The British Humanist Association has a useful overview of recent bids for faith-based Free Schools (Creationist Free School bids rejected before interview as other ‘faith’ schools advance to interviews). The article seems fairly upbeat about the failure of several bids from groups clearly planning to teach creationism as an alternative to scientific reality. 

Bids to set up creationist Free Schools have been rejected by the Department for Education (DfE). In particular, the DfE have turned down a high-profile bid from Sheffield Christian Free School, which would have been affiliated to the Christian Schools’ Trust (CST) network of largely creationist private schools. The British Humanist Association (BHA) has welcomed the news; however, at least 15 other proposals to open ‘faith’ schools in 2013 have advanced to the interview stage.

The fate of several specific bids for creationist Free Schools is summarised in the article:

• Creationist Everyday Champions Church’s bid to establish Exemplar Academy appears to have been withdrawn, with the website having vanished prior to the application deadline.
• The fate of other proposals from CST schools such as Destiny Christian School in Bedford and Barnsley Christian School is unknown, but it is unlikely that they were successful.
• Similarly, it is unknown whether CofE school Clayton Academy, proposed by creationist Jesmond Parish Church – who have strong links to the Christian Institute – has progressed.
• Interestingly, creationism is not given as a cause for Sheffield Christian Free School’s rejection, in contrast to when Everyday Champions Academy’s bid was rejected last year.

I share the BHA’s concern about the general tendency for diverse and factional religiously motivated Free School proposals to be made. I also have a worry about school bids with a focus on barmpottery (as David Colquhoun puts it) suchas the three Steiner schools which have progressed in the application process. 

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That hotbed of UK Intelligent Design creationism and Discovery Institute wannabees, the Centre for Intelligent Design (C4ID) has been sending out publicity for another meeting at which Intelligent Design creationism will feature. C4ID Director Dr Alastair Noble enthusiastically writes:

I write to draw your attention to a fascinating conference on Design in Nature being organised by the Philosophy of Religion section of the Tyndale Fellowship in Cambridge.

Here is the doctrinal position of the Tyndale Fellowship Philosophy of Religion Section- very focussed on christianity – as is their Mission Statement. It is reportedly an academic society associated with Tyndale House, a residential biblical study centre in Cambridge.

Stephen Meyer and Steve Fuller will present aspects of Intelligent Design and the other speakers will explore some philosophical implications of the Design Argument. Details of the day and of the talks can be found at  www.tyndalephilosophy.org.uk/events. Information about booking is also available there.

Part of the background to this conference is the C4ID Inaugural Lecture given in London last November by Stephen Meyer which stimulated Tyndale Philosophy to follow up that event with a day conference to explore some key philosophical implications of the ancient question of Design in Nature and the re-emergence of Intelligent Design.

I wonder what’s meant by the re-emergence of Intelligent Design? Maybe that refers to a resurgence of ID twaddle in the UK and the establishment of C4ID, after the Kitzmiller case saw a pretty definitive slap-down for ID creationism in the USA back in 2005.

This will be a significant day conference, dealing with contemporary and controversial issues. I would urge you to attend.

In addition to Stephen Meyer and Steve Fuller, two other speakers are taking part, Stephen Clark (Emeritus Professor, Liverpool) and David Glass (University of Ulster). None of the four speakers appear to be biologists, which is about par for the course for this sort of event (though when I read the email, I wondered if the conference organisers were mounting their own version of Project Steve!).  This seems to be another of these events intent on convincing participants that there is any kind of controversy about evolution.  Other than in their own little world, of course – biologists just continue on their merry way working within the context of evolutionary biology and for the most part ignore these peripheral and generally religiously motivated voices arguing for a celestial designer.

Alastair Noble rounds off his email with another exhortation to buy the entirely risible pseudo-textbook “Explore Evolution”:

P.S. There is probably no other book on the market like Explore Evolution!  Click here to view a full-colour summary of  the book which will help you make up your own mind, from the scientific evidence, about the adequacy of Darwinism to explain the development and complexity of life.

Noble is probably correct when he says “There is probably no other book on the market like Explore Evolution!“, and for that we really ought to be grateful. You may recall that Explore Evolution was previously distributed by the very oddly and inaccurately named Truth in Science. There is a brief review of this short book by the BCSE, a lengthier deconstruction by the NCSE, and a review in the academic journal Evolution & Development. Suffice it to say, Explore Evolution is a deeply deceptive and dishonest treatment of the subject.  For Alastair Noble to peddle this misinformation is a poor show, and particularly so when he targets it at school students (as he has done in recent emails). Remember, he has a past (and possibly current) role as Education Officer with CARE – the Contact Us page for CARE in Scotland lists Alastair Noble as Education Officer.

