Emerging Scholars Blog

InterVarsity's Emerging Scholars Network

chance vs. design

Science Corner: One Is The Likeliest Number

You have to pick a special range, like one to one million, to get the blue distribution; most ranges give you the orange distribution, showing the Newcomb-Benford law. (Image by Andy Walsh)

Take a list of numbers. Maybe it’s your lab’s itemized expenses, or the prices from a week’s grocery shopping, or a list of values for physical constants. Look at just the leading digit of all those numbers. So if the number is $1.59 then you get a 1, or if it’s 3.14 then you get a 3, and so forth. Now count up all the 1s, 2s, 3s, etc. What do you expect you’ll find? Are you imagining a roughly equal amount of each of the nine possible digits? If so, you are in good company, because that’s a common expectation. But there’s also a decent chance you are wrong.
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Science Corner: I’ll Be in Scotland Afore Ye

downtown pittsburgh photo
In Pittsburgh, there’s more than one river that will take you ‘dahntahn.’
Photo by jpellgen

In a lovely bit of metaconvergence, two studies on convergent evolution showed up in the news this week. The first looked at ants in Arizona and whether five distinct populations separately stopped producing queens with wings in favor of wingless ones. The second was more extensive, showing that a wide range of species across phyla all have the same solution at the genetic level for coping with a toxin produced by some plants and toads. Both studies suggest that natural history was not purely random, and “replaying the tape” as it were might not always produce wildly different results.

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Does Intelligent Design Rule Out Evolution?

In the next series of blog posts we are going to look at Christian questions about evolution. In my last post we saw that two of the Christian views of creation, Young Earth Creationism and Old Earth Creationism, disagree with the scientific account of the mechanism of creation. Because of this we need to ask, is evolution true? Perhaps the strongest recent challenge to evolution has been the Intelligent Design movement. For the rest of this post we are going to look at Intelligent Design and ask if it is a better explanation than the scientific view of evolution by natural selection.

What is Intelligent Design? Intelligent Design supporters make three claims.

  1. Certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection.
  2. Intelligent design is detectable based on empirical observations using objective criteria.
  3. Reference to intelligent design is legitimate within a scientific explanation of events in natural history.
Fig. 1. Detecting God’s Activity in Natural History

How might we detect God’s supernatural intervention during the course of natural history? If God has intervened supernaturally during the course of natural history, one would expect to find gaps in the chain of natural explanations. And in fact there are gaps. Some examples are the origin of life, the origin of biological information, the origin of complex biological structures, the origin of the universe, and the fine-tuning of the laws of nature for life. So those gaps could represent places where God has intervened supernaturally. However, all scientific explanations are underdetermined by the data so it is not surprising to find gaps. Furthermore, science has a history of filling in the gaps. Therefore the presence of gaps alone doesn’t prove that the gaps are due to direct action by God. [Read more…] about Does Intelligent Design Rule Out Evolution?