The following is a position statement that summarizes some of the recent breakthroughs involving stem cell research and offers a "common ground" position that may provide a viable solution to the moral and ethical morass surrounding stem cell research, regardless of one's individual view of the moral worth of embryos. The case being made is that recent breakthroughs involving induced pluripotent stem cells and the extraction of viable stem cells from arrested development embryos make it possible to achieve the incredible potential of stem cells for treatments and knowledge while at the same time preserving the value and dignity of human life, even in its earliest stage of development.
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Common Ground on Stem Cell Research
Again I have run into the character limit that Blogger has in place for comments while responding to someone’s comments. Here is an exchange that I have been having with someone who commented on the excerpts I posted from Mike Murray’s essay, “Intelligent Dishonesty (by design).” This exchange may provide you with a deeper insight into what Murray was saying in his essay. Some of the earlier comments may also be from the same person, but since he or she has chosen to remain anonymous I cannot tell, so I have only included the last two comments which hold a common thread.
Francisco Ayala, who recently debated William Lane Craig on the viability of ID, has written a review of Stephen Meyer’s prominent book, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design. The publication of this book has led to a flurry of exchanges among proponents of evolution and ID, but that will have to be the topic for some other time. In this post I mainly want to focus on two key points that Ayala makes in his review, which he also used in his debate with Craig. An earlier post offers some of the responses from Craig, Bradley Monton (the moderator), and others following the debate, which may provide some background and context for my following comments.
Essay by Jeff Lindsay, Design Flaws versus Intelligent Design: The Perspective of an Engineer and Inventor
http://www.jefflindsay.com/DesignFlaws.shtml
In my current work, I often work on inventions that become patents. Those who invent know that many of the most clever inventions are non-intuitive. Inventions often come when the inventor encounters a problem with the "obvious" way of doing things, and then finds an alternative that violates old assumptions. Those who are ignorant may look at the invention and dismiss it as fundamentally flawed for its failure to conform to simple paradigms of the past - but what at first looks like a design flaw may hold a brilliant breakthrough.
This argument is based on the assumption that the human eye does not see well compared to an octopus. Is there any evidence that our sight is suboptimal relative to the octopus? The argument is based on a simple-minded assumption and ignorance of what the retina actually does. Do we really understand the complexities of the retina enough to address this issue?
Lindsay cites research on the retina by Helga Kolb, “How the Retina Works”
http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/num2/2003/1/how-the-retina-works/1
The above broad sketch of retinal circuitry suggests that the retina is remarkably complex. As vision research advances, the retina seems to take on an increasingly active role in perception. Although we do not fully understand the neural code that the ganglion-cell axons send as trains of spikes into the brain, we are coming close to understanding how ensembles of ganglion cells respond differently to aspects of the visual scene and how fields of influence on particular ganglion cells are constructed. Much of the construction of the visual images does seem to take place in the retina itself, although the final perception of sight is indisputably done in the brain….
The most recent surprise has been that a previously unknown ganglion cell type appears to function as a giant photoreceptor itself, without needing input from rods or cones. This ganglion's cell membrane contains light-reactive molecules known as melanopsins. Given such unexpected findings, it appears that there may still be much more to learn about how the retina works.
Lindsay writes that this discovery “points to at least one obvious function that could not be achieved with nerves behind the photoreceptors.”
He then lays down this challenge to those who think the vertebrate eye is flawed in design:
- How do you know that you would see better if your eye was rewired according to the design you think is more logical?
- Can you provide the image processing functions of the neural circuitry in front of the photoreceptors by moving the nerves to some other place?
- Can you provide the benefits of photoreceptive ganglion cells by moving them elsewhere?
- What problems are associated with rerouting the nerves?
Lindsay also cites a discussion by Arthur Chadwick comparing the design benefits of the human eye versus the cephalopod (eg. squid and octopus) eye:
http://origins.swau.edu/q_and_a/evol/questions/q6.html
Which design is best? This is not an easy question to answer. In the vertebrate eye, the photoreceptor cells lie in contact with the opaque pigment epithelium. This tissue prevents the transmission of light past the eye, and also is involved in the critical process of recycling exposed photopigments, a critical process for eyes of animals that are very active, since it allows for tight packing of photoreceptor cells and rapid recycling of used photopigments. The invertebrate eye, that lacks this feature, may have to sacrifice the ability to keep up a sustained high level of visual acuity for the possible gain in visual acuity, but this is only speculation. In any case it is far premature to conclude that one design or the other is inferior without having physiological bases for such statements.