Returning to the C4ID publicised meeting, it seems to have developed from the Meyer lecture back in November last year, which has attracted the attention of the Tyndale Fellowship.  It’s interesting to note that it’s to be held at the Tyndale Fellowship Philosophy of Religion Section (see links to their doctrinal position above).  Not bad for a supposedly scientific alternative to the rigorously investigated and experimentally supported science of Evolutionary Biology.

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Courtesy of the excellent Sensuous Curmudgeon (Discovery Institute: What Are They Thinking?), here is a bafflingly inane  page at the Biologic Institute.  It quotes Douglas Adams famously taking the piss out of the anthropic principle (and effectively creationism, including intelligent design creationism). It’s actually a quotation from an eulogy delivered by Richard Dawkins in 2001 (see also Positive Atheism’s Douglas Adams quotations).

Imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, “This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in; fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well! It must have been made to have me in it!”

The Biologic Institute follows this quotation with this one-liner:

Well, if a puddle actually woke up and thought anything, it would be entitled to that opinion.

Remember, the Biologic Institute is supposed to be the powerhouse of Intelligent Design creationist research.

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I received an advertising email from the UK’s very own Discotute wannabees, the Centre for Intelligent Design. It’s advertising a ‘textbook’ entitled Explore Evolution, and it’s headlined Explore Evolution- A remarkable book. In common with quite a bit of creationist activity, Explore Evolution seems to be named with the intention to deceive: in reality this publication aims to persuade the reader that there is a genuine scientific controversy, and that creationist views such as Intelligent Design are credible alternatives to evolutionary biology. You can read analyses of this ‘textbook’ by the BCSE and NCSE (the NCSE’s analysis is particularly detailed). There’s also a Wikipedia page on the book. And here’s a review at Ars Technica.

The advert begins:

I write to encourage you to buy a copy of the remarkable book Explore Evolution whose authors include the scientists Stephen Meyer, Paul Nelson and Scott Minnich.   This textbook, which is particularly suitable for senior high school students and undergraduates, is a must read for anyone who is interested in the continuing controversy about Darwinian evolution.  It is also a book to pass on to those who are studying the subject or are confused by the debate. [my emphasis]

It’s bogus – there is no controversy about ‘Darwinian evolution’.  If anything there is a manufactured social controversy, engineered by particular groups and individuals, often with a distinctively religious agenda. I’ve emphasised some text which makes it clear that Dr Alastair Noble (who holds a PhD in Chemistry rather than the Biological Sciences) is seeking to push his Intelligent Design creationism at schools.

This book will help you make up your own mind, from the scientific evidence, about the adequacy of Darwinism to explain the development and complexity of life.

More probably, the intention is to confuse the reader!

Explore Evolution first surfaced in the UK when the fundamentalist creationist group Truth in Science mailed copies to school librarians (BCSE responded by circulating an Open Letter to School Librarians). This looks to me like further blurring of the artificial boundaries between ID creationism and other forms of creationism.

UPDATE: One other relevant observation is that the Contact Us page for CARE in Scotland lists Alastair Noble as Education Officer. CARE is a Christian lobbying group which has interns working for MPs at Westminster. Here’s a Herald article (Rival to evolution may enter schools) in which Dr Noble is quoted:

Alastair Noble is an educational consultant who has been invited by both denominational and non- denominational secondary schools to present ID on a scientific basis. He said: “I gauge a growing level of interest from pupils and teachers. My guess is that the (TiS) DVDs are being used by a small but significant number of teachers.”

“It deserves formal consideration. It presents a scientific challenge to the construct that the world is the result of blind and purposeless forces.”

A more recent article at the Herald includes this strange bit of doublespeak from Dr Noble:

The group’s director, Dr Alastair Noble, told the Sunday Herald it was “inevitable” the debate would make its way into schools — even though the Scottish Government says teachers should not regard intelligent design as science.

“We are definitely not targeting schools, but that doesn’t mean to say we may not produce resources that go to schools,” Dr Noble said, adding that he had already been asked to speak in Scottish schools, and agreed to do so.

