Nairaland Forum

Extremely brilliant lecture by Professor Daniel Dennett. If you can, please watch


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khp4VWJC1FI

Enjoy!

j-girl:

Oh really! I'm happy someone really got to you this time. I'll watch the clips in a minute.

Thanks. I would really like to know your opinions on the videos. Please, report back, can you?

Watch the brilliant Christian cell biologist Ken Miller explain the theory and successes of evolution;


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5qZ9g4VHL4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlqkcZJtCjQ&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtOgeIyNREQ&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vw2t1dHQtA&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vw2t1dHQtA&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50_i0QibHI8&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwX-yUh5qo8&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpbjHjLncH0&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nG5CHaUh_sk&feature=related

Enjoy!

Watch the brilliant Christian cell biologist Ken Miller explain the theory and successes of evolution;


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5qZ9g4VHL4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlqkcZJtCjQ&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtOgeIyNREQ&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vw2t1dHQtA&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vw2t1dHQtA&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50_i0QibHI8&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwX-yUh5qo8&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpbjHjLncH0&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nG5CHaUh_sk&feature=related

Enjoy!

An insect with a foot-long tongue must exist to pollinate this orchid.

Not all of Darwin's conjectures were so broad in scope or so earth-shaking; some were simple predictions. Take the case of this species of orchid, Angraecum sesquipedale, from Madagascar. When Darwin saw this orchid in 1862, he, like anyone who saw it, was astonished by the length of its spur, which can reach over a foot in length. (See long, slim tube in photo.) "Astounding," he wrote. "What insect could suck it?" For some as-yet unknown insect must, he insisted, and it had to have a foot-long tongue to get at the plant's nectar, which pools at the very base of the spur. Entomologists of his day were skeptical, for no such creature had ever turned up. But more than 40 years after Darwin's death in 1882, scientists discovered a giant hawk moth in Madagascar, and it lapped the orchid's nectar with, yes, a foot-long tongue. The moth was named Xanthopan morganii praedicta in honor of his prediction. Once again, Darwin was right. Source:http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/id/pred-nf.html

Alphazee:

@joshjoshJoshjosh, this is no joke. I only used 1995 statistics to show you that the sign of the churches' impending death emerged years back and from the very source that brought the religion to you .

Ofcourse if you need more current data, I've come across millions. Try these:
source: http://freshome.com/2008/01/22/a-chapel-converted-into-a-modern-apartment/
source: http://www.canadianchristianity.com/nationalupdates/071206state.html
source: http://rebeccabarnes1.blogspot.com/2006/05/how-to-address-church-attendance.html
source:http://www.maltachurch.org.mt/Press/2007/Falling%20Church%20Attendance.pdf
source: http://geoconger.wordpress.com/2007/11/10/more-pressure-to-postpone-lambeth-conference-cen-110907-p-6/

I can go on and on

Alphazee, thankx for adding these links; Whilst I had know about this, I had never actually looked into the figures.

Cult Deaths Recall Jonestown
Ugandan sect's similarities to Peoples Temple disputed


Don Lattin, Chronicle Religion Writer
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2000/04/01/MN49627.DTL&hw=jonestown&sn=039&sc=318

For Northern Californians, the mounting cult horror in Uganda revives a 1978 nightmare in another jungle, the murder-suicide in Jonestown of 914 members of San Francisco's Peoples Temple.

Yesterday, Ugandan police revised the number of deaths linked to an African doomsday sect to 924, surpassing the Guyana tragedy and making it one of the largest cult-related killings in modern history.


As the death toll mounts, religion scholars disagree as to whether the Ugandan sect is ``another Jonestown,'' a unique event, or just the latest chapter in Africa's bloody history of religious violence and tribal conflict.

Since an enormous church fire in Uganda on March 17, the remains of the members of the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God have been recovered from the charred rubble of the sect's sanctuary and pulled from a series of mass graves.

Local authorities initially called the deaths a ``mass suicide,'' but now believe many or most of the members were murdered -- perhaps when they began to question the failed doomsday prophecies of three sect leaders.

PEOPLES TEMPLE REDUX

For Berkeley psychologist Margaret Singer, author of ``Cults in Our Midst,'' the carnage in Uganda is a Peoples Temple reprise.

Amid a mounting government and media probe, followers of the Rev. Jim Jones fled from San Francisco to the jungle in Guyana, where they and their leader died in a macabre ritual of murder and mass suicide. Many temple members willingly drank cyanide-laced ``Flavor- Aid;'' some had it poured down their throats, and others were shot.

In Uganda, the church was led by a defrocked Roman Catholic priest, an excommunicated Catholic layman, and a woman who claimed to receive messages from God and apocalyptic prophesies from the Virgin Mary. Authorities say two of those three leaders may still be alive.

In recent days, stories of abuses in the Ugandan sect have emerged that are reminiscent of those committed by Jones, a Christian socialist who was originally ordained in the Disciples of Christ, a mainline Protestant church. Both sects demanded strict obedience, demonized outsiders and promised impoverished members a utopian afterlife.

``It looks like the usual cult pattern where a corrupt person wants power and money. He gets this woman helper, and they start making ridiculous predictions that the world will end,'' Singer said. ``When it didn't end, people probably wanted their money so they could return to their villages.

``It's just like we've seen before,'' she added. ``Jonestown was also a constructed, engineered mass murder.''

Other experts warned against comparing the Uganda church to Peoples Temple, or to other notorious doomsday cults and mass suicide sects such as the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas, or Heaven's Gate, the UFO cult in Southern California.

J. Gordon Melton, who directs the Institute for the Study of American Religion in Santa Barbara and is an authority on new religious movements, said most of the adult members at Jonestown were sincere ideological converts who decided that their religious and political views were worth dying for in an act of ``revolutionary suicide.''

A UNIQUE HORROR

That's different than what happened in Uganda, Melton said, where it appears that most of members were led into a series of traps and murdered.

``This is looking like a unique event that could become the largest mass murder in history, apart from war,'' Melton said. ``Killing this many people is heinous no matter why, but there's a difference between premeditated murder and psychopathology.''

Other scholars said it's important to view the Ugandan tragedy in its African context.

``In Africa, there is a long tradition of similar Christian movements going back 300 years,'' said David Barrett, editor of the World Christian Encyclopedia, which monitors global church growth. ``Mass killings are not that unusual in tropical Africa. There are also large numbers of clergy who are eased out, or kicked out, of churches and start something on their own.''

Rosalind Hackett, a professor of religious studies at the University of Tennessee, said there are between 8,000 and 12,000 new religious movements in Africa. Most of them are offshoots from established Protestant or Catholic churches.

RELIGIOUS FERMENT

``There is tremendous religious ferment in Africa,'' said Hackett, who has studied the explosion of indigenous African churches. ``They range from humble storefronts to mega-churches based on the American model, from churches with illiterate leaders to pastors with Ph.D.s in nuclear physics.''

Hackett said many of these sects break away from mainstream churches over money, politics, style of worship, or the feeling that the mother church is not ``morally upright.''

Famine, poverty, violence and a rampaging AIDS epidemic have encouraged some churches to embrace an apocalyptic Christian vision that sees a new era of peace and harmony following a time of cataclysmic upheaval.

Doomsday theology also has been spread by Bible tracts, videos and satellite broadcasts from American televangelists and Pentecostal preachers, she said.

Hackett emphasized, however, that the overwhelming majority of African indigenous churches are making a positive contribution .

``They are helping people who are marginalized by the system,'' she said. ``Survival is what most of these churches are really all about.''

