Phillip Johnson authored Science Futures, an article that makes some points that resonate with me. From the article:

“Predicting is very difficult, especially when it is about the future.” I probably don’t need to tell readers of Touchstone that this weird sentence, paradoxically both wise and absurd, bears the trademark of New York Yankee sage Yogi Berra, the Buddha of baseball.

I think of the great Yogi’s maxim whenever I hear theistic evolutionists warn intelligent design theorists against committing what they call the “God of the gaps” fallacy. Their point is that it is futile to rely on “gaps” that the theory of evolution has not yet explained as places where divine acts might be necessary, because those gaps will inevitably be filled as science progresses. Eventually, God will be squeezed out of these spaces, with consequent embarrassment to the cause of religion.

To avoid committing this fallacy, they claim, we must concede that evolutionary naturalism in biology has been proved beyond doubt, since whatever proof is missing today will surely be supplied tomorrow. I see the point, but I wonder how these folks can be so sure that the future discoveries will always support naturalism. Don’t they know that predicting is difficult, especially when it is about the future?

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We are continually discovering and classifying planetary systems beyond our own solar system. These efforts can lead to the discovery of exotic formations. Solar systems like ours likely to be rarer than we thought contains this paragraph:

Astronomers, to their obvious delight, have discovered some 250 planetary systems beyond our own, many of them with curious properties. In particular, the discovery of several “hot Jupiters” gas giants that orbit close to their parent stars, challenges our theories of planet formation. The thinking is that gas giants can only form far away from stars because gas and dust simply gets blown away from the inner regions.

Data gathered from the study of other solar systems can influence theories as to how our solar system formed. Another quote:

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Mark Vernon authored Not so highly evolved, an article worth reviewing, both for its analysis of Richard Dawkins and for its commentary about an evolutionary phenomenon known as convergence. The article begins:

The 2009 Darwin celebrations are officially under way, now that we are halfway through Richard Dawkins' flagship TV series, The Genius of Charles Darwin. But I can't help but feel they have not begun well. Dawkins' exploration of the science seems to be driven mostly by his desire to score atheistic points: this is not evolution as survival of the fittest but as zero-sum game.

I have not seen the TV series but based on prior behavior a charge that Dawkins is using science to score atheistic points comes as no surprise. If Dawkins is indeed guilty as charged he needs to be taken to task. The Trojan Horse imagary is apt for all who would use science to introduce a side agenda. Vernon also had this to say:

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Mike Gene has written a piece pertinent to the blog entry Pondering Evolution titled A Hibernation Mechanism? Mike makes these observations:

As I see it, chapter 6 from The Design Matrix once again becomes important if one desires to extrapolate Sherman’s model/predictions to a case for teleological evolution/design. With such an extrapolation, the predictions that Sherman makes are more relevant to the realm of epistemological evidence than ontological evidence. Put simply, these predictions, if verified, would be revolutionary and might indeed convince hardcore skeptics of teleological evolution, but I don’t think that we should expect such things from the hypothesis of design through front-loading itself.

As I just explained, genetic information in lower taxons that would be functionally useless but become useful in higher taxons would amount to a pool of pseudogenes in lower taxons that would quickly be erased by mutations. And since developmental programs amount to genes and their regulatory units, these too would decay if they are not useful.

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CHARLES DARWIN has been hailed as the greatest scientist of the 19th century for his discovery of the secrets of evolution.

Is that true? My favorite is James Clerk Maxwell.

In the early nineteenth century, despite many individual advances in knowledge, there was no inkling of a comprehensive theory of electricity and magnetism. In developing this, Maxwell pointed the way to the existence of the spectrum of electromagnetic radiation. Defining fields as a tension in the medium, he stated his belief in a new concept - that energies resides in fields as well as bodies. This pointed the way to the application of electromagnetic radiation for such present-day uses as radio, television, radar, microwaves and thermal imaging.

Who is your candidate? The scientist must have performed the major body of his work during the 19th century. So, for example, Einstein and others would not be considered even though they were born in the 1800s.

Michael Sherman's Universal Genome in the Origin of Metazoa proposes an experimentally testable hypothesis and a model with two major predictions appearing in the linked abstract:

…first that a significant fraction of genetic information in lower taxons must be functionally useless but becomes useful in higher taxons, and second that one should be able to turn on in lower taxons some of the complex latent developmental programs, e.g., a program of eye development or antibody synthesis in sea urchin. An example of natural turning on of a complex latent program in a lower taxon is discussed.

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(Yeah, yeah, I'm on vacation, and I was staying away from the library. Who knew I would stumble upon another computer linked to the internet and read what was going on at Behe's Test? So here I am trying to repair the damage. Who knew leaders of the ID movement could shoot themselves in the foot so many times? Oh yeah, we did.)

A very hearty, big "THANK YOU!!!" to our own, obsessive, compulsive Thought Provoker for finding and providing a link to Barry Hall's paper! I assumed that I would have to go to a college library and hope they carried the journal that Hall's paper was published in. It didn't occur to me that it would be online and for free. I suggest that anyone interested in pursuing this topic further, first read the paper. It's short, and despite the technical jargon, not that difficult to understand. But read it. Don't just scan it. Read the rest of this entry »

Politics isn't a focus of this forum, and participants here cover the spectrum of political views and policy leanings. This is not a thread about politics, please don't use it as one.

That out of the way, I'd like to post a few excerpts from a review of progressive activist Markos Moulitsas' new book Taking On the System, because his words have broader social application.

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In his book, The Edge of Evolution; the Search for the Limits of Darwinism, Michael Behe cites work by Barry Hall in support of his view that there are limits fairly narrow limits to what Darwinian evolution can accomplish: Read the rest of this entry »