Stephen C. Meyer debates Charles Marshall on the Cambrian explosion | WINTERY KNIGHT

Stephen C. Meyer debates Charles Marshall on the Cambrian explosion

Here is a summary of recent podcast of Unbelievable between intelligent design proponent Stephen C. Meyer and UC Berkeley evolutionary biologist Charles Marshall. Dr. Marshall had previously reviewed Dr. Meyer’s new book “Darwin’s Doubt” in the prestigious peer-reviewed journal “Science”.

Details:

Stephen C Meyer is the world’s leading Intelligent Design proponent. His new book Darwin’s Doubt claims that the Cambrian fossil record, which saw an “explosion” of new life forms in a short space of time, is evidence for ID.

Evolutionary biologist Charles Marshall of the University of California, Berkeley has written a critical review of the book. He debates Meyer on whether Darwinian evolution can explain the diversity of life in the Cambrian rocks.

For Meyer & Darwin’s Doubt:
http://www.darwinsdoubt.com/

For Charles Marshall’s review:
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/341/6152/1344.1.full

Here’s the debate on YouTube:

The brief summary this time is not provided by me, it’s from Evolution News.

Excerpt:

This past weekend Britain’s Premier radio network broadcast a debate between Stephen Meyer and UC Berkeley paleontologist Charles Marshall, recorded at the beginning of November. As David Klinghoffer noted yesterday, the subject of the debate was Meyer’s book Darwin’s Doubt. Yes, that’s the same Charles Marshall who reviewed Darwin’s Doubt in Science back in September. See here for our multiple responses.

It was an excellent debate, with both participants offering important insights and good arguments, though in my opinion Meyer unquestionably had the better of it, especially concerning the key scientific question of the origin of the information necessary to build the Cambrian animals. Nevertheless, both parties came to the table ready to engage in serious, thoughtful, and civil discussion about the core issues raised in Darwin’s Doubt, and we commend Marshall not only for participating, but for focusing his critique of the book on the central scientific issues, something other critics have conspicuously failed to do.

The debate was consequently both constructive and civil. Both parties complimented, as well as critiqued, the work of the other. Marshall, for example, described the first third of Darwin’s Doubt — the section that discusses the Cambrian and Precambrian fossil record, Marshall’s own area of principle expertise — as “good scholarship.” He also said it “looks like good science” and that Meyer “writes well,” and that he (Marshall) “really enjoyed reading”Darwin’s Doubt. Meyer, for his, part expressed his admiration for Marshall’s many scientific papers in paleontology and noted that he had been looking forward to the conversation because he and Marshall clearly “shared a passion for the same subject,” despite their different perspectives. Of course, Marshall is not pro-ID and both men expressed spirited disagreements, but they did so in a mostly respectful way that made the debate all the more interesting and engaging to listen to.

I was very impressed with Dr. Marshall’s performance during the debate, although he did try to poison the well a bit against ID at the beginning, and he got nasty at the end. It’s amazing how Dr. Meyer was able to get him to stop it with the politics and get serious, just by sticking to the science. Even when Marshall got insulting at the end, it was still valuable to see how the other side has to abandon rational argument and scientific evidence once they see that they can’t win on the merits. It’s “Inherit the Wind” in reverse.

Evolution News also posted a more complete guide to the debate in this post, and I recommend that you read that post before listening to the debate if you are not familiar with the science.

This is a great debate, and you definitely ought to listen to it. I hope I’ve posted enough here to convince you. If you haven’t yet bought “Signature in the Cell” and “Darwin’s Doubt“, then I urge you to get them, although they are intermediate/advanced level books. The two books are the state of the art in intelligent design research, good enough to be debated with a University of California, Berkeley professor of biology.

Does the fossil record match Darwinist predictions or Design predictions? | WINTERY KNIGHT

Does the fossil record match Darwinist predictions or Design predictions?

Recently, I wrote a post about how you can make a simple argument for intelligent design based on junk DNA.  Step 1: find out what Darwinian naturalists claim about junk DNA. Step 2: find out what design proponents claim about junk DNA. Step 3: compare those predictions with scientific discoveries about junk DNA over the past decades. Today we’ll do it with the fossil record.

I’m going to use an amazing article from Günter Bechly from over at Evolution News. Günter writes an article about fossils every Friday (he calls it “Fossil Friday”).

Here’s last Friday’s article, where he gave a nice overview of why Christians should care about the fossil record.

He writes:

This Fossil Friday I want to address the common request to provide an expanded written form of my lectures on discontinuities in the fossil record (e.g., on YouTube) together with references to mainstream scientific papers that back up these arguments against neo-Darwinism. Since the sudden appearance of trilobites in the Cambrian Explosion is one of the best known examples for discontinuities in the fossil record, I chose the early trilobite Wanneria sp. from the Lower Cambrian of Canada as today’s featured fossil. So let’s jump right in.