The Doomsday Code

First shown on Channel 4 in September 2006

Taken from http://www.channel4.com/culture/microsites/C/can_you_believe_it/debates/doomsday.html


In this Channel 4 documentary Tony Robinson investigates the people with powerful political friends in the White House, who are trying to bring about the end of the world. Julia Bard reports

Revelation, the last book in the New Testament, is filled with bizarre, violent and terrifying images. Its origins are unclear and its content is controversial. Some say it is the work of St John but many others believe he could not have been the author. But whoever wrote it, described apocalyptic visions of plagues, famines, wars, devils, wild beasts and rivers of blood. It is so strange and complex that scholars down the centuries have continually reinterpreted its message and meaning.

Today, though, a growing number of American evangelical Christians reckon they have cracked the code. These End Timers believe that every weird word of Revelation predicts real events. Like a Hollywood sci fi movie they say that any time now the world will end. And when it does, true believers in Christ will be whisked up to heaven in an event called The Rapture while non-believers are left behind on earth to face famine, war, terror and destruction as the forces of good and evil fight to the bitter end.

Political implications

If this was confined to the personal beliefs of a few fundamentalists it would be of little significance but, says Tony Robinson, the leaders of the End Time movement are rich, well-connected and very powerful. Though the USA constitution enshrines the separation of church and state End Timers are frequent visitors to the White House. No one knows if George W Bush is an End Timer himself, but his policies are at one with those of the evangelical Right and his language is often apocalyptic, such as when he describes the 'war on terror' as 'the epic struggle of good and evil'.
Jerusalem

According to the prophecy, Jerusalem is where this final battle is to be played out. No stranger to conflict and violence, this city is the focus of End Timers' dreams of eternal paradise, because, according to their beliefs, this is where Christ will come back to earth. But first, they say, the Jews must return. End Timers believe that the establishment of the State of israel in 1948 was a fulfilment of the biblical prophecy and that since then 'the last days clock has been ticking'.

Many of them interpret the US government's policies on Israel and the Middle East from a biblical point of view. Before the war in Iraq, the USA supported a negotiated settlement in which Israel would return the Occupied Territories to the Palestinians. By 2004, after a torrent of criticism of the Roadmap to Peace, Bush's position had changed and now there is no call for a large-scale withdrawal from the West Bank.

End Timers parade through the streets of Jerusalem and take large amounts of cash to illegal West Bank settlements to encourage the residents to entrench themselves more deeply on this Palestinian land. In Jerusalem itself, Jews are being bankrolled by Christian fundamentalists to reside in Arab houses. The End Timers think that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon suffered a stroke ('was removed from the scene') because he wanted to give back some of the Palestinian land.

Many Israelis are very worried about the kind of 'support' they are being offered. One journalist says that this is not based on Israel's needs and that there is no support for peacemaking. On the contrary, the agenda of the Evangelicals is war, so as to fulfil violent prophecy of Revelation.

Provocatively, some End Timers have joined forces with a fundamentalist Jewish group who want to rebuild the Temple of Solomon – touching on the ancient Jewish yearning for their destroyed Temple. But the place where they plan to build it has deep meaning for the three Abrahamic religions – Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The Temple Mount, where Islam's 3rd most holy site, Al-Aqsa Mosque, is situated, is the spot where Muslim, Jewish and Christian believers think that God created Adam, Abraham prepared his son Isaac to be sacrificed, and according to his vision, Muhammed was carried on a winged horse.

Mainstream Christians in the locality are appalled. They say attempts to rebuild the Temple are inflammatory and threaten to unleash even more bloodshed in the Middle East.

Predictions of war

Could it be that this is precisely what they are trying to provoke, in order to hasten the end of days? According to End Timers, when the believers are whisked up to heaven those left behind will face the ultimate battle between good and evil. It will take seven years to count the dead, they say – the time of Tribulation, a hell on earth. Israel will survive, according to this story, but will have a sudden victory only after a long war. Some say this means nuclear war and they support the war in Iraq because they believe that will bring it closer. Megiddo is the Hebrew name for Armageddon: the town where this carnage will occur.

For some End Timers, all this is big – very big – business. Tim LaHaye's Christian fiction series, Left Behind, has sold 63 million books, and movies of the books have been made by Cloud Ten Pictures. The internet is awash with websites which tell you how to prepare for The Rapture, and there are American shops to sell you everything you need to survive (for around $3,000) if you're unfortunate enough to be left behind.

The concept of the Antichrist originated in Medieval times, and is not found in the Bible. Nevertheless these evangelical Christians believe that the Antichrist is 'walking among us right now', the incarnation of evil, luring people to his cause with false promises of peace. For End Timers, the United Nations, whose role is to seek and maintain peace across the world, fits this description perfectly.

Undermining Africa

Now End Time beliefs are now spreading to Africa, with dire consequences. Uganda's President, Yoweri Museveni, is a born again Christian who is lionised by American End Timers. An American preacher in the capital, Kampala, says that the answers to Uganda's problems are not political, economic or educational, but can be found in the Bible, which he describes as 'God's constitution for the planet'.

Newspaper editor Andrew Mwenda is appalled by these Doomsday preachers, who he believes are converting young people and diverting them from fulfilling their potential and pursuing their careers. He says: 'This country is on a highway to hell.'

Uganda was a model in Africa of AIDS education and prevention and the rate of infection was falling. Now Museveni is promoting abstinence rather than safer sex, the number of cases is rising.Teacher Julius Othieno describes children being taken out of school, and not taking medicine when they are ill, in order to hasten their death.


Revelation

What is the real source of these ideas that so many people attribute to the book of Revelation? Whoever wrote it sheltered in a cave on the Greek island of Patmos, probably a refugee from Roman occupied Palestine. He is also likely to have consumed the local hallucinogenic magic mushrooms. So rather than taking these bizarre visions literally, it might make more sense to try to understand them in their historical context.

There are some 40 apocalyptic books from this era but this was the only one that made it into the Bible. If the author was writing about the hated Roman Empire, it could be that the seven heads of the beast meant the seven emperors. The mark of the beast could be the head of the emperor on the coins. The dreaded 666 very likely represented three letters indicating the Emperor Nero – representing letters by numbers was, and is, common in Hebrew. If so, instead of being a description of a world in chaos, it could be seen as a book of morality, optimism and faith.

Let's hope the End Timers start to see it like that before their actions really do bring about the end of the world.

Any more interests?

why don't you check it out : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphysical_naturalism

What is a Sin? What is a Crime? What is an Offense?

Is is possible to commit a sin without committing a crime, and vice versa, can one commit a crime without having committed a sin?

Take the case of the American creationist evangelist Kent Hovind, who is now serving time for tax evasion, amongst other crimes. Would be also have committed a sin?

How would you like to be punished for an act you did not know was a crime or offense or sin? Check out Genesis 2: 15 - 17;


15 And the LORD God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it.

16 And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat:

17 But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.


Now, can Adam and Eve be said to have had knowledge of good and evil BEFORE they ate the forbidden fruit? Would they have know what death was? I don't so either.

Would they have fully appreciated the consequences of violating this injunction given that they had no direct knowledge of good/evil and death?

Would you inflict such grievous punishment on someone who had no appreciation of the act they have committed?

Humans down the ages have practiced various types of bodily mutilations and scarifications for cosmetic and superstitious reasons. They have ranged from lips discs, piercings (on the lips, ears, Cores, mouth etc), teeth extractions and filings, binding of the heads and feet, elongation of the neck with rings, stitching of the Arrow/labia for females, male and female circumcisions, castrations and other forms of ritual paintings and tatooings.

A lot of these practices are now things of the past, but there are some that are still about, largely buttressed by the religious institutions. Circumcisions (both male and female) are a particular case in point. In the monotheistic traditions, these are mandated for males as a covenant between the male and their god. In Abrahamic religions, female circumcision is not mandated, as far as I know. However, where Abrahamism meets other world religions already practicing female circumcision, it no surprise that the latter is not condemned. Such is the case in some parts of Nigeria and East Africa where young girls have their clitorises excised and their labia stitched together, to reduce the sensitivity to intimate pleasure. Is anything more GROSS and revolting that this sort of treatment of defenseless young girls?

