here

Timelines have a starting point. That would involve a biological entity able to replicate itself. Once that condition is present it is assumed that natural selection sufficiently explains subsequent changes. Yet more than an unknown starting point needs to be recognized. A symmetry break between physical properties and function is noted as is the insufficiency of natural selection based theories to bridge a gap between a prebiotic environment and a biological reproducing entity. At one point in time there is no self-replicator and no specification criteria. Then there is both. That is the moment correlating to initial front loading. The difference between IDists and their critics is the belief by the former that intelligence accounts for loading of the replicating information storage unit.

But it may also be that natural selection is credited with more of a role than merited even when biological organisms are present. At least the logic that common ancestry requires natural selection is doubtful according to the PNAS paper: Did Darwin write the Origin backwards? The abstract:

After clarifying how Darwin understood natural selection and common ancestry, I consider how the two concepts are related in his theory. I argue that common ancestry has evidential priority. Arguments about natural selection often make use of the assumption of common ancestry, whereas arguments for common ancestry do not require the assumption that natural selection has been at work. In fact, Darwin held that the key evidence for common ancestry comes from characters whose evolution is not caused by natural selection. This raises the question of why Darwin puts natural selection first and foremost in the Origin.

Reference:

1. Intelligent Design; William A. Dembski; Page 149; InterVarsity Press; 1999.
2. Ibid.

Crispian Jago, an IT consultant, is hoping the experience will enrich his two children.

“I’m very keen on not indoctrinating them with religion or creeds,” he said this weekend. “I would rather equip them with the tools to learn how to think, not what to think.”

But there is also this:

While afternoons at the camp will involve familiar activities such as canoeing and swimming, the youngsters’ mornings will be spent debunking supernatural phenomena such as the formation of crop circles and telepathy. Even Uri Geller’s apparent ability to bend spoons with his mind will come under scrutiny.

Debunking supernatural phenomenon heh. Most assuredly this will be done by teahing children how to think rather than what to think.

And there is this objective appraisal:

“We are not trying to bash religion, but it encourages people to believe in a lot of things for which there is no evidence.”

No evidence. Beware when people cite an absolute value like zero as an evidentiary descriptor. Even when I disagree I tend to be more generous with my opponents but then again I'm more objective too. But what is the evidence that sustains the position that there is no God?

Oh well, there is this too:

While afternoons at the camp will involve familiar activities such as canoeing and swimming…

So let's hope for the best. For the sake of preventing child abuse of course.

This assembly maps involves 15 universal small subunit ribosomal proteins, and of these 15, ten have a moonlighting role (we shall explore several of these functions at a future date). What’s striking is that all proteins involved in binding to the 3’ domain of the rRNA are not only universal proteins, but also have moonlighting functions.

In other words 2/3 of the proteins have moonlighting roles. Quite a large percentage. Darwinian evolution predicts that some ancient proteins will be coopted for future uses, but 2/3 of them? What is even more intriguing about Mike's post is his prediction:

Those universal ribosomal proteins that don’t seem to have a moonlighting role are s17, s5, s8, s11, and s15.

Thus, the front-loading hypothesis further predicts these too will eventually be discovered to have moonlighting functions.

Anyone care to predict that he's wrong?

God has mellowed. The God that most Americans worship occasionally gets upset about abortion and gay marriage, but he is a softy compared with the Yahweh of the Hebrew Bible. That was a warrior God, savagely tribal, deeply insecure about his status and willing to commit mass murder to show off his powers. But at least Yahweh had strong moral views, occasionally enlightened ones, about how the Israelites should behave. His hunter-gatherer ancestors, by contrast, were doofus gods. Morally clueless, they were often yelled at by their people and tended toward quirky obsessions. One thunder god would get mad if people combed their hair during a storm or watched dogs mate.

Bearing in mind that philosophies, ideologies, religions and beliefs are accompanied by narratives able to outline basic positions unique to them, let's look at contrasting narratives. One is explicitly portrayed even if it is also misleading in its portrayal. The second is implicit and derived from narratives used to critique the Judeo-Christian God. That narrative is in evidence in the preceding quote. The God of the ancient Hebrews we are told "was a warrior God, savagely tribal, deeply insecure about his status and willing to commit mass murder to show off his powers. This incidently is part of a common narrative used to debunk Judeo-Christian concepts and conversely promote, albeit not overtly, contrasting ones. Critics know that an effective guerrilla war entails keeping you own agenda under the radar screen. Arrows do not hit invisible targets.

The theme of the warrior narrative is change. Your God changed with time. He was once a savage mass murderer who became Jesus, the mortal philosopher. The evidence is there in the Old Testament. God commanded Joshua to lead the Isrealites into the promised land and slay the inhabitants of it. Of course we do not really believe God existed but the purpose of our narrative is to debunk so if you uneducated Christian readers will keep an open mind you'll see that mass murder is immoral. I would use the descriptor instrinsically immoral except that it would make me look like an absolutist in an age when moral relativism is a litmus test for sophistication.

God then evolved to become Jesus; he who taught that we turn the other cheek. A mass murderer turning the other cheek. Can't you see the absurdity of your biblical narrative? What really evolved, of course, was your fantasy and I'm bright enough to elucidate it in cleverly mocking tones.

