Intelligent Design Theory: Science or Religion?

Trouble ahead for science
(By Kenneth R. Miller, Boston Globe, May 8, 2008)

AMERICAN science is in trouble, and if you wonder why, just go to the movies. Popular culture is gradually turning against science, and Ben Stein's new movie, "Expelled," is helping to push it along.

"Intelligent Design," the relabeled, repackaged form of American creationism, has always had a problem. It just can't seem to produce any evidence. To scientists, the reasons for this are obvious. To conservative Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, Intelligent Design is nothing more than a "phony theory." No data, no science, no experiments, just an attempt to sneak a narrow set of religious views into US classrooms.

Advocates of Intelligent Design needed a story to explain why the idea has been a nonstarter within the scientific community, and Ben Stein has given it to them. The story line is that Intelligent Design advocates are persecuted and suppressed. "Expelled" tells of this terrible campaign against free expression, and mocks the pretensions of the closed-minded scientific elite supposedly behind it.

There are many things wrong with this movie. One example: Viewers are told that Dr. Richard Sternberg lost his job at the Smithsonian Institution because he edited a paper favorable to Intelligent Design. Wrong.

Sternberg wasn't even employed by the Smithsonian (he had no job to lose), and had resigned as journal editor six months before the paper was published. In fact, the irony is that neither Steinberg nor any of the other people featured as martyrs in "Expelled" lost jobs as a result of their advocacy of Intelligent Design, while many others who supported evolution have. In 2007, Chris Comer, the director of science education for Texas schools, was fired for having done nothing more than forwarding an e-mail announcing a pro-evolution seminar.

The movie also uses interviews with avowed atheists like Richard Dawkins, author of "The God Delusion," to argue that scientific establishment is vehemently anti-God. Never mind that 40 percent of the members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science profess belief in a personal God. Stein, avoiding these 50,000 people, tells viewers that "Darwinists" don't allow scientists to even think of God.

Puzzled, the editors of Scientific American asked Mark Mathis, the film's co-producer, why he and Stein didn't interview such people, like Francis Collins (head of the Human Genome Project), Francisco Ayala, or myself. Mathis cited me by name, saying "Ken Miller would have confused the film unnecessarily." In other words, showing a scientist who accepts both God and evolution would have confused their story line.

Despite these falsehoods, by far the film's most outlandish misrepresentation is its linkage of Darwin with the Holocaust. A concentration camp tour guide tells Stein that the Nazis were practicing "Darwinism," and that's that. Never mind those belt buckles proclaiming Gott mit uns (God is with us), the toxic anti-Semitism of Martin Luther, the ghettoes and murderous pogroms in Christian Europe centuries before Darwin's birth. No matter. It's all the fault of evolution.

Why is all this nonsense a threat to science? The reason is Stein's libelous conclusion that science is simply evil. In an April 21 interview on the Trinity Broadcast Network, Stein called the Nazi murder of children "horrifying beyond words." Indeed. But what led to such horrors? Stein explained: "that's where science in my opinion, this is just an opinion, that's where science leads you. Love of God and compassion and empathy leads you to a very glorious place. Science leads you to killing people."

According to Stein, science leads you to "killing people." Not to cures and vaccines, not to a deeper understanding of nature, not to wonders like computers and cellphones, and certainly not to a better life. Nope. Science is murder.

"Expelled" is a shoddy piece of propaganda that props up the failures of Intelligent Design by playing the victim card. It deceives its audiences, slanders the scientific community, and contributes mightily to a climate of hostility to science itself. Stein is doing nothing less than helping turn a generation of American youth away from science. If we actually come to believe that science leads to murder, then we deserve to lose world leadership in science. In that sense, the word "expelled" may have a different and more tragic connotation for our country than Stein intended.

Good piece, to the point and accessible to the world. It does what Stein cant do. Miller makes his assertions backed by real evidence.

Nothing I say has scientific validity.

Platypus Genome Found Fittingly Strange
(By Rick Weiss, Washington Post, May 8, 2008)

When the British naturalist George Shaw received a weird specimen from Australia in 1799 -- one with a mole's fur, a duck's bill and serpentlike spurs on its rear legs -- he did what any skeptical scientist would do: He looked for the stitching and glue that would reveal it to be a hoax.

"It was impossible not to entertain some distant doubts as to the genuine nature of the animal," Shaw wrote of the seemingly built-by-committee creature, which he eventually named "platypus," for its flat, webbed feet.

Now, more than 200 years later, a team of scientists has determined the platypus's entire genetic code. And right down to its DNA, it turns out, the animal continues to strain credulity, bearing genetic modules that are in turn mammalian, reptilian and avian.

There are genes for egg laying -- evidence of its reptilian roots. Genes for making milk, which the platypus does in mammalian style despite not having nipples. Genes for making snake venom, which the animal stores in its legs. And there are five times as many sex-determining chromosomes as scientists know what to do with.