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Here’s a review of Meyer’s ‘Signature in the Cell’, published back in 2010 in the American Science Affiliation*’s journal, Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith: Seeking a Signature, by Dennis Venema (2010, Vol 62, pp 276-283). It’s rather a nice review of ‘Signature in the Cell’, and makes some good points – it’s well worth reading. I particularly noted this paragraph towards the end of the review:

Effectively, Meyer requests that we trade pursuing an ongoing area of productive research for his pronouncement that it will never succeed. Not so. Biologists know full well that natural mechanisms can add functional information to DNA sequences, and it thus makes good sense to look for pathways that exploit these mechanisms at the origin of life. True, research in this field has not solved the origin-of-life problem, and there are several competing hypotheses on the table, all with some experimental support. Quite a lot has been accomplished in this area in the last few decades, and it is a reasonable expectation that further research will continue to pay dividends. To halt research in this field and to label it “design” (and therefore unsolvable) accomplishes nothing scientifically, especially when there is no workable theory of design to guide future work.

I think that passage quite neatly encapsulates a major problem with Meyer’s argument that we have reached a conclusion to science’s efforts to figure out how life originated, and that science has failed to do so, leaving open only the possibility of supernatural intervention. Quite frankly, such a view does a significant disservice to science.

Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith seems to specialise in letting authors and critics exchange views in print.  Venema’s review was followed in the the June 2011 issue by a couple of small response articles, and in the September 2011 issue by a lengthy rebuttal from Meyer (Of Molecules and (Straw) Men: A Response to Dennis Venema’s Review of Signature in the Cell), and a response to Meyer’s rebuttal by Venema (Intelligent Design, Abiogenesis, and Learning from History: A Reply to Meyer).  Hopefully this will draw the to-and-fro of opinions to a close, though I note the final issue of 2011 does have a couple of articles on information and the origins of life.

Meyer’s response seeks to shift the discussion of biological information origins away from a more generic discussion (where Meyer is clearly wrong that no natural processes can give rise to biological information) to one focussed on the origins of biological information.  He’s irked, for example, that Venema thinks that he gave short shrift to considering the possibility that the relationship between codon and amino acid are not random (see for example work by Yarus).  This is something I’d picked up on while ploughing through Signature. He returns to the woolly concept of functional specified information. [Actually, I think that a major problem with this functionality is that our picture of the functions of nucleic acids shifts continually as scientific discoveries are made, hypotheses formulated and tested.  Only a decade or so ago short functional mRNA sequences were pretty much unheard of - now miRs are known to be not only widespread but a highly important component of gene regulation; function in DNA sequence need not relate to encoding RNA or protein sequences, etc, making definitive statements around functional information problematic.]  In the end, however, Meyer’s argument that the most likely explanation for the origin of biological information is a supernatural one rests on his belief that (a) scientific explanations (for Meyer, these are materialistic explanations) of the origin of  life have failed to explain how genetic systems arose, but more importantly that (b) they will not do so, and that scientific investigation into the origins of biological information are now unsuccessfully concluded.  How else, then, can he assert the best explanation for the origins of biological information requires a supernatural entity (for which there is no evidence), and the use of unknown technology to accomplish the design?  It still seems to me to be a classic ‘God of the Gaps’ explanation.

Venema’s reply to Meyer has a lengthy argument that such strategies are doomed to fail where reliance is made on a perceived explanatory failure of science – scientific investigation is usually an ongoing endeavour. This is returning to the passage I quote above from his review of ‘Signature in the Cell’, but in his reply he very effectively illustrates the problem an Intelligent Design creationist faces in making use of such a strategy.

It struck me while reading ‘Signature in the Cell’ that Meyer’s so-called argument from best explanation was remarkably poor, and it’s rather helpful to see Venema’a deconstruction in print. So, my version of the argument from best explanation would be a choice between two alternatives.

1. That a supernatural entity (for which there is not a jot of evidence) used unknown techniques (for which, obviously, there is not a jot of evidence) to initiate life using the genetic code which is extant today.

or

2. That natural processes gave rise to life as we know it. At present no definitive conclusions have been reached as the the chemical basis of this process, but it is an active research area that has over the years advanced numerous hypotheses, many of which offer testable predictions.

I know which alternative I prefer.

*The ASA, incidentally, is an international network of christians in the sciences, as stated at their website:

The American Scientific Affiliation, or ASA, was founded in 1941 as an international network of Christians in the sciences.