What is misleading about the anti-Christian narrative? The review contains ample evidence of a secondary commonly used debunking tactic- enumerations of ancient religious beliefs and behaviors repugnant to the 21st century mind. You know. Doofus gods who "often yelled at by their people and tended toward quirky obsessions. One thunder god would get mad if people combed their hair during a storm or watched dogs mate." Ha ha ha. Things got a little better with the Isrealites. We went from doofus to mass murderer. From oaf to creep. But what really stands out to those familar with facts as well as narratives is a glaring ommission. Critics delight in depicting the absurd views of the ancients but where oh where was the depiction of a practice important to the inhabitants of the promised land- child sacrifice? I mean if you are going to debunk religion start with that right? Wrong. If that is mentioned it is not front and center. Front and center is the God who would wipe out cultures that practice child sacrifice. Hidden in the background is the practice itself for it mitigates the assumption of innocent victim and substitutes a notion of justice in its place. Mocking treads lightly on substance as substance and snickering are not compatible bedfellows. Mockery of a morally capricious God is enhanced if we do not focus on the dreaded practices of tribes indigenous to the promised land. Child sacrifice and its utility to debunking religion has at least temporarily taken a back seat. No sense in validating death sentences for it.

Quoting Bloom:

Wright also denies the specialness of any faith. In his view, there is continuous positive change over time — religious history has a moral direction — but no movement of moral revelation associated with the emergence of Moses, Jesus or Mohammed.

Denying "specialness" is part of attempts to eviscerate. The primary weapon wielded in secular attacks on Christianity is the contention that it is not real. God is not real and any moral values linked to God are suspect at best or worthy of outright dismissal. It's not subtle:

The bad news is that your God was born imperfect. The good news is that he doesn’t really exist.

Clever one liners that avoid substance. Wright is not in a position to adjudicate the God/no God debate. But he's able to expose his prejuduces. It's Archie Bunker hiding behind ivy leaves.

Abstract: Light harvesting components of photosynthetic organisms are complex, coupled, many-body quantum systems, in which electronic coherence has recently been shown to survive for relatively long time scales despite the decohering effects of their environments. Within this context, we critically analyze entanglement in multi-chromophoric light harvesting complexes; we clarify the connection between coherence and entanglement in these systems, and establish methods for quantification of entanglement by presenting necessary and sufficient conditions for entanglement and by deriving a measure of global entanglement. These methods are then applied to the Fenna-Matthews-Olson (FMO) protein to extract the initial state and temperature dependencies of entanglement in this complex. We show that while FMO in natural conditions largely contains bipartite entanglement between dimerized chromophores, a small amount of long-range and multipartite entanglement exists even at physiological temperatures. This constitutes the first rigorous quantification of entanglement in a biological system. Finally, we discuss the practical utilization of entanglement in densely packed molecular aggregates such as light harvesting complexes.

I share the sentiments of a commenter who wrote:

If entanglement were to have an effect on a biological level, it would have to be translated into a biochemical mechanism. Say, one receptor on one cell getting "entangled" with another receptor in another cell. But reading out the entanglement leads to its destruction, so it's hard to see how it could be leveraged in biology.

But I'm open to more insightful points of view if they exist. I don't see how entanglement would fit in in a causal explanation for the origin of photosynthesis. Perhaps someone else does.

1. Despite the claim at the book's website, it doesn't seem to be presenting a "radical" new argument for ID (in his acknowledgments, he thanks Dembski — among others — for reviewing his book, so I don't think there is a "split" in the ID movement).

2. But it does seem to be a very comprehensive one, covering all the origin-of-life hypotheses.

3. In this book (which is presented in a biographical, narrative form), Meyer is essentially exploring the origin of biological information contained in DNA.

4. Meyer is a trained philosopher of science who rigorously defends the view that ID is science.

5. His argument is abductive: ID is the best explanation for the origin of biological information.

6. He lists both peer-reviewed books, articles in peer-reviewed books, and peer-reviewed papers written in support of ID. (p.412)

7. He has additional chapters suggesting ways ID can lead to more research. Some of it seems to be borrowed from Mike Gene's ideas (no acknowledgment, unfortunately), even including the use of the term "foresight." I know Mike doesn't think that term is original with him, but does anyone know who used it before Mike (in relation to doing ID research)?

8. What I like best, so far, is Meyer's justification for writing a "trade press" book on ID:

Since World War II, scientists have stressed the importance of publishing their work in specialized peer-reviewed journals, but throughout the history of science "paradigm-shifting" ideas and theories have typically been presented in books, including many that we might now call "trade press (rather than academic) books.
There are a couple of reasons for this. First, books allow scientists to make sustained and comprehensive arguments for synthetic new ideas….Although this is sometimes done successfully in short articles — as Einstein did in making his case for special and general relativity and Watson and Crick did in their nine-hundred word article proposing a double helix structure for DNA — books have often been the go-to genre for presenting and evaluating new arguments for synthetic interpretations of a relevant body of evidence.
Perhaps, the best-known example of this form of scientific discourse was provided by Charles Darwin himself, who famously described his work in On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection as "one long argument." …Other scientists such as Newton, Copernicus, Galileo, and Lyell as well as a host of lesser figures have used books to advance scientific arguments in favor of novel and comprehensive interpretations of the scientific evidence in their disciplines.
There are other reasons that books are used to advance paradigm-shifting ideas….Modern scientific journals, typically focused as they are on topics within a narrowly defined subdiscipline, rarely permit the kind of comprehensive review and assessment of evidence that the advancement of a new interpretive framework requires.
Additionally, by creating a larger audience for a new idea, a book, and particularly a popular trade book, can go over the heads of an entrenched establishment to force the reevaluation of an established theory by creating wider interest in its standing. Darwin did this by publishing [Origins] with John Murray, a prominent trade press in Victorian England. p.7

9. No mention of me. Despite this oversight, I still think the book is a bargain.