"It's such a wacky organism," said Richard Wilson, director of the Genome Sequencing Center at Washington University in St. Louis, who with colleague Wesley Warren led the two-year effort, described today in the journal Nature.

Yet in its wackiness, Wilson said, the platypus genome offers an unprecedented glimpse of how evolution made its first stabs at producing mammals. It tells the tale of how early mammals learned to nurse their young; how they matched poisonous snakes at their venomous game; and how they struggled to build a system of fertilization and gestation that would eventually, through relatives that took a different tack, give rise to the first humans.

"As we learn more about things like platypuses," Wilson said, "we also learn more about ourselves and where we came from and how we work."

Platypuses (preferred over "platypi" in U.S. dictionaries) live on a sliver of Earth along Australia's east coast, in Tasmania and in Papua New Guinea. They are not endangered, but few people see them since they spend their days in burrows built into stream banks. But Ornithorhynchus anatinus has a global fan base, it seems, serving as the mascot for countless companies, products and events.

The animal's complete genetic code, or genome, turns out to have 2.2 billion molecular "letters" of DNA, or about two-thirds as many as the human genome, and contains 18,500 genes, about the same as humans.

Finding the order of all those letters was grueling, scientists said, because no similar animal has ever been sequenced. The platypus inhabits an isolated branch on the evolutionary tree with just one cousin, the echidna, also of Australia. That left researchers with no model to help them figure out how the platypus's DNA fits together.

"It was quite a difficult thing," said Jennifer Marshall Graves of Australian National University in Canberra, who led part of the analysis after the St. Louis team derived the basic sequence.

"The genome was completely unknown, and we knew it was going to be fairly weird," Graves said. "You'd look at some of these repetitive sequences and think, 'What on Earth is that?' "

One of the more surprising elements was the animal's system for sex determination. Most mammals have two sex chromosomes, either two "X" chromosomes (to make a female) or an "X" and a "Y" (to make a male). Not only do platypuses have 10 instead of two, but they seem closer to the "Z" and "W" chromosomes of birds.

Moreover, the key gene on the Y chromosome that confers maleness in most mammals is not on any of the platypus's sex chromosomes. It is on another chromosome, where it seems to have nothing to do with sex. In its place, another gene seems to be central to sex determination in platypuses -- evidence of a shakeout of various evolutionary efforts to settle on a system of sex determination in early mammals.

Other genes show how platypuses were transitional creatures on the road from egg laying to internal gestation. There is just one gene for one kind of yolk protein, for example, while chickens have three. That is consistent with the idea that the platypus represents a shift in strategy toward providing more nutrition after hatching, rather than during incubation, and lends credence to the poet Ogden Nash's famous appreciation of the platypus's approach to child-rearing: "I like the way it raises its family/Partly birdly, partly mammaly."

Platypus milk appears to be a modified version of a moisturizing fluid that ancestral platypuses once used to keep their leathery, lizardlike eggs from drying out during incubation. It is secreted from "milk patches" on the mother's abdomen.

As with kangaroos, platypus milk becomes more nutritionally complex over a period of months while the young suckle and grow, the result of at least five different genes turning on in sequence.

"The dairy industry is actually very interested in this and want to get their hands on the controlling gene elements that turn these milk genes on and off," Graves said.

Another surprise was that platypuses have a huge array of genes that help them detect chemical signals released underwater by other animals. That makes sense, scientists said, since platypuses close their eyes and nostrils while diving for the small aquatic crustaceans that make up the bulk of their diet.

These "vomeronasal" genes, active in the back of the mouth, give the platypus a highly sensitive system for detecting waterborne pheromones -- hormonelike signals released by potential mates or prey.

Yet another surprise came from an examination of the genes that make platypus venom, which males can deliver from a sharp spur on each of their rear legs.

The platypus is the only mammal to make venom, and the chemicals in it are almost identical to those in some snake venoms. Yet the new analysis shows plainly that the two classes of animals came up with the innovation independently and by different evolutionary routes, though both built their poisons from the same starter molecule, an immune system chemical.

Disappointingly, scientists said, they have been unable to find any genes involved in the platypus's elaborate system for detecting electrical fields, which it does through its bill, perhaps to help navigate through narrow waterways. But that is just one of many avenues, they said, that promise to keep them busy with duck-billed DNA.

"We're going to be using the platypus genome for the next 50 years," said Ewan Birney of the European Bioinformatics Institute in Cambridge, England, which was involved in the analysis.

"The platypus gives us a perspective that is deep in time, that tells us what was going on 170 million years ago, when all these traits were being developed," Birney said. "Every time there's a difference in the DNA between human and dog, or human and some other mammal, and you want to know which one changed more recently, you need these outgroup species to be able to answer that."

Spendius:Quote:
Nothing I say has scientific validity.


Or merit.
Or insight.
Or


Joe(never mind, it's not worth the time)Nation