As research on the functionality of the eye continues, we learn more of its fantastic ability to receive and process signals. The more we learn, the more we are convinced that no plausible mechanism in evolution can produce such a structure with the properties it possesses. This trend, and past experience assure us that when we have a fuller knowledge of the functional properties of the vertebrate eye, we will understand why the retina is designed the way it is. Recent developments along this line include an article in Nature by M.J. Berry II, I.H.Brivanlou , T.A. Jordan and M. Meister, entitled "Anticipation of moving stimuli by the retina," (398:334-338). In this article the authors explore one of the most phenomenal feats of optical response ever discovered: the ability to precisely anticipate the position of a moving object at the level of the retina. Gegenfurtner, in an article in the same issue ("Neurobiology: The eyes have it!" 398), summarizing the paper by Berry, et.al, states:
"But the visual system can circumvent such delays [between detection and response to a moving object] by anticipating the path of moving stimuli. Such motion anticipation was assumed to be controlled by high-level motion areas of the visual cortex. Now, very much to our surprise, Berry et al. (page 334 of this issue) report that motion anticipation is already accomplished to a large extent in the retina, by neural circuits that were discovered long ago." Barry, et.al. in the article demonstrate how the eye performs calculus in order to solve the problems of the future location of a moving object, for example, a baseball batter responding to a fastball:"In a stunning surprise, Berry et al. now show that motion anticipation not only starts at the retina, the first stage of processing in the visual system, but that it also follows from current models of retinal processing. The basic ingredients are all well studied and common to many stages of processing in the visual system. So how do these ingredients work to produce motion anticipation? The most important part of the process is actually the simplest -namely that retinal ganglion cells pool their inputs over large regions of the visual scene (their receptive fields)." (p291).
"In this scenario, the retina integrates the light stimulus over space and time, with a weighting function k(x,t) given by the ganglion cell's receptive field, and the resulting signal determines the neuron's firing rate." This amazing new understanding of how the "backward" retina can perform calculations of a very high order is no deterrent to evolutionists, who quickly integrate evolution into our understanding of the process. To explain the existence of this phenomenal ability in the retina, Gegenfurtner suggests:
"If, for example, we assume a processing delay of about 100 ms [the time necessary for processing an impulse in the visual cortex of the brain], an animal (or a car nowadays) moving at a speed of 40 km per hour would be seen more than one metre behind its actual position. To overcome this potentially lethal problem, evolution has selected(emphasis added) mechanisms that anticipate the path of motion." (Gegenfurtner, p291). That statement illustrates the expectations of evolution and flies in the face of the assertions of Gould and Dawkins that evolution is a science of mistakes and wrong pathways. In fact, evolution appears to be defined in a circular manner, as the science of what is. When a marvelous organ such as the eye that is infathomably complex is encountered, evolutionists apparently feel the need to find some flaw in it that can be used to distract attention from the problem the existence of such complexity presents for evolution.
The eye remains one of the most intractible arguments for a Designer in nature, and suggestions to the contrary are without scientific merit. Those who protest thst the eye is poorly designed are being challenged to design a better one, or to show how it might be improved. Until they convincingly do so, this argument cannot be taken seriously.
A reader named Andrew has offered a couple of interesting comments on the post “Design Flaws” in the Human Breathing System. I think some worthwhile points have been made in our exchange, so I am copying his comments and my responses to this new entry. This will also allow me to include some of the images and animations cited; plus my second response hit the 4096 character limit for Blogger comments, so it wouldn’t fit in the comment box.
The following are some excerpts from an insightful and fair-minded essay I read recently by Mike Murray that addresses the “theology bashing” being condoned by various scientists today. He makes one explicit statement that I do not entirely agree with, that “religion is subjective (faith-based),” but I heartily applaud everything else he writes.
“Intelligent Dishonesty (by design)”
by Mike Murray
I have a vague, conceptual belief in some kind of "supreme being." I see that conviction as being not at all at odds with science. I have stated it before and I will repeat it here: There is no belief system -- scientific, religious, or any combination thereof -- that escapes the requirement of faith.
For, to those scientists who say that a god cannot exist since one cannot be proved (and because no one can say from where such a god would have come), the retort is obvious. If the physical matter that presumably exploded in a "Big Bang" wasn't created by a god, from where did that come? If a god did not create the stuff from which the universe supposedly evolved, who -- or what -- did?
If it cannot be proved that "God always was," neither can it be proved that "matter always existed." A degree of faith (or of sticking one's head in the sand) is involved, whichever way you slice it…
But this visit, together with some questions on optics and vision asked by my AP Physics students last week, reminded me of just how incredibly intricate our vision is, from the way the placement of our eyeballs gives us stereoscopic vision, to the manner in which our brain interprets and reverses the images so that we see right side up.
An “Inverted” Retina
But in contrast to our intuitive recognition of its wonders, the human eye is often cited as an example of something that is sub-optimally designed, or so flawed that it could not have possibly been designed by an intelligent designer. Now, I know that my own eyes are certainly not optimal—just take a look at how thick my glasses are—but the argument is that even the most perfectly seeing eye is flawed, due to a critical “mistake” in the design of the human eye that can only be explained by an unintelligent evolutionary process rather than an intelligent designer.
