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EVOLUTION VS. INTELLIGENT DESIGN

EDITOR: Thank you for joining us Nicholas Matzke and Mustafa Akyol. Can you each give us a short account of your side of the debate please?

NICHOLAS MATZKE: Hi everyone. I am Nick Matzke. I work for the National Center for Science Education in the U.S. We are a nonprofit watchdog group based in Oakland, California, and our mission is to defend the teaching of science, i.e. evolution, in the public schools. This includes educating the public through meetings and talks, answering press questions, keeping statistics on the issue in the US and monitoring creationist activities through a website (www.ncseweb.org) and bimonthly journal. I was the science/creationism advisor for the lawyers in the Pennsylvania Kitzmiller vs. Dover case, where ID was declared unconstitutional. Obviously I think ID is not science, instead it is fundamentalist Christian apologetics, formerly known as "creation science", dressed up to be more secular.

MUSTAFA AKYOL: I am a Muslim writer who has been involved in the Intelligent Design/Darwinism debate for about 10 years. I am a proponent of Intelligent Design (ID); I think it is supported by the scientific evidence.
Although I believe that there is evolution in nature in the sense of change and adaptation, I don't think that the origin of life and the origin of complex biological systems can be explained by the natural processes that Darwinian evolution suggests.

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QUESTION: (Lujain / United Kingdom) I've never understood the nature of the Islamic religious debate against evolutionism. Evolutionism is a science. Islam is not against science. So where exactly does the problem arise?

NICHOLAS MATZKE: I would like to say up front that I am very far from being an expert on Islam and so I cannot presume to speak authoritatively about it. But I think there are some commonalities between Islamic and Christian antievolutionism. These include: (1) antievolutionism is part of a larger conflict between modernism and fundamentalism, (2) fundamentalist adoption of a rigid/literalist interpretation of a holy text. (3) Creation of a pseudoscience to make it appear as if religious apologetics has the authority and prestige of science. It is a very strange fact that Islamic creationists in Turkey have borrowed/plagiarized much of their material from the Institute for Creation Research in the U.S., a young-earth creationist group here that believes in a strict Biblical literalism, including 6,000 year old earth, Noah's flood (as global), and also many believe that Armageddon is coming in a titanic battle in the Middle East. Of course, they believe this because they believe if they give up on Biblical literalism, then sin wasn't caused by Adam, and therefore Jesus died for nothing and didn't need to be resurrected. So it is very odd that e.g. fundamentalist Islamic groups such as Harun Yahya have adopted much of their material.

MUSTAFA AKYOL: There is no problem between Islam and "evolution" per se, but the meaning of the latter is open to interpretation. If evolution means that there is continuous change in nature and that species adopt to their environments, I think that's a scientific statement and it has no contradiction with the Muslim faith. However, by the term evolution, modern Darwinians mean something more. They argue that life on Earth is the product of the blind forces of nature and that there is no Creator worth speaking about. "Chance and necessity," as the famous atheist Jacques Monod argued, is their substitute for a Creator. Also George Gaylord Simpson, one of the gurus of neo-Darwinism, in his book "The Meaning of Evolution" put this quite clearly. "Man is the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind," Simpson wrote, "He was not planned." (Simpson 1967, p. 345)
Now I don't think this openly atheistic idea is compatible with Islam. And it is not compatible with the scientific evidence, either. It is a philosophical presupposition that is imposed onto the scientific evidence. Intelligent Design theorists have unveiled this crucial fact and that's why they have been receiving so much reaction.

NICHOLAS MATZKE: I should add that for both Christianity and Islam, many people of each faith see no inherent conflict between their religion and science. Often people take the view that texts written 1,000+ years ago were not intended as science textbooks, because the original readers had no experience of atoms, galaxies, deep time, etc. But it took western Christianity hundreds of years to work out the relationship between religion and science, and it haven't finished, so it is not surprising that it might take awhile in Islam and elsewhere also.

MUSTAFA AKYOL: Putting the debate as a conflict between modernism and fundamentalism is wrong, I think. It is more of a debate between theism (the belief that there is a God) and atheism on a scientific level. A Muslim believer does not have to be a "fundamentalist" to believe that God created life. This is the very core of the Muslim faith. On the other hand, one does not have to be an atheist to be a modernist. The issue here is not Biblical literalism. It is whether life is designed or not.

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QUESTION: (Reef / United Kingdom) I view evolution theory as a doctrine like any other with the difference that it does not "allow God a foot in the door!". This is essential to its existence. But from the beginning, it contradicts a basic requirement of life. Constantly, in our daily lives, we opt for the most likely event to explain a situation and to solve our problems. Evolution opts for the most unlikely event simply because the alternative implies acceptance of a creator. I guess this kind of twisted reasoning wil not last and a better theory that recognises the existence of an all powerful all wise creator will replace it. ID seems to be the first step but the way forward is to recognise the existence of an other force that science cannot comprehend and which shapes all existence and all life according to what it sees fit. Only then can we look at the diversity of creation and find ways to explain how the creator brought into existence innumerable types of plants, animals, birds, fish and insects. At this point, I'd say that life comes from life and there is scope for a certain type of evolution in that a creator would not need to re-invent the wheel when making a new species.

NICHOLAS MATZKE: There are several prongs to this question, but the most important is the one that is fundamental to creationism in general: many people think that if evolution is true, and there is a natural explanation for life, then God of a higher power doesn't exist. But this is really not the case. Does anyone feel that their faith is threatened by the fact that we have a natural explanation for the weather, i.e. hurricanes, droughts, rain, snow, lightning, etc.? All of these things are mentioned as being controlled by God in the Bible (and I assume other holy texts and religious traditions), and many people pray about these things, but for some reason no one goes around and accuses the meteorologists and climatologists of promoting atheism. Benjamin Franklin got some flack when he developed the lightning rod in the 1700s, because people thought that this thwarted God's will. But soon people realized that this didn't make much sense, and that it was silly to think that a human invention like a lightning rod, based on a natural explanation of lightning (electricity), could contradict God's will. We can say the same thing about atomism, heliocentrism, etc. — they were religiously controversial for a time, but eventually people realized that having a natural explanation for things made creation more amazing, rather than less so. Evolution is just one of the bigger and historically more recent shocks along these lines. But if someone really thinks that having a natural explanation for the origin of species really promotes atheism, then they should be fair about it and say the same thing about the chemists, physicists, meteorologists, geologists, etc., because they all discovered and rely upon natural explanations. Why single out evolution?

MUSTAFA AKYOL: This view is interesting but the nature does not have to comply with our intuitions. It could well be argued that the Creator created the universe without a need for any design and things would just evolve by themselves. But this would be a deistic, not a theistic faith. Moreover, this does not seem compatible with the scientific evidence because the complexity of life and the capacity of the natural laws we observe show us that those laws are not enough to create life. That's why biological design seems to be the best explanation for life's origin and the origin of new biological information as well. To have bacteria, fish, butterflies, elephants or humans from simple chemicals, you need very complex information and our experience shows us that information only comes from a mind.

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QUESTION: (Stan K. / United States) I keep hearing of staggering evidence supporting evolution, what's the basis of an argument in support of creationism or intelligent design then?

MUSTAFA AKYOL: There is a wide range of evidence which supports what scientist call "micro-evolution", which means small-scale changes in an existing species. Animals and plants do change and adopt. But there is no observation showing us that truly new biological information — like new genes, proteins, organels, organs — arise through Darwinians mechanisms. Darwinists extrapolate from micro to macro evolution, but that's an article of faith. Micro-evolution does not produce new systems over time. No matter how long you breed horses, they will not develop wings. And, by the way, even some of the very famous "staggering evidence" of Darwinism turned out to be wrong in the past years. Two striking examples are the peppered moths of 19th century Britain and the embryo drawings of Ernst Haeckel. In both cases, the evidence was faked in order to produce evidence for Darwinism

NICHOLAS MATZKE: Well, there is reality and then there is what creationist/ID proponents say. There are hundreds of creationist arguments, often very obscure. Short rebuttals to most of them are here: http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/list.html In my opinion most creationist arguments are just wrong, usually uninformed, half-baked, or based on misleading rhetoric or misquoting authorities. A few of the creationist arguments rise to level of "science hasn't explained X yet", which is better, but usually scientists actually do know quite a bit about X, they just don't completely understand everything yet, which is very common in science.
For example, the "best" ID argument is that complex biological adaptations could not evolve gradually because all of the parts would have to come together at once for the system to function. This argument seems somewhat impressive at first, but it falls apart when you look at it closely because structures can and have changed function in evolution, a process called cooption or exaptation. For example, penguin flippers are derived from the wings of flying birds, those wings came from dinosaur forelimbs (see the amazing "dinobird" fossil by going here: http://research.amnh.org/vertpaleo/dinobird.html ), etc.
Darwin himself emphasized this point in 1859, but creationists have mostly ignored it. The ID camp found this out to their chagrin in the Dover trial, when Michael Behe was challenged on his claim that the immune system, a complex biochemical system that produces antibodies to diseases when you are vaccinated, could not evolve.
He said the scientists had "no answers" on how it evolved. But in fact, hundreds of papers have been published on exactly this topic. When cross-examining Behe, we stacked up a pile of books and papers on evolutionary immunology on Behe's witness stand to challenge his claim — and yet he dismissed them all with a wave of his hand, saying they were not detailed enough for him. Of course he has no explanation whatsoever except for "ID did it". Anyway, expert witness Kenneth Miller said it best afterwards: "Ain't nothing going to convince this guy." The links, documentation, commentary, etc. on this episode are here: http://www2.ncseweb.org/wp/?p=124

MUSTAFA AKYOL: Well, there is reality and what Darwinists say. First of all, it is not just ID proponents who disagree with the standard Darwinian stories. Penguins are of course birds but the origin of birds is a controversial issue. The dinosaur theory, which is so popular in the media, is basically a just-so story. Ask this to Alan Feduccia, one of the world's most prominent ornithologists. He is not an ID proponent, he is an evolutionist, but he thinks that birds did not come from dinosaurs and this is a great myth. The dinosaurs which are proposed to be the ancestor of Archaeopteryx, the first known bird, is much younger from it... This is just one flaw in the whole dinobird hype.
As for Behe and irreducible complexity, Mr. Matzke is doing injustice. It is not just Behe who says that there are no detailed Darwinian accounts for the origin of complex biochemical systems. Let me just give you a quote from Franklin M. Harold, an evolutionary biochemist:
"We must concede that there are presently no detailed Darwinian accounts of the evolution of any biochemical or cellular system, only a variety of wishful speculations." (Franklin M. Harold, The Way of the Cell: Molecules, Organisms and the Order of Life 205 (New York, Oxford University Press 2001).)
Now ID does not say "we don't know how this evolved, so it must be designed." No, there are mathematical criteria to detect design. (See Dembski's work).
Kenneth Miller is not convincing Behe or any other objective commentator on the origin of biological complexity, because he is filling all the gaps with a commitment to naturalism. For Miller, see http://www.designinference.com/documents/2003.02.Miller_Response.htm

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QUESTION: (Ahmed Bahaa / Egypt) Is the current theory of evolution the same as Darwin's orignal theory or an expanded version of it?

