Monthly Archives: November 2011

Since Penman keeps asking me, and since he’s the only person who reads this blog apart from a few hundred spambots, here’s an attempt to summarise what James Shapiro is presenting in Evolution – a View from the 21st Century for a complete non scientist. Those with scientific training will realise it is grossly inadequate, but I’ve done a more critical review here!

In my last post  I looked at how the real heart of Darwinian evolutionary theory is a mental concept, comparable to the Anthropic Principle, that enables one to conceive of design witout a designer. This is what makes the theory so malleable to any actual data. I want to  carry on with the example I was using there of the first self-replicating molecule, as it’s relatively uncomplicated to imagine. The question, you’ll remember, is whether it makes any difference (for a theist) to consider such a complex and closely specified self-replicating molecule as the work of God-as-designer, or as the work of God-as-behind-a-rational-and-scientific-fluke-of-extreme-improbability. I concluded that the only real difference … Continue reading →

What did Darwin actually present in 1859? I suggest it wasn’t so much a scientific theory as a plausible new way of looking at things. It wasn’t his evidence that “swept away the illusion of design” but the mental flip that suddenly enables one to see how design could happen without a designer. Darwin presented some evidence for descent with modification, but that in itself wasn’t new but common currency in the scientific community. His Big Idea was natural selection, and the only evidence he presented for that was a comparison with artificial selection. If a breeder can select for useful traits, why should not nature itself do so? It’s … Continue reading →

One thing you notice as soon as you participate in evolution discussions is that you don’t understand anything about evolution. This is true whatever your background. You notice in most of the criticisms of a biochemist like Behe or an origins-of-life PhD like Meyer that they somehow neglected to learn the rudiments of evolution. My own background was zoology and medicine, but it has never prevented the “You don’t understand the first thing…” accusations. Some people might argue that those with weak arguments prefer to say, “You wouldn’t understand…” than argue their case, but the alternative is to go back and try to reach that basic, essential comprehension. So let’s … Continue reading →

Another interesting paper, again brought to my attention by an ID website (sorry). But again, I was interested in looking at the original in PLoS Genetics, which fortunately for us all has open access. The basic finding is a surprisingly high number of de novo protein-coding genes in the human genome, to the tune of 60. This was compared to chimpanzee and other primate sources. This, they say, is three times more than what was found hitherto – but then they looked harder.