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Professor Nagel has read ID-supportive works such as Dr. Behe's Edge of Evolution (p. 192). He reports that based on his examination of their work, ID "does not seem to depend on massive distortions of the evidence and hopeless incoherencies in its interpretation" (pp. 196-197). He reports that ID does not depend on any assumption that ID is "immune to empirical evidence" in the way that believers in biblical literalism believe the bible is immune to disproof by evidence (p. 197). Thus, he says "ID is very different from creation science" (p. 196).

He reports that the "presently available evidence" comes "nothing close" to establishing "the sufficiency of standard evolutionary mechanisms to account for the entire evolution of life" (p. 199).

He notes that his judgment is supported by two prominent scientists (Marc Kirschner and John Gerhart, writing in the Oct. 2005 book Plausibility of Life), who also recognized that (prior to offering their own theory, at least) the "available evidence" did not "decisively settle[]" whether mutations in DNA "are entirely due to chance" (p. 191). And he cites one Stuart Kauffman, a "complexity theorist who defends a naturalistic theory of emergence," that random mutation "is not sufficient" to explain DNA (p. 192).

He does not, however, say that the evidence compels acceptance of ID; instead, some may consider as an alternative to ID that an "as-yet undiscovered, purely naturalistic theory" will supply the deficiency, rather than some form of intelligence (p. 203).

Prof. Nagel says that "some part of the high school curriculum" "should" include "a frank discussion of the relation of evolutionary theory to religion" but that this need not occur in biology classes if the biology teachers would find this too much of a "burden" (p. 204)

He rejects any rule that well-educated, intelligent laymen such as himself must simply accept the assertions of the leading evolutionary biologists that the evidence in favor of evolution disproves intelligent design. Using his informed judgment, he rejects the claim that the scientific data "decisively" disproves intelligent design. He, an atheist, says that as a matter of science, intelligent design could possibly be correct. And he says it would be constitutional to say as much in a public school science class.

The emotionalism which scientists have brought to this issue since before the Scopes Trial, even if directed against a real, rather than imaginary target, has introduced a non-scientific motivation into the hearts of evolutionary biologists that has biased and rendered unreliable their evaluation of the data, especially the relatively recent data concerning DNA and molecular biology. Moreover, those who are convinced that we are not-very-far-descended from troupes of apes that engage in group dominance struggles should monitor themselves for the possibility that they are engaged less in a search for truth than in a search for dominance. An Achilles' Heel of modern science is the satisfying sense of pride that comes from having successfully dominated the people around you. Its origin is from the apes and its goal is to flatter emotion, not to facilitate reason.

the real challenge of the Cambrian explosion is the wide variety of fossilizable forms which appeared at more or less the same instant in geological time. Every single phyla represented by modern day organisms — certainly all those with fossilizable parts — were included, yet for none is there any clearly identifiable ancestor. It is explaining the simultaneous and abrupt appearance of those which is one of the leading challenges in evolutionary biology.

paleontologists have discovered many Precambrian fossils, many of them microscopic or soft-bodied. As Darwinian paleobiologist William Schopf wrote in his The early evolution of life: solution to Darwin’s dilemma, “The long-held notion that Precambrian organisms must have been too small or too delicate to have been preserved in geological materials…[is] now recognised as incorrect.”

as discussed in some detail here, the Ediacaran fauna are not generally thought to be ancestral to the modern phyla which appear explosively in the Cambrian radiation.

While the fitness of bacteria had increased, it had come at a cost. For instance, all the tribes had lost the ability to catabolise ribose. Some tribes had lost the ability to repair DNA. These bacteria may indeed be more fit in a lab setting, but when placed back into their environment alongside their wild-type counterparts, they would be at a selective disadvantage.

wild-type E. coli already possesses the genes necessary for the transportation of citrate into the cell and subsequent utilisation of it.

Indeed, Lenski et al. (2008) note that “A more likely possibility, in our view, is that an existing transporter has been co-opted for citrate transport under oxic [high oxygen level] conditions.” Such a scenario could take place by a loss of gene regulation (meaning that the gene is no longer expressed exclusively under low oxygen conditions) or a loss of transporter specificity.

the central claim of neo-Darwinism is that natural selection, coupled with chance mutation, can mimic what would normally be ascribed to intelligence.