NICHOLAS MATZKE: Modern Evolutionary Theory (I will call it MET) has many features not found in Darwin's work. Darwin is famous for:
(1) making the first compelling case for common ancestry in a "tree of life" pattern
(2) for arguing for natural selection as the explanation of functional adaptation.

(1) was accepted immediately, (2) was not really dominant in the scientific community until the 1930s. In the 1930s-1940s we had the "neo-darwinian synthesis" which combined natural selection and Mendelian genetics into population genetics, a mathematical description of how genes spread in populations under the force of selection. This body of theory led to things like neutral evolution (where selective differences are near 0), geographically localized speciation (from which "punctuated equilibrium" was derived), etc. In the 1960s onward we have had the incorporation of molecular biology providing the molecular mechanisms of heredity and mutation, and now we have "evo-devo", the synthesis of population genetics and developmental biology.
Much of this Darwin could not have even imagined. But it is impressive that his basic theory has stood up to repeated testing which each of these developments.

MUSTAFA AKYOL: It is not the same. Darwin did not know about genetics. What we have today is neo-Darwinism, which is an updated version of Darwin's original theory with modern genetics. But natural selection, Darwin's main idea, is still there. Neo-Darwinism adds random mutations as another "mechanism" of evolution.

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QUESTION: (Avery / United States) Mustafa Akyol, in your previous comment you stated you supported ID because you "think it is supported by the scientific evidence"... Do you 'know' of any evidence that supports ID, or just 'think' that it is out there somewhere to be found? And "don't think that the origin of life and the origin of complex biological systems can be explained by the natural processes..." Some amount of evidence has convinced you of what you would call 'micro-evolution'...How many explanations or how many steps of the natural processes would it take to make you 'think' that it might be possible?

MUSTAFA AKYOL: The steps I would need to be convinced are the ones that Darwin himself described. "Numerous, successive slight modifications."
Show me that life can originate from a prebiotic soup, and I will retreat from Intelligent Design. Or show me a natural process that produces rock formations like the Stonehenge, I will stop thinking that it was designed by intelligent beings.
Actually everybody accepts that life on Earth seems to have been designed. Richard Dawkins says that in his book, The Blind Watchmaker. But he says this is apparent design and actually there are natural mechanisms creating these complex being. Well, OK, then show us those mechanisms.. But instead, the Darwinians take it granted that such mechanisms exist and impose this faith of theirs as an integral part of science. No, science does not have such a commitment

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QUESTION: (Sally / Canada) Why should - or shouldn't - intelligent design be taught in school?

NICHOLAS MATZKE: There are several reasons why ID should not be taught in schools. The most important one is that it is pseudoscience, i.e. fake science, and that kids who are taught ID are basically being misled and misinformed about the results of science. If you put ID in the classroom for reasons of "fairness", "balance", etc., then you are going to have to let in all of the other pseudosciences for the same reason — e.g. denial that HIV causes AIDS (which happens to be supported by IDers Phillip Johnson and Jonathan Wells), Holocaust denial (which happens to be supported by Harun Yayha's organization, a group which Mustafa Akyol worked for I believe), UFO's, bigfoot, etc.
The second reason, particularly important in the U.S., is that the government should not be engaging in religious instruction in the public schools. Government establishment of religion is barred in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution because from the beginning the U.S. has been made up of diverse faiths, many of which fled religious oppression in Europe. The Founding Fathers realized that governmental establishment of religion resulted in strife, because while it might please the majority religion, members of minority religions would be excluded. People often think that teaching ID would be a good thing because they agree with it, until they realize that it would mean that someone else could teach *their* religious view in schools.
The situation is somewhat different in other countries that do not have a tradition of strict church/state establishment, but I think the history of conflict resulting from governments promoting particular religious views shows that keeping the government out of religious matters is probably a good idea in general.
Private schools are another matter of course, and one can debate teaching ID in a comparative religious context — but in the U.S., if one is going to do comparative religion in a social studies class, I think it would be much more important for kids to learn about world religions than about a strange pseudoscience like ID, invented for legal purposes. But there might be situations in which this sort of thing would be appropriate, while teaching a variety of creation stories from various religions.

MUSTAFA AKYOL: I don't think that Intelligent Design should be mandated in science curriculums, because it is a new theory that needs to be developed, tested and refined. But students should be taught that there is a controversy going on about life's origins. Most textbooks in the West teach Darwinism as an undisputed fact. But this is not true. More than 600 scientists right now question Darwinism.
If schools and teacher want to include ID into their classes, that's fine, too. The core issue here is academic freedom and educational objectivity. We would be wrong to indoctrinate kids with Marxism, but we can teach ABOUT it, along with the critiques that people has brought about Marxism.

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QUESTION: (Ahmad / Egypt) The biggest hurdle in the path of evolution is the 'missing link'. How does the theory of evolution explain the lack of it?

NICHOLAS MATZKE: The common public understanding of a "missing link" is basically an urban legend. First, evolution is not a chain (the "Great Chain of Being" is a pre-Darwinian model of the organization of life) — it is a tree. And either way, there could be many more than One Single Missing Link.
Once that is cleared up, we come to the claim of more informed creationists, that there are no fossils with transitional morphologies (transitional forms) showing how ancestral species gradually diversified into modern organisms. This claim is endlessly repeated by creationists, usually along with some standard recycled quotes mined from evolutionary biologists. I wouldn't be surprised if Akyol posts the Gould quote about "the trade secret of paleontology". So I will preemptively post Gould's own rebuttal to creationist misquotes of him:
"Since we proposed punctuated equilibria to explain trends, it is infuriating to be quoted again and again by creationists - whether through design or stupidity, I do not know - as admitting that the fossil record includes no transitional forms. Transitional forms are generally lacking at the species level, but they are abundant between larger groups."
- "Evolution as Fact and Theory," Hen's Teet
Stephen Jay Gould, "Evolution as Fact and Theory," Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes: Further Reflections in Natural History, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1994, p. 260.

Now, I will show readers some transitional fossils to disprove the creationist claim. Follow the links:
Fossils in between apes and humans:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/section1.html#morphological_intermediates_ex3
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/images/hominids2.jpg

Brain size in fossil human ("hominid") skulls over the last few million years:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/brainsize.gif
This link covers reptiles/birds, reptiles/mammals, ape/humans, early whales with legs, and seacows with legs. The graphics are quite impressive
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/section1.html#morphological_intermediates

And I already showed you the dinobird, http://research.amnh.org/vertpaleo/dinobird.html , which along with Archeoptyryx and other feathered dinosaurs discovered in the last few years has clarified the origin of birds immensely.
So, this is just a sample of what is out there. As creationist Kurt Wise once admitted, these transitional fossils are expected on the evolutionary view, and not the creationist view. Most creationists pretend it all doesn't exist, or try and make it disappear with quotes out of context and the like.
Now, certainly, we don't have every fossil we would like to have, and there are many "missing links" — but we have enough transitional forms with well-fossilized organisms, e.g. all of the major vertebrate groups, that we can be confident that these transformations did indeed happen.
The creationists can't even agree on which hominid skulls are apes and which are humans, see: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/compare.html This means, of course, that the skulls are inbetween, as evolution predicts.

MUSTAFA AKYOL: Well, what constitutes as a missing link or not has been a matter of debate, for sure. So Darwinians claim that they have some missing links, but others doubt whether these really create a lineage. The standard Darwinian answer has been "well we have a few and will find out more, soon." However, some prominent paleontologists have challenged this apologetic. From late 70's on, Gould and Eldredge challenged classical Darwinism and proposed "punctuated equilibrium" instead. This means "evolution happened too fast and did not leave behind transitional forms." (Well, if there are no traces left, how do you know it happened in the first place?)
Anyway, Gould was criticized by Dawkins for proposing an evolutionary scenario without a mechanism, like Darwin's small step-by-step changes. Gould, in response, argued that his view was supported by the fossils. So one side had the fossil, the other had the supposed mechanism, and they did not match.
The fossil problem still persist for Darwinism, especially in the Cambrian explosion phenomenon. Cambrian is the geological time when there was "Big Bang of biology". Before it, there were a few simple soft bodied living forms. During the Cambrian, all the major animals group (phyla) appeared quite abruptly.
Steve Meyer has a very good scientific paper on the Cambrian, titled " The Origin of Biological Information and the Higher Taxonomic Categories." He concludes that the best explanation is design.
You can read it here:
http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/index.php?command=view&id=2177

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QUESTION: (Moza/Bahrain) Is there an ideological framework behind evolutionism or is it plain science? If so, what is it, and is it the reason there is so much controversy between evolutionists and people with varying religious beliefs?

