BioLogos: God's Word, God's World

Some interesting stuff, for example:

Return of the God Hypothesis: A Biologist’s Reflections

Darrel Falk

Like him, I believe that God’s Spirit has been at work throughout the entire course of creation through what we call the natural laws, but I also think there are times when God has worked differently. Like him (I think), I don’t use the word “intervention” to describe what God is doing in those times when God chooses to work differently: it makes no sense to say that God “intervenes” in what God has already been doing. Like him, I don’t believe that natural selection, sexual selection, genetic drift, or luck are sufficient to explain our existence on this planet.

I think the evidence for common descent is overwhelming and, in Darwin’s Doubt (loc. 7655), Meyer indicates that the Intelligent Design movement is not opposed to this either. I am certainly in complete agreement with Meyer that the scientistic views of scientists like Stephen Hawking, Richard Dawkins, Lawrence Krauss, Stephen Weinberg, and Sean Carroll are deeply flawed; they are grounded in their own philosophical worldview—not science. So I think we largely agree on the fundamentals, and yet I am very uncomfortable with his latest book—Here’s why...

Meyer believes that the Cambrian explosion creates a major crisis for the theory of evolution; he thinks there was a significant unexplained increase in genetic information that entered the biological world at that time. I think any evolutionary biologist would, upon reading his work, say that Meyer does not fully appreciate the power of gene duplication and mutation in generating new proteins and changing the way that gene regulatory networks function. One of the mysteries that, according to Meyer, “Neo-Darwinism fails to explain” is the evolutionary transition from the fins of fish to the limbs of land animals (p. 303). This, and other challenges like it, is simply no longer the mystery he thinks it is. In fact, Gerd Muller, that first speaker at the 2016 meeting, wrote:

“When natural selection affects such kinds of systems, the resulting phenotype variation does not need to be gradual and continuous. In fact, simulations of the dynamical behaviours of gene regulatory networks in evolution demonstrate that bistable changes are more likely to occur than gradual transitions.”4