I'm almost done reading The Design Matrix for the second time. I'll probably read it a third time. I thought I would just post some of the passages that I especially enjoy. Feel free to comment on them, or post your own favorite passages from Mike's book.

It is my belief that there are people in the world like me — people who are tired of the heated debates, name-calling, innuendo, and political fights. Such people might find themselves in the middle ground and would rather focus on the hypotheses, the arguments, and the evidence. We might not be completely convinced that life was designed, yet we find the hypothesis to be tremendously intriguing. Rather than belaboring the concern as to whether the study of Intelligent Design should be labeled science, metaphysics, or religion, it is my belief that there are people who would rather just ponder the issues that are raised by design and evolution.

(Introduction, p.xi) Read the rest of this entry »

Piattelli-Palmarini: Ostracism W/out Nat Selection, is the title of an article featuring an interview of Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini by Suzan Mazur. It is rich in notable quotes. Although Piattelli-Palmarini has some counter-mainstream ideas he establshes his bonafides with mainstreamers with this comment:

I think that abandoning Darwinism (or explicitly relegating it where it belongs, in the refinement and tuning of existing forms) sounds anti-scientific. They fear that the tenants of intelligent design and the creationists (people I hate as much as they do) will rejoice and quote them as being on their side. They really fear that, so they are prudent, some in good faith, some for calculated fear of being cast out of the scientific community.

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To what degree is the design of a designer constrained by his/her building material? For example, imagine that we enlisted the service of the worlds most creative and brilliant engineers and tasked them to design a space craft that will carry men to Mars and back. Now, let’s add one constraint – the only material available to the designers is concrete. Would these brilliant designers be able to meet the design objective?

Or consider the computer. Today’s computers are more sophisticated than computers from the 1950s, allowing people to design programs that allow you and me to communicate with great ease and little cost. Why is it that programmers seem to be able to do more with computers today than they could in the 1950s? Is it because today’s designers are smarter than yesterday? Have new laws of nature been discovered? Or does it have something to do with an observation from Hartwell et al.?

An early stored-program computer (left), built around 1950, used vacuum tubes in logic circuits, whereas modern computers use transistors and silicon wafers (right), but both are based on the same principles.

So again, to what degree is the design of a designer constrained by his/her building material? Furthermore, since natural selection can act as a designer-mimic, wouldn’t it too be subject to similar limitations?

I imagine that in one of his two upcoming volumes, Mike Gene will discuss whether DNA and RNA were optimal design materials. When I read Robert Shapiro's comments that Mike linked to here:

http://www.edge.org/documents/life/Life.pdf

I found this:

There's famous set of experiments from about ten years ago when Albert Eschenmoser, a brilliant Swiss synthetic chemist, set out to prove why
nature had a select DNA. With enormous Swiss skill and manpower he set
students out to make DNA-like molecules using different sugars, one after the
other, expecting that in every instance he would fail. But in fact he succeeded and
he found that different sugars in many cases was superior to DNA. They had
greater stability; they had fewer complications in replication.
I thought that he would arrange to have the Swiss government declare that from
now on every Swiss life form would adapt his symbiosis and dispense with DNA
as quickly as possible. There's PAN, and someone else came up with TNA —
there's endless ones — and so to me DNA is probably what evolution stumbled
upon through accident, and it's the easiest thing that could be come upon by slow
trial and error that would make a molecule that could be replicated by proteins
and that's how it came into being.

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After a winter of discontent, the snapping point came while Ms. Venkatesan was lecturing on "ecofeminism," which holds, in part, that scientific advancements benefit the patriarchy but leave women out. One student took issue, and reasonably so – actually, empirically so. But "these weren't thoughtful statements," Ms. Venkatesan protests. "They were irrational." The class thought otherwise. Following what she calls the student's "diatribe," several of his classmates applauded.

Ms. Venkatesan informed her pupils that their behavior was "fascist demagoguery." Then, after consulting a physician about "intellectual distress," she cancelled classes for a week. Thus the pending litigation.

HERE

HT: UD

It has sadly reached the point that my ancient 'pooter and cranky dial-up connection simply cannot load the On Holocaust Memorial Day thread anymore. I've had to follow comments from the admin board, and I can't post from there.

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Here is an interesting article:

From these two facts it follows that the evolutionary path to life-forms capable of space colonization leads through a "Great Filter," which can be thought of as a probability barrier. (I borrow this term from Robin Hanson, an economist at George Mason University.) The filter consists of one or more evolutionary transitions or steps that must be traversed at great odds in order for an Earth-like planet to produce a civilization capable of exploring distant solar systems. You start with billions and billions of potential germination points for life, and you end up with a sum total of zero extraterrestrial civilizations that we can observe. The Great Filter must therefore be sufficiently powerful–which is to say, passing the critical points must be sufficiently improbable–that even with many billions of rolls of the dice, one ends up with nothing: no aliens, no spacecraft, no signals. At least, none that we can detect in our neck of the woods.

Now, just where might this Great Filter be located? There are two possibilities: It might be behind us, somewhere in our distant past. Or it might be ahead of us, somewhere in the decades, centuries, or millennia to come. Let us ponder these possibilities in turn.

Where Are They?
Why I hope the search for extraterrestrial life finds nothing.

A major short-coming of Intelligent Design Theory has been its reluctance to identify the designer. This study addresses this problem and firmly establishes the reality of Intelligent Design.

Most design theorists are uncomfortable talking about the designer. Wedgocentric analysis has demonstrated this reluctance to be part of a sinister plot to foist a theocracy on an unsuspecting, scientifically-illiterate, Bush-electing public. If intelligent design is to be recognized for the science that it is, it must eschew this deception and show the scientific community the designer.

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Mike has highlighted the importance of proteins. Proteins are involved in all sorts of cellular functions including their own synthesis. Each step in the pathway to protein synthesis involves proteins. That includes the regulation of genes (whether or not a gene coding protein will be expressed), the transcription process and translation. It takes proteins to generate proteins. The proteins involved in the synthesis of other proteins are synthesized by the same cellular mechanisms they become part of.

There are two ways of analyzing the role of proteins. Proteins illustrate the interdependence of cellular functions and the dependence of cells on the proper coordination of its separate parts. That in turn is evidence of downward causation- a paradigm favorable to ID.

But we could continue to approach the matter of life's origin solely from a reductionist perspective. After all reductionism has led to success in other fields and provides an inductive argument for its continued utilization in origin of life research. Spinning wheels can keep an occupant in the same place but rabbits have another means of advancing.

Here. Since there is very little evidence the blind watchmaker can do that much without help from proteins, the next question to ask is: why are proteins so incredibly helpful to the blind watchmaker?