The concept of common descent is crucial to the Darwinian paradigm, but its falsehood is by no means critical to the design thesis. To the design hypothesis, as a scientific model, it is a secondary issue whether the various forms of life were created independently or by modification of previously existing forms. While the latter model rejects the theory of evolution as an overall paradigm, it is nonetheless consistent with common descent. Thus, even if one were to concede that the fossil record supports common descent — a notion which I challenge — it would not by any means prove neo-Darwinism.

we have only fragments of Lucy’s cranium, but her lower jaw is unusually well preserved.

There is good evidence that the bones attributed to Lucy really did all come from a single individual…

Only 40% was found, and a significant percentage of the known bones are rib fragments.

Ironically, Lucy still represents the most complete pre-Homo known hominid skeleton to date.

It is an extremely difficult case to state that all Lucy’s bones are clearly from one individual of one species, and it requires some heavy assumptions.

Given that the much earlier fossil record from the Miocene yields bipedal apes that supposedly evolved upright-walking completely independently from the line that supposedly led to humans, it would seem that the answer is emphatically no.

it is almost certain that A. afarensis and other australopithecines were not adapted to a striding gait and running, as humans are. It doesn’t seem very advantageous, and therefore likely, to use bipedality as one’s primary mode of locomotion if one cannot use it to quickly run from predators.

ltimately, Richard Dawkins is here depending upon the utilisation of theological arguments in order to support his case. The theory of intelligent design states that certain features of the natural world exhibit indicators of intelligent design. Questions relating to the identity or skill of the designer are questions for theologians and philosophers to address, and thus stand independently from biological or scientific concerns.

If it can be demonstrated that there exists functional reasons for the relevant instances of apparent ‘bad design’ or if new evidence suggests a pattern of degenerative evolution (that is to say, evidence of decay of an otherwise rational and beneficial original design), then the argument would no longer hold water.

Biologist George Ayoub has shown, for example, that the vertebrate retina provides an excellent example of what engineers call a constrained optimisation, in which several competing design objectives are elegantly balanced to achieve an optimal overall design.

these anti-design arguments by Dawkins, Gould, and other Darwinists are not scientific ones. They are aesthetic arguments, expressing an idea of what the universe should look like—that is, that it should satisfy the tidy-minded engineer. But who is to say that the Darwinists’ taste is that of the cosmic designer, if there is one? Who is to say that the designer should value tidiness over, say, whimsy?

religious zealots who have been poisoning the minds of the young

Gnu Atheists are so dang angry. Damned right we are. The real question is why everyone else isn't.

Idiot America

The sea our country is drowning in is a raging religiosity, wave after wave of ignorant arguments and ideological absurdities pushed by tired dogma and fervent and frustrated fanatics.

The solution, the only longterm solution, is the sanity of secularism.

pseudoscientific BS like intelligent design

disease

if you're one of those people trying to defend superstition and quivering in fear at the idea of taking on a majority that believes in foolishness, urging us to continue slapping bandages on the blight of faith, well then, you're part of the problem and we'll probably do something utterly dreadful, like be rude to you or write some cutting sarcastic essay to mock your position. That is our métier, after all.

the Gnu Atheists have values, too, and premiere among them is truth. And that makes us uncivil and rude, because we challenge the truth of religion.

Evolution is a real, and it is a process built on raw chance driven by the brutal engines of selection, and there is no sign of a loving, personal god, but only billions of years of pitiless winnowing without any direction other than short-term survival and reproduction. It's not pretty, it's not consoling, it doesn't sanctify virginity, or tell you that god really loves your foreskin, but it's got one soaring virtue that trumps all the others: it's true.

Far from explaining nothing because it explains everything, such an explanation explains a lot by explaining everything. It just doesn't explain it convincingly to a scientist with other evidentiary standards.

he concedes that "nonscientific claims may be true and still not qualify as science." But if that's so, and we care about truth, why exalt science to the degree he does? If there's really a heaven, and science can't (yet?) detect it, so much the worse for science.

In some cases, what appears to be a nontranslated pseudogene can, in fact, code for truncated proteins (Kandouz et al. 2004; Zhang et al. 2006). Nevertheless, the evidence that some pseudogenes can exert regulatory effects on their protein-coding cousins is mounting.

For the large part, pseudogenes have been overlooked in the quest to understand the biology of health and disease, to the extent that pseudogene probes are often absent from commercially available microarrays. As evidence emerges that pseudogenes are deregulated in disease, and indeed that their deregulation can contribute to diseases such as diabetes and cancer, the prevalent attitude that they are nonfunctional relics is slowly changing.