That male circumcision is still quite popular amongst Africans is also a disgrace to human decency. In bygone ages, this served as a rite of passage into adulthood, but those days are well and truly gone - and so should this barbaric practice. Where it is not required for medical reasons, it should be discouraged. (Incidentally, it turns out that circumcised males are about 30% less likely to catch the AIDS virus from unprotected sex than their uncircumcised friends. But this is not a reason to have the foreskin removed. It would be like arguing for the surgical removal of the bosom as this would stop women developing bosom cancer.)

Mutilations and scarifications for cosmetic reasons are purely in the domain of the individual concerned as long as the are fully aware of the act they are getting into. Much as I dislike bodily tatoos, I am loathed to see a blanket ban of the practise as long as it is well regulated by the authorities.

Reptyle:

I don't need to know the details of the day to day life of Jesus. The essentials have been captured in the Bible and that is good enough for me. The truth is that even if I die today and realize that Heaven and Hell do not exist and Jesus isn't what he claims to be, I'll still be happy I lived my life as a christian.

The fact is the "essentials" are very much in doubt. How can you build a belief system on a base of doubt and forgery and falsehood. Truth trumps all of this for me every single time.

Our civilization has development a systematic methodology for investigating the nature of reality and it has produced tremendous benefits to humankind in the last 300 years. When this methodology is turned to investigate the claims of the bronze age superstitions we inherited, we find very little worthy of truth.

There is an alternative to superstition; it is called naturalism or metaphysical naturalism. This system of belief is founded on the scientific method, amongst other well attested philosophies. You do not need to resort to superstitions - think of all the time you have wasted when such time and effort could have been better spent more progressive endeavours.

imhotep:

@therationa
You keep forgeting to add that communists in Russia murdered over 20 million people.
Communism also contributed to the irreversible decay of the Russian economy.

Communists believed in atheism, incredulity and rationalism------just like you do, therationa.

We worry for your future victims.

You are thrashing about yet again. Deal with the subject of the post. Please have the decency to stay on topic.

imhotep:

You have been unable to defend atheism and evoltuion.

You have also failed to lampoon the bible. You merely revealed your inner shallowness.

When I see you thrashing about like this, I know I have got you. I have asked you to defend the subject of this post (ie Jesus doctrine of passive non-resistance to evil) yet you have said NOT a single word about it. You only want to thrash about from here to there, and there.

We are not talking about atheism and evolution on this post. There are other posts for that. Please, stay on topic.

imhotep:

@therationa
I see you are at your wits end. So much for evolution and logic.

My points are so pithy, if only you had the brain, you would see them.

What is half a brain? The mammalian brain is not the same as the brain of the worm, but you could erroneously think the worms brain is "half" of that of the mammal.

A brain with 1 brain cell is better than one with no brain at all. Think about it, a worm is alot more complex that the bacteria, yet the worm only has a fraction of the cells in the mammalian brain. So each organism has the brain that befits it,as predicted by evolution.

imhotep:

@therationa
This level of sloppy biblical scholarship deserves no response.

Go and improve yourself before asking dumb questions.

Well, yet again. The last refuge of the coward. Nowhere to hide now, can't even think of a rebuttal? C'mon, address the verses I mentioned above.

imhotep:

This is from an earlier post of mine ->

The idea of organs developing incrementally (to adapt to changes in the environment, or whatever) is objectionable, in the form of questions like =>

1) What use is half a wing?
2) What use is half an eye?
3) What use is half a brain?

etc etc

imhotep:


1) What use is half a wing?

You had an answer to this earlier. Better than no wing.

imhotep:


2) What use is half an eye?

Ditto;

imhotep:


3) What use is half a brain?

You seem to be doing OK-ish; Sorry, you asked for that one

imhotep:

@therationa

Shoddy biblical scholarship - as usual

Why don't you rebut by arguments rather than just comment sloppily. I want to see your arguments.

If you had been wondering what the fate of the earth might be, rest assured that the earth is save for several more billions of years. Whether there will be life of the earth then is another matter. But the earth, like other planets and stars has a finite lifespan. When our star (the Sun) dies, the some of the planets in the solar system would also be doomed to disintegrate. For more details, read http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/080226-vaporized-earth.html, given below;

By Clara Moskowitz
Staff Writer
posted: 2008 February 26
07:00 am ET

"Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice," wrote the poet Robert Frost. Astronomers, it turns out, are in the former camp.

A new calculation predicts that Earth will be swallowed up by the sun in 7.6 billion years, capping off a longstanding debate over whether the sun's gravitational pull will have weakened enough for Earth to escape final destruction or not.

Other theorists have predicted that our planet will fry as the sun expands in its old age. But the time estimates have varied by a couple billion years.

"Although people have looked at these problems before, we would claim this is the best attempt that's been made to date, and probably the most reliable," said astronomer Robert Smith, emeritus reader at the U.K.'s University of Sussex, who made the new calculations with astronomer Klaus-Peter Schroeder of the University of Guanajuato in Mexico. "What we've done is to refine existing models and to put the best calculations we can at each point in the model."

If 7.6 billion years doesn't sound like an urgent death sentence, don't relax yet. Regardless of whether Earth will ultimately be vaporized, as the sun heats up, our planet will become too hot to live on before then.

"After a billion years or so you've got an Earth with no atmosphere, no water and a surface temperature of hundreds of degrees, way above the boiling point of water," Smith told SPACE.com. "The Earth will become dry basically. It will become completely impossible for life of any kind to exist. It's a pretty gloomy forecast."

Nonetheless, scientists are curious about the ultimate fate of our planet after we are gone (like all previous hominids and more than 99 percent of all species that have lived on Earth, humans will probably go extinct, and it will likely happen sooner than a billion years).

Smith's earlier studies found that Earth would narrowly escape being engorged. As the sun ages and expands into a red giant star, it will shed its outer gaseous layers, thus losing mass and weakening its gravitational pull. Previous calculations found that this let-up would allow the Earth's orbit to shift outward, enabling the planet to slip free of the smoldering sun.

But this scenario doesn't account for tidal forces, and the drag of the sun's outer layers. As the Earth orbits the sun, its smaller gravitational pull isn't completely negligible — it actually causes the side of the sun closest to our planet to hoard more mass and bulge out toward us.

"Just as the Earth is pulling on the sun's bulge, it's pulling on the Earth, and that causes the Earth to slow in its orbit," Smith said. "It will spiral back and finally end up inside the sun."

In addition, the gas that the sun expels will also drag Earth inward toward its demise.

Smith's previous calculations had ignored these effects.

"We didn't think it mattered, but it turns out it does," he said. "You might say our previous models had a gap."

There may even be hope for Earth. Some scientists have proposed a scheme for down the road to use the gravity of a passing asteroid to budge Earth out of the way of the sun toward cooler territory, assuming there is life around at the time that is intelligent enough to engineer this solution.

"It sounds like science fiction, but there's a group of people who have quite seriously suggested that it might be possible," Smith said. "If it's done right, that would just keep the Earth moving fast enough to keep it out of harm's way. Maybe life could go on for as much as 7 billion years."

Smith's findings have been accepted for publication in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

ty4real:

@Therationa!Haivng gone through your post, I must say that I am yet to get the point you are driving at! Why on earth do you think I would be interested to hear the verses you listed above in my church!You gotten the whole concept of church all mixed up and am appalled at the way you are going about it with your post!Obviously,you had it rough with a church you attended at on epoint in your life but I still don't see it as good enough reason to flaunt your gullibility here,every one knows that there are challants who parade themselves as church or whatever!Why you want to make a mountain out of it is what I am yet to grasp!or are you seeking attention here ni?Please Get a Life cause you piss me off!

My goodness. If you have read most of my posts on this forum and still not got my point, then shame on you.

I have not only got a beef about churches, I have got a COW about the institution that is religion and all of its ancillaries.

