The California Institute of Technology, or Caltech \u2014 shown here in an aerial photo \u2014 was just on the edge of what I, as a young boy, perceived and thought of as my \u201cneighborhood,\u201d reachable by bicycle and often passed by car.
(Wikimedia Commons public domain photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
Douglas Axe studied engineering and molecular biology at the University of California at Berkeley and at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), where he earned his doctorate. \u00a0He then did postdoctoral research at Cambridge University in England, followed by a stint as a research scientist there.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Here are some passages that I marked while reading his book\u00a0Undeniable: How Biology Confirms Our Intuition That Life is Designed<\/em>\u00a0(New York: HarperOne, 2016):<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
[T]he flag that has flown for many generations over the academy of higher education is that of a broad school of thought known as materialism<\/em>.\u00a0 The meaning here isn\u2019t the common one (an obsession with flashy cars or expensive clothes) but rather the view that matter<\/em> \u2014 the stuff of physics \u2014 underlies everything real.\u00a0 Even if they don\u2019t use this term, atheists tend to subscribe to the materialist view of reality, believing God to be a product of the human imagination, which they believe to be a product of material evolution.\u00a0 Theists, on the other hand, believe the reverse \u2014 that the material universe was brought into existence by God, who is not material.\u00a0 Both views accept the reality of the physical world, but one sees this as the only<\/em> reality whereas the other doesn\u2019t.\u00a0 (6-7)<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
materialism:<\/strong> the belief that physical stuff underlies everything real<\/span><\/p>\nscientism:<\/strong> the belief that science is the only reliable source of truth.\u00a0 (7)<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
The Universal Design Intuition: Tasks that we would need knowledge to accomplish can be accomplished only by someone who has that knowledge.\u00a0 (20)<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
Despite the opposition, by 2004 I was confident that I had confirmed Michael Denton\u2019s hunch that \u201cfunctional proteins could well be exceedingly rare.\u201d . . .\u00a0 Denton reckoned that accidental processes would be incapable of finding new functional proteins if their amino-acid sequences were more rare than about one in 1040<\/sup>\u00a0(1 followed by forty zeros).\u00a0 Having now completed the experiments I described to Alan Fersht and the graduate students in 2002, I was able to put a number on the actual rarity \u2014 a startling<\/em> number.\u00a0 With only one good protein sequence for every\u00a01074<\/sup>\u00a0bad ones, I had found functional proteins to be roughly 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000-fold more rare than Denton\u2019s criterion!\u00a0 Unless this number was overturned somehow, a decisive blow had been dealt to the idea that proteins arose from accidental causes.\u00a0 (57)<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
For me there is no debate.\u00a0 The scientific facts are in complete harmony with the universal design intuition.\u00a0 The work my colleagues and I have done on proteins has completely resolved the internal conflict \u2014 for me.\u00a0\u00a0<\/em>(59)<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u00a0 \u00a0 Douglas Axe studied engineering and molecular biology at the University of California at Berkeley and at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), where he earned his doctorate. \u00a0He then did postdoctoral research at Cambridge University in England, followed by a stint as a research scientist there. \u00a0 Here are some passages that I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1019,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[5652,16409,1053,16421,120,16403,16406,16427,16430,677,11582,915,4063,222,9700,16418,255,16400,6237,117,16412,16415,16424],"class_list":["post-88112","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-amino-acids","tag-amino-acid","tag-biology","tag-denton","tag-design","tag-designed","tag-douglas-axe","tag-functional-protein","tag-functional-proteins","tag-intelligence","tag-intuition","tag-knowledge","tag-life","tag-materialism","tag-michael","tag-michael-denton","tag-naturalism","tag-protein","tag-purpose","tag-scientism","tag-sequence","tag-sequences","tag-universal-design-intuition"],"yoast_head":"\n
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