djmullen

Newsflash: Michael Behe, Percival Davis, William Dembski, Dean Kenyon and Jonathan Wells are writing ... wait for it ... a biology text book!

The title will be, "The Design of Life - Discovering Signs of Intelligence in Biological Systems" and you can see a sample of it here

According to Ed Babinski, in a note published on ARN , he corresponded with Dembski on evo-devo and Dembski responded with a section from the forthcoming book. Ed has published this here. (Presumably the original has paragraphs.)

To get an idea of how good this book is going to be, scan down to "SIDEBAR" (about half way down) and see Dembski's "EVIDENCE THAT GENETIC PROGRAMS DO NOT CONTROL DEVELOPMENT". Observe evidence #1:

1. Placing foreign DNA into an egg does not change the species of the egg or embryo.

This is straight from Wells and it's absolute BS unless you're talking about squirting some insignificant portion of DNA into a cell. It doesn't take much to show that it's wrong. My first hit when Googling for "cloning wild cattle endangered" gave this article from CNN concerning the cloning of endangered species of cattle. It seems that researchers from Massachusets Advanced Cell Technologies, the San Diego Zoo, Iowa State University and Trans Ova Genetics took DNA from frozen cells "donated" by a Banteng bull that died in 1980. Bantengs are "enormous cattle that once thrived in the dense forests of Indonesia, Myanmar, Malaysia and elsewhere in southeast Asia" and they are now endangered. They took the DNA from a Banteng cell and inserted it into a domestic cow egg and used a cow as a surrogate mother. Two baby Bantengs were born. One appears to be normal and one was born twice as heavy as normal and was euthanized.

Most important: Putting BANTENG DNA into a COW egg produced a baby BANTENG. So much for "Placing foreign DNA into an egg does not change the species of the egg or embryo."

His other "reasons" why DNA doesn't control development look equally daffy. Number 2 is, "DNA mutations can interfere with development, but they never alter its endpoint." Huh?

Number 3 is equally bad: "Different cell types arise in the same animal even though all of them contain the same DNA." One is tempted to say, "No kidding? That must be what all the fuss over stem cells is about."

Number 4 is straight forward evidence for common descent: "Similar developmental genes are found in animals as different as worms, flies, and mammals."

Number 5 is another ho-hummer: "Eggs contain several structures (such as microtubule arrays and membrane patterns) that are known to influence development independently of the DNA." Wow! How long have we known this now?

While you're reading SIDEBAR #1, look at the reference right below it: "i Quoted from Elizabeth Pennisi, "Evo-Devo Enthusiasts Get Down to Details," Science 298 (1 November 2002): 953. The details that evo-devo enthusiasts are getting down to are microevolutionary changes. This insightful article makes clear that macroevolution has eluded evo-devo."

"i" is the number of the footnote and it refers to this text: "Yet despite this initial promise, evo-devo is now in a state of crisis. To be sure, its study of genes that control development continues apace. And the field is making some progress in understanding how genetic developmental mechanisms assist in microevolutionary change (like changes in butterfly eyespots). But, as William Jeffery, an evolutionary developmental biologist at the University of Maryland put it, in trying to understand how developmental genes induce macroevolutionary change, the field is "at a dead end."i

I strongly suspect that Dembski is engaging in some more YEC style quote mining. Does anybody have access to the 1 November 2002 Science magazine?

Roland98

"The field" is at a dead-end? This is from the article:

Sounds like he's saying pretty much the opposite--that this is a place where the field starts. More here for those of you with access.

Nic Tamzek

Wow, that's a pretty egregious misquote when you look at the full context.

I know that's obvious, but, well, wow.

Albion

Well, we don't know that Dembski isn't a YEC, do we?

Perhaps someone with a website should start a collection of Dembski mined quotes and their contexts; there's beginning to be quite a few of them.

Edited to say - DJ, why don't you do what you did last time and forward the Dembski quote mangling to the original author and ask for comments?

Valentine Pontifex

For those of us without access without a visit to the stacks, can can someone state why it is a misquote? If it is "egregious" someone might might to pass it to catshark in the t.o. newsgroup.

RBH

Paraphrasing the original: 'Attempting to ascertain the mechanisms of evolution via analyzing lists of developmental genetic controls from very different organisms is at a dead end; the solution is to look at closely related species to get a handle on the genetic control, and therefore the evolutionary implications and effects, of developmental processes.'

Dembski: "But, as William Jeffery, an evolutionary developmental biologist at the University of Maryland put it, in trying to understand how developmental genes induce macroevolutionary change, the field is "at a dead end."

Jeffrey is talking about changing research strategies, Dembski misrepresents Jeffreys as pronouncing the death of the possibility of understanding macroevolution via genetic changes in developmental controls.

RBH

Nic Tamzek

Indeed, evo-devo is really about the synthesis of developmental biology and neoDarwinian population genetics ("microevolution"). Evo-devo appeared a decade and a half after the deeply-conserved developmental genes were discovered, and pretty much the whole point is to break "macroevolutionary" morphological changes into microevolutionary processes.

The ID textbook quotes the bit about "macroevolution" being "a dead end" (meaning that comparing widely divergence organisms tells you that similarities go far back, but doesn't tell you how of the differences arose (it tells you alot about the origin of metazoans, actually, e.g. the number of Hox genes steadily increases from sponges, jellys, etc. through to the bilaterans, but that's a different story)). But Jeffrey's *whole point* is that evo-devo explores exactly the question of the differences:

If I had a nickel for every time creationists quoted the "statement of the question" part of the article but left out the "solution" part, I'd be on a yacht in the South Pacific right now...

Coragyps

You have access if you register, free, at www.sciencemag.org. All content from 1996 (?) to a year ago is there.

monkenstick

every single one of those points is so incredibly dumb that I can hardly believe it - this is the guy who's going to overthrow NDT? he might want to read some basic biology textbooks himself before he tries bloody WRITING one

SEF

That's the point though - he doesn't want to do that (nor does he want anyone else to do it). He doesn't want to believe the things real textbooks and scientists say about the real evidence. So, from his warped point of view, it is better just to make stuff up based on what he wants to believe anyway (or, more worryingly, what the voices in his head are telling him).