Published on Nov 26, 2012
In the first half of "The Creation Conversation", Dr. Stephen Meyer offers an introduction to the evening's presentation and defines Intelligent Design. He is followed by Dr. Michael Behe, who, among other things, discusses the issue of irreducible complexity.

This week’s diamond jubilee of the discovery of DNA’s molecular struc- ture rightly celebrates how Francis Crick, James Watson and their collaborators launched the ‘genomic age’ by revealing how hereditary information is encoded in the dou- ble helix. Yet the conventional narrative — in which their 1953 Nature paper led inexorably to the Human Genome Project and the dawn of personalized medicine — is as misleading as the popular narrative of gene function itself, in which the DNA sequence is translated into proteins and ultimately into an organism’s observable characteristics, or phenotype.

Sixty years on, the very definition of ‘gene’ is hotly debated. We do not know what most of our DNA does, nor how, or to what extent it governs traits. In other words, we do not fully understand how evolution works at the molecular level.

That sounds to me like an extraordinarily exciting state of affairs, comparable perhaps to the disruptive discovery in cosmology in 1998 that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating rather than decelerating, as astronomers had believed since the late 1920s. Yet, while specialists debate what the latest findings mean, the rhetoric of popular discussions of DNA, genomics and evolution remains largely unchanged, and the public continues to be fed assurances that DNA is as solipsistic a blueprint as ever.

The more complex picture now emerging raises difficult questions that this outsider knows he can barely discern. But I can tell that the usual tidy tale of how ‘DNA makes RNA makes protein’ is sanitized to the point of distortion. Instead of occasional, muted confessions from genomics boosters and popularizers of evolution that the story has turned out to be a little more complex, there should be a bolder admission — indeed a celebration — of the known unknowns.

 

A short video which shows the machines of life at work in our cells, maintaining libraries of information by transcription and transporting the data to new cells.

As David Klinghoffer mentioned yesterday, Jerry Coyne is pretty upset at Paul Nelson for saying his challenge to natural selection has broad scientific support, as Paul did in an email to Coyne and in a recent talk. Read Coyne's post: There is hardly a scientific argument against Paul Nelson to be found, either in Coyne's comments or in the comments of the scientists he contacted who affirmed that they, indeed, are not "creationists." No surprise in that, but it hardly negates their criticisms of modern neo-Darwinian theory.

Now watch Paul's talk. Paul didn't invent quotes from any of these evolutionary scientists, who published their own remarks in peer-reviewed scientific papers, explaining serious problems with standard textbook descriptions of neo-Darwinism.

Very little needs to be said in response to Coyne. The blog post in question is substance-free and politically motivated. And Coyne closes by asking his readers to be "civil"? Yet look at the tone he takes, calling Paul Nelson a "liar," "ignorant," "lying" etc. Coyne's commenters follow generally his uncivil, substance-free approach. If this is Coyne's response, his best shot at a reply to Paul's actual arguments, we ought to feel encouraged.

The secular worldview has long changed with every new truth about our created universe that is discovered and overturned. The biblical worldview has long been a constant truth since conception.

To provide the best, most current sceintific information about the arguments being made for creation and rebutals to naturalism beliefs.

Gods word to mankind will forever be infalliable. While our own knowledge and understanding of his words will grow, we agknowlege that our shortcomings in this matter are ours, not his.