Vibrant Dance: Signature in the Cell

The final position paper of the day was by Stephen C. Meyer of the Discovery Institute entitled, “Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design.”

As Meyer got started by talking about natural versus artificial selection, it occurred to me that artificial selection is even found in the Bible, as far back as Genesis, when Jacob was working for Laban to earn Rachel’s hand. In order to increase his herd at the expense of Laban’s, when the strongest and best animals were going to mate he did certain things so that the offspring would be marked as his, and when the weaker animals were mating, he left them alone so they would be marked as Laban’s. Thus he was using artificial selection to create a superior herd and a weaker herd. (Gen 30) (NB: Jacob’s method of marking is rather suspect, but the fact that he was selectively breeding the stronger animals together and the weaker ones together is the point!)

Meyer asked a couple of introductory questions:  Is adaptation the only appearance of design? And, if not, has natural selection explained away all other appearances of design? In other words, the naturalists say that nature has the “appearance of design,” but not actual design, and that adaptation is a key factor that gives the appearance of design.

In answer, he quotes natural philosopher Bernd Olaf-Kuppers, “the problem with the origin of life is basically the origin of new information.” So, can either adaptation or natural selection be given as an initial source of the information density required for life?

Naturalists initially offered up Chance as the origin of information, but even they have rejected this as being insufficient. The next theory was “pre-biotic natural selection”—that certain arrangements of non-living (pre-biotic) materials was better able to transmit/promote life than other arrangements. Meyer showed that this doesn’t work because it is a non-sequitor:  how can a non-functional system reproduce to form a functional system that functions better? In other words, natural selection is defined as “A process in nature in which organisms possessing certain genotypic characteristics that make them better adjusted to an environment tend to survive, reproduce, increase in number or frequency, and therefore, are able to transmit and perpetuate their essential genotypic qualities to succeeding generations.” So how can something that is pre-biotic (not alive) survive and reproduce better than something else that is also not alive? If it is not alive, then it is by definition incapable of survival and reproduction.

Even Nobel laureate Christian de Duve recognized the problem by saying that theories of origin “need information, which implies they have to presuppose what is to be explained in the first place.”

A third and more contemporary scenario Meyer offered from the naturalists was the general category of “self-organization scenarios.” Here, the idea is that in some solution somewhere billions of years ago, molecular bits bumping around aggregated together in a specific order due to certain attractive forces based on the unique compounds that make up the DNA ‘letters’ and formed the first DNA or RNA molecule, and presto, this random assembly of chemicals happened to code for the first living thing. The problem with this proposal is that it doesn’t work. The DNA letters are chemical units called bases, which are attached to a molecule composed of a sugar and a ‘phosphate group.’ This molecule to which the bases attach is like a vertebrae that when connected to others forms a backbone, and the bases stick out from the backbone like a half-rung of a ladder. The vertebrae are all identical to each other and the letters only attach to the backbone in a way that leaves a given vertebra to attach to any other vertebra, regardless of the base attached to it.

An analogy would be a set of train cars. You can have box cars, flatbeds, tank cars, cattle cars and so on, but they can be placed together in any order because the parts that link them together are universal and identical. The couplers ability to latch to each other is 100% independent of what kind of container is place on top of the undercarriage. It is only the presence of an intelligence, the loadmaster, that determines which order the cars should be linked for the train’s itinerary. {Meyer used a different analogy- a prop he brought, but this conveys better in print.}

Meyer then asked, “can the design hypothesis be transformed into a scientifically rigorous argument?”

To address this, he showed how Darwin explicitly used an approach called “multiple competing theories” in arriving at his evolutionary conclusions. In other words, he looked at various possible hypotheses for the data to explain a historical event (origin of life) and used “inference to the best explanation” to eliminate the bad hypotheses. In plain English, he used logical inferences to see which hypothesis did not adequately explain the data and eliminated them from consideration. Ideally, this leaves the strongest hypothesis remaining.

Using this approach, Meyer drew on another priniciple, that of uniformitarianism—“the present is the key to the past.” The natural laws at work today were at work in the same way throughout the universe’s history. Given that today, “the creation of new information is habitually the result of conscious activity,” he reasons that the creation of life from non-life is the creation of new information and therefore must be the result of conscious activity.