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The Centre for Intelligent Design (the UK’s very own Discotute wannabees) have posted a video of Stephen C. Meyer’s lecture from last November online.  Over at the BCSE blog, my colleague Psiloiordinary has taken on the task of working through the lecture (Live Blogging the UK C4ID Lecture 2011).  For my part, I confess to a lack of willingness to spend the time on such a thankless task, since I expended quite a bit of effort recently ploughing through Meyer’s  magnum opus Signature in the Cell. 

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I received an email from the Centre for Intelligent Design (the UK organisation pushing Intelligent Design creationism). The main offer is that these presentations are free (though contributions would be welcome). The full text has also been blogged here. I particularly noted this paragraph:

I have a number of illustrated presentations which are suitable for college, university, church or public audiences and which deal with various aspects of Intelligent Design. Although C4ID is not specifically targeting schools, I am also happy to give talks in schools, to classes or clubs, where appropriate. 

Dr Alastair Noble (his PhD is in Chemistry, rather than the biological sciences) has spent much of his career working in education, particularly from a religious perspective.  This has of course led to accusations in the press that he’s going to be targetting schools, for example this report in the Herald, from which this quotation:

The group’s director, Dr Alastair Noble, told the Sunday Herald it was “inevitable” the debate would make its way into schools — even though the Scottish Government says teachers should not regard intelligent design as science.

“We are definitely not targeting schools, but that doesn’t mean to say we may not produce resources that go to schools,” Dr Noble said, adding that he had already been asked to speak in Scottish schools, and agreed to do so.

Maybe I’m a suspicious old thing, but I think it might be interesting to see how many schools engage Dr Noble.

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 A review of Stephen C. Meyer’s Signature in the Cell

Pub 2009, Harper One (edition reviewed was the Kindle edition).

Introduction

In late 2011, Stephen Meyer delivered a lecture in London. Organised by the UK’s very own Centre for Intelligent Design (C4ID), and hosted in Whitehall by Lord Mackay of Clashfern (a notable member of the Free Church of Scotland), I received an invitation in the post.  Circumstances surrounding this lecture coupled with some background reading I’d done on Meyer’s thinking and an awareness of how Intelligent Design creationists have in the past used academic attendees at events as some kind of litmus test of acceptance, I decided not to attend.  Instead, I was quite vocal (critical of ID creationism) in several internet fora, which attracted some criticism that I had not actually read the book in question (had I attended, I would have been given a copy).

I can summarise my opinion of the book quite succinctly. It is lengthy, tedious, overblown, very defensive at times, occasionally interesting, generally deceptive, but ultimately completely unconvincing to a practising biologist.  However, I did read this book with the intention of reviewing it, so here goes.

I reviewed the Kindle edition of this book.  This hasn’t made it terribly easy to work through as it’s quite difficult to move to and fro around the text, particularly if one wishes to take a quick look at a citation. HarperOne could have done a much better job.  Also the figures are pretty scrappy, resembling sketches drawn to assist a graphic designer: whether the figures in the paper version are better, I don’t know.

The Author

Stephen Meyer is a major figure in the American Intelligent Design creationism movement.  Along with William Dembski (who is extensively quoted in Signature), and Jonathan Wells (who’s on record as setting out to destroy Darwinism), he’s one of the intellectual leaders of this regrettable movement.  Meyer graduated with a degree in Physics and Earth Science from the christian Whitworth College, and worked for a while as a geophysicist before undertaking a PhD in the philosophy of science at the University of Cambridge.  The more interesting sections of Signature reflect his PhD: they are an account of hypotheses for the origin of life. Meyer then held teaching positions at Whitworth and at Palm Beach Atlantic University (another college with a distinctive christian ethos), before settling at the Discovery Institute, where he’s been a leading light in the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture.

Meyer’s background isn’t in biology, or molecular biology, which may explain some of the more startling asides in Signature.  His involvement in Intelligent Design can be traced back to around 1992.

The Discovery Institute and the Wedge Strategy

Somewhere along the line Meyer became convinced that life on Earth must have originated with a designer of some kind. According to Signature this was a realisation that followed his study of the many hypotheses of life’s origins that have been advanced over the years.  Meyer is credited as one of the authors of the Wedge Strategy document, which sets out the Discovery Institute’s strategy for intelligent design. To quote from the Wikipedia page:

The document sets forth the short-term and long-term goals with milestones for the intelligent design movement, with its governing goals stated in the opening paragraph:

• “To defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural, and political legacies”
• “To replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God”

There are three Wedge Projects, referred to in the strategy as three phases designed to reach a governing goal:

• Scientific Research, Writing & Publicity
• Publicity & Opinion-making
• Cultural Confrontation & Renewal

Recognising the need for support, the institute affirms the strategy’s Christian, evangelistic orientation:

Alongside a focus on the influential opinion-makers, we also seek to build up a popular base of support among our natural constituency, namely, Christians. We will do this primarily through apologetics seminars. We intend these to encourage and equip believers with new scientific evidences that support the faith, as well as to popularize our ideas in the broader culture.