NICHOLAS MATZKE: Some have used evolution in support of ideologies, just as some have used heliocentrism, atomism, psychology, etc., in this way. Notably, some campaigning atheists like Richard Dawkins like to the existence of God to the Design Argument, and then debunk the design argument and claim they have disproved God.

These folks have as much a right to their views on religion as everyone else, but they have stepped outside science when they start to draw metaphysical conclusions. In this way they mirror the creationists, who do the same thing in the opposite direction. Many have observed that these two noisy camps fighting each other provide a lot of the fuel that keeps the creation/evolution issue alive.

Science is limited to the study of the natural world - conclusions about the existence or non-existence of God, and whether or not he intervenes in some supernatural or sub-natural fashion - are beyond the limits of science. If you actually go read scientific articles on evolutionary biology, you will find most of them are typical scientific articles - technical, data gathering, methods, statistics, etc. I was recently at the Evolution 2006 meeting, and there were hundreds of papers like this - people studying the evolution of orchid pollinations mechanisms, the biogeography of plants, the ability of fruit flies to digest alcohol, etc. Religion and the existence of God simply are not the topic at all - it only comes up when the creationism problem is raised.

So, while the public may get a different impression based on the popular-level books they read in the book store (some of which do advocate "evolutionism"), the actual science of evolution is just like other science: dry, statistics, details, tests, etc. Communicating this to the public however is difficult.

MUSTAFA AKYOL: Of course there is an ideology behind evolutionism, or to use a better term, Darwinism. However, proponents of this theory will tell you mostly that they have no ideological commitment, and they are just trying to figure out how life on Earth came to be. (They will say that there are some ideologues that have used Darwinian evolution for their own agenda — such as biological racists or Marxist revolutionaries — but the theory itself is pure science.)

Well, that's not the case and you come to realize this when you look at the rules of the Darwinian game. The theory only allows natural causes to explain the origin of life on Earth. Non-natural, in other words, intelligent causes are never allowed to have a role. That is considered as blasphemy to "science."

However, science means an empirical search for truth. Whether this truth is compatible with naturalism or not cannot be decided before looking into the nature. Yet this is precisely what the Darwinists do: Their central dogma is that life evolved purely by causes and one must never ever doubt this basic premise. This is a faith, not an empirical data.

Just look at what Richard Lewontin, a prominent Darwinist, frankly says:

"We have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door." (http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft9711/johnson.html)

This commitment to materialism (or naturalism) is the ideology behind Darwinism. And the obvious reason is not to "allow a Divine Foot in the door."

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QUESTION: (Reham / Egypt) Is it possible for a Muslim or a Christian who believes in God to believe also in the theory of evolution?

NICHOLAS MATZKE: The short answer is yes, because it is an objective fact that such people exist. Some of the leaders of evolutionary biology were in fact theists. Ronald Fisher was a lifelong Anglican, Theodosius Dobzhansky was (if I recall correctly) Eastern Orthodox.

You will find that the literature on this topic is dominated by discussions of Christianity and evolution, but in that vein some good ones are Finding Darwin's God by Kenneth Miller; Can a Darwinian be a Christian? by Michael Ruse, and several books by John Haught.

MUSTAFA AKYOL: My answer is yes, on two different levels. First, a believer can reasonably accept a guided evolution, a process determined and directed by God. I think this is compatible with Islam or Christianity.

Second, one can believe even in a purely Darwinian (unguided, driven by chance and natural law) evolution and still can be a Muslim or Christian. However this is a very shaky and problematic position. Because the Qur'an — and the Bible, for that matter — tells us that the existence of God is evident in what He has created. There are many verses in the Quran telling about God's signs in nature; in animals, plants or the human body. But Darwinism says, "Well, no, there are no such signs, because all of this is created by the blind forces of nature."

In other words accepting Darwinism does not force you to deny God, but forces you to accept that there is no rational evidence from nature to believe in God. It does not make you necessarily an atheist, but it portrays atheism as a perfectly rational, reasonable position. That's why the arch-atheist Richard Dawkins thanks Darwin because "Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist."

The sad thing for atheists is that Darwinism is wrong. It contradicts with the scientific evidence. Today it is surviving not because of its scientific merits, but because of its hegemony on the rules of science.

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QUESTION: (Meunda / Kenya) Why is evolution still considered a theory? Evolutionists are always talking about the facts that have been found in the fossil record. So what's remaining for evolution to become a simple fact of life?

NICHOLAS MATZKE: The whole confusion about the terms "theory" and "fact" proves that scientists never had a PR consultant help out with their terminology. Roughly, in colloquial English, "theory" means "guess" and "fact" means "truth." But in science, "theory" means "comprehensive explanation" or "well-tested systematic explanation", whereas facts are the little pieces that are used to construct and test theories.

So in popular language, "theories" are doubtful, but in science the word "theory" does not imply uncertainty. Atomic theory, cell theory, the theory of relativity, quantum theory, the germ theory of disease, etc. - none of these are particularly in doubt. We don't call them "facts" even though people bet their lives on these theories every day.

Some have proposed that evolution is a fact - in the sense of being so well-supported that it is perverse to deny - AND a theory, in the sense of being a well-confirmed systematic explanation. See Stephen Jay Gould's essay, "Evolution is a Fact and a Theory." Sometimes scientists will note that Darwin defined evolution as "descent with modification", and say that common ancestry (common descent) is simply a fact, as are the modifications, and that evolutionary theory is the explanation for how and why the modifications occurred.

These proposals work reasonably well, but use slightly different definitions of the terms "fact" and "theory." I sometimes think it would be simpler if scientists would just ditch the word "theory" and come up with a new term, but there is no realistic way to make this happen. In the meantime, creationists push the line that "evolution is theory, not fact", cleverly exploiting the terminological confusion. The best response is simply to invoke the other organizing theories of science - atomic theory etc. - and point out that these theories are not particularly doubtful.

MUSTAFA AKYOL: I don't agree with Gould's assertion that "Evolution is a Fact and a Theory." Facts are what we observe. Gravity is a fact; all apples fall to the ground when they are disconnected from their tree. Or water always boils at 100 degrees Celsius. These are facts; you observe them. However, nobody has observed the grand narrative of Darwinism; that inanimate matter, simple chemicals organized themselves into a living cell and then reorganized and developed themselves to create all life on Earth. A Darwinist would say, "of course we don't observe it because it takes billions of years." But if that was the case, we should have been observing tiny bits of that evolutionary process. We don't see that either.

There are indeed facts that Darwinian evolution speaks about; like variation in a given species, adaptation and all other processes called "micro-evolution." But the extrapolation from micro to macro-evolution is unjustified, and even some Darwinians accept this fact.

And if you wish to learn more about some of the famous "facts" that Darwinians always speak about, I suggest biologist Jonathan Wells' interesting article, "The Survival of the Fakest." (http://www.discovery.org/articleFiles/PDFs/survivalOfTheFakest.pdf)

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QUESTION: (Dan Stanley / Tajikistan) "Intelligent Design" requires faith that a Higher Being created life. Evolution, on the other hand, is only a theory, and therefore does not require faith. The idea of evolution is only as good as the scientific evidence that supports it. Does it make sense to compare these two ideas, since one requires faith and one does not?

NICHOLAS MATZKE

Just to be pedantic, you yourself just compared the two ;-). But I think your main point is correct. Religion and science, or a Higher Being and evolution, are not an either/or choice. Many people accept both.

I think that making this work does require some careful thinking. E.g., science should restrict itself to the physical and avoid the metaphysical. On the religion side there are many proposals for how to relate the two. In Christianity, I am puzzled how certain things about evolution bother many people, when if you think them through, the "conflict" is imaginary. For example: evolution is often blamed for (a) a bloody view of the world, full of death, animals eating each other, etc., (b) diminishing the importance of humanity in the cosmos, (c) a science where miracles are impossible.

But if you think about it, (a) the world was just as bloody before we knew about evolution, with people and animals killing each other and dying from disease just as much. Theology has to deal with this either way. (b) I am convinced that what evolution is challenging here is not God, but human vanity. What right do humans have to think that they are the pinnacle of the cosmos, anyway? Theists should be more aware of this human foible than the average person. And which view of God seems better? A God that sets up a cosmic zoo solely for the pleasure of one narcissistic, preening species - or a God that loves all of creation, even one tiny, insignificant and fairly pitiful species living on a dust speck in the Milky Way galaxy? (c) Regarding miracles - they were equally impossible before and after evolution, because they violate not evolution, but basic laws of physics, like the principle that matter and energy cannot be created or destroyed. (Strangely, no one accuses the physicists of atheism because of their conservation laws.) But think about it - the whole point of miracles is that they are impossible. Even before modern science everyone knew that people didn't normally come back to life, that virgins didn't give birth, and that people normally couldn't fly up in the air into heaven. Whether or not it requires faith to accept miracles is another question entirely, but you're really missing the point if you start to kvetch about how science makes miracles impossible.

Anyway, that may be aimed more at Christian theologians than the folks at IslamOnline.net, but perhaps it is something worthwhile to think about.

MUSTAFA AKYOL: No. Intelligent Design theory does not require faith in a Higher Being. It does not require faith in anything accept the scientific method. ID only starts with a question: Are there some features of the universe and the natural world which give evidence for intelligent activity? Are living things, for example, designed? This is a question, not a dogma.

And the theory says yes, there are some features in the natural world that we can only explain by intelligent causes. It comes to the conclusion by examining the natural world and making an inference to the best explanation.

It is most reasonable to accept that that explanation gives us evidence for God, but this is the result that people infer from the theory. It is not an integral part of the theory.

Let me give you an example: Imagine we have a super-fast spaceship. We travel to a far galaxy and land on a planet. On the planet, to our surprise, we find a mind-boggling library that includes tons of books written in a language we don't know. We would undoubtedly conclude that intelligent beings have written these books. It would not be "faith in intelligent beings" that would lead us to conclude that the books are not natural. Quite the contrary, the evidence before our eyes would lead us to infer the existence of those intelligent beings.