Thus, he argues for Intelligent Design. I agree with Falk on one thing at least, that ID is a one issue view—is design scientifically discernable? And therefore, it is an umbrella over all three main creationist camps (young earth, old earth and evolutionary creationism). While there is a wide variety of opinion on mechanism within ID, they are focused on the issue of whether agency can be detected. However, the ID folks at the conference from the Discovery Institute were definitely old earth progressive creationists and seemed to spend as much time trying to show why evolution is not a viable mechanism as trying to show that God’s agency is scientifically detectable. While there may be some correlation here, and at the moment I tend to agree with them, it does seem to be a distraction from their main point and creates unnecessary (at this point) division within the Christian scientific world.

Random question to the masses: I’ve noticed that in all of these discussions, plant life is virtually ignored and the focus in evolutionary discussions seems exclusively based on animal life. It seems that it would be worthwhile to examine how evolution would ‘explain’ which came first, plant or animal? How did the transformation occur between the two? Where do protists fit in? I think the naturalists’ answer would be that a protist that metabolized via photosynthesis was the first life form and eventually plants and animals diverged from that, but how does that affect the time needed and what genetic traits are common to plants, animals and protists that would give clues to this common ancestor if such a critter did exist?

SDG

Vibrant Dance: “God’s Creativity and Providence”

{This post was to be about Fuz Rana’s (RTB) talk about “Biochemistry and the Bible:  How Fine-tuning in the Design and Specific Unfolding of the Biosphere Support Christianity,” but during his talk my laptop battery died and I lost pretty much all of those notes, so I am skipping to Darrel Falk’s presentation. I will listen to the CD of Fuz’s talk in the next few days and take a new set of notes. They will be limited as I won’t have access to his slides, but it should be a passable representation of his talk.}

Darrel Falk from the BioLogos Foundation presented their position in “God’s Creativity and Providence for the Unfolding of Life: An Evolutionary Creationist’s Perspective on the Universe.” A key point was that he (and many in his camp) don’t really like the term ‘theistic evolution,’ preferring rather the term, ‘evolutionary creationism’ because it puts the noun emphasis on creation rather than evolution, and I can definitely appreciate the distinction.

As someone who is admittedly skeptical about the ability of evolutionary mechanisms to truly model the AMAZING diversity of life on this planet, especially the ‘explosions’ of speciation  that occur spontaneously in the geologic record, I was really looking forward to a cogent explanation of this position, addressing some of the key criticisms of it by other creation viewpoints.

Unfortunately, I was really disappointed for a number of reasons. One of the biggest distractions were Falk’s slides—he used extremely fancy fonts and effects that made them hard to read and absorb quickly. They were visually artful and attractive, yet did not communicate the information efficiently. He tried to give a two hour talk in 50 minutes, so flew through critical slides, which compounded the problem of being able to read the info. Falk himself was distracted—he had an early technological glitch with a laser pointer that really bothered him and he spent a lot of time with extraneous and filler comments that made it harder to follow his train of thought. I am a PhD scientist, but haven’t had any biology since high school, so I was having to put my mind in an unfamiliar paradigm, so I can imagine the difficulty for a non-technical audience. In all honesty, I kind of gave up on notetaking fairly early because I had to concentrate so hard on what he was saying, so will have to go back and listen to it again, and revisit.

He spent probably half to two-thirds of his talk discussing the insertion of the Alu DNA sequence into the genetic code and tracing it through the genetic codes of several species. Alu is a stretch of DNA that codes for a specific protein and tends to insert itself in particular places due (I think) to environmental or other kinds of stress, and then get transmitted to future generations. Therefore, the logic goes, if it occurs in the same place in several species, then they must have a common ancestor.

Not knowing more about Alu insertion, I have several questions based on what I understood in Falk’s presentation. It is not clear to me when he says “it inserts into particular positions,” whether that means that it inserts randomly, so when it appears in a genomic sequence, that means it is truly a unique fingerprint and the chances of it appearing there in another species is so improbable as to ignore the possibility, or, if it tends to insert in specific parts of the code in different types of species, so those are fingerprints for genetic similarities. If it is the first, then there may be some validity to it supporting common descent. If it is the second, then I see it as no more unique as vertebrates tending to have four limbs, which could be common design just as easily as common descent.