I’m including this outline of the position of ID creationism as seen by the Discovery Institute because I think it reveals an overall agenda in pushing a set of religiously motivated objectives, an agenda that initially was covert.  And the identity of the ‘Designer’ is clear from the Wedge Document (though proponents of ID creationism like to keep this vague). Looking into the history of Intelligent Design creationism, one sees that the Wedge Document (thought to date from around 1998) reflects a neo-creationist strategy that began in the early 1990s, and in specific response to successive legal defeats of co-called creation science in the USA, where the teaching of creationism falls foul of the constitutional separation of religion and state.

Intelligent Design is creationism

In 2005, an American court reached judgement on whether Intelligent Design could legitimately be described as science, in the context of the constitutional separation of church and state.  The case arose because a school board in Pennsylvania chose to present ID in schools.  In the end, the court (on the basis of very persuasive evidence) recognised that ID was a form of creationism, albeit one which had attempted to cover its tracks with a surface of science-y language.

Signature in the Cell

Signature is one of the main sources for Intelligent Design creationism.  It presents a version of ID creationism aimed at convincing the general public that not only has science failed to explain the origin of life (specifically the origins of genetic systems), but that it never will, and that ID creationism is (a) a scientific approach and (b) the best explanation for the origins of biological information.  Unfortunately for Meyer, he fails to persuade informed readers.

The Victimhood Card

Somewhat strangely, Signature begins with an account of the Sternberg affair, in which a journal editor abused his position and enabled publication of a paper by Meyer.  Meyer’s take is somewhat at odds with historical reality, making out that the whole affair was one in which Sternberg’s academic freedom was attacked.  However, detailed investigation revealed this to be far from the truth (see for example this report).  But I thought that beginning your popular science exposition of Intelligent Design creationism with a bid for martydom was more than a little odd.  It’s a theme that recurs occasionally as one ploughs through the tome.

Background to Molecular Biology

Next up is what’s essentially a primer on basic molecular biology.  This isn’t presented at a particularly heavy level, which is appropriate for the target general audience.  I thought the material was pretty clearly presented, though the reader would be well-advised to look at any one of the multitude of college-level texts that exist if they wish to get an even better feel for the complexity within the cell.  It’s while reading these chapters that the astute biologist gains the first inklings of the strategy to come, which is to argue that the complexity of cellular systems is just too much to have occurred through natural processes.  I think the biggest failing here is that Meyer’s background is insufficient to truly express how biological systems are systems in which ‘information’ (note that I use ‘information’ in a metaphorical way) can degrade, change and also expand and contract in quantity.  And what’s not made clear is that all the molecular processes that are required for evolutionary change are pretty well characterised and understood.

Strangely, Meyer has the hubris to believe he’s having major inspirational insights:

But notice too that there are no chemical bonds between the bases along the longitudinal axis in the center of the helix. Yet it is precisely along this axis of the DNA molecule that the genetic information is stored.

Amplified later as this revelatory insight:

There in the classroom this elementary fact of DNA chemistry leaped out at me. I realized that explaining DNA’s information-rich sequences by appealing to differential bonding affinities meant that there had to be chemical bonds of differing strength between the different bases along the information-bearing axis of the DNA molecule. Yet, as it turns out, there are no differential bonding affinities there. Indeed, there is not just an absence of differing bonding affinities; there are no bonds at all between the critical information-bearing bases in DNA. In the lecture hall the point suddenly struck me as embarrassingly simple: there are neither bonds nor bonding affinities—differing in strength or otherwise—that can explain the origin of the base sequencing that constitutes the information in the DNA molecule. A force has to exist before it can cause something. And the relevant kind of force in this case (differing chemical attractions between nucleotide bases) does not exist within the DNA molecule.

Well, I’m not so sure I find this an astonishing insight.  In the context of present-day DNA and RNA synthesis, the phosphate moeities are crucial in the formation of linkage between successive nucleotides.