The same is true for life on Earth. The information written in the genes is so complex that it leads us to conclude that it must be the handiwork of a Designer. Actually it is the Darwinist side that is faith-based; they deny the evidence for design because of their commitment to philosophical materialism.

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QUESTION: (Wild_Rose / Palestine) Does evolution cancel the existence of intelligent design? I know some people who believe in both of them.

NICHOLAS MATZKE: I believe Wild_Rose is using a very generic definition of "intelligent design", basically saying, "God exists and evolution happened also." This position is typically called "theistic evolution" or "evolutionary creationism." (see: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/wic.html ) The antievolutionists who came up with the phrase "intelligent design" deliberately made it vague in order to get exactly this reaction: upon hearing a little bit about ID, many people say, "Yes, that's basically what I think, since I believe in God and evolution."

But in reality, ID is a very specific doctrine of Christian fundamentalists called "special creation." This doctrine is based on a particular literalist reading of Genesis, where the text says God commanded animals and plants to reproduce "after their kind." Some creationists from the Seventh-Day Adventist church (the Seventh-Day Adventists are a Christian sect that originated in the U.S. in the 1800s) interpreted this to mean that evolution could happen on a very small scale - within a species or genus - but not on a large scale. This was at the core of "creation science", and was incorporated unchanged as the central idea of ID when the labels were switched in 1987 (see http://www.pandasthumb.org/archives/2005/10/i_guess_id_real.html and http://www.pandasthumb.org/archives/2005/11/missing_link_cd.html )

So as you can see, one is signing up to a very specific and historically peculiar doctrine of fundamentalist Christianity when one signs up to ID. As ID leader William Dembski put it, "Design theorists are no friends of theistic evolution." (Italics original, http://www.arn.org/docs/dembski/wd_theologn.htm )

MUSTAFA AKYOL: No. ID is compatible with the concept of evolution. It is Darwinism, a specific theory of evolution, that ID challenges.

On the other hand, with all due respect to Mr. Matzke, I have to note something else: Asserting, "ID is a very specific doctrine of Christian fundamentalists... based on a particular literalist reading of Genesis" in the face of a Muslim proponent of ID such as myself might not be a very wise argument. I am not a "Christian fundamentalist", even a Christian, but here I am standing for Intelligent Design. And not just me, many contemporary Muslim thinkers are supportive of or sympathetic to Intelligent Design, because it challenges the Darwinist dogmatism and hegemony over modern biology. (For an Islamic interpretation of Islamic design, see: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0QYQ/is_1_2/ai_n6160521)

It is a very common but dishonest strategy to attack ID by linking it to "Christian fundamentalism." Unfortunately such ploys are used by the Darwinist ideologues pretty often. When 9/11 happened, Richard Dawkins (the world's no. 1 Darwinist) put the blame on "religions of the Abrahamic kind," whereas one could list endless evils committed by the religions of his kind, such as the massacres committed by Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, the French Revolutionaries, and so on.

The only religious outcome of Intelligent Design is a rational support for the belief that there is a Creator who created life on Earth. This is of course compatible with Islam, Christianity, Judaism and other theistic religions. Telling Muslims, "don't get interested in this theory because the Christian fundamentalists are also supporting it" is ridiculous.

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QUESTION: (Phillip / France) In a poll in the US it seems more people believe in intelligent design than evolution, but a poll in Europe showed the opposite result. Why do you think that is?

NICHOLAS MATZKE: The U.S. has a very peculiar religious history. It was founded in part by radical religious dissidents fleeing religious oppression in Europe. So it has a tradition of populism, anti-authority, and (in part because of the "free market" of religion in the U.S.) very vigorous, bible-based evangelism. Between the Civil War and World War I, Christianity in the U.S. split into liberal "modernist" and conservative "fundamentalist" camps (a series of articles called The Fundamentals were published by the conservatives, which is where the term "fundamentalist" comes from). The core theological issue was the doctrine of Biblical inerrancy - was the Bible a historical product or God's literal absolute truth? Evolution got wrapped into this fairly late in the game when a demagogic politician named William Jennings Bryan decided that evolution was behind German hostility in World War I, and campaigned around the U.S. in the 1920's advocating bans on teaching evolution. This provoked the famous Scopes Monkey Trial in 1925.

As you can see, it is somewhat bizarre that this specific and peculiar history in the U.S. has now spread a particular brand of creationism around the globe. The case of Turkey (the only country in the poll with lower evolution acceptance than the U.S.) is instructive, since it has its own version of a modernist/fundamentalist conflict, and Harun Yayha has imported American creationism to match.

Good books on this:
Ronald Numbers (1992), The Creationists: The Evolution of Scientific Creationism
Arthur McCalla (2006), The Creationist Debate
Various books by George Marsden.

MUSTAFA AKYOL: It is fact that religious beliefs have a role in the popular anti-Darwinian opinions. And United States is more religious than much of Europe. So there is a religious side of this. But this is not the whole issue. Intelligent Design is a scientific theory and you can't explain its origins by simply referring to the religiosity of the US. Actually some of the prominent defenders of Intelligent Design are secular scientists like Michael Denton or David Berlinski. They did not dissent from Darwinism because of their beliefs, but because of the scientific evidence that they have studied.

Moreover, religiosity can be a factor in explaining the motivations of some of the ID proponents — and I am probably one of them — but motivations and arguments are not the same thing. Motivations can explain why you find a particular argument important, but the argument stands on it own merits. In other words, people might be interested in ID because they are religious, but ID is not based on their religious beliefs. It is based on scientific evidence, such as the complexity of life, the genetic information, or the major gaps in the fossil record.

And we should also see the other side of the coin: Most Darwinians are motivated by their beliefs, too. However in this case, the belief is not theistic, but atheistic. Just look at what Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg, a hard-core proponent of Darwinian evolution, says:

"I personally feel that the teaching of modern science is corrosive of religious belief, and I'm all for that! One of the things that in fact has driven me in my life is the feeling that this is one of the great social functions of science - to free people from superstition. ... I can hope that this long sad story will come to an end at some time in the future and that this progression of priests and ministers and rabbis and ulamas and imams and bonzes and bodhisattvas will come to an end, that we'll see no more of them." (http://www.ffrf.org/fttoday/2000/april2000/weinberg.html)

So for Weinberg and other like-minded Darwinist, "science" (as defined by materialism) is a tool to destroy all theistic religions. This is obviously a philosophical, not a scientific, motive.

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QUESTION: (Breathe) If evolution is random, how come we don't see other evolutionary paths and more randomness? For example humans with wings or extra limbs etc.

NICHOLAS MATZKE: Several reasons (1) Most "random" mutations are of small effect, so that the mutant is actually rather close to the original. (2) Many genes have to interact in just the right way to produce a complex, organized structure like a wing. It takes a gradual accumulation of many steps to build up this complexity, and something like a wing is always a modification of a previous structure. Bird wings are modified dinosaur forelimbs, bat wings are modified hands/arms of mammals, and insect wings are modified gills, if I remember things correctly. (3) To survive in a population, mutations typically have to be advantageous overall. Extra limbs and the like (they do occur, although usually developmental anomalies rather than genetic changes) are not usually beneficial.

The idea that evolution is "random" is another proof that scientists need a PR agency. The modern doctrine that mutation is random is based in part on some famous and very clever experiments from the 1940s (the Luria-Delbruck experiments) that showed that beneficial mutations just occur by chance at a certain frequencies, rather than in response to environmental pressure. This rebutted some earlier proposals that mutation was somehow guided by the environment or the organism. So "mutations are random" became a standard part of the description of evolution.

In science, "random" has a specific statistical meaning: outcomes cannot be predicted exactly in advance, rather various outcomes have various probabilities. E.g., a coin flip has a 50% chance of being heads or tails. All of statistics, and all sciences involving statistics (which is all sciences) make use of models that rely upon what are called "random processes" - processes that can produce a variety of outcomes. For example, a meteorologist models the weather with a random process and various predictive variables, and concludes a 50% chance of rain on a given day. This is just everyday science and not controversial.

But again, in the public realm, "random" means something different: "purposeless", "meaningless", etc. And again, the apologists on each side have employed this popular meaning to argue for or against God. As a result, many people have the idea that if mutation is random (true), then evolution is random (false - natural selection is a deterministic, nonrandom process), and that means life is random and there is no point to existence (doubly false, because even if evolution were scientifically "random", this would not imply metaphysical pointlessness any more than random processes in weather models imply metaphysical pointlessness).

MUSTAFA AKYOL: There are different interpretations of evolutionary theory. The mainstream Darwinist view is that life is random, that is it has no predestined goal. "Re-run the evolutionary process many times," said Gould, "you would get different results in each time." (I paraphrase.) Of course this view is very compatible with atheism; in a godless universe we can only be a cosmic accident.

As I have noted, this is the mainstream Darwinist view. However there are other evolutionary biologists who disagree with this view. For example, Simon Conway Morris, professor of evolutionary palaebiology at the University of Cambridge, argues that life is not random and evolution has followed a pattern. Why he thinks like that? Because, as he explains in his book "Life's Solution", there are very similar patterns in totally unrelated species from an evolutionary perspective. Man and the octopus have virtually the same eye structure, for example, but our "common ancestor" would not have any eye at all. So these eyes arose independently. Independently but so similar. Why?

According to Morris, there is pattern. He is a Christian so he sees a divine meaning here. Intelligent Design goes a step further and explains the similar but unrelated patterns in nature by referring to common design — which is I think a more "intellectually fulfilling" explanation.

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QUESTION: (Quasam Khan) The fossil record is full of signs that evolution is a theory in crisis why are the evolutionists bent on denying God when it's so obvious that every part of the universe is intelligently designed. Isn't the fossil record against evolution?