Another question is if Alu can so easily insert itself into the code, can it also delete itself and/or mutate? If so, how can we really be sure it is useful as a tracking tag?

I had many similar questions throughout the talk, when I could follow the arguments. I’m not offering these questions as contrarian attempts to discredit his position, but as an attempt to understand it, and illustrate areas for improvement in the argument’s clarity.

When Falk got to the end of the Alu discussion, he went on to cover at least two other completely different evidences for the evolutionary creationist position, but covered all of it in a quarter of the time he spent on Alu, and it simply blew past me.

As I indicated in my Day 1 Recap, a common problem the position speakers had was covering too much info at medium depth. It would be better to do a low orbit overview of the entire position in 10-15 minutes, then do a thorough discussion of ONE point from beginning to end to show the ruggedness of the argument on that point. The context of this session was that of introducing one’s position to people you assume know nothing about it, with the opportunity to go into greater detail in the later breakout sessions for those interested.

I look forward to learning more about the Evolutionary Creationist position in the future and sympathize with Falk—sometimes Murphy just takes center stage.

SDG

Vibrant Dance: “Cosmic Reasons”

{Warning: LONG post}

The first of the “position talks” of Tuesday afternoon, Hugh Ross of Reasons to Believe addressed the cosmological aspect of the RTB model in “Cosmic Reasons: Did God Supernaturally Design the Universe for Man's Benefit?” He sent an avalanche of data on our way showing that the Biblical God is a reasonable conclusion. His arguments fall into several categories.

Universe’s Beginning:  Ross stated that scientists acknowledge design, but who/what is the designer? And, is evidence for the Creator’s existence shrinking or growing? He quoted astronomer Hoyle, “there is a good deal of cosmology in the Bible…it is a remarkable conception.” Taking Hoyle’s cue, Ross listed a number of cosmological passages from the Bible that indicate a singularity beginning to the universe:  Gen 1:1, 2:3, 2:4, Ps148:5, Is 40:26, 42:5, 45:18, Jn 1:3, Col 1:15-17, Heb 11:3, and Titus 1:2.

He argued that if mass exists in the universe and if general relativity reliably predicts cosmic dynamics, then space and time must be created by a Causal Agent who transcends space and time. He stated that general relativity is the most tested theory, proven to 15 decimal places. As a scientist, I was hoping for references for these assertions, but given the lay audience, I’ll let it slide. Besides, it is probably in one of his books somewhere.

A key point was that he studied many of the major sacred books in the world and the Bible is just about the only one of them that makes cosmological arguments centuries before science could confirm them, and any other books with cosmology were later shown to be wrong.

Expanding Universe:  “Any universe that, on average expands, must have a beginning in the finite past.” “All reasonable expanding universe models are subject to the relentless grip of the spacetime theorems.” If the Bible’s cosmology is correct, we would expect the following three predictions: 1) Evidence for a single beginning of space-time will grow, 2) The certainty of the current space-time theorems will grow (their “grip will become even more relentless”), 3) the case for a transcendental cause will grow stronger. Ultimately he predicts that scientists will no longer be able to presume all causes are natural.

Scripture evidence for an expanding universe according to Ross include: Job 9:8, PS 104:2, Is 40:22, 42:5, 45:12, 48:13, 51:13, Jer 10:12, 51:15, and Zech 12:1. Furthermore, Ross says that Hebrew scholars from 1000 years ago assumed these passages indicated an expanding universe—12 billion years ago, galaxies were close together and farther apart 2 billion years ago.

Constant Laws of Physics:  One of the key hypotheses of the Young Earth Creationist camp is that the physical laws were different in the “early” universe around 10,000 years ago. Ross says the Bible insists these laws of necessity have been constant by God’s decree and design, citing Jeremiah 33:25.

Second Law of Thermodynamics: The movement of the universe towards decay is Biblical too:  Romans 8:20-22.