Origins of Life

This is a genuinely interesting overview of how theories of the origins of life have arisen and been modified in light of increasing understanding of cellular molecular biology.  Unfortunately Meyer is clearly presenting a thesis that there are no successful hypotheses.  It’s here that the deeply unscientific nature of ID creationism becomes visible: “Science” is not some completed enterprise: indeed new hypotheses and findings are continually made – not least in the fields associated with the origins of life.  This is the more intellectually satisfying aspects in origins of life research: that novel hypotheses are continually framed and modified – and tested.  But hey, when you’re religiously motivated, why not cut and run and invoke a supernatural designer?

Design Detection, Information Theory & Specified (Functional) Information

There are two significant areas where Meyer draws on the work of colleagues, and in particular William Dembski, a mathematician who claims to have devised probability based methods for the detection of design.  Meyer relies heavily on William Dembski’s approach to detecting design.  I have several problems: essentially this becomes an exercise in probability, where the probability of events cannot really be calculated.

Yes, it may seem that the probability of life beginning was quite low, but Signature exaggerates this by seeming to insist on features of molecular replication being established all at once.  It’s as if Meyer is really keen to place obstacles in front of non-supernatural explanations.

Information Theory

Meyer’s use of information theory in Signature is difficult. As far as I can tell, Meyer doesn’t really have the background to adequately discuss this (and neither do I).  Meyer uses neither Shannon nor Kolomogorov information as the basis of his discussions, but a strange hybrid form in which not only the information is considered, but the message/meaning that is in the information. I find this completely uncompelling.  Meyer’s arguments require an understanding of which stretches of DNA sequence ultimately have functional significance, and he tends to avoid anything other than protein coding sequences.  He doesn’t consider, for example, the latitude there may be in protein sequence before a protein’s function is compromised.  I got the sense that for Meyer, the world is a rather binary place: stuff works or it doesn’t work.

Jeffrey Shallit, who has experience with information theory and mathematics has written several articles slamming Meyer’s treatment of information theory in Signature (for example Stephen Meyer’s Bogus Information Theory): much of this revolves around the undefined concept of functional specified information.

Meyer makes great play of the similarities between genetic information and human language – he gives many examples, even reiterating objections to Dawkins’ ‘Methinks it is a weasel’ computer programme, to which he imputes particular strategy in programming.  It’s interesting to note that the Weasel programme was a simple script to demonstrate how selection speeds up the attainment of an endpoint, in comparison to random letter choice.  This isn’t really a simulation of evolution, and of course the selection pressure here is to home in on a target phrase. I’m unsure quite what Meyer’s goal here is or was, but it’s instructive to read this take on the issue: Dembski weasels out.

Off the Fence: Meyer’s Intelligent Design

Finally, Meyer gets of the fence.  He believes that life originated as an act of Design. Unfortunately, Meyer refuses to come clean that he believes that God was that designer, at which is what I would be led to believe from his co-authorship of the Wedge Document (“To replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God”).  Frankly, this is a hugely dishonest approach, but one in keeping with the strategy of Intelligent Design creationism proponents.

But who or what is the designer?

If we can take Signature at face value, no effort seems to be made to establish who or what the designer was.  There is no evidence in any shape or form for the existence of such a supernatural entity – though I believe that in the minds of ID proponents they have uncovered evidence OF a designer

Inference to Best Explanation

Meyer’s attempt to infer the existence of intelligent design are somewhat naive.  He summarises his strategy as “Inference to Best Explanation”.

Premise One: Despite a thorough search, no material causes have been discovered that demonstrate the power to produce large amounts of specified information.

The flaws with Premise One:  (1) There are plenty of chemical and biological mechanisms which can and do increase the quantity of biological information.  (2) ‘Specified Information’ is a bogus concept, and one which Meyer never actually defines. (3) A number of hypotheses have been advanced to explain the origins of biological information, and it’s only the straw man versions set up as easy targets by Meyer which fail.  (4) And finally, science will ultimately continue to generate origin of life hypotheses, some completely undreamt of as yet.

Premise Two: Intelligent causes have demonstrated the power to produce large amounts of specified information.

The flaws with Premise Two: (1) Specified Information continues to evade definition by Meyer.  (2) The only intelligent cause that Meyer can demonstrate is human cause, and (3) the complex information devised and generated by humans does not in fact correspond to biological information.

Conclusion: Intelligent design constitutes the best, most causally adequate, explanation for the information in the cell.

