hosted the last one, and I'll be hosting this one with a focus on biology.
I was having a conversation with someone about fitness functions, who asked how someone could sneak information into a fitness function. I responded. Of course, someone else then asked about how evolution worked in cases where information wasn't snuck into the fitness function - the answer - it is usually snuck into the parameters of evolution! But I hope you can see why online discussions are hard (for any issue). People take the answer to a single *aspect* of the issue to be a universal answer to the whole deal. They mistake the fact that you are having a conversation with a specific person about a specific thing to be a general public service announcement. We can't spend our lives speaking in qualified statements, but we do need to be aware that people listening in aren't familiar with the full context of the conversation.
Todd Wood has an excellent introduction to the form-vs-function debate, focusing on the ideas of Richard Owen. From his post:
Owen's eclectic embracing of functionalism and structuralism were answers to different questions: 1. Why are organisms so well-adapted? and 2. Why are there homologies?....Organismal similarity was to Owen based a [sic] natural law of the archetype. The differences Owen attributed to functional requirements. (Thus he saw two answers for two different questions.)
There is so much going on, it is difficult to keep track of! Unfortunately, I am, yet again, left without time to make adequate reflection, so I'm just going to give a dump.
And, with that, my browser windows are much happier now.
Sorry for the lack of posting. This is my last semester in seminary, and I'm focusing on that. Anyway, here's some stuff that I found rather interesting:
I get information from a number of sources, and often times wind up with more things to read and write about than there is time in the day. So, in order to get my browser back down to its normal size, I'm just going to share with you a link list (note that I have not even read most of these):
As mentioned earlier, Dr. Faulk and Stephen Meyer are having a real debate on the merits of ID. Dr. Faulk gave what he believes to be a disconfirming example of ID's arguments. My response, which is also in the comments is below. In addition, some earlier comments of mine on randomness might be interesting, including:
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Dr. Faulk -
I take issue with your description of the processes of antibody diversity generation. While there is some statistical randomness at play, I would say that the specificity in the process is huge. The parts of the antibody gene are segregated into matchable parts (V, D, J, and C), which are rearranged in specified ways, whose rearrangments are managed by the RSS signal between each part. In addition, after recombination, the cell can generate DNA which are needed to make the final protein fold better (Sanz and Capra PNAS 84(4)).
During the mutation afterwards, the mutations are focused on that gene only, and, for that gene, it focuses on the complementary-determining region and skip the C region (which attaches to the B cell, and thus would be counterproductive to mutate) (Papavasiliou and Schatz Cell 109(2 supplement 1)).
To call this orchestration "random" just because it isn't 100% deterministic is an abuse of the term. It has never been the position of ID that nothing can find a solution within a search space which _utilizes_ randomness. But rather that this only works when the search space has already been narrowed by information. This process works only because, rather than mutations happening at random throughout the cell's DNA, they only happen within a well-defined scope - a scope that _matches_ the environment problem that it is trying to solve.
This is the focus of Dembski's work on Active Information, started with his No Free Lunch book and continuing in the papers he has done with Dr. Marks.
If the process were not so constrained, it would not work. This is the results of not only the work on the immune system, but also those of bacteria - when you mess up the genes in the SOS pathway, evolution does not occur. The evolutionary definition of randomness is that "one of the central tenets of Darwinian evolution is that mutations are random with respect to the needs of the organism in coping with its environment" (Templeton, "Population Genetics and Microevolutionary Theory", 2006, pg 3).
Well, your example is actually one that contradicts this statement - the gene which is modified is not random with respect to the needs of the organism, and neither is the are of the gene which is mutated. This is excluded well over 99.99% of the genome. How a mutation directed to the correct 0.01% of the genome is considered "random with respect to the needs of the organism" just because, within that 0.01% there is some variability, is completely beyond me.
Tim Heaton wrote a number of criticisms of young-earth Creationism in a recent paper in the journal Science and Education. Tim has been kind enough to discuss the paper over at Paul Garner's blog. He also posted a copy of that paper and one other.
Anyway, it would be worth your while to read the paper, Paul Garner's post, and the comments.
One objection that I often hear about Creation Research and specifically Creation-oriented journals is the accusation of "circular reasoning". A recent discussion I was having with Clever Badger was on just this topic. While I don't think that the charge is legitimate, I believe that those who level the charge are doing so in good faith. There is a legitimate question on the methods of science in there, and I think it deserves a good and well-thought-out answer.
Here is Clever Badger's objection:
The problem here is that it presupposes a literal interpretation of Genesis. In other words, the ARJ [Answers Research Journal] isn’t looking for objective research – it’s looking for writers who can force data to fit a predetermined conclusion (e.g. that the diversity of life on Earth today can be somehow traced back to pairs of animals coming off of a boat several thousand years ago). That’s not how science works. The ARJ is basically saying that they don’t want articles that disagree with their position
Basically the accusation is circular reasoning - that people are presupposing a literal interpretation of Genesis and then using that presupposition to argue for that very conclusion, and call it a publicly valid argument. I have, indeed, seen bad arguments of that sort, but I think that Clever Badger is misinterpreting a lot of what is going on - both in Creation circles and secular circles.
First of all, Clever Badger is implicitly stating that the same kind of presuppositions are not occuring in secular science. To examine that claim, let's take a look at two journal purpose statements.