NICHOLAS MATZKE
I answered this in the first session; see those links and the graphics therein. I would only add that antievolutionists are not helping themselves when they say things like this - sooner or later someone who knows the material will come along and expose them. This happened at the Kitzmiller v. Dover case when paleontologist Kevin Padian came to court with dozens of photos of transitional fossils taken at museums from all over the world. See: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/dover/day9am.html

Mustafa Akyol mentioned the Cambrian Explosion in the first session. This is popular with Harun Yahya as well. Here is an actual modern view of the Cambrian fossil record from an actual expert:

A remarkably complete series is now available, demonstrating how the
most basal, worm-like taxa of the entire Arthropoda sequentially acquired
the important features characteristic of their clade ... Clearly, for the
arthropods at least, current opinion now stands rather far away from the
view expressed only a decade ago that the Cambrian record did not reveal
anything of the origin of the phyla.
(Graham E. Budd (2003). "The Cambrian Fossil Record and the Origin of the Phyla." Integrative and Comparative Biology, 43: 157-165.)

I will also include that quote from Kurt Wise, one of the only creationists with real paleontological training (he got a PhD. under Stephen Jay Gould):

It is a Very Good Evolutionary Argument

Of Darwinism's four stratomorphic intermediate expectations, that of the commonness of inter-specific stratomorphic intermediates has been the most disappointing for classical Darwinists. The current lack of any certain inter-specific stratomorphic intermediates has, of course, led to the development and increased acceptance of punctuated equilibrium theory. Evidences for Darwin's second expectation — of stratomorphic intermediate species — include such species as Baragwanathia (between rhyniophytes and lycopods), Pikaia (between echinoderms and chordates), Purgatorius (between the tree shrews and the primates), and Proconsul (between the non-hominoid primates and the hominoids). Darwin's third expectation — of higher-taxon stratomorphic intermediates — has been confirmed by such examples as the mammal-like reptile groups between the reptiles and the mammals, and the phenacodontids between the horses and their presumed ancestors. Darwin's fourth expectation — of stratomorphic series —- has been confirmed by such examples as the early bird series, the tetrapod series, the whale series, the various mammal series of the Cenozoic (for example, the horse series, the camel series, the elephant series, the pig series, the titanothere series, etc.), the Cantius and Plesiadapus primate series, and the hominid series. Evidence for not just one but for all three of the species level and above types of stratomorphic intermediates expected by macroevolutionary theory is surely strong evidence for macroevolutionary theory. Creationists therefore need to accept this fact. It certainly CANNOT be said that traditional creation theory expected (predicted) any of these fossil finds.

(pp. 218-219 of: Kurt P. Wise, 1995. "Towards a Creationist Understanding of 'Transitional Forms'". Creation ex nihilo Technical Journal, 9(2), pp. 216-222. Formatting original, including CAPS. Endnotes omitted.)

Wise is saying exactly what his mentor Stephen Jay Gould said: "Transitional forms are generally lacking at the species level, but they are abundant between larger groups." (Whether Gould was right about the species-species claim is debated, studies go each way, and IMO the hominid fossil series looks pretty darn smooth for the last 2 million years; but that is another discussion.)

MUSTAFA AKYOL: Whether the fossil record supports gradual, Darwinian evolution is a big debate. Darwinians of course insists it does, but paleontologists like Gould have been challenging this view since the 80's. Then Gould defined gradual evolution as "effectively dead, despite its persistence as textbook orthodoxy."

ID theorists point out to this fact. They don't claim that there is no evolution and common descent in nature. Michael Behe has always emphasized that he finds universal common descent plausible.

But what is the mechanism of that common descent — whether it is universal or limited? Most ID theorists argue that it is impossible for natural selection/mutation to create truly new forms and the sudden increases in genetic information can be best explained by intelligent design. I have referred to Meyer's paper on this. Also here is a good summary Australian biologist/ID supporter Stephen Jones Perth, which also includes the Kurt Wise quote that Mr. Matzke has given: http://creationevolutiondesign.blogspot.com/2005/10/my-response-to-questions-on.html

The Cambrian explosion, of course, is the biggest challenge to Darwinian evolution from the fossil record. Mr. Matzke refers to Graham E. Budd's work to claim that the origin of Cambrian Arthropods is now explained in "a remarkably complete series." The problem with Budd's argument (the paper is at http://icb.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/43/1/157) is that the fossils that Budd cites are all in the Cambrian, so they're essentially contemporary with the Cambrian explosion. What predated the Cambrian explosion? Nothing.

What Budd does is to use the method called cladistics, which just assumes that evolution happened and than start building phylogenetic relationships between different taxa without considering their geological timetable. This would not prove evolution, because it assumes it in the first place. For those who are interested, Steve Meyer has a good critique of Budd's (and his colleague Jensen's work) here:
http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/index.php?command=view&id=2177

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QUESTION:(Mohsin Khan / United States) Dear Nicholas, some modern scientists of today have rejected the idea that Jesus was not born miraculously or without a male intervention. They say that you got to have a male chromasome for the birth of a person like Jesus. The very same scientists on the other hand maintain that this universe came into existence on its own or by chance. Now I have a question-For a person like Jesus to come into existence you need to have a male intervention then how come this marvellous universe will come into existence on its own or by chance without any intervention by a creator. Thanks in advance

NICHOLAS MATZKE: See my previous comments on miracles. Everyone knows that you need 23 chromosomes from each parent to form a human with 46 chromosomes, and that males need a Y chromosome. These are biological facts and people plan their whole lives based on the expectation that this is how it works.

Like I said above, if you want to invoke a miracle, just invoke a miracle and accept the fact that you are proposing that a miracle occurred in defiance of typical natural law. That is the point of a miracle, after all. But I think one has to acknowledge that this is an act of religious faith, not something that public evidence or science can justify - after all, the universal experience is that you need 23 chromosomes from each parent.

As for the origin of the universe, I only understand the physics in a vague way, but as far as I'm concerned, saying "God created the Universe", either in the Big Bang or whatever was "before" the Big Bang, is as good an option as any. It's not a scientific answer, but there is no guarantee that science will be able to answer ultimate questions like this.

Here is a quote from a recent Science article on "inflation" (the theory behind the Big Bang):

What supplies the energy for this gigantic expansion? The answer, surprisingly, is that no energy is needed (7). Physicists have known since the 1930s (8) that the gravitational field carries negative potential energy density. As vast quantities of matter are produced during inflation, a vast amount of negative potential energy materializes in the gravitational field that fills the ever-enlarging region of space. The total energy remains constant, and very small, and possibly exactly equal to zero. (p. 886, Alan H. Guth and David I. Kaiser (2005), "Inflationary Cosmology: Exploring the Universe from the Smallest to the Largest Scales." Science 307, pp. 884-890)

If I am not horribly misinterpreting this (which I might be doing), it sounds like the "positive" and "negative" mass/energy (since mass and energy are interconvertable) of the Universe adds up to...zero. In one sense, therefore, the Universe is one fantastic elaboration on nothingness, and perhaps this means that no "creation" is required.

Even thinking about fundamental physics makes my head hurt. But if the above is true, would it disprove God? Of course not. We can always ask if there is an ultimate explanation behind whatever proximate explanation science comes up with. We could say that God created the vacuum energy or whatever it is that spawns matter/energy and the negative potential energy that make up the Universe. As I have said before, in the end, science cannot provide ultimate explanations, only proximate explanations.

MUSTAFA AKYOL: Miracles are indeed faith matters. We believe that Jesus Christ had a Virgin Birth because the Qur'an and the Bible tell us so. This is pure faith. But other miracles, like the people Jesus raised from the dead, happened before the eyes of some people and it was a sign for them. In such cases miracles are "detected" by humans, so that they will see God's hand the in action He took to affect the ordinary flow of events.

Theologically speaking, Intelligent Design would correspond to such a "detectable miracle," if we accept that the Designer is the God of the Qur'an and the Bible. (Well, we don't see design happening right before our eyes, but we trace its footprints.) To say, "No, this is faith" would be like saying, "no, this is faith" to the people who saw Jesus raising dead people. Those people saw that miracle and it strengthened their faith; it wasn't their faith that made them see it.

As for the origin of the universe, I think we should note the very compelling evidence for design from physics. Since the late 1970's, scientists are realizing that the fundamental laws of physics are astonishingly "fine-tuned" for human life. Fred Hoyle, though he was an atheist, was persuaded that the carbon 12 resonance — which we owe our existence to — pointed to "some super intellect [who] has monkeyed with physics as well as chemistry and biology."
For more on this topic, see: http://origins.org/articles/ross_designanthropic.html

The Big Bang cosmology also supports theism by refuting the age-old materialist claim that matter is eternal. Big Bang shows that time and matter started to exist at a specific point and "before" that, there was a timeless and spaceless reality. There are many cosmologists who find this fact very compatible with the Biblical/Qur'anic account of a universe created by God from nothingness.
For more on this topic, see: http://origins.org/articles/craig_existencegodbeginning.html

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QUESTION: (Sayed Amer / Japan) I am an associate professor dealing with the relationships among different groups of animals (phylogeny) using DNA, fossils and geological data. I am studying when and where groups of animals originated and specialized. I believe that the tree of life does not mean that all creatures descended from one ancestor. What evolutionists did argue is just hypotheses. I can suggest that the tree explains the degree of differences and substitutions in the genomes of groups

NICHOLAS MATZKE: I can't make much of this question. You say you don't accept common ancestry, but you don't propose an alternative explanation for the treelike pattern of biological similarities.

It means that the further the relationships the bigger the genomes differences. Also, why are the control regions (mitochondrial genome, non-coding sequences carrying the information for genome replication) differ even between very close taxa whose genomes are quit similar.

It is well-known that portions of mitochondrial genomes evolve quite rapidly. Part of it is population genetics: because mitochondria are inherited only from the mother, neutral drift proceeds four times faster (if I recall correctly).