One of my wittier students put this as her answer (in lieu of an actual solution) to a problem on a recent Physics test on Newton’s Laws:
"Help me, Mr. Yeh-Kenobi! You are my only hope!”
My immediate response,
“Use the Force (=mass times acceleration), Beth!”
Her table got a kick out of that when I handed back the test.
Two weeks ago, Campus Crusade for Christ at Indiana University sponsored a debate on the question, “Is Intelligent Design Viable?” The audio for the debate is available for download from the Apologetics 315 blog.
The two participants were Francisco J. Ayala and William Lane Craig, and the debate was moderated by Bradley Monton, an atheist philosopher of science who argues that ID is deserving of serious consideration as a scientific theory (even though he personally believes that it is false). Monton recently published a book called Seeking God in Science: An Atheist Defends Intelligent Design.
Francisco Ayala is Donald Bren Professor of Biological Sciences, Ecology & Evolutionary Biology as well as Professor of Logic and Philosophy of Science at UCI, and author of a number of books such as Darwin and Intelligent Design, Darwin’s Gift to Science and Religion, and the Handbook of Evolution: The Evolution of Living Systems, in addition to nearly a thousand publications on evolutionary biology.
William Lane Craig is Research Professor of Philosophy at Talbot School of Theology, and a noted philosopher, theologian, and Christian apologist. He is respected among theists and atheists alike as one of the strongest defenders of the Christian faith, and he has debated a number of people in defense of the existence of God and the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Some of his exceptional debate opponents include Anthony Flew, Peter Atkins, and recently a very prominent debate with Christopher Hitchens at Biola University on the existence of God. His website, Reasonable Faith, is a great resource for Christian apologetics and it is also a recommended visit for those who have serious questions or doubts about Christianity. See the debate’s Participant Information page for more on the accomplishments of both Ayala and Craig.
What was very interesting to me was that this is the first time that Craig is debating specifically on the topic of intelligent design in biology, and I was curious to hear how he would fare against Ayala, who has written numerous books and articles on biological evolution and and one specifically against intelligent design.
An update to the previous post on the intelligent prank Harvey Mudd students pulled on the Victoria’s Secret Pink Collegiate Collection competition. Here are the current standings (click on the image to view the full size screen cap):
HMC is still in the lead, of course, though now with over 2 million votes. But now the first letter of the top 23 schools spells out something that has even broader appeal to all Mudders (I was a Southie myself for part of my time at Mudd, and remember being blasted awake more than once by West Dorm antics). They also included a friendly shout-out to their little rival in Pasadena.
So can natural selection do this? But of course! Since intelligence carries significant fitness value, survival of the fittest dictates that it is only natural that the most intelligent will rise to the top.
Thanks to JF (who I’m going to assume is a fellow Mudder) for bringing this to my attention and for providing the up to date screencap.
The above image shows the recent standings of a contest promoting the Victoria’s Secret “Pink Collegiate Collection”. The idea is that VS will create “products” featuring the mascots of the top schools from this competition. You are only allowed to vote once a day for a particular school, and there are protections in place to prevent automated voting bots. In essence, this is a popularity contest, and natural selection dictates that schools that have the greatest number of students, alumni, and fans who care will naturally rise to the top of the standings.
But if you take a closer look at the standings, you may soon realize that something exceeding the natural course of things may be occurring. The most immediate discrepancy is the fact that Harvey Mudd College is not only at the top of the list, but it has over 500,000 votes more than the next school on the list. Now, HMC has a current student population of less than 700, and even if you add all the alumni, faculty and everyone in existence who has even heard of the school, you would still have a number far less than the current student population of some of the other schools on the list. Just this might be enough to clue you in that something unnatural is going on.
But there’s more. #4 on the list is Bob Jones University, and if you know anything about Bob Jones University, you know that it has no reason being voted near the top of any list associated with Victoria’s Secret. #5 on the list is Scripps College, which is a woman’s college neighboring HMC with a student population even smaller than Mudd. Now, Scripps students are certainly more likely to purchase Victoria's Secret merchandise than the majority of Mudd students, but it defies the imagination that they can rally together over half a million votes.
In addition, if you are more familiar with Harvey Mudd College, you may also recognize that the first letter of the names of schools #2-7 form the acronym WIBSTR, which carries special meaning to any Mudd student. See this link for an explanation of WIBSTR (I’m trying to keep this a ‘G’ rated blog).
Finally, if you’ve ever seen Wally Mudd (aka the Mudd Wart), the HMC mascot, you’ll understand why it’s not likely to be a popular choice to be emblazoned on a new line of Victoria’s Secret intimates.