They promote credulity, gullibility, ignorance, superstition, fear, destitution, exploitation of the poor, slowpoke social progress, bigotry, zealotry, impede scientific progress, etc, etc. Do you want me to give specific examples? Or can you thing up some for yourself?

I will answer with this quote taken from Gore Vidal's speech;

The great unmentionable evil at the center of our culture is monotheism. From a barbaric Bronze Age text known as the Old Testament, three anti-human religions have evolved --Judaism, Christianity, Islam. These are sky-god religions. They are, literally, patriarchal --God is the omnipotent father-- hence the loathing of women for 2,000 years in those countries afflicted by the sky-god and his earthly male delegates. The sky-god is a jealous god, of course. He requires total obedience from everyone on earth, as he is in place not for just one tribe but for all creation. Those who would reject him must be converted or killed for their own good. Ultimately, totalitarianism is the only sort of politics that can truly serve the sky-god's purpose. Any movement of a liberal nature endangers his authority and that of his delegates on earth. One God, one King, one Pope, one master in the factory, one father-leader in the family home.
; Source: http://www.isebrand.com/Gore_Vidal_Monotheism_1992.htm

The progress of human civilization is in danger if superstitions are allowed to grow unchecked. Just like the doctors and scientist study viruses and bacteria in the hope of minimizing their impact of humans, I study religion for the same reason.

dafidixone:

Vacancy in some Zoo.

Decendant of Apes and other animals could apply for this. More than eneough banana.

Monkeys with MBA will be added advantage.


Oro ja-gba-ja-gba

Why don't you get you mind off the cesspit of religion/bible and educate yourself for once. You can start by reading the post;
http://www.nairaland.com/nigeria/topic-116423.0.html

The Great Mutator
Jerry Coyne,
Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago.

I.

Browsing the websites of different colleges, a prospective biology student finds an unusual statement on the page of the Department of Biological Sciences at Lehigh University. It begins:


The faculty in the department of biological sciences is committed to the highest standards of scientific integrity and academic function. This commitment carries with it unwavering support for academic freedom and the free exchange of ideas. It also demands the utmost respect for the scientific method, integrity in the conduct of research, and recognition that the validity of any scientific model comes only as a result of rational hypothesis testing, sound experimentation, and findings that can be replicated by others.



So far, so good. After all, every science department should adhere to rigorous canons of research. But then comes a curious disclaimer:

The department faculty, then, are unequivocal in their support of evolutionary theory, which has its roots in the seminal work of Charles Darwin and has been supported by findings accumulated over 140 years. The sole dissenter from this position, Prof. Michael Behe, is a well-known proponent of "intelligent design." While we respect Prof. Behe's right to express his views, they are his alone and are in no way endorsed by the department.It is our collective position that intelligent design has no basis in science, has not been tested experimentally, and should not be regarded as scientific.



To my knowledge, such a statement is unique. Biology departments do not customarily assert publicly that they support a theory known for more than a century to be true. This is equivalent to a chemistry faculty announcing that "we are unequivocal in our support of atoms." Yet this disclaimer is perfectly understandable. For in this department resides Michael Behe--that rara avis, a genuine biologist who is also an advocate of "intelligent design." And Lehigh University does not wish to lose prospective students who bridle at the thought of studying miracles in their science courses.

Intelligent design, or ID, is a modern form of creationism cleverly constructed to circumvent the many court decisions that have banned, on First Amendment grounds, the teaching of religious views in the science classroom. ID has shed many of the trappings that once cost creationists scientific and legal credibility, including explicit reference to God and the ludicrous idea that the Earth is only about ten thousand years old. Instead, God has been replaced by an unspecified "intelligent designer." Besides making the usual shopworn criticisms of evolutionary theory, IDers contend that some features of life are too complex to have evolved, and so required celestial intervention.

Behe has been an especially valuable ally of the IDers. Not only is he one of the few working scientists in their camp (he is a protein biochemist), thus giving them a smidgen of scientific respectability, but in 1996 he published Darwin's Black Box, a popular-science book that has become something of a manifesto for "intelligent design." In that book, Behe updated an old creationist chestnut: the assertion that some aspects of life could not have evolved by means of natural selection, because that evolution would have required untenable steps. Consider the eye, which consists of a number of interacting parts (such as the retina, the optic nerve, the lens, and the cornea) that work together to allow vision. How could such a complex feature have evolved gradually if it could not work unless all its components were already in place? Such features, said Behe, are "irreducibly complex": their evolution supposedly cannot be reduced to a sequential series of adaptive steps, as required by Darwinian natural selection.

Well, scientists already knew that "irreducibly complex" features can indeed be explained by natural selection; and Darwin himself had no trouble doing this for the eye in On the Origin of Species, describing a series of perfectly well-adapted living species, each of which had a slightly more advanced version of an eye. Behe's novelty was to extend this argument to complex biochemical pathways, the evolution of many of which we do not yet fully understand. It was in the complexity of metabolism, blood clotting, and immunology that Behe claimed to have found the hand of the Great Designer.

The reviews of Darwin's Black Box in the scientific community were uniformly negative, for two reasons. First, we do understand something about how these pathways might have evolved in stepwise fashion, though we are as yet admittedly ignorant of many details. (It is harder to reconstruct the evolution of biochemical pathways than the evolution of organisms themselves, because, unlike organisms, these pathways do not fossilize, and so their evolution must be reconstructed entirely from living species.) Second, in the scientific community a failure to understand something does not automatically count as evidence for divine creation. Science is littered with once-mysterious facts first imputed to God and later found out to be explicable solely through natural processes. This, in fact, is what Darwin's theory of natural selection did to the earlier idea that organisms were designed by a Creator.

More damaging than the scientific criticisms of Behe's work was the review that he got in 2005 from Judge John E. Jones III. After an ID textbook called Of Pandas and People was proposed for biology classes at a high school in Dover, Pennsylvania, a group of local parents brought suit against the Dover Area School District and some of its members. There followed a six-week trial in federal court in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, with the plaintiffs supported by the ACLU and a Pennsylvania law firm, and the school district defended by a right-wing Christian law firm. The case of Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover Area School District et al., dubbed by some "the Scopes trial of our century," included luminaries from both the scientific camp and the ID camp battling it out in front of Judge Jones. With his scientific credentials, Behe was the key witness for the defense.

Jones's 139-page verdict for the plaintiffs was eloquent, strong, and unequivocal, especially coming from a churchgoing Republican. He ruled that "intelligent design" is not only unscientific, but a doctrine based firmly on religion. Jones called the introduction of the clandestinely creationist textbook at Dover High School an act of "breathtaking inanity." He also found Behe's testimony wholly unconvincing, noting that irreducible complexity was not evidence against evolution, and that the biochemical systems touted by Behe were not irreducibly complex anyway. Behe's credibility was damaged also by his admission that ID's definition of science was so loose that it could encompass astrology, and by his fatal assertion that the plausibility of the argument for ID depends upon the extent to which one believes in the existence of God.

But IDers, like all creationists, are never down for the count, because they see themselves as fighting for the Lord. So Behe is back now, with a new book and a brand-new theory that puts the Intelligent Designer back into biology. What has Behe now found to resurrect his campaign for ID? It's rather pathetic, really. Basically, he now admits that almost the entire edifice of evolutionary theory is true: evolution, natural selection, common ancestry. His one novel claim is that the genetic variation that fuels natural selection--mutation--is produced not by random changes in DNA, as evolutionists maintain, but by an Intelligent Designer. That is, he sees God as the Great Mutator.

II.

For a start, let us be clear about what Behe now accepts about evolutionary theory. He has no problem with a 4.5-billion-year-old Earth, nor with evolutionary change over time, nor apparently with its ample documentation through the fossil record--the geographical distribution of organisms, the existence of vestigial traits testifying to ancient ancestry, and the finding of fossil "missing links" that show common ancestry among major groups of organisms. Behe admits that most evolution is caused by natural selection, and that all species share common ancestors. He even accepts the one fact that most other IDers would rather die than admit: that humans shared a common ancestor with chimpanzees and other apes.


