An Interview with an ID advocate

http://www.ucg.org/science/evolution-vs-intelligent-design-debate/

This is an interview from 2009 (I think) with a professor at UC Berkeley and his beliefs regarding evolution. He seems to be fairly opposed to evolution, and I’ll summarize some of his arguments here. He also provides a pretty interesting view on what he thinks of the ID vs Evolution debate going on now.

He starts off by stating that many people do not have a problem with the small-scale idea of evolution (such as change over time, or smaller changes within a species), but he says that what a lot of people have a problem with is Darwinism, which states that evolution is the mechanism by which all life came about. As he puts it, ID says that some features (but not necessarily all) of living creatures are explained better by an intelligent cause than by unguided natural processes. Evolution on the other hand, states that all features of living creatures are brought about by unguided natural processes, which is why there is an irreconcilable conflict between the two ideas.

He goes on to dismiss one of evolution’s strongest pieces of evidence, the existence of a tremendous amount of DNA in our genomes. He states that recent discoveries have indicated that this junk DNA is not necessarily useless. He doesn’t elaborate on this, but I do remember reading somewhere a while back (and I apologize for not having a source for this), that a lot of DNA that doesn’t code for proteins still plays a non-transcriptional role in affecting our bodies’ processes, for example: affecting methylation sites and interactions with histones to determine how DNA folds up into chromosomes.

He then makes the argument (which I think is a bit silly), that the Origin of Species is filled with so many theological references that it too should not be taught in schools.

He goes on to talk about a lot of mistakes Darwin had when he first proposed the theory of natural selection, which frankly makes complete sense given how little information about genetics he had access to. Doesn’t make much sense to criticize Darwin for not applying scientific knowledge to his theory if that knowledge wouldn’t be available for decades to come.

He ends by saying that the high similarity between Chimpanzee and Human DNA actually serves as evidence against evolution. He says this because evolution is based around heritable changes in DNA, and if human and chimp DNA is so similar (98% similarity), how can we account for the tremendous amount of morphological differences between the two species.

Overall I can’t say I agree with him, but he does bring up some interesting points, and it is important to listen to both sides of the debate and not just the side you support.