The first, is the Creationist ARJ's journal (note that while I am a fan of ARJ, the reason that they are being focused on is merely because AiG [the publisher of ARJ] was the original target of Clever Badger's post - there are many other good Creation journals as well):
ARJ is a professional, peer-reviewed technical journal for the publication of interdisciplinary scientific and other relevant research from the perspective of the recent Creation and the global Flood within a biblical framework...
ARJ is a professional, peer-reviewed technical journal for the publication of interdisciplinary scientific and other relevant research from the perspective of the recent Creation and the global Flood within a biblical framework...
Now, let's look at the mission statement for another publication - the journal Evolution:
Evolution, published for the Society for the Study of Evolution, is the premier publication devoted to the study of organic evolution and the integration of the various fields of science concerned with evolution. The journal presents significant and original results that extend our understanding of evolutionary phenomena and processes.
So, ARJ is a journal published by a Creation organization, for the purposes of furthering our understanding of Creation in an interdisciplinary manner. Evolution, is a journal published by the Society for the Study of Evolution, for the purposes of furthering our understanding of evolution in an interdisciplinary manner.
Hmmmm......
As you can see, every scientist presupposes the basic tenets of their field. The purpose of these fields is to learn and understand more on the basis of these tenets. The journal Evolution presupposes common ancestry (I challenge anyone to find an article in Evolution giving a comparison of common ancestry to other hypotheses), the journal ARJ presupposes Biblical Creation.
I think that the stumbling point is that many people think that Biblical Creation is the stopping point, rather than the starting point. For some people it is, but for many Creation researches, Biblical Creation is the starting point of what we do. The goal is to use Biblical Creation to better understand nature. In fact, many of the foundational principles of many branches of science were based on just that supposition.
For instance, many do not know that Steno, known as the "Father of Geology", was motivated by Creation, and used Biblical Creation principles to formulate his laws of stratigraphy. It was precisely because he believed in the global flood that gave him the intellectual capacity to argue that Shark's teeth found inland were the remains of buried animals and not created by God in situ, as was a common geological notion in his time.
Likewise, Gregor Mendel, was motivated by his disbelief in evolutionary principles for his experimentation in pea plants. His paper, which is the foundation of genetics, was actually explicitly anti-evolutionary (it took the evolutionists about 50 years to find a way to incorporate genetics into evolutionary theory).
Similar stories exist for Keppler and many other scientists who were foundational to their field. They used Scripture to understand Creation better.
Another interesting example is the Big Bang theory. Most people don't know that LeMaitre, who originally proposed the Big Bang, was working from the same data everyone else was. The only difference is that he also added to his data a touch of Biblical history and Catholic theology. The notion that the universe expanding was not new, but LeMaitre was the one - based on his belief in a beginning - who used that notion to propose that the world originated as a "cosmic egg" (which is very Thomistic in its outlook). In fact, an early, unpublished paper by LeMaitre described the his ideas specifically in support of Genesis, saying that the beginning happened "as Genesis suggested it".
As you can see, presuppositions are present in all of science, and Biblical presuppositions have been key in the founding of nearly every major branch of science. Many people have a view of science that is very dry, calculating, and objective. Science has never been as dull, or as objective, as people's descriptions of it.
In specific reference to Creationism, it is interesting to note that criticisms of evolution have been allowed in the secular, scientific literature, but only when it is posed as an "unsolved problem" for understanding evolution, rather than as a possibility that evolution is false. For instance see this abstract. I know of several ID papers published in this same manner over the last few years, but the authors have asked me not to disclose them as IDists because they want the papers to be evaluated "on their own merits".
So, going back to my discussion with Clever Badger, Clever Badger also notes the apologetic aspect of Creationism. However, showing that scientific theory X doesn't make sense, or that theory Y is a better explanation for facts A, B, and C is in fact a legitimate part of science.
But can an external belief be valid in such a context? Absolutely so! External beliefs are perfectly valid heuristics for finding scientific ideas. In fact, in Gilkey's Creationism on Trial, he notes that historians of science believe that Gould's punctuated equilibrium came from his Marxist beliefs (they both hinge on revolution, rather than gradualism, being the defining mode of life). Why isn't this invalid? Because Gould never uses Marxist ideology as evidence. The submitted evidence is all externally verifiable. Likewise, for apologetic Creationism, the Bible is used as a heuristic for finding one's own position, but not as an external justification for it.
So, to summarize, there are two basic forms of Creation research (though many engage in both):
a) use Biblical Creation as an assumption to learn more about nature. This is not circular because it does not use the findings as a reason to believe that Biblical Creation is true, nor does it claim that its findings should be reasonable or valid to people in a different perspective.
b) engage in apologetics for Biblical Creation. This is not circular because although the Bible was used by the researchers as a heuristic for their own positions, it was not used as an external justification to others.
Certainly there is interplay between these two poles, as some ideas discovered by the group in (a) can in fact be used and/or proven without reference to scripture, despite the fact that it was originally studied in that way. Likewise, apologetics can sometimes reveal very interesting aspects about the nature of creation. This latter notion is often what happens with my studies. It starts off as apologetic, but later sparks additional ideas and questions which lead to a greater understanding of God's creation for those who share my assumptions.
So, hopefully this gives you a little insight into the thinking behind Creationism.