Casey Luskin on the Rising Tide of Intelligent Design Research
Any scientific theory for the origin of life and the universe is only as strong as its research program. For intelligent design, this is good news. On today’s ID The Future, Dr. Casey Luskin describes the current growth and scientific maturity of the Intelligent Design (ID) movement. Luskin describes the progress of ID across three main areas: successful scientific predictions, the unresolved failures of Neo-Darwinism to account for life, and the growth of the ID community as well as scientists outside ID who are looking for alternatives to modern evolutionary proposals. Dr. Luskin compares the growth of the ID research program to a snowball; it started small and faced early setbacks, but it is now rapidly picking up size, speed, and scientific weight as it rolls forward.
The predictive power of ID has made it successful in forecasting biological discoveries. Most notably, ID theorists correctly predicted function for “junk DNA” long before research confirming that 80% or more of the genome shows biochemical functionality. This view has now culminated in a paradigm shift that has changed the way scientists study non-coding regions of the genome. Research has also fulfilled ID predictions regarding new layers of information in epigenetics, the prevalence of unique “orphan genes” without evolutionary ancestors, and the reuse of complex parts across distantly related species based on functional needs rather than common ancestry.
Luskin also contends that Neo-Darwinism is hindered by significant structural obstacles that remain unaddressed by mainstream science. He points out that evolutionary biology lacks stepwise explanations for irreducibly complex molecular machines, such as the bacterial flagellum, and that the fossil record consistently reveals abrupt explosions of new life forms rather than gradual transitions. He argues that modern genome sequencing has produced conflicting trees of life, indicating that the model of common ancestry is an unreliable explanation for the distribution of biological traits. Standard models, argues Luskin, have failed to explain the origin of new complex biological features such as body plans and complex organs.
The conversation ends by referencing the growth of the intelligent design research community, including a vibrant student pipeline of young ID researchers and an engineering research group promoting a new way to study biological systems using principles from engineering. Luskin also points out that even mainstream scientists who reject both ID and Neo-Darwinism acknowledge that biology requires a focus on teleology (purpose) and that standard models are dead or seriously flawed.
The future is bright indeed for intelligent design research!
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