47 kinds of chocolate chip

Back in 2007 (you see I’m late, as ever) Allen MacNeill published a list of 47 sources of variation within living cells. I believe he’s since expanded it to over 50. As you’ll see from the link, his intention was to knock down an ID “straw man” that random point mutation cannot produce nearly enough variation to give natural selection traction. Every evolutionary biologist, he points out, can refute that from the hosts of other mechanisms now known to occur.

His critique of ID is a little unfair, I feel, having seen firsthand how often orthodox Neodarwinists knock down ID on the basis that point mutations are more than sufficient, or even unnecessary, to keep natural selection humming along. Certainly that is the case on BioLogos, where relatively little has been discussed in articles about epigenetics, gene splicing and so on. But he still makes a very cogent point. The year after his blog, MacNeill participated in a long and very fruitful (not to say educational and unusually good natured) discussion on this, and other, matters on Uncommon Descent. As he put it then:

…the engines of variation are more than up to the task of generating anything that could conceivably be of use to a living organism (plus an immensely larger amount of useless variation).

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Semi-creationism is alive and well in TE

One of the key insights in recent times that enables Christians to integrate a Biblical worldview with a scientific one is that expressed in John Walton’s seminal Lost World of Genesis One. In this he shows how the Genesis creation account was originally intended not as a material description of creation, but as a functional account of God’s ordering of it as his temple, with mankind in the privileged position of both priest-king and temple-image. Continue reading

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A day of darkness (maybe)

In a previous post I looked at Neodarwinism as a self-contained belief system which, in essence, cannot be falsified. Today I want to consider what would happen if it were shown to be mistaken.

Nearly all the criticism of the Modern Synthesis, outside Biblical Creationism, arises from the mathematical improbability of random mutation having the creative ability to produce the raw material for natural selection to work on. As far back as 1966, mathematicians at the Wistar Conference cast serious doubt on this. The immediate response of the biologists present will be familiar even today: since evolution has occurred, the maths (rather than the MS) must be wrong. Nevertheless one would have thought that such a conference would have provoked a burst of mathematical activity to put evolutionary theory on a more secure footing. Continue reading

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Gordon Giltrap

For the last 41 years I’ve been going every so often to get my fix of the music of Gordon Giltrap, one of Britain’s greatest and undersung guitarists. It’s a bit harder to get to him now we’re living in the wilds of the west country, but I caught up with him on Sunday, and found all the old magic that made him my guitar hero back in 1969 is still there. So this is just a heads up to check him out on his website. There’s some good stuff on YouTube too, such as this tour de force.

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The Power of Myth

Everybody interested in evolution ought to read evolutionary biologist Arlin Stoltzfus’s remarkable series on the establishment of the Modern Synthesis (Neodarwinism) as an unassailable and infinitely flexible (though factually mistaken) dogma. Telic Thoughts has actually run a thread on it, and they, like me, picked up the link from a quotation by Mike Gene. Thanks Mike. It’s worth another link for those who missed it.

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Uncommonly Decent

I see (or actually, someone told me) that my piece on Signature in the Cell has been quoted on the news page of Uncommon Descent, the Intelligent Design site. This, naturally, is quite flattering – after all, UD is almost as famous as those other websites, Telic Thumb and Pandas in Genesis. Continue reading

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Whales and chimpanzees

Whilst I was re-reading the threads on BioLogos about Signature in the Cell, I chanced upon an exchange between Rich and Dennis Venema (from this time last year) on a thread about whale evolution. Rich had linked to a video by Richard Sternberg . In this he suggested that the large number of big hurdles evolution needed to overcome, in a short time, to cause the change from terrestrial mammal to whale, seemed to be mathematically implausible given known rates of mutation. Rich was bemoaning the fact that, although no detailed genetic transitions had ever been proposed even hypothetically for such an evolutionary process, Neodarwinists are still supremely, or even belligerently, overconfident that random mutation and natural selection undoubtedly explain them. I can’t disagree with Rich’s analysis. Continue reading

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Signature in the BioLogos

I’ve finally got round to reading Stephen Meyer’s Signature in the Cell. This is the second ID text I have read, having tackled Darwin’s Black Box  in 1998. In the view of some people on the BioLogos forum, that makes me an addict of “mendacious intellectual pornography.” Indeed, it was BioLogos that persuaded me to read Meyer. Continue reading

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14th Century Marmoset

This is just to produce a link to my new instrumental album, which you can hear and download here.

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The image of God – being spokesperson for a worshipping cosmos

I want to pick up on one throwaway idea on my previous blog. That is the thought that one aim of gaining knowledge, apart from the good of mankind, is to praise God for it. I was prompted in this by a video of Tom Wright, which I won’t link to as he was reflecting someone else’s thought – though no doubt, being Wright, some additional insight drifted in.

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