Fine Tuning Arguments:  Next, Ross went to the ever-present fine tuning argument. Surprisingly to me, he focused on the topic of dark energy. {Personally, I hold dark energy/matter very lightly as a theory as it is sort of a bogeyman theory—there seems to be something out there that we can’t directly observe or measure, so until we know what it is, we’ll call it ‘dark’ whatever. I would be very interested and it seems that it would be a very powerful supporting argument of the RTB model if they could find evidence of the true nature of dark stuff in the Bible in such a way that it would direct researchers to ‘discover’ it directly.}

So, Ross maintains that the fine tuning of the amount and expansion of dark energy is so precise that it exceeds the very best design success of humans (the gravity wave telescope) by 10⁹⁷. {Basically, God is at least a googol times smarter than the best humans have come up with so far.} Apparently, the existence and impact of dark energy has been confirmed nine ways. He also discussed work by Dyson, Kleban and Susskind where they admit disturbing (and potentially theistic) implications of the cosmological constant. Further fine tuning is observed in the following constants that dictate the life must be carbon based:  gravitational force constant, strong/weak nuclear force constants, proton/electron number ratio, electron/proton mass ratio, velocity of light, cosmic expansion rate, cosmic entropy level, and at least 132 others. Evidence for fine tuning are found at all cosmic size scales—we have “just the right sized” galaxy, sun, Jupiter, earth and moon.

Fine tuning can be a sound argument, however, the strictest skeptics will claim it is a cleverly disguised “god-of-the-gaps” argument—“the current universe is so improbable, God must have done it.” However, as Walter Bradley has pointed out to thousands of college students over the last 25 years, fine tuning is ‘evidence for,’ not ‘proof of,’ a key distinction. It is important to remember that origins is a “historical science” rather than an “experimental science” that can be tested through repeated experimentation. Therefore, to make a legal-historical proof, one must build up a body of evidence, some individual pieces stronger, and some weaker, so that the overall case is compelling, beyond a reasonable doubt. Therefore, use of fine tuning is acceptable as a part of a larger whole, of which Ross provides glimpses.

Model Predictions:  RTB’s shtick is that the Bible offers predictive theories to guide researchers into new discoveries, as I indicated above. Therefore, Ross offers some comments on predictions and compares an atheistic universe to a theistic one.

If there is no Creator:

                Design evidence will decrease in strength and number

                Evidence for Biblical God will get progressively weaker

                Design evidence will be for life in general, not humans in particular

                Astonomers will find many systems capable of permitting advanced life

If there IS a Creator:

                Astronomers will soon find 10000+ “goldilocks” planets, but none will match the abundance profile of Earth that makes advanced life possible (Earth has 22 anomalous vital poisons, including carbon, nitrogen, fluorine, phosphorous, potassium, sulfur, and so on. And it has anomalous vital metals: aluminum, titanium, thorium, uranium and others.)

                Fossils of Earth’s first life will prove to be abundant, 1-10 microns in size, complex, and diverse. He offered a surprising theory that these fossils should be found on the moon! They will be rare on earth because of all of the weathering and geologic activity that has torn up the surface over the ensuing millions/billions of years, BUT that some of the debris from asteroidal bombardment at this time either is expected to or has been found on the moon and since the moon is not geologically active, we should be able to search for such fossils there. That would be a fine find indeed!

Ross closed with two thoughts.

1)    -  Gaps exist on both sides of the debate, and over time therefore, we should examine to see for which side the gaps are shrinking in size and number.

2)    -  We are in the “7^th day of creation” where God is at rest from His Creative works, which is why we don’t see speciation occurring since the arrival of modern humans, and why scientists studying present day Earth (through chemistry, biology and physics, etc, as opposed to origin scientists) only see naturalistic outcomes.

Hugh Ross provided an information rich talk that was like drinking from a fire hose. The main trouble with a talk like that is that so much is presented so fast, it is difficult to evaluate any given argument for validity and robustness. He has written so many books by this point that the evidence for things is scattered across all of them, so it is a decision of effort to study the whole thing. However, he has combed hundreds if not thousands of journal articles and summarized and synthesized them into those books, which makes it less daunting than what he has spent the last few decades doing.

A final thought:  some might argue that it isn’t exactly fair to have the RTB (aka progressive creation model) have two talks right off the bat, compared to one for the other two camps. As I mentioned in one of my recaps last week, the ID folks really are an umbrella group saying there is an intelligent creator (though many tend to be progressivists versus theistic evolution), and the theistic evolution folks only deal with origin of life, not origin of the universe. Therefore, it is fair for RTB to separate out those two aspects of their model, so that origin of life arguments can be compared apples to apples. It is also logical for Ross to address cosmological origins first as the universe had to get here first before life.