Why does Behe come clean about all this? The reason is plain. There is simply too much evidence for any scientist to deny these facts without losing all credibility. "Intelligent design" is desperate for scientific respectability, and you do not get that by fighting facts about which everybody agrees. But with most of evolutionary biology accepted, what's left for a good IDer to contest? Behe finds his bugbear in evolutionary theory's view that "random mutation" provides the raw material for evolutionary change. And to understand his critique, we first have to grasp how mutation fits into evolutionary theory, and what scientists mean when they say that mutations are "random."

If evolution is a car, then natural selection is the engine and mutation is the gas. Although evolutionary change can be driven by several processes, natural selection is almost certainly the main one--and the only one that can adapt organisms to their environment, creating the misleading appearance of deliberate design. Yet natural selection, which is simply the preservation of genes that give their possessors greater reproductive success than their competitors, cannot take place without genetic variation. Although Darwin had no idea where this variation came from, we now know that it is produced by mutation--accidental changes in the sequence of DNA that usually occur as copying errors when a molecule replicates during cell division. We also know that mutation-generated variation is pervasive: different forms of genes produced by mutation, for example, explain variation in human eye color, blood types, and much of our--and other species'--variation in height, weight, biochemistry, and innumerable other traits.

Once the variation exists, those genes that enhance an individual's "fitness" are preserved, and those that reduce it are discarded. (Natural selection is not really a "process," but simply a description of the differential and adaptive survival of genes.) The polar bear, for instance, has a white coat (its hairs actually lack pigment but appear white because they reflect light), and since this color is unique among bears, the polar bear presumably evolved from a dark-furred ancestor. The likely scenario is that mutations occurred that produced individuals varying in their coat color. Bears with a lighter coat had an advantage over others, for they would be more camouflaged against the Arctic ice and snow and better at sneaking up on seals. Lighter bears would then outcompete darker ones at getting food and thus produce more offspring, leaving more copies of the "light-coat" genes. Over time, the population of bears would evolve lighter and lighter coats until they were almost invisible against the snow.



On the basis of much evidence, scientists have concluded that mutations occur randomly. The term "random" here has a specific meaning that is often misunderstood, even by biologists. What we mean is that mutations occur irrespective of whether they would be useful to the organism. Mutations are simply errors in DNA replication. Most of them are harmful or neutral, but a few of them can turn out to be useful. And there is no known biological mechanism for jacking up the probability that a mutation will meet the current adaptive needs of the organism. Bears adapting to snowy terrain will not enjoy a higher probability of getting mutations producing lighter coats than will bears inhabiting non-snowy terrain.


What we do not mean by "random" is that all genes are equally likely to mutate (some are more mutable than others) or that all mutations are equally likely (some types of DNA change are more common than others). It is more accurate, then, to call mutations "indifferent" rather than "random": the chance of a mutation happening is indifferent to whether it would be helpful or harmful. Evolution by selection, then, is a combination of two steps: a "random" (or indifferent) step--mutation--that generates a panoply of genetic variants, both good and bad (in our example, a variety of new coat colors); and then a deterministic step--natural selection--that orders this variation, keeping the good and winnowing the bad (the retention of light-color genes at the expense of dark-color ones).

It is important to clarify these two steps because of the widespread misconception, promoted by creationists, that in evolution "everything happens by chance." Creationists equate the chance that evolution could produce a complex organism to the infinitesimal chance that a hurricane could sweep through a junkyard and randomly assemble the junk into a Boeing 747. But this analogy is specious. Evolution is manifestly not a chance process because of the order produced by natural selection--order that can, over vast periods of time, result in complex organisms looking as if they were designed to fit their environment. Humans, the product of non-random natural selection, are the biological equivalent of a 747, and in some ways they are even more complex. The explanation of seeming design by solely materialistic processes was Darwin's greatest achievement, and a major source of discomfort for those holding the view that nature was designed by God.





III.

In a series of rather disconnected and scientifically dubious arguments, Behe tries to claim that random mutations cannot possibly be the building blocks of evolution. His main argument involves malaria, in particular the evolution of humans to resist infection by malaria, and the evolution of the malaria parasite itself to counteract the evolution of human resistance and the development of anti-malarial drugs.


Malaria actually provides a superb example of natural selection, and its story has some intriguing quirks. The disease is caused by a protozoan carried by mosquitoes, who act as flying syringes that inject the microbe into the human bloodstream. There it takes up residence in the liver and then in the red blood cells, multiplies prolifically, and can ultimately cause anemia, kidney failure, hemorrhage, and death. Residence in red blood cells and the liver is adaptive for the parasites, because in those spots they are hidden from the immune system that usually destroys invading microbes. Yet the human spleen can also detect and destroy circulating parasite-laden cells. To counter this tactic, the malaria parasite secretes proteins that cause its carrier blood cells to stick to the walls of blood vessels, avoiding the spleen (this sticking is what causes hemorrhage).

Here, then, is an arms race between a blood-loving parasite and a human body seeking to destroy it. Yet the story is even more complicated and interesting. In sub-Saharan Africa, where malaria is rampant, a mutation has arisen in the gene producing hemoglobin that helps ward off malaria. The striking thing about this mutation, known as the sickle-cell mutation, is that it somehow reduces the chances of contracting malaria when its carriers have one copy of the gene (like most organisms, we have two copies of every gene, one on each of our two sets of chromosomes), but it causes sickle-cell anemia when the carriers have two copies. In sickle-cell anemia, the red blood cells form clumps because of the altered hemoglobin they carry, causing a syndrome of complications that invariably cause death before adulthood.

Thus we have the unusual situation in which heterozygotes, or individuals carrying both one "normal" and one "mutant" hemoglobin gene, are fitter than homozygous individuals, who carry either two "normal" genes (more susceptible to malaria) or two mutant genes (death from sickle-cell anemia). Evolutionary genetics tells us that in a case such as this one, both forms of the gene will remain in the population, ensuring some protection against malaria but also the continuing production of babies with sickle-cell anemia. Africans would be better off if everyone were a heterozygote, but that is impossible, because the two gene copies separate at reproduction and unite with other copies, necessarily producing some deleterious homozygotes.

This example shows that natural selection does not necessarily produce absolute perfection; it works with whatever mutations arise to create the best possible situation given the available raw material and the constraints of genetics. And finally, although the malaria parasite has been unable to counter-evolve resistance to heterozygotes for the sickle-cell gene, it has evolved, through mutation, resistance to various anti-malarial drugs devised by humans. This resistance has become so strong that some strains of malaria are completely resistant to drugs--yet another example of successful natural selection.


Malaria, then, shows evolution acting on a number of levels. So how can it disprove Darwinian evolution? According to Behe, malaria shows that random mutation is insufficient to explain biological complexity. He disparages the defensive sickle-cell mutation and similar mutations, saying that they "are quintessentially hurtful mutations because they diminish the functioning of the human body" (does successfully resisting malaria really diminish the function of our body?) and that they are "not in the process of joining to build a complex, interactive biochemical system." And although the parasite and the humans are in the process of trying to outwit each other in an evolutionary arms race (including the development of drugs), Behe notes that this arms race has not prompted the evolution of biological complexity. Instead Behe sees the malaria/parasite battle as a mere "trench war of attrition."


In the end, after pages of rather tedious detail about malaria, Behe dismisses the evolutionary aspects of malaria as "chaotic and tangled," which, while showing random mutation and natural selection, are irrelevant to his main concerns: "In this book we are concerned with how machinery [i.e., complex organisms] can be built," he writes. "To build a complex machine many different pieces have to be brought together and fitted to one another." Behe buttresses his conclusion by describing how the AIDS virus evolved to outwit not only the strategies of the human immune system but also powerful anti-viral drugs. Again he sees little evolution of complexity: "HIV has killed millions of people, fended off the human immune system, and become resistant to whatever drug humanity could throw at it. Yet through all that, there have been no significant basic biochemical changes in the virus at all."