ID creationism fails.  Even were one to suppose intelligent design, for this form of creationism to gain traction, one would need at the very least to identify who or what this designer is (or was), and the means by which this intelligent designer undertook this major design effort (which actually exceeds the human ability at present).

Ultimately, Meyer’s concept remains a restatement of the classic ‘God of the Gaps’.  Because Meyer cannot conceive of a natural mechanism by which genetic information arose (or indeed believes that such a mechanism can never be uncovered) the role of a supernatural entity is the explanation.  Meyer rejects this, and rather unsuccessfully argues that his ‘Inference to Best Explanation’ is not such a ‘God of the Gaps’ argument.

Meyer restates his chain of illogic as follows:

Premise One: Causes A through X do not produce evidence E. Premise Two: Cause Y can and does produce E. Conclusion: Y explains E better than A through X.

For Meyer, the ‘E’ in the first premise is biological (genetic) information.  He also supposes that an exhaustive catalogue of explanations has been generated and rejected.  This reveals his unscientific approach: the list can not be exhaustive, and many explanations only fail for Meyer because of the way he’s set up straw men, and applied irrelevant statistical tests.  Meyer makes a direct connection between human generated information and biological information.  From my perspective as a research in molecular genetics, the premises must be restated as:

Premise One: Causes A through P do not explain (in Meyer’s view) the origin of evidence E (biological information), though we have yet to devise causes Q-X . Premise Two: Cause Y can and does produce F (human-generated information). Conclusion: Y explains E better than A through X.

This quite clearly illustrates the flaws in Meyer’s reasoning. I don’t believe that linguistic information or computer code are directly analogous to biological information.

Victimhood again

Meyer goes on at some length about how ID creationists in Institutes and Universities have been persecuted for holding heretical views.  An earlier example was the Sternberg affair, which Meyer misrepresents.  A similar accusation of individuals having their academic freedom trampled on is raised.  Unfortunately for Meyer (and fortunately for everyone else),  academic freedom allows academics to hold views, and conduct research that run counter to accepted wisdom.  This is entirely appropriate.  It can have quite serious effects: it’s why, for example, Peter Duesberg is able to continue claiming that AIDS is not caused by HIV – the failure to accept this has led to considerable mortality.  But what academic freedom does not (and should not) permit is the deliberate mis-education of students.  Frankly ID creationism is so far “out there” that it should not be represented in the undergraduate science curricula.

Meyer spends some time battling against the Dover trial, at which the presiding judge ruled that Intelligent Design was indeed a variety of creationism. But anyone reading the testimony could not fail to be convinced by the evidence that Intelligent Design was a deliberate strategy to make creationism look a bit less religious: particularly damning was the evidence from the iterative revision of the creationist text book Of Pandas and People. Also notable was that the Discovery Institute experts cut and ran from the trial when it became obvious early on that they would be involved in a big time courtroom defeat.

Is Intelligent Design creationism a testable theory?

Meyer wheels out the existence or not of junk DNA as an opportunity to portray ID creationism as a testable theory. He writes:

Consider the case of so-called junk DNA—the DNA that does not code for proteins found in the genomes of both one-celled organisms and multicellular plants and animals. The theory of intelligent design and materialistic evolutionary theories (both chemical and biological) differ in their interpretation of so-called junk DNA. Since neo-Darwinism holds that new biological information arises as the result of a process of mutational trial and error, it predicts that nonfunctional DNA would tend to accumulate in the genomes of eukaryotic organisms (organisms whose cells contain nuclei).

Evolutionary theory does not make the prediction that non-functional DNA would tend to accumulate. Whether mutational events lead to genome expansion would depend on selection pressures.  Within the eukaryotes, one can see huge variation in the extent to which ‘junk‘ DNA is present. Whether ‘junk’ DNA exists or not depends of course on how one interprets function: undoubtedly some DNA is present as a structural feature, some will be transcribed to yield functional RNA, and some will be transcribed to yield mRNA. P. Z. Myers gets it about right (Junk DNA is still junk) in a blog article on a peer-reviewed paper.

One assumes that the ‘predictions’ of ID creationism that ‘we expect DNA, as much as possible, to exhibit function’ (and that’s a pretty crappy prediction – as much as possible) are an attempt by ID creationists to read the mind of their creator designer.