{PS- The next post was to be about Fuz Rana’s (RTB) talk about “Biochemistry and the Bible:  How Fine-tuning in the Design and Specific Unfolding of the Biosphere Support Christianity,” but in looking ahead in my notes, it turns out that during his talk my laptop battery died and I lost pretty much all of those notes, so I am skipping to Darrel Falk’s presentation. I will listen to the CD of Fuz’s talk in the next few days and take a new set of notes. They will be limited as I won’t have access to his slides, but it should be a passable representation of his talk.}

SDG

Vibrant Dance: “Science Cannot Be God”

The last talk of Tuesday morning, and the last of the preparatory talks before the position talks was by Dan Heinze, geophysicist, Vibrant Dance co-host and co-sponsor on “Science Cannot be God: What is Science? Some Limitations, Some Implications.” Again, this was a well thought-out and apropos foundational talk for a conference of this type. As it was targeted towards clergy and non-science lay leaders, it was important to discuss what science is and isn’t, and was a helpful reminder to the scientists present.

He started with some basic principles, such as that all experiments have a self-referential component—a frame of reference that must be clearly understood and can affect the measurements. This is due partially to something called the uncertainty principle that indicates the ultimate confidence to which the accuracy of any measurement can be ascertained. One ramification of this (combined with quantum mechanics) is that observing an event affects it. It occurs to me as it might to you that how then can we have confidence that we are learning anything true about the world? We can take comfort as Christians that God is the ultimate observer, and as He is outside the universe and sees all of it, exerts an objectivity on it that gives us an extra measure of confidence.

A second point Heinze made regarded a discovery in mathematics in the 1930’s by Kurt Gödel that mathematics is incomplete, and therefore, it is impossible for all truth to be determined by math alone, and specifically, it is possible to know something to be true and yet not be able to prove it mathematically. {This is a VERY simple summary of a superficial treatment of a deep subject, so for those that have studied this, consider it a book report on the Cliff’s Notes of the Reader’s Digest Condensed Version of War and Peace.)

The conclusion of these ideas is that both math and science are limited.

He then discussed work by Alan Turing (British mathematician, computer scientist, cryptologist, etc) that indicates that a given system is not able to be understood within itself. A more complex system outside the studied system is needed to explain or understand it.  There are some profound comparative religion implications to this. Neither the gods of Buddhism nor New Age are able to fully comprehend the universe because they are synonymous with said universe.

Given that the universe is a complex system, some of the factors that contribute to the truth of Turing’s postulate are that nonlinearities obscure subtle features, discontinuous and emergent behaviours also impede understanding, and the limited reach of humanity affects our ability to understand such systems (a term known as complexity reach). Sartre stated that humans need an infinite frame of reference to understand {life}, something we don’t have.

Now, to briefly elaborate on the previous list. When phenomena do not act the same way at all ranges of their existence ( i.e. when a spring is pulled beyond its elasticity) it is said to have non-linear behaviour. As you can imagine, non-linear behaviour can make predictions and understanding more difficult until you can study the details much more closely, and sometimes our models are merely approximations, so we miss subtleties. In other instances, a substance will have a certain set of properties in small quantities, but then suddenly at some seemingly arbitrary point, the properties change suddenly. This is a discontinuity, and many fields of research are trying to study where these transition points lie and then to understand what happens at them. Closely related to discontinuities are emergent behaviours—synergistic or unexpected phenomena that occur when the right combination of more basic conditions happen.

Heinze concluded with the statement, “It is intellectually respectable to accept divine revelation as an authority in complex soft sciences.” This is a strong statement, and while I as a Christian am amenable to it, do not see it as an unimpeachable QED from his arguments. I would like to see that conclusion tested for its ruggedness before making it a philosophical axiom.

I should note that I completely left out of my notes portions of his talk that are concordant with a similar essay I have written, so if this post seems to jump around, that is one reason. I will sometime in the near future share that in a series of posts and refer back to this one and hopefully reintegrate Heinze’s ideas better.

SDG