In light of evolutionary theory, these conclusions are truly bizarre. No sane evolutionist has ever claimed that an adaptation of a parasite to a host will produce complex biochemical changes. Evolutionary theory predicts only that parasites will adapt, not how they will adapt. In fact, both the malaria parasite and the HIV virus have undergone sufficient "biochemical change" to make them almost completely adapted to withstand both human drugs and the immune system. And humans have, through the sickle-cell mutation and other changes in hemoglobin, become somewhat resistant to malaria. Beyond that, what does Behe expect? A red blood cell with hands to throttle the parasite? A malaria parasite with a cunning brain to outwit the sickle-cell protein? HIV and malaria are doing pretty well at reproducing themselves--sans new complex systems--in their present environments. That is all evolution can do.

So what if the malaria parasite has not completely outwitted the sickle-cell mutation? No biologist, least among them Darwin, ever claimed that adaptation is always perfect. Every infection by a parasite, every disease, and every species that goes extinct represents a failure to adapt. Sometimes the right mutations do not arise or cannot arise because of the constraints of development; sometimes they do arise, but produce an imperfect adaptation. In his book The Causes of Evolution, the British biologist J.B.S. Haldane addressed this problem with tongue in cheek: "A selector of sufficient knowledge and power might perhaps obtain from the genes at present available in the human species a race combining an average intellect equal to that of Shakespeare with the stature of Carnera. But he could not produce a race of angels. For the moral character or for the wings, he would have to await or produce suitable mutations."

By disparaging the malaria system as mere "trench warfare" and characterizing the mutations involved as "not constructive" and causing "broken genes," Behe not only engages in sophistry, but shows an almost willful misunderstanding of Darwinism. Natural selection is not a one-way path to more complex adaptations or organisms. Organisms adapt to whatever environmental challenges they face, and those changes could require either small biochemical adjustments (as in the case of malaria), more extensive changes that require complex adaptation (as in the evolution of amphibians from fish), or even the evolution of less complexity. The tapeworm, for example, is considerably simpler than its ancestor: it has lost its nervous system, its digestive system, and most of its reproductive system, becoming in effect an absorptive sack of gonads. But it is nevertheless well adapted to its novel intestinal niche, where it can dispense with unnecessary features (its food, for one thing, is pre-digested). Using malaria and HIV to argue that random mutations cannot fuel the evolution of complexity is like displaying a crudely built footstool to prove that it is impossible to build a house with lumber, hammer, and nails.


IV.

The general reader, at whom The Edge of Evolution is aimed, is unlikely to find the scientific holes in its arguments. Behe writes clearly and engagingly, and someone lacking formal training in biochemistry and evolutionary biology may be easily snowed by his rhetoric. The snow falls most heavily when Behe writes about the complex biochemical adaptations of animals, such as the structure and the operation of cilia. Cilia are small, hairlike structures whose rhythmic beating propels microorganisms; they also help move things along in other species (cilia line the fallopian tubes of mammals, for example, where they sweep the egg into the uterus). Each cilium is built from more than two hundred different proteins, including those making up its structure and "motor proteins" that make it move. Moreover, when a cilium is damaged or a new one is built, an equally complex system of intraflagellar transport uses sixteen other proteins to bring new material from out of the cell for repair, rather like a molecular assembly line.


This description is entertaining and instructive, and those unacquainted with molecular biology will be wowed by the elegance of this adaptation. Indeed, such complex features were what lured many of us into biology, hoping to explain their evolution. But the purpose of Behe's exercise, beyond pedagogy, is simply to overwhelm the reader with nature's complexity, hoping to raise the question of how mutation and natural selection could possibly have built such a feature--as if being wowed were the same as being persuaded. As Behe says, "The point is to see how elegant and interdependent the coherent system is--to see how different it is from the broken genes and desperate measures that random mutation routinely involves." ("Broken genes and desperate measures" refers to the simple adaptations of the malaria parasite and its human opponent.) Surely, says Behe, a better theory is that cilia were created by the Intelligent Designer.

In Darwin's Black Box, Behe made exactly the same argument to show that a similar structure, the flagellum (a larger cilium that propels microorganisms), could not have evolved by natural selection. But in this case Behe's claim that no intermediate stages could have existed was refuted. Ken Miller, a biologist at Brown University (and an observant Catholic), showed how flagella and cilia could have had their precursors in mechanisms that the cell uses to transport proteins, mechanisms that are co-opted to construct flagella. Indeed, the whole problem of the evolution of cilia was argued before Judge Jones in Harrisburg, who ruled that there was no convincing evidence that evolution could not have produced this structure, making legal doctrine from something biologists already knew. In his new book, however, Behe simply ignores his critics, repeating his bankrupt claim that there is "no Darwinian explanation for the step-by-step origin of the cilium."

If ID were science, we could make an equivalent demand of its advocates. We could ask Behe to produce a complete step-by-step accounting of what God (sorry, the Intelligent Designer) did when He designed the cilia. And of course Behe would not be able to do that--nor does he even try. IDers never produce their own "scientific" explanation of life. They just carp about evolution. And as evolutionists explain one thing after another, IDers simply ignore these successes and move on to the ever-dwindling set of unsolved problems in which they continue to see the hand of God.

Behe's arguments from the gaps in scientific knowledge are fatuous. It is certainly true that we do not yet understand every step in the origin of the cilium, but these are early days. Molecular biology is a very young field, and molecular evolutionary biology is even younger. The way to understand the evolution of cilia is to get to work in the laboratory, not to throw up our hands and cry "design." Perhaps we will never understand every step in the evolution of a complex feature, just as we cannot know everything about the development of human civilization from archaeology. But is the incompleteness of our knowledge a reason to invoke God? The history of science shows us that patching the gaps in our knowledge with miracles creates a path that leads only to perpetual ignorance.





V.

Beyond his own incredulity, Behe has two other arguments against the efficacy of mutation and natural selection in creating complex features:


First, steps. The more intermediate evolutionary steps that must be climbed to achieve some biological goal without reaping a net benefit, the more unlikely a Darwinian explanation. Second, coherence. A telltale signature of planning is the coherent ordering of steps toward a goal. Random mutation, on the other hand, is incoherent; that is, any given evolutionary step taken by a population of organisms is unlikely to be connected to its predecessor.



These arguments betray a profound, almost willful ignorance of the evolutionary process. It is indeed true that natural selection cannot build any feature in which intermediate steps do not confer a net benefit on the organism. As Darwin wrote in On the Origin of Species, "If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find out no such case." A century and a half later, there is still no such case. Behe certainly fails to make one.

But he does try gamely, claiming that complex interactions between proteins are features that simply could not have evolved. Proteins represent strings of building blocks--amino acids--and the cooperation between some proteins requires that sets of amino acids in one protein interact rather precisely with sets in another. (For example, the two strings of amino acids making up human hemoglobin, the alpha and beta chains, are closely aligned, and work together in a coordinated way to take aboard oxygen and later relinquish it in the right tissues.) Such precise protein-protein interactions, says Behe, could not have been formed by "numerous, successive, slight steps," because such Darwinian evolution would be wildly improbable.

To demonstrate the improbability, Behe does some math. He calculates the probability that such interactions between amino acids could evolve, assuming that a precise set of amino acids is required. Not surprisingly, it turns out that getting by mutation a set of three to four amino acids required for only one protein-protein interaction is very low (mutations in the DNA affect the building blocks of proteins, since DNA codes for a sequence of amino acids). It is especially low because Behe requires all of the three or four mutations needed to create such an interaction to arise simultaneously. Since any one mutation is very rare (on the order of one in a billion in any given generation at a specified DNA site), the chances that a specified group of changes could arise in one fell swoop is unimaginably rare. And this is for only a single pair of interacting proteins. When you consider the thousands of proteins in a cell that interact with others, some with as many as five or six others, evolution looks impossible.