Moreover, how can evolutionists explain tandem duplication, gene translocation and inversion which sometimes appear in the genome of one species and not appear in the genome of its counterparts?

Mutations can occur in one lineage and not another. This is not controversial or surprising.

MUSTAFA AKYOL: Thanks so much for this comment, which points to a very important fact: The newly emerging picture of life from genetic studies do not fit with the traditional fossil-based "tree of life." There are unexpected similarities between very distant taxa and unexpected differences between very close groups. Biologist and ID proponent Jonathan Wells addresses this issue in his new book, "The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design," which I strongly suggest.
(See: http://www.ideacenter.org/contentmgr/showdetails.php/id/1421)

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QUESTION: (Arslan Aziz / India) Jews and Christians who reject evolution based on the Testament, claim that the earth is about 10,000 to 6,000 years old. What is the Islamic viewpoint regarding this? Couldn't Adam and Eve have lived a very primitive life 2 million years ago?

NICHOLAS MATZKE: Some Christians take this view also - the idea that the first true humans biologically evolved from apes, but God gave them souls at a specific point a few hundred thousand/million years ago. It is another attempt to reconcile Genesis and science. This view does not really conflict with science, because a "soul" is not a scientifically definable or measurable concept. Whether or not one wants to identify Adam and Eve with a 1.3 meter-tall hairy ape that walked on two legs but had a brain less than half as big as ours is a question for the theologians.

In my personal opinion, it would make more sense to just acknowledge up front that holy texts were not written as science books, and that they were instead written for a culture with no scientific knowledge or background. Trying to force the two traditions into a single unified model is probably not very convincing in the long run. Wouldn't it be better to say that the stories about Adam and Eve represent universal human experiences involving love, temptation, sin, guilt, and reconciliation, and are not literal history?

In any event, historians point out that in Genesis you really have two creation stories that have been merged, and that if read literally, do not really even match each other.

MUSTAFA AKYOL: My answer is yes. I don't think that the Qur'an gives us a date for the history of the universe, the world or the humans. Yet the debate between Intelligent Design and Darwinism is not on such dating issues, but on whether life is designed or not.

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QUESTION (Rich - United States): What research / experiments is ID currently doing? How will this research benefit mankind?

NICHOLAS MATZKE: As far as I know ID isn't really doing any research. There are occasional vague hints about secret research, but that is it.

It's bad enough that ID advocates aren't doing the empirical original research that would be necessary to legitimate their view, but the real problem with ID is that it gets inserted into people's minds in place of already documented knowledge. Thousands of people think that there are no transitional fossils, because the ID/creationists told them so. This is simply misinformation.

MUSTAFA AKYOL: ID is a theory about the origin of life. How will this research benefit mankind? It will benefit mankind by discovering how they came to be. If you think that science is only about finding new medicines or making better cell phones, you might see this as trivia. Other people don't; they are also interested in the so-called big questions. ID is about them.

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QUESTION: (Mubashir / Finland) When you say evolution what do you mean by it in the strict sense? I also believe in evolution but its in the supreme knwoledge of ALlah all-mighty whatever happens, has happened or is happening (He already knows what you are going to write). I simply think that we are too complex in design and function to claim that we are just accidental. What do you think is the origin of RNA and DNA?And what do you think is the origin of simple elements like carbon, hydrogen etc? Could you also shed some light on this brother Mustafa?

NICHOLAS MATZKE: "Evolution" has several definitions, but in biology the best one is the Modern Theory of Evolution: basically (1) organisms share common ancestry and have descended with modification from prior ancestors; (2) natural selection was one of the major mechanisms of this modification, along with some other documented mechanisms such as neutral evolution, symbiosis, etc.

The idea that evolution means we are "accidental" is basically like the "randomness" claim I discussed above. It is true that some scientists have claimed that evolution = accidental, and there is a statistical sense in which this is uncontroversial. But this is usually another example of metaphysics sneaking into popular science books. The right way to think about it is this: is it "accidental" that water flows downhill to the sea? Is it "accidental" that soft rock erodes more quickly than hard rock? Evolution is "accidental" in exactly the same way - sort of, but not really.

What do you think is the origin of RNA and DNA?

Origin of DNA: the "RNA World" model solved several origin-of-life problems and suggests that RNA preceded DNA and proteins. Attempts to produce RNA have had some success and some failures, so some propose it may have been preceded by a simpler nucleic-acid (NA) molecule. The recent proposal that a combination of small RNAs had activity, instead of a single large RNA molecule, solves the problem of how to get long functional sequences from simple precursors. See this paper:

Vlassov AV, Kazakov SA, Johnston BH, Landweber LF. "The RNA world on ice: a new scenario for the emergence of RNA information." Journal of Molecular Evolution. 61(2): 264-73. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=16044244&dopt=Abstract

I have also found these articles impressive:

Edward N. Trifonov (2004). "The Triplet Code From First Principles." Journal of Biomolecular Structure & Dynamics, 22(1), 1-11. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=15214800&dopt=Citation

U. F. MÅller (2006). "Re-creating an RNA world." Cellular and Molecular Life Sciences. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00018-006-6047-1

I will not claim that the origin of life is solved, but I will claim that some impressive progress has been made. Problems thought to be "insoluble" - like the DNA/protein paradox - have been solved (here, by RNA world).

And what do you think is the origin of simple elements like carbon, hydrogen etc?

The answer to this is well-known: the Universe started out with mostly hydrogen and helium. When these gas clouds collapse into stars, fusion at the core fuses these elements into heavier elements like oxygen, carbon, etc. Regular fusion produces elements up to iron (IIRC). Then the star runs out of fuel and goes supernova, and in the shock waves of this explosion the heaviest elements are created via fusion. A number of nice explanation are available on google: http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=mozclient&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&q=origin+of+the+elements

MUSTAFA AKYOL: This is a good question. Yes, neither Darwinism nor any other naturalistic theory can't explain for amazing complexity of even the simplest life forms and even their basic "machinery." Everybody in the field knows that RNA World and other theories on the origin of life are too far away from explaining the basic problem: The origin of the information which defines what life is.

Take a look at what Paul Davies, a very prominent scientist and not an ID-proponent, says on this:

"Many investigators feel uneasy about stating in public that the origin of life is a mystery, even though behind closed doors they freely admit that they are baffled. There seems to be two reasons for their unease. Firstly, they feel it opens the door to religious fundamentalists and their god-of-the-gaps pseudo-explanations. Secondly, they worry that a frank admission of ignorance will undermine funding, especially for the search for life in space." (Davies, The Origin of Life, 2003, p. xxiv)

Of course Davies speaks against ID as a "god-of-the-gaps pseudo-explanation", but by doing this he just unveils a materialist presupposition: How does he — and other materialists— "know" that intelligence wasn't at work in the origin of life. They don't know this, they can't prove otherwise. They just believe in it.

Intelligent Design, on the other, is based on empirical data. The cell is extremely complex, (it has what William Dembski calls "specified complexity") and our experience shows that such information-rich systems only originate from a mind. Thus ID theorists conclude that the first cell was designed.

For more on the design inference, I can suggest "Molecular Machines: Experimental Support for the Design Inference" by Michael J. Behe, here: http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/index.php?program=CSC&command=view&id=54%20

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QUESTION: (Bekir / United States) Regarding the famous some parents v. Dover Area School District (DASD)(the Panda) trial, the plaintiffs challenged the policy statement by the DASD which read "The school leaves the discussion of the Origins of Life up to individual students and their families." Which part of this statetement did your organization, NCSE find problematic causing you to join the lawsuit? What was the priinciple you were trying to uphold or the common good you were trying to serve by protecting the young minds from alternative explanations of immensely complex and controversial subjects such as the origins of life?

NICHOLAS MATZKE: The statement in Dover was four paragraphs, not just the one sentence. Our problems with the full statement were described well in the judge's opinion, which we completely agree with. As for the "Origins of Life" sentence, in Dover, "Origins of Life" meant "macroevolution", not "the origin of the first cell billions of years ago". So the sentence is really saying that any discussion of the big idea of evolution - common ancestry — is banned from the public school just because some parents object on religious grounds. This impairs the education of the plaintiffs' children and other children, and this policy brings us straight back to the bad old days of the 1920s-1960s when teaching evolution was banned outright in many states and local districts in the U.S. This was unambiguously declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1968 (the Epperson v. Arkansas decision, available online).

MUSTAFA AKYOL: The question is not directed to me, but just let me mention a good critique of the Dover case and the decision by Judge John E. Jones: Traipsing Into Evolution: Intelligent Design and the Kitzmiller vs. Dover Decision. (http://www.discovery.org/csc/traipsing/)

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QUESTION: (Lutfi / Turkey) Mr. Matzke, you suggested in your previous answer that Turkish ID proponents, such as Harun Yahya and the likes of Mr. Akyol adopted the fundamentalist positions by the Christian Id proponents, which you described as "odd". To my understanding Harun Yahya, as well as Mr. Akyol argue based on the evidence they present that the life must be the product of design. What do you find "odd" about the argument being made by a Muslim, Christian, Jewish or Hindu? You are not playing the "fundamentalist card" are you?

NICHOLAS MATZKE

I just find it very peculiar that Muslims or people of other faiths would be interested in adopting a doctrine from the apologetics literature of fundamentalist U.S. Christianity. The very same group of conservative evangelicals in the U.S. that supports ID and bashes evolution also regularly (a) bashes Islam in a fairly vicious way, (b) attempts to subvert church-state separation in the U.S. by imposing their religious views in the public schools and elsewhere, ignoring the rights of minority religious faiths, and (c) unflaggingly supports the Bush administration's policies in the Middle East.

It is important for folks to understand that any alliances the Christian Right makes with Muslims, e.g. Mustafa Akyol, are strictly for convenience and the appearance of being secular. These guys have a pretty absolutist and radical agenda and a history of twisting science, history, religion, naãve personalities, the law, politicians, the media, etc. to meet their apologetics goals. It is naãve to think that any such alliance will last for long.

