Thursday, January 11, 2007

The Limits of Darwinian Pathways

Intelligent design is a science, not a faith makes the case that: "If certain Darwinists also had the intellectual honesty to distinguish between science and their religious beliefs, the public understanding of science would be much enhanced." That would come as a revelation to those who believe their views of natural history flow from scientific inferences rather than a combination of scientific data and their own subjective viewpoints. From the article:

"If Darwin had known what we now know about molecular biology - gigabytes of coded information in DNA, cells rife with tiny machines, the highly specific structures of certain proteins - would he have found his own theory convincing? Randerson thinks that natural selection works fine to explain the origin of molecular machines. But the fact is that we are still unable even to guess Darwinian pathways for the origin of most complex biological structures.

Science has turned lots of corners since Darwin, and many of them have thrown up data quite unpredicted by his theory. Who, on Darwinian premises, would have expected that the patterns of distribution and abundance of species in tropical rainforests could be modelled without taking local adaptation into account? Or that whenever we sequence a new genome we find unique genes, unlike any found in other species? Or that bacteria gain pathogenicity (the ability to cause disease) by losing genes?"


Intelligent design advocates need to align solid empirical data in support of theory. It is a new and developing field. But they are working at it in spite of their detractors. If the foregoing sounds familiar then perhaps you too have been reading comments made by mainstream defenders of origin of life beliefs. Those "gigabytes of coded information in DNA" have resisted efforts by the mainstream scientific community to account for their origins. It's time to look elsewhere.

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