Wrong. If it looks impossible, this is only because of Behe's bizarre and unrealistic assumption that for a protein-protein interaction to evolve, all mutations must occur simultaneously, because the step-by-step path is not adaptive. Yet Behe furnishes no proof, no convincing argument, that interactions cannot evolve gradually. In fact, interactions between proteins, like any complex interaction, were certainly built up step by mutational step, with each change producing an interaction scrutinized by selection and retained if it enhanced an organism's fitness. This process could have begun with weak protein-protein associations that were beneficial to the organism. These were then strengthened gradually, involving more and more amino acids to make the interaction stronger and more specific. At the end, you get what we see today: many proteins interacting strongly and specifically. What seems improbable in a single leap becomes much more likely when it evolves gradually, step by step.

A simple example shows this difference. Suppose a complex adaptation involves twenty parts, represented by twenty dice, each one showing a six. The adaptation is fueled by random mutation, represented by throwing the dice. Behe's way of getting this adaptation requires you to roll all twenty dice simultaneously, waiting until they all come up six (that is, all successful mutations must happen together). The probability of getting this outcome is very low; in fact, if you tossed the dice once per second, it would take about a hundred million years to get the right outcome. But now let us build the adaptation step by step, as evolutionary theory dictates. You start by rolling the first die, and keep rolling it until a six comes up. When it does, you keep that die (a successful first step in the adaptation) and move on to the next one. You toss the second die until it comes up six (the second step), and so on until all twenty dice show a six. On average, this would take about a hundred and twenty rolls, or a total of two minutes at one roll per second. This sequential way of getting twenty sixes is infinitely faster than Behe's method. And this is the way natural selection and mutation really work, not by the ludicrous scenario presented by Behe.

As for Behe's assertion that mutation and selection cannot produce "coherence," it is absurd. Coherence is precisely the product of natural selection working with mutation. Yes, mutations are random in the sense I have described, but to say that an evolutionary step taken by an organism is unconnected to its predecessor completely ignores the fact that during evolution organisms are adapting to something in their environment, and that this adaptation can involve a coherent, coordinated response of many features. Consider the evolution of whales from terrestrial animals, now documented by a superb fossil record. The fossils show a wolf-like creature gradually becoming aquatic, with the hind limbs being reduced and finally lost, the forelimbs transformed into flippers, and the nostrils gradually moving atop the head to form the blowhole. How can anyone say that these changes (which of course look planned at the end) are unconnected or incoherent? They represent a case of natural selection eventually turning a land animal into a well-adapted aquatic one.

Not surprisingly, Behe ignores the fact the evolutionists have indeed determined whether mutations are random. Instead, he asserts that randomness is simply assumed by biologists because "the dominant theory [evolution] requires it." That is, all evolutionists are dupes. But for several decades molecular biologists have tested in the laboratory Behe's assumption of non-randomness: that the probability of a mutation being useful increases when a species is exposed to a new environment. These experiments have all failed. As far as we can see, mutations really are random with respect to the "needs" of the organism. There is no reason to assume otherwise.

To get an idea of the power of truly random mutations coupled with selection, we need only look at the successes of animal and plant breeders over the past few centuries. In that time, they have turned the wolf into breeds as diverse as the greyhound, the dachshund, and the chihuahua, and the wild mustard into cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, and brussels sprouts. Virtually every fruit, vegetable, and meat that we eat has been drastically remodeled by the artificial selection of wild ancestors. All these changes have been immeasurably faster than evolution in the wild, which takes hundreds of thousands to millions of years. And all of these changes have involved selection of random mutations. After all, commercial corn, greyhounds, tomatoes, and turkeys were redesigned by humans, not the Intelligent Designer, and since humans cannot produce miracle mutations, we are limited to selecting whichever ones arise--that is, random ones. To think otherwise would require the extraordinary assumption that the Designer foresaw the intentions of breeders and supplied them with the appropriate miraculous mutations. The success of animal and plant breeding, far outstripping the pace of evolution in nature, is a severe rebuke to Behe's view that evolution cannot work unless God helps it along by producing nonrandom mutations.





VI.

As the philosopher Philip Kitcher shows in his superb new book, Living With Darwin, the theory of intelligent design is a mixture of "dead science" and non-science. That is, insofar as ID makes scientific claims (for example, that natural selection cannot produce complexity), those claims not only are wrong, but were proved wrong years ago. And ID is deeply unscientific in its assertion that certain aspects of evolution (mutation, in Behe's case) required supernatural intervention. Behe's attacks on evolutionary theory are once again wrongheaded, but the intellectual situation grows far worse when we see what theory he offers in its place.


The first problem is that Behe's "scientific" ideas are offered to the public in a trade book, and have never gone through the usual process of vetting in peer-reviewed scientific journals. This was also the case with Darwin's Black Box. In fact, Behe has never published a paper supporting intelligent design in any scientific journal, despite his assertion in Darwin's Black Box that his own discovery of biochemical design "must be ranked as one of the greatest achievements in the history of science," rivaling "those of Newton and Einstein, Lavoisier and Schrodinger, Pasteur, and Darwin." Surely such an important theory deserves a place in the scientific literature! But the reason for the lack of peer review is obvious: Behe's ideas would never pass muster among scientists, despite the fact that anybody who really could disprove Darwinism would win great renown.

So let us put some empirical questions to Behe, since his theory is supposedly scientific. Which features of life were designed, as opposed to evolved? How exactly did the mutations responsible for design come about? Who was the Designer? To what end did the Designer work? If the goal was perfection, why are some features of life (such as our appendix or prostate gland) palpably imperfect?

In response to the question of what exactly was designed, Behe's answer seems to be: pretty much everything, including cells, biochemical systems, and the features distinguishing major groups of organisms, such as wings and warm-bloodedness. Behe's criterion is basically twofold: a feature of life must have been designed if it consists of a "purposeful arrangement of parts" and is composed of at least three parts.


But when we see something that looks designed, how do we know whether that design is "purposeful"? Natural selection displaced divine design precisely because it offered a naturalistic explanation for things that appeared to be purposeful. And why three components? This appears to come from Behe's claim that three amino acids are unlikely to change simultaneously in a protein. Well, that claim is true, but it has nothing to do with protein evolution, much less with the evolution of complex features. As we know from the fossil record, the multiple features of organisms that make them look designed--say, the feathers, legs, and wings of birds--did not appear instantly and simultaneously, but evolved gradually. There is not the slightest connection between the likelihood of three binding sites appearing simultaneously in a protein and the likelihood of three features of an organism evolving. Conflating these issues, and hoping that the reader will not notice, must be a deliberate rhetorical trick on Behe's part, for surely even he is not that ignorant of basic biology.

How did the non-random mutations come about? Well, they were obviously created by the Intelligent Designer. In Darwin's Black Box, Behe made the outrageous claim that the Designer might have engineered the first cell to contain all the mutations for the evolution of every species that would ever exist. This claim is manifestly false: such a cell would have unmanageably large amounts of DNA, and we see no evidence of "future DNA reserves" in primitive organisms such as bacteria. Behe still raises this possibility in his new book, but he also floats another idea: that mutations might not have been built into the first organism but could have occurred later, foreseen by God. In other words, they were miracles. So you can choose between the two possibilities: either mutations occurred in one big miracle or in millions of little miracles. The first claim is religious and false. The second claim is religious and untestable. Neither claim is scientific.



