Category Archives: Theology

This interesting paper has attracted some attention from the Intelligent Design websites like ENV and UD. And well it might, because it has reversed the usual Darwinian understanding of evolutionary expansion as an increasingly divergent tree, and replaced it with something more like a turnip. “The turnip of life” … doesn’t quite have the same ring, does it?

Investigating a leak in our roof yesterday (expensive!) I came across a long-lost friend:

I’m just reading a refreshingly non-controversial book of the type that first got me seriously interested in palaeontology maybe 50 years ago. It’s a new survey of Pterosaurs, by palaeontologist and skilled paleoartist Mark P Witton. I ordered it from the subject and text description, and hadn’t realised that it’s not only a comprehensive and authoritative overview of some incredibly interesting and unusual creatures, whose story has been much better understood recently, but also a gorgeously illustrated coffee-table book. It’s also excellent value for money. I’m a teenager again!

Yesterday I looked at orphan genes in the general context of providence, and cited a New Scientist article showing the increasing degree to which they are thought to arise in non-coding DNA sequences. In other words, in the proverbial “Junk DNA”.

The questioning of natural selection in my last two posts should be seen as a simple lack of conviction that classical Neodarwinianism is robust enough to account for, in a well-worn phrase, the origin of the species. I should emphasise again that theologically, an adequate scientific theory of evolution is perfectly compatible with the providence (ie supervision and direction) of a wise God: the denial of teleology is categorically an unscientific and metaphysical claim. At the same time, the astonishing complexity of life, as its wonders are exponentially proving, makes some kind of teleological mechanism within biology ever more likely, if we are to avoid a high contingency theory that is unsatisfactory … Continue reading →

After publishing my last post I noticed I’d downloaded from somewhere (maybe the Sanford article) a 2008 paper by Austin L Hughes about the methods that are used to detect genes that have been subject to natural selection.

When Winfrith of Crediton, not many miles from the Hump’s rural seat, went to Germany and cut down a celebrated pagan sacred oak around 723 AD, the lack of any resulting thunderbolt from Thor destroyed the entire basis of pagan belief. With the tree gone, there was literally nothing left. A couple of recent interesting papers here  and here look in detail at natural selection and question its ability to do what is claimed of it.

I came across this 1992 symposium when following up a conversation at BioLogos in which I mentioned David L Wilcox. I’ve written about Wilcox before as a like mind in having a high (Reformed) view of God’s providence in nature, linked to at least general support for evolutionary theory (he is, after all, a population geneticist). But apart from his paper here, the whole symposium has interesting things to read.