#136 – a leading ID proponent rebuts our anti-ID challenges

After last week’s scientific experts cleared up much ID-rhetoric, we ask a rising star in the ID movement — Dr. Jonathan McLatchie — to respond to our reinvigorated questions, concern, and critiques of Intelligent Design

After starting this mini-series with an interview with one leading ID proponent, and then hearing from a number of scientific experts who gave a different perspective on things, we now want to finish this on-going conversation with an interview with another leading ID proponent — a relatively new face — Dr. Jonathan McLatchie. With three graduate degrees in biology and evolutionary biology, he may be a rising leader in that movement. Before the interview, we gave him a list of the anti-ID challenges we’d be raising, so that we could get fully prepared and informed responses to those questions. Here are his answers, and our other points of discussion:

• Challenge #1: for us, ID is still just God-of-the-gaps thinking
• Challenge #2: ID doesn’t explain anything, it just attributes phenomena to an intelligence without saying anything about exactly how that intelligence might have done it. ID proponents often refer to this as an inference to the best explanation, but is it really just an inference to the best attribution?
• Challenge #3: where does the science go after the attribution has been established? Does ID make testable predictions which actually advance scientific knowledge?
• as always happens in discussions with ID proponents, “junk DNA” came up as one of ID’s greatest scientific advances
• Challenge #4: ID proponents often make reference to astronomically huge numbers when refuting evolutionists (“the chances of that happening spontaneously are one in 10 with eighty-nine zeroes behind it“) …. again, this just betrays God-of-the-gaps thinking
• Challenge #5: ID proponents are always attacking “Darwinism.” We need to move away from simple Darwinian mechanisms and recognize that genetics has moved far, far beyond simple point mutations; we now know about large-scale movements and reorganizations of DNA
• what exactly does “Darwinism” mean to an ID proponent?
• we started to wade a bit into the evo/devo world (a term for evolutionary developmental biology, which pertains to how a single-celled embryo organizes itself into a multi-cellular fetus)
• Challenge #6: ID proponents often resort to hyperbolic appeals to “cataclysmic failure” and “death” and “extinction” in order to push back on discussions of genetic mutations and rearrangements being the creative engine of evolution; they only see genetic changes as harming a given protein/function, and avoid or ignore the possibility that a genetic change might morph that function into a new one (a process referred to as exaptation)
• gene duplication with modification is the R&D department of the cell
• as ID proponents often do, Dr. McLatchie quoted from a small select group of scientific studies which supported his pro-ID or anti-evolution point(s), while not accounting for the much larger number of scientific papers which come to the opposite conclusions (“cherry-picking”)
• Dr. McLatchie claimed that there is very little evidence of gene duplication and modification producing new functions; we countered with one example of the family of receptors that convey smell (there are thousands of these, all just a little bit different from each other), but didn’t have time to talk about visual receptors, ion channels, protein-eating enzymes, carbohydrate-eating enzymes, neurotransmitter receptors, signaling molecules called GPCRs, antibodies, ………… the list goes on and on
• ID proponents re-defining the adjectives “detrimental” and “beneficial” when talking about genetic mutations
• disparaging misrepresentations of the Long-Term Evolution Experiment; we will be talking to one of the members of that project in the next few weeks to fact-check statements from Dr. McLatchie (in this episode), Dr. Behe a few weeks ago, and from ID proponents in general
• Dr. McLatchie sees evolutionary mechanisms simply “degrading genetic information,” while we see this as life getting creative and trying new things, and re-purposing old ideas
• function becomes conflated with design; just because something has a function, this doesn’t mean it was “designed” to do that (did someone “design” an old broken brick to hold that garage door open?)
• strange/awkward designs (backwards wiring of the retina) and truly malevolent designs (convergence of the wind-pipe and food-pipe, or childbirth) make it hard for many of us to embrace ID; a designer working from the bottom up wouldn’t design it this way
• when asked why humans couldn’t have been “designed” with thicker necks having a food pipe on one side completely separate from a windpipe on the other side, the response can’t be “well, that would look weird”
• the accumulation of gradual changes that we see in living organisms over time (complete with genetic dead-ends and fragments of old, out-dated designs) is not consistent with the idea of a Master Designer
• what do ID proponents think of common descent of humans and primates (they’re quite divided on this), and how exactly do they explain speciation?
• why is the scientific community at large so resistant to ID-thinking?
• the ancient Hebrews thought the weather involved God having jars of rain, closets of lightning bolts, and breathing out the wind and the dew; today, we can set up mathematical models that only take into account gradients of temperature, pressure and humidity and predict the weather out over the next week or two
• exactly how would “the Designer” design things? What would this look like? Is he/she/it tirelessly tinkering away at a work-bench, or just dropping in from time to time to nudge things over key evolutionary hurdles? Jonathan’s answer included a reference to periodic injection of information content into the global pool of living organisms (“the biosphere”)

As always, tell us your thoughts on this topic …

Find more about Dr. Jonathan McLatchie, including upcoming public speaking engagements and writings, at his web-site.

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