The evolution/creationism issue is impossible to understand without looking at the history of fundamentalism in the U.S. Fundamentalist opposition to evolution is the reason we are all still talking about this issue here in the 21st century.

MUSTAFA AKYOL: The question is very wise. The answer is problematic. Of course believers in different traditions can find common grounds in theism and disagree in other things, especially on political issues. To deny that is like saying, "hey, some Christians who don't like Islam believe in God; so Muslims should not believe in God."

Moreover, the parallelism that Mr. Matzke tries to create between "Islam bashers" and "Darwin bashers" is simply not true. First, the ID movement is not a "group of conservative evangelicals" (there are many Catholics there, such as Michael Behe, the number one theorist of ID.) Second, "conservative evangelicals" are not necessarily anti-Islamic. Actually anti-Islamic ideologues in the US are few in number and you can't put all of them into a single faith category. Third, "Bush administration's policies in the Middle East" is again a broad category, ranging from the Iraqi War to promoting democracy with peaceful means. We should also note that some of most die-hard hawks in Washington, such as the Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, are fierce opponents of Intelligent Design. There is no correlation between the attitude towards Islam and the attitude towards ID.

Actually what I have personally observed is the exact opposite of what Mr. Maztke is trying to portray. The Christians and Jews in the ID movement are interested in and respectful to Islam, because they see that the real trouble in the modern world is materialism and Islam is on the same side with them in the stance against the arrogant proponents of this philosophy.

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QUESTION: (Adam) Isn't ID not a scientific theory? It isn't falsifiable (it's falsifiable components IC and CSI have been falsified), it isn't tentative, it isn't naturalistic, it isn't parsimonious, it does not make accurate predictions, it does not explain why so many predictions by evolution are correct, and finally, many of its arguments are negative arguments against evolution, not actual positive evidence for it. Why would anyone support it as a scientific theory? Also, I'm wondering how either of you feel about the fact that 98.5% of our genome consisting of endogenous retroviruses, non-coding DNA, and pseudo-genes and how identical ERV insertions in chimp and human DNA affect ID.

NICHOLAS MATZKE: I agree with all of this. Since ID proponents sometimes make the facetious claim that ID critics say ID is both "falsified" and "unfalsifiable", I will clarify this point: claims about evolution are testable - e.g. "no transitional fossils", or "IC systems have to be built all at once". These claims have been tested and falsified. But the generic ID claim "ID did something, somewhere, sometime, for unspecified reasons" is not testable and so not just wrong science, but not science at all.

MUSTAFA AKYOL: There are many arguments in this single question, probably we don't have time for all, but let me take on the most important ones.

First, "Why many of ID arguments are negative arguments against evolution." There is a good reason for this. Before Darwin, it was the mainstream view in biology that life is designed. Why? Because that's the rational conclusion you reach when you look at the natural world. Even Richard Dawkins says, "Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose."

Yet Darwin argued that he discovered a natural, purposeless mechanism, called natural selection, which leaves no need for design. That mechanism, which Richard Dawkins calls the Blind Watchmaker, is supposedly the creator of all biological reality.

Now, if it turns out that Darwinism is not an adequate explanation for biological complexity, then the design argument becomes vindicated again. In other words, if the Blind Watchmaker is a myth, than the watches we have at hand undoubtedly point to an intelligent watchmaker. Therefore, of course Intelligent Design is linked with the refutation of Darwinism and it is simply demagoguery to criticize ID for it uses "negative arguments against evolution".

Yet ID theorists do not only criticize Darwinism, they have also established positive criteria about detecting design in nature. (See William Dembski's work; www.designinference.com)

As for the genetic similarity between humans and chimps; it is not a surprise from a design perspective. ID does not argue that species are unrelated. Some ID theorist accept the whole notion of common descent, others accept limited common descent. Moreover, similarity does not prove common descent; it can also be explained by common design. (And, by the way, the fossil evidence shows a huge gap between earliest humans [Homo erectus and Homo ergaster] and earlier species. For more on this, see, Casey Luskin's remarkable article, "Human Origins and Intelligent Design," at http://www.iscid.org/boards/ubb-get_topic-f-10-t-000069.html)

Now let me come to the most important issue in this question: The "noncoding DNA, and pseuedogenes." I would suggest Adam to read more about the recent literature. Studies show that what has been defined as "noncoding DNA" is indeed functional; it is only our ignorance that led the scientist to define those parts of DNA as "junk." (Like the good old "vestigial organs" that turned out to be functional one by one.). Take a look at the site, http://www.noncodingdna.com/. There you can read:

"Many people believe that the vast majority of the human genome is functionless. This part of the genome is generally referred to as noncoding DNA, but has also been labeled junk DNA. There is mounting evidence, however, to suggest that these genetic sequences are biologically important. __A recent paper - the reason for the design of this site - suggests that the amount of noncoding DNA (or junk DNA) per genome is a more accurate indicator of biological complexity than either gene number or genome size. It is therefore highly likely that these sequences are functional, and the idea of "junk" DNA may need to be trashed."

There is an interesting aspect of this "Junk DNA" myth: Darwinism have been acting as a science-stopper here. For example, a widely used college textbook on molecular biology leads students to believe that, under Neo-Darwinian thinking, introns are merely genetic junk:

"Unlike the sequence of an exon, the exact nucleotide sequence of an intron seems to be unimportant. Thus introns have accumulated mutations rapidly during evolution, and it is often possible to alter most of an intron's nucleotide sequence without greatly affecting gene function. This has led to the suggestion that intron sequences have no function at all and are largely genetic "junk"..."
(Molecular biology of the Cell, 3rd Ed. (1994) by Bruce Alberts, Dennis Bray, Julian Lewis, Martin Raff, Keith Roberts, and James D. Watson)

That Darwinist statement was written in 1994. In 2003, Scientific American reported the functionality of so-called "junk-DNA," and called our failure to recognize these allegedly "junk" introns as functional within the cell as "one of the biggest mistakes in the history of molecular biology". This mistake was caused by "evolutionary assumptions".

Pro-ID biologist Jonathan Wells has predicted in a pro-ID journal that intelligent design can help us to understand function of Junk-DNA:

"Since non-coding regions do not produce proteins, Darwinian biologists have been dismissing them for decades as random evolutionary noise or 'junk DNA.' From an ID perspective, however, it is extremely unlikely that an organism would expend its resources on preserving and transmitting so much 'junk.'" (Jonathan Wells, "Using Intelligent Design Theory to Guide Scientific Research," Progress in Complexity, Information, and Design, Vol 3.1, Nov., 2004.)

Wells's predictions might have helped us to avoid pitfalls stemming from Neo-Darwinian thought.

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QUESTION: (Farshad) While the whole effort of ID opponents is to try to associate ID with a religious agenda, it seems they're totally blind to the atheistic agenda behind the Darwinian evolution. It seems the whole matter sounds like a philosophical battle rather than being a scientific issue. Science should have no problem with intelligent intervention in abiogensis or in any stages of evolution a priori. Science should be open to all possibilities and that's what ID is trying to promote.

However, the atheistic view would have a big problem in accepting even a minimal level of intervention by an external source of intelligence. It's evident that they have a big fear that this may collapse their belief system which is totally based on Blind Watchmaker philosophy. Consequently, don't you think this enormous effort of anti-ID camp to keep ID away from scientific mainstream is simply nothing but efforts of atheists who are trying to protect their Sacred cow!?

NICHOLAS MATZKE: Two general comments:

(1) I have expressed my opposition to claiming atheism is proved by science here and elsewhere. We made this point repeatedly with the judge in the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial, and he mentioned it in his decision.

(2) The problem with inserting divine intervention into gaps is as follows: you are just proposing a miracle to cover up your own ignorance. Again and again in the history of science a scientist eventually comes along and gives a natural explanation, and then religion looks silly.

An even worse, and much more common problem, comes when creationists propose miracles for phenomena that already have natural explanations. In essence, they take their own personal ignorance of the science, assume that this ignorance means that scientists don't know anything about the problem, and then teach thousands or millions of adults and children that science has no explanation and that they should think a miracle was responsible instead. This is a fairly vicious form of ignorance and becomes particularly outrageous when the creationists attempt to push it via the governmental education system (as in Kansas and Ohio recently).

MUSTAFA AKYOL

The question and the comment it includes are perfect. I fully agree. But Mr. Matzke says, "with inserting divine intervention into gaps... you are just proposing a miracle to cover up your own ignorance." Hmmm, Interesting... I wonder how he KNOWS that there is a naturalistic explanation for every single natural phenomenon while there is a scientific ignorance about them. Could he be using our ignorance about the nature to propose a naturalistic scenario for anything that we don't know?

What we actually see here is the dogmatic materialist belief that underlies Darwinism: Darwinists take it granted that materialism is true and science will prove this over time. Whether science really supports materialism or not is not important. That's accepted as a given, as an unchallenged dogma.

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QUESTION: (Arsalan Aziz / India) As a Muslim believer, ID seems the reasonable middle ground between atheistic darwinian evolution and orthodox creationism (the sort claiming human civilization is only a few thousand years old).

NICHOLAS MATZKE: Careful - more ID advocates are young-earth creationists than they let on. Discovery Institute Fellows Paul Nelson, John Mark Reynolds, and Nancy Pearcey are some, and many others (such as Phillip Johnson) take a bizarre kind of agnostic position on the question. This is scientifically preposterous, but that is what they do. It does show (again) that scientific truth and forthrightness is not the primary guide for these folks.

MUSTAFA AKYOL: I agree with the comment, but have to note that ID did not start in order to find a middle ground. It started to find the truth about biological origins.

