According to back-to-back posts on Evolution News and Views, evolution is religion, while intelligent design is science. In a badly argued post today, Cornelius Hunter says,
As I have explained many times, evolution is a religious theory…
Yesterday on the same platform, Steve Laufmann explained
…intelligent design is science, though not everyone knows it yet.
Well, he’s right about the second part.
Image from www.twoheadedquarter.net. Only $6.95!
I have previously complained that, for cdesign proponentsists,
…if multicellularity is really complicated, that’s evidence for intelligent design. But if multicellularity is really simple, that’s evidence for intelligent design.
Now here’s another example of this logic. Fellows of the Discovery Institute have been arguing for some time that the human and chimpanzee genomes differ by more than is usually reported, and that this (of course) supports intelligent design. [Read more…]
Figure 2 from Hanschen et al. 2016. (a) Predicted number of genes in each phylostratum (PS1–PS9) for Chlamydomonas, Gonium and Volvox. (b) Heatmap of transcription factor abundance for all green algae. Significant over- (+) and under-representation (−) in colonial/multicellular lineages (Gonium and Volvox) is denoted (G test of independence, α=0.05). Rows are clustered (left), an accepted phylogeny is depicted (top). (c) Phylogenetic analysis of gene family evolution. Bars to the left and right of the vertical axis denote the lost and gained gene families respectively, relative to its parental node. (d) Venn diagram of the species distribution of Pfam A domains unique to the volvocine algae.
Erik Hanschen, the lead author on the Gonium genome paper, is also an old friend of mine from when we were both in Michael Doebeli’s lab at the University of British Columbia. He kindly agreed to write a guest post responding to Evolution News and Views‘ misunderstandings of his paper. Everything below the fold was written by Erik:
Figure 6 from Hanschen et al. 2016. Multicellularity hinges on the evolution of cell cycle regulation in a multicellular context with subsequent evolution of cellular differentiation (here, cell size-based) and increased body size.
Remember how I said they’re prolific? Before I’ve even had a chance to write up my thoughts on the Gonium genome paper, Evolution News & Views has already published theirs. The story has also been picked up by the Washington Post, New Historian, GenNews, and ScienceDaily (that last one looks like just a reprint of the press release from University of the Witwatersrand). By the way, the genome paper is open access, so you don’t need a subscription to see it for yourself.
We already know that cdesign proponentsists are not fans of research into the evolution of multicellularity, and that they have trouble understanding it. In an unsigned article on the Gonium genome at ENV, they admit that
After reading this paper, we’re none the wiser.
That’s too bad. I’m here to help.
…is that the people in your tent only share some of your views. And one of the problems with having a blog is that it’s searchable, so that when you say ‘no one in my tent ever said x,’ it’s easy to show that it’s a lie.
Within the intelligent design tent, there are people like Michael Behe, who believe that species change over time and that they evolved from a common ancestor, differing from evolutionary biologists only in their insistence that some aspects of biology must have been designed:
I am not a creationist and have no reason to doubt common descent.
There are also people in the tent like Casey Luskin, Stephen C. Meyer, and Jonathon Wells who doubt, and spend a lot of their time attacking, common descent (see “Intelligent design’s relationship with common descent? It’s complicated.“).
Say what you want about the Discovery Institute; they are prolific! Evolution News & Views alone publishes several articles a day. I’m lucky if I can crank out three a week, and I try to limit the proportion that are about cdesign proponentsists being wrong. It’s a continual temptation, because those posts are easier to write than, say, digging into a peer-reviewed article. PZ promises me that blogging on FtB will eventually earn me enough to buy a cup of coffee, but I have a job. All of this means that I have to let a lot of big, juicy targets sail by. So, quickly:
Thank you, Michael Denton; no evolutionary biologist ever considered the possibility that not everything is adaptive. To answer your question, some aspects of leaf shape are adaptive, some are not. Next.
Double Tourbillon 30° mechanism by Greubel Forsey. Creative Commons image from Wikimedia.
Despite protests to the contrary, intelligent design is a god of the gaps argument. Take a look at Discovery Institute blogs, and a large portion of the posts are essentially arguing that some aspect of biology or biochemistry is really, really complicated (for example, Howard Glicksman’s posts at Evolution News & Views). As if there are bunches of evolutionary biologists running around saying life is simple. So most intelligent design arguments boil down to “there’s no plausible evolutionary explanation for this aspect of biology, therefore it must have been designed.” And cdesign proponentsists insist on a high standard of evidence to consider an evolutionary explanation plausible. For example, here’s Michael Behe’s standard for believing that “…complex biochemical systems could arise by a random mutation and natural selection…”:
Noah’s Ark by Edward Hicks, 1845. Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.
Cdesign proponentsists frequently claim that intelligent design is not creationism. For example, David Klinghoffer says:
…intelligent design is not the same thing as creationism.
Say you think I’m full of it. Or Larry Moran is. Or ScienceNews, or Scientific American, or PhysOrg. One of us has written about a peer-reviewed paper, and you think maybe we’ve misrepresented it, or cherry-picked the bits we like, or you just want to read a more complete story. There’s good reason to be skeptical: news organizations (and bloggers) misunderstand, misrepresent, or exaggerate scientific studies all the time. But the article is behind a paywall, and you don’t want to have to shell out serious money every time you have your doubts. So you just have to take our word for it, right? Not usually.
When I wrote about Michael Behe’s shock that any sane person would associate the bacterial flagellum with intelligent design (Michael Behe’s “Secret Obsessions“), I failed to notice something that was staring me right in the face. The masthead for intelligent design blog Uncommon Descent:
Remember, if you meet someone who thinks intelligent design advocates
…think they [bacterial flagella] are examples of “intelligent design”
or that bacterial flagella have
…been at the center of the thinly veiled creationism movement called intelligent design,
you should
back away slowly, smiling, wishing him a nice day…