Conclusions

While I’ve been preparing this review (it’s taken rather longer than I’d thought, due to pressure of work), I note that the Centre for Intelligent Design has posted an article about November’s Meyer lecture (C4ID’s Inaugural Lecture 2011: ‘Is there a Signature in the Cell?’).  Sadly, no video is presented.  It proclaims:

The content of Dr Meyer’s lecture was fascinating and his book, ‘Signature in the Cell’ is truly groundbreaking.  In his lecture, he outlined his initial interest in the problem of the emergence of first life and the absence, then and now, of any credible explanation for it.  He described how this had led him to Cambridge to undertake a PhD in the philosophy of science and to his discovery of the significance of the information content of DNA.  Using the method of inference to the best explanation, the very approach adopted by Charles Darwin in his elaboration of evolution by variation and natural selection, he described the scientific legitimacy of concluding that the information carried by DNA is best explained by intelligent mind.

This, frankly is nonsense.  The book is not groundbreaking but rather contains an insupportable claim not only that science has no credible explanation for the origins of biological ‘information’, but that it can never have such an explanation.  It uses outdated accounts of the origins of life, does not review more recent theories that have emerged since Meyer’s PhD thesis, and makes use of mangled information theory.  And as for ‘inference to best explanation’, the proposal that some unknown entity, with supernatural powers, was responsible for life’s appearance on Earth is not only ludicrous without evidence for the existence of such an entity but is intellectually hopeless.

There’s a rather succinct demolition of Meyer’s argument in a posting to Panda’s Thumb (ID: Intelligent Design as Imitatio Dei (report on the 2007 ‘Wistar Retrospective Symposium’)) which reviews a bogus conference staged by the Discovery Institute in 2007 (a bit like this one, but where actual scientists were invited – I presume the ID crew learnt from that mistake).  I somewhat regret not having read that article earlier, I might not have wasted the money on Meyer’s ‘groundbreaking’ book or more importantly the time it took to wade through it.

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I noticed this story at the Panda’s Thumb developing over the last few days: Springer gets suckered by creationist pseudoscience – The Panda’s Thumb

It looks like some creationist engineers found a way to slither some ID/creationism into a major academic publisher, Springer. The major publishers have enough problems at the moment (e.g. see the Elsevier boycott), it seems like the last thing they should be doing is frittering away their credibility even further by uncritically publishing creationist work and giving it a veneer of respectability. The mega-publishers are expensive, are making money off of largely government-funded work provided to them for free, and then the public doesn’t even have access to it. The only thing they have going for them is quality control and credibility – if they give that away to cranks, there is no reason at all to support them.

The comments at Panda’s Thumb are rather informative:

• The book is a conference proceedings, but not in the biological sciences
• The conference was held in rooms rented from Cornell, but not promoted by Cornell or its academic community
• The participants’ names are secret
• Attendance was invitation only
• At least one of the volume editors appears to be a creationist of the young earth variety

It would seem that Springer may be having second thoughts: the notification of this volume has now disappeared from their website.

This all seems to be part of the Wedge Strategy to gain apparent endorsement by the academic world. Similar conferences have been documented in ‘Creationism’s Trojan Horse‘.  Indeed similar strategies appear to be endorsed by C4ID, who’s conferences may only be attended by those sympathetic to ID creationism, and who recently organised a lecture in London by Stephen Meyer at which the names of those attending have been kept confidential.

UPDATE: There’s an update to this story at Panda’s Thumb. The story is also covered at Inside Higher Ed.

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Last year, when bemused physicists reported the apparent discovery of faster than light neutrinos, a shock wave ran through the news media, despite professional physicists the world over pointing out that it was almost certainly a technical cockup (ISTR the original experimenters suggested such). In the bizarre world of creationism, the potential upset to such a well-entrenched scientific theory as Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity was seen as evidence that the whole edifice of evolutionary biology was teetering on the brink. Here for example is a brief piece by David Klinghoffer at the oddly named Evolution News and Views (which is a mouthpiece for Intelligent Design creationism) – “Another One Bites the Dust?”. Here, Klinghoffer makes a very brief point:

If you think Darwin’s theory of evolution is as secure as Einstein’s theory of special relativity, well…maybe you’re right. [followed by a slightly longer quotation from The Guardian]

Well, actually I do (and did) think that modern evolutionary biology is pretty secure.  And as it turns out, physicists’ expectations that there was something wrong with the experimental set-up are supported – news reports indicate that the faster than light neutrinos weren’t faster than light, but that the data are explained by a loose fibre optic cable connecting GPS devices. You can read the reports at the journal Science’s website: BREAKING NEWS: Error Undoes Faster-Than-Light Neutrino Results – ScienceInsider.

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