Intelligent Design Debate Roars On

The NYT leads off its national section today with a 4-clicker called, "In Explaining Life's Complexity, Darwinists and Doubters Clash," another in a recent smattering of stories in the big MSM about intelligent design. It includes this passage:

In one such study, Dr. Axe looked at a protein, called penicillinase, that gives bacteria the ability to survive treatment with the antibiotic penicillin. Dr. Meyer, of the Discovery Institute, has referred to Dr. Axe's work in arguing that working proteins are so rare that evolution cannot by chance discover them.

What was the probability, Dr. Axe asked in his study, of a protein with this ability existing in the universe of all possible proteins?

Penicillinase is made up of a strand of chemicals called amino acids folded into a shape that binds to penicillin and thus disables it. Whether the protein folds up in the right way determines whether it works or not.

Dr. Axe calculated that of the plausible amino acid sequences, only one in 100,000 trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion - a number written as 1 followed by 77 zeroes - would provide resistance to penicillin.

In other words, the probability was essentially zero.

Dr. Axe's research appeared last year in The Journal of Molecular Biology, a peer-reviewed scientific publication.

Dr. Kenneth R. Miller, a professor of biology at Brown University and a frequent sparring partner of design proponents, said that in his study, Dr. Axe did not look at penicillinase "the way evolution looks at the protein."

Natural selection, he said, is not random. A small number of mutations, sometimes just one, can change the function of a protein, allowing it to diverge along new evolutionary paths and eventually form a new shape or fold.

Dr. Axe presents a pretty compelling argument, and it seems to me that Dr. Miller's answer, that natural selection is not random, itself argues that some force is directing it.

Like most of the articles, this one has a discernable pro-Darwin edge, but in objectively presenting the arguments for intelligent design, the big papers are probably opening the eyes of many who previously accepted Darwinism as a given -- and that's healthy for the debate.