Who, precisely, was the Designer? Here Behe weasels a bit, as he should given the federal judiciary's dislike of religion in the science classroom. He mentions that the Christian God is only one of several possibilities. But you can bet that it was not Brahma, or the Bushmen's Kaang, or a space alien. As Jones remarked in Kitzmiller v. Dover: "Consider, to illustrate, that Professor Behe remarkably and unmistakably claims that the plausibility of the argument for ID depends upon the extent to which one believes in the existence of God." It is disingenuous of IDers to pretend that the Great Designer is unknown. Intelligent design has deep roots in fundamentalist Christianity, and its advocates are not fooling anyone.


And what were the Designer's goals? This is where Behe really gives away the game. He asserts that the goal was "intelligent life." Of course, what he really means is humans, presumably because Christians (Behe is a Catholic) feel that humans were made in the image of God: "What we sense, as elaborated through modern science's instruments and our reasoning, is that we live in a universe fine-tuned for intelligent life." And elsewhere: "Parts were moving into place over geological time for the subsequent, purposeful, planned emergence of intelligent life."

From God's mouth to Behe's ear! At this point we can simply stop asking whether Behe's theory is scientific, for he provides not the slightest evidence that evolution had any goal, much less one of intelligent life. In fact, every form of life on Earth, from humans to ferns to squirrels, can trace its ancestry back to the same single species that lived about three and a half billion years ago. In that sense, all species are equally evolved and equally removed in time from life's origin. Science long ago dispensed with the notion of the scala natura: a progressive ladder of life with humans at the top. Rather, each existing species is at the tip of a branch on the tree of life. So what scientific reason can there be for singling out just one species as the Designer's goal? How do we know that the goal was not butterflies or sunflowers? Plainly, Behe is adopting religious dogma as part of his theory. Yet he continues to assert that "I regard design as a completely scientific conclusion."

And what about the features of organisms that do not look well designed, such as the appendix, the vestigial wings of the kiwi bird, or the vestigial pelvis of whales? In Darwin's Black Box, Behe punted and said that the Designer's goals were unknowable: "Features that strike us as odd in a design might have been placed there by the designer for a reason--for artistic reasons, for variety, to show off, for some as-yet-undetected practical purpose, or for some unguessable reason--or they might not." But if we do not know why the Designer did things, how can we possibly know that his goal was intelligent life?



Finally Behe gets to theodicy: why is there pain and evil in the world if the Designer is omnipotent? How come He/She/It allows innocent babies to get sickle-cell anemia? Behe's answer is that "maybe the Designer isn't all that beneficent or omnipotent. Science can't answer questions like that." But questions about the goals, the powers, and the limitations of the Designer are precisely what must be answered if ID is to become scientific. After all, we do know something about the power and the limitations of natural selection, a process that can explain pain and things that seem evil.


Is Behe's theory testable? Well, not really, since it consists not of positive assertions, but of criticisms of evolutionary theory and solemn declarations that it is powerless to explain complexity. And it is certainly true that scientists will never be able to give Darwinian explanations for the evolution of everything. The origins of many features, such as the bony plates on the back of the Stegosaurus, are lost in the irrecoverable past. But neither can archaeology unearth everything about ancient history. We do not maintain on these grounds that archaeology is not a science.

Behe waffles when confronted with the testability problem of ID and turns it back on evolutionists, saying that "coming from Darwinists, both objections [the lack of predictions and the untestability of ID] are instances of the pot calling the kettle black." He then waffles even more when implying that ID does not even need to be testable: "Both additional demands--for hard-and-fast predictions or for direct evidence of a theory's fundamental principle--are disingenuous. Philosophers have long known that no simple criterion, including prediction, automatically qualifies or disqualifies something as science, and fundamental entities invoked by a theory can remain mysterious for centuries, or indefinitely."

But who is being disingenuous here? Evolution has been tested, and confirmed, many times over. Every time we find an early human fossil dating back several million years, it confirms evolution. Every time a new transitional fossil is found, such as the recently discovered "missing links" between land animals and whales, it confirms evolution. Each time a bacterial strain becomes resistant to an antibiotic, it confirms evolution. And evolutionary biology makes predictions. Here is one that Darwin himself made: that the earliest human ancestors will be found in Africa. (That prediction was confirmed, of course.) Another was made by Neil Shubin at the University of Chicago: that transitional forms between fish and amphibians would be found in 370-million-year-old rocks. Sure enough, he discovered that there were rocks of that age in Canada, went and looked at them, and found the right fossils. Intelligent design, in contrast, makes no predictions. It is infinitely malleable in the face of counterevidence, cannot be refuted, and is therefore not science.



In the end, The Edge of Evolution is not an advance or a refinement of the theory of intelligent design, but a retreat from its original claims--an act of desperation designed to maintain credibility in a world of scientific progress. But it is all for nothing, because Behe's new theory remains the same old mixture of dead science and thinly disguised theology. There is no evidence for his main claim of non-random mutation, and scientists have plenty of evidence against it. His arguments against the Darwinian evolution of complex organisms are flawed and misleading. And there is not a shred of evidence supporting his claim that the goal of evolution is intelligent life. In contrast to the feast of evidence that nourishes evolutionary theory, Behe gives us an empty plate.


The overweening strategy of IDers, and their creationist forebears, is to say that everything that we do not understand is evidence of the existence of God. I can imagine IDers of two centuries ago claiming that God made the sun shine, because until 1938 we had no idea where all that energy came from. It was not until quantum mechanics arrived out of left field that the physicist Hans Bethe was able to surmise, correctly, that the sun is a giant fusion reactor, converting hydrogen atoms into helium and energy. Who knew?

One of the great joys of science is that we never know what will happen next. Who could have guessed twenty years ago that dinosaurs probably became extinct after a giant meteorite collided with Earth and produced a "nuclear winter"? IDers would deprive us of this essential excitement, urging us to stop working when we come up against the hard problems and to ascribe our difficulties to God. They would have us join the herd of the benighted who proclaim so confidently that they have descried the bounds of our knowledge. But this attitude, this philosophy, was anticipated and unmasked by none other than Darwin himself, who was prescient not only about biology, but also about the nature of science: "Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science."


Jerry Coyne is a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago.

Would you try and stop a burglar breaking into your home? Why? That is not what Jesus would have done!

JayFK:

Therationa you're my hero lol

People just trust the bible wholeheartedly and take it word for word instead of actually looking to science and pure common sense, that's why you have universities in which you are required to go to church? and why we have Creationism accepted in schools even though it has nothing to do with science rather than Evolution where there is at least some semblance of proof to it.
I feel the sooner Nigerians abandon religion the sooner we go forward, I mean it gets annoying really, i lived in PH about 4 years ago and theres what? over 2000 churches!! are you freaking kidding me? and all these pastors just milk Nigerians for their money, belief that you are healed? look up placebo effect, fall under the power of God? look up hypnosis, its actually a technique, plus you have Nigerians praying for change and poo instead of actually doing something about our situation, It's sickening really, plus people say have faith? Lemme say something about "faith", "faith" is exactly that "faith" wholehearted belief in something without sufficient proof, for those of you that believe in God, I want you to tell me something God has done for you that you couldn't do for yourself? I know most people who will reply will say God forgive you and poo like that but I want you to please argue to the contrary.

JayFK, many many thanks. This is the only positive post I have received for this article. I am really glad you posted this.

Why don't you contact me at therationalist@yahoo.com

olabowale:

@Imhotep: Forget Therationa. I am asking you, where did sin originate? Unfortunately, what Aquinas and the pope and all the christian pundits have said are not satisfactory to me. Let just say that I am not smart, so just answer the question, directly. At least to me.

Good job, Olabowale. Let us see the good scholar he claims to be.

camchupa:

my God in heaven knows i have done what he asked me to do. i therefore dust my feet off you. it is better you learn the lesson on your own. remain blessed and goodbye.

Thank goodness.

Mr. Turkey:

^{a bunch of numbskulls all. . .}

I agree. That's exactly what I thought about these bible believers too.

Did God know Moses was going to smash the 1st set of commandments? Just a thought

Anyone knows what is this about?