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QUESTION: (Hamba / Malaysia) I believe that the most convincing proof that a Creator exists is the creations themselves. Advancements in scientific knowledge in recent years, particularly with regard to the structure of the DNA molecule and the almost unimaginable complexity of the living cell, have made the atheist claim that they have come about and evolved all on their own without any intelligent design involved to be increasingly untenable with each new scientific discovery.

In other words, if Science has turned against them, then atheists no longer have a leg to stand on with regard to their belief that no Creator exists. Would you agree that the greatest threat to atheist belief is not religion but Science itself?

NICHOLAS MATZKE: This is mostly standard creationist rhetoric I have already addressed. If you really think that molecular biology is trending against evolution then you have another thing coming. Evolution is the language in which the human genome and all the other genomes were written, and it is the language that scientists use to analyze our DNA. I am not exaggerating. Go to the NCBI website and search on terms like "evolution" and "homology". Genomics would completely collapse without these concepts. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/

MUSTAFA AKYOL: The question is right to the point. Yes, it is science (but science freed from materialist hegemony) that worries atheists more than religion. Because they can toss aside religion as "mere belief." But when science points to a Creator, they are in big trouble, because science deals with facts, not beliefs. This is why the expression a religious belief in a Creator is tolerated by most atheists, but they become very angry and intolerant when it comes to Intelligent Design.

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QUESTION: (Cengis / Turkey) Mr. Matzke, you say ID is not science. Can you explain what makes ID a religious claim, not a scientific theory?

NICHOLAS MATZKE: I think I addressed this above. ID was invented in a re-labeling event when "creation science" was declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1987. See:
http://www.pandasthumb.org/archives/2005/10/i_guess_id_real.html
http://www.pandasthumb.org/archives/2005/11/missing_link_cd.html

For deeper history on the ancestry of the creationist view of creation "after their kind", see my essay in this new book:

Matzke, Nicholas J., and Gross, Paul R. (2006). "Analyzing Critical Analysis: The Fallback Antievolutionist Strategy." Chapter 2, pp. 28-56 of Not in Our Classrooms: Why Intelligent Design is Wrong for Our Schools. Edited by Eugenie C Scott and Glenn Branch. Foreword by: Barry W. Lynn.

MUSTAFA AKYOL

The origins of ID goes back to theistic thinkers of Ancient Greece, and medieval Christian and Muslim scholars. (Ghazali, for example, used many design arguments for God in his works.) The modern Intelligent Design theory is more sophisticated and refined then those early design arguments, but there is a history there.

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QUESTION: (Ahmet / Turkey) Is there any "observed positive morphologic mutation" until today?

NICHOLAS MATZKE: Heck, domestic dogs by themselves have quantifiably more morphologic diversity in their skulls than the whole dog family Canidae. They approximately equal the diversity of the whole order Carnivora (which includes bears, sea lions, etc.). This diversity has mostly originated in the past thousand years or so, as humans selected dogs for various functions (e.g., dachshunds were specialized for going down badger holes).

MUSTAFA AKYOL: Wait a minute!.. This is breathtakingly wrong!.. Selective breeding is not an evidence for "observed positive morphologic mutation." Selective breeding has nothing to do with mutations. It corresponds to genetic recombination, which means the recombination of already existing genetic information in a species' gene pool. For truly new genetic information, you need mutations. But there are none of them that create that truly new genetic information!

Let me put it this way: By breeding dogs, you can have better, faster dogs. You can have a dog with a wing. To have a wing, a dogs would need to acquire a lot of new genetic information. Darwinism supposes that mutations do this over time. But there is no observed case in which mutations have created new genetic information. This is a huge problem for Darwinism — Mr. Matzke's reply shows that they are unable to even start to deal with it.

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QUESTION: (Mustafa Ajlan Abudak / Turkey) Mr. Metzke Can you give us an example of genetic mutation or any evolution process which can be seen to increase information in the genome?

NICHOLAS MATZKE: Yes, this question is easy to answer. The origin of new genes with new functions has been documented dozens of times. Mutations can duplicate genes, and mutations and selection can make their sequences change and their functions diverge. This produces the pattern of related genes that we see in all genome sequences.

See this review paper which reviews hundreds of studies, which we cited in the Kitzmiller case to rebut this claim, one of the favorite claims of the ID movement, and yet one of their silliest and most uninformed claims as well.

M Long, E Betran, K Thornton, W Wang (2003). "The origin of new genes." Nature Reviews Genetics. 4(11):865-75.

Google scholar:
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&lr=&cluster=5627619428927621967

Here is a free online version:
http://scholar.google.com/url?sa=U&q=http://entomology.wisc.edu/~dshoemak/teaching/ent472/Longetal2003.pdf

Table 1 shows the mechanisms, Table 2 shows the examples. Follow the references for more.

MUSTAFA AKYOL: To define the argument that new genetic information does not come from mutations a "silly and most uninformed" one is at least a "breathtaking inanity," to borrow a term from the Judge Jones of the Kitzmiller case that Mr. Matzke refers to.

What is the truth? Well let's first talk about Mr. Matzke's citation to the "Origin of New Genes" paper. Judge Jones wrote that "Dr. Miller refuted Pandas' claim that evolution cannot account for new genetic information and pointed to more than three dozen peer-reviewed scientific publications showing the origin of new genetic information by evolutionary processes." (Kitzmiller v. Dover, 400 F.Supp. 2d 707, 744 (2005)). Miller's discussion relied entirely upon the review article "The Origin of New Genes: Glimpses From the Young and Old" (by Manyuan Long, et al., Nature Reviews Genetics (4):865-875 (Nov., 2003)) and its citations to provide the "more than three dozen" articles. Yet the body text of the article does not even contain the word "information", much less the phrase "new genetic information." The word "information" appears once in the entire Long et al. article—in the title of reference #103

Now, let's come to the real point. The question is not "can we duplicate genes and get more raw nucleotide bases." Of course we can do that. The question is, "Do new functions arise by gene duplication?" To this question, creationists Yingguang Liu and Dan Moran, by referring to dozens of mainstream sources, give this answer:

"Here we examine the known mechanisms of gene duplication in the light of genomic complexity and post-duplication events, and argue that: (1) gene duplications are aberrations of cell division processes and are more likely to cause malformation or diseases rather than selective advantage; (2) duplicated genes are usually silenced and subjected to degenerative mutations; (3) regulation of supposedly duplicated gene clusters and gene families is irreducibly complex, and demands simultaneous development of fully functional multiple genes and switching networks, contrary to Darwinian gradualism." (See, http://www.creationontheweb.com/content/view/4618/)

In other words, merely duplicating genes doesn't get what Darwinists need. That isn't enough to explain how new FUNCTIONS evolve.

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QUESTION: (Sanja) Respected Nicholas Matzke, Do you think that humans are still evolving, or you rather think that humans reached a perfect point?

NICHOLAS MATZKE: Evolution does not produce perfection (see: the human birth canal, the epiglottis and choking risk, etc.), but it does tend to push organisms toward an optimum in a particular environment.

Since humans have recently changed their ancestral environment with agriculture, industry, etc., we are undoubtedly evolving in response to that. Human teeth have been slowly decreasing in size for the last few thousand years in response to better food processing. In particular, many modern "lifestyle" diseases are a product of too much food and not enough exercise - neither was a problem for humans when we were hunter-gatherers.

MUSTAFA AKYOL: Humans might be "evolving" culturally in terms of social progress. But I don't think humans are evolving biologically. Better health conditions do improve our lives, but the genetic burden we have acquired from mutations just increase over time. This causes more cancer and other genetic diseases. In other words mutations, the "mechanism of evolution", just make humans more defective.

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QUESTION: (Cengis / Turkey) Mr. Matzke, Creationism is the view that "God made it" referring to scripture. ID is the claim that there should be a designer for these complex structures to exist at the first place, without referring to any religious belief. What makes you think ID is creationism in a more secular form?

NICHOLAS MATZKE: If you read the ID literature, it becomes apparent that ID is much more than just the creation of complex structures. Almost every ID advocate (Behe is about the only exception) denies common ancestry, and thus believes in thousands or millions of miraculous special creation events in the history of life. This is a rather extravagant idea, and is definitely a specific religious view based on a specific fundamentalist interpretation of the "after their kind" passages of Genesis.

If ID was serious science instead of apologetics aimed at the public schools, its advocates would drop and vehemently oppose all attempts to interfere with the teaching of evolution in the public schools. They would stop doing fake "conferences" that are really ID promotion events, they would stop hiring PR agencies, running commercial in Kansas elections, writing deceptive textbooks aimed at ninth-graders, and pushing their material primarily in the evangelical community. Instead, they would try to convince the scientific experts by (a) putting forward a specific, testable ID model and (b) putting all of their energy and money into primary original research. It would be a long, hard road, but this is the road that all other scientific ideas had to pass before making it into the textbooks. Did the people who came up with the Big Bang model lobby school boards and legislatures? The very idea is ridiculous.

MUSTAFA AKYOL: I want to focus on Mr. Matzke's answer rather then the question. Why is it a "rather extravagant idea... a specific religious view" to say that life is designed by a designer? Why Darwinism is not another "extravagant idea"? The ready-to-give answers Mr. Matzke has for these questions are based purely on an unbreakable belief in materialism.

This is very typical. Most Darwinists employ an "argument from personal incredulity" against intelligent design. It goes like this: "I can't make myself believe that there can be a Designer, so I will stick with materialism, no matter how unscientific its claims are."

As for the "publicity" side of ID, one can of course ask what the Darwinists have been doing since the 19th century. Why don't they just "put all of their energy and money into primary original research," but establish institutions and museums, write popular books and op-eds, create documentaries, sell t-shirts and stickers, all for promoting Darwinism to society? Why do they celebrate an annual "Darwin Day," which is cherished by all atheist groups in the United States? Why did they fill the textbooks with fake evidence for Darwin's theory such as the peppered moths and Haeckel's embryos?

In the face of such worldwide Darwinist mass indoctrination, the ID movement is definitely justified to appeal to the public opinion.