Then he talks about the predictions of Darwinists and design proponents:

Every theory makes certain predictions and these predictions have to be tested with empirical evidence. Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution necessarily predicts a gradual development of life. Therefore he insisted on gradualism, against the advice of his good friend Thomas Huxley. Darwin quoted in his magnum opus The Origin of Species (Darwin 1859) not less that six times the Latin dictum “natura non facit saltus”, nature does not make jumps, because he wanted to present a fully naturalistic explanation for the history of life on our planet, knowing perfectly well that saltations would have tacitly implied miracle-like intelligent interventions. The prediction of gradualism is not accidental and not a dispensable side issue in Darwinism. This was made clear by Richard Dawkins, arguably the most ardent modern popularizer of Darwinism, in his bestselling book The Greatest Show on Earth (Dawkins 2009), where he explicitly clarified that “Evolution not only is a gradual process as a matter of fact; it has to be gradual if it is to do any explanatory work.” In another book titled Climbing Mount Improbable (Dawkins 1996) he explained the reasons with a beautiful metaphor: Imagine the task to reach the top of a steep and tall cliff from the sea shore. It would be an improbable (or rather impossible) miracle to achieve this task with a single big jump. However, if there was a gentle slope on the backside of the cliff, you could easily and effortlessly climb the mountain with a lot of small successive steps. This is the way evolution must operate according to Darwin and Dawkins: not by sudden miraculous jumps, but many small steps, that are each not unlikely to happen accidentally without intelligent intervention, and which accumulate over long periods of time to add up to big biological differences.

Engineers don’t check in code gradually, one letter at a time. We check in a bunch of related changes to different files that implement some feature. Some days, I have a lot of meetings. Some days, I spend time doing code reviews or making diagrams or writing documentation. And some days, I get to write code all day. So, if you look at my Github history, you’ll see that some days I have 35 commits, and other days none. That’s consistent with having a “designer”. The complexity increases in “jumps”, with each jump containing changes to several files, and the changes add some new feature. But that’s not available to Dawkins and Darwin, they don’t like engineers, or sudden jumps in complexity.

Günter lists out a bunch of biological “jumps”, where God pulled an all-nighter, with pizza and Mountain Dew, and checked in a whole bunch of new code all at once.

Here are a few from his list of about 15 of them:

• The Origin of Life (3.8 bya)
• The Origin of Photosynthesis (3.8 bya)
• The Cambrian Explosion (537-508 mya)
• The Carboniferous Insect Explosion (325-314/307 mya)
• The Early Triassic Marine Reptile Radiation (248-240 mya)
• The Mid Triassic Gliding / Flying Reptile Radiation (230-210 mya)
• Upper Triassic Dinosaur Explosion (234-232 mya)
• The Abominable Mystery of the Origin of Flowering Plants (130-115 mya)
• The Paleogene Big Bang of Modern Birds (65-55 mya)

Günter has the details of each of these, but if you have listened to our recent episode about the origin of life with Dr. Fazala Rana, then you already know about the first one. The point is that the fossil record has a whole bunch of “big bangs”, where God checked in a whole bunch of new code in a very short period of time. This is strictly forbidden in Darwinian theory, but the fossil record doesn’t care about theories.

Günter concludes:

The gradualistic core predictions of any unguided evolutionary mechanisms such as neo-Darwinism are strongly contradicted by the empirical evidence. The cumulative conflicting evidence from molecular biology, genetics, population genetics, and the discontinuous fossil record can no longer be explained away as anomalies or as artifacts such as under-sampling of an incomplete fossil record. The total evidence is better explained with pulses of infusion of new information from outside of the system (top-down), rather than with a purely mechanistic stepwise bottom-up process. The only known cause in the universe that is able to produce significant amounts of new complex specified information is the activity of an intelligent conscious agent, so that intelligent design theory qualifies as superior alternative to unguided Darwinian evolution in an inference to the best explanation (abductive reasoning) among competing hypotheses. This is not an argument from ignorance (i.e., God of the gaps) as is often incorrectly claimed by critics, but is based on empirical data and our positive knowledge about the regular causal structure of the universe and the type of causes that exclusively are known to produce certain effects.

And I found a nice lecture that he gave on the topic:

The article was tough for me to understand, but I think I got the big picture of what he was saying. I blogged on it so that I can find it again if I get questions about what evidence there is for a designer. I sure hope that we are making more scientists like him for Team Design, because his post was quality work.