Because we can see that the results of the competition cannot be accounted for within the limitations of the natural voting process, together with the significance of the complex and specified “WIBSTR” sequence, it would be very reasonable for a person to infer that this was an intelligently designed prank. With some additional revelation we can perhaps know who actually pulled this prank, but that is not needed to know that a prank has indeed been pulled.
But perhaps there will still be those who insist that the specific sequence of “WIBSTR” is just a happy coincidence, and no matter how improbable the standings, these results must be due solely to the natural selection process, because the CAPTCHA program used by VS in the voting process absolutely restricts voting to once per person per day, and nothing can go beyond these boundaries as defined by the VS programmers.
That being said, I for one wouldn’t mind buying something from Victoria’s Secret with a Mudd Wart on it.
For more information, read this article from the CMC Forum: “Harvey Mudd 1, Victoria’s Secret 0”
Something I read today that reminded me of the importance of seeing the big picture, and how seeming “improvements” in one area can have drastic implications in the overall picture.
Joseph Burdo, Assistant Professor of Biology at Boston College, wrote a comment entitled “Design Flaws” in response to a Wired magazine article on “10 Worst Evolutionary Designs.” Professor Burdo wrote:
“[Y]ou forgot about one of the best arguments against the "theory" of intelligent design: the shared opening to the esophagus and trachea in humans (and many other mammals). Hundreds of choking deaths occur in the US every year due to food obstructions in the trachea. Doesn't seem too intelligent to purposefully design such a hazard.”
If you’ve ever had food or water go down the wrong way then you’ve experienced this “bad design” first hand. This argument was also listed in a 2001 Scientific American article called “If Humans were Built to Last” by S. Jay Olshansky, Bruce Carnes, and Robert Butler. The authors suggested that a better design would feature independent tubes for breathing and eating.
But though it seems so obvious that a dual tube system would eliminate the possibility of choking, and seems like a much better design, consider some of the implications of this change. Have you ever had a bad cold, so bad that your nose became completely plugged up and the only way you could breathe was through your mouth? With our current shared opening between mouth, nose, and trachea, nasal congestion is an uncomfortable but minor nuisance. But if the nose was the only means of getting air to the lungs, then nasal congestion would potentially be a fatal condition! Instead of a few hundred people dying of choking each year, you would be looking at possibly millions of people dying from asphyxiation due to the common cold or allergy symptoms.
Richard Deem from the Evidence for God from Science website offers some more implications of the alternative design for the human trachea and esophagus system:
There would also be the problem of getting rid of liquid that accidentally enters the lungs. It would have to be pushed all the way up to the nose and expelled there (make sure you carry lots of tissue with you!). Under the current system, it need only go to the top of the trachea and the down the esophagus to the stomach. The two tube design would also restrict the amount of physical activity that humans could do. When we run, we take in air through our mouths, since the larger opening allows for a more rapid respiration rate. The only way to allow for a large respiration rate with one tube to the nose would be to greatly increase the size and openings in our nose. Not only would this look ugly, but the larger openings would present problems. Things could enter into such large openings and have direct access to your lungs (How would you like to inhale a fly into your lungs?). Larger nasal passages would also reduce the temperature of the air, since it could not be heated as effectively (important for cold climates). Another major problem would be speech and language. We need to use our mouths and tongue in order to produce speech. Air running over vocal cords, in the absence of a tongue, lips and teeth, would only be able to produce a very limited number of sounds (it might not affect Rambo, but the rest of us would have a difficult time communicating). Try it some time (hold your mouth open and don't move your tongue as you attempt to communicate). Of course the evolutionist might propose additional structures in the nose (like a tongue, lips and teeth-like structures).
So, here is what the evolutionists are proposing for a superior breathing apparatus. Our trachea would continue up to our nose, requiring our necks to be at least 1 inch wider. We would have huge noses with nose lips and a tongue protruding out. Of course, our faces would have to be much longer to accommodate the additional structures. Now, we would really be ugly! On second thought, it might be interesting trying to kiss with two sets of lips - nah, constantly expelling liquid out our nose would make it kind of gross. Aren't you glad you weren't designed by an evolutionist!
Even in a well designed and engineered system, it may seem as if you can improve one specific aspect of the system by changing a certain part, but what you quickly discover is that even minor changes lead to consequences that actually degrade the functioning of the system as a whole. In considering “bad designs” in nature, it’s critical to remember that living organisms do not function as a set of independent parts, but as cohesive and finely tuned wholes. Most arguments of “bad design” in nature fail to appreciate this intertwining cohesiveness.
Human throat image obtained from the Mayo Foundation for Medical Education and Research (https://www.bcbsri.com/BCBSRIWeb/images/mayo_popup/Yourthroat.jsp)