Kirk Durston's Proof of God

 
I went to the lecture in Denyse O'Leary's course last night [I'm Going to a Lecture on Intelligent Design]. As promised, the guest speaker was Kirk Durston, a graduate student in biophysics at the University of Guelph.

It was a very frustrating experience. Like most Intelligent Design Creationists, Durston was all over the map in terms of spreading lies and misconceptions about science. This scattergun approach seems to be very successful for them. I assume it's because no one person can address all of the problems with their presentation. Most people will catch one or two flaws but they'll assume that everything else has to be correct.

I'll come back to some of these lies in another posting but right now I'd like to explain his main argument.

Kirk Durston has a background in computer science and his project has to do with analyzing the sequences of conserved gene families.

The Intelligent Design Creationist part of his study relies heavily on the work of Douglas Axe (Axe, 2000; Axe, 2004). Axe is head of Biologic Institute a "research" company in Redmond, WA (USA) with ties to the Discovery Institute [We're in Trouble Now].

The papers Axe published in the prestigious Journal of Molecular Biology represent work he did as a post-doc in Cambridge UK. The goal was to show that the probability of a protein adopting a particular three-dimensional fold is very, very low.

Durston is pursuing this line of work and he described it in his talk last night with plenty of equations and diagrams. There were about 15 people in the room and it's almost certain that nobody other than me had any idea what was going on. But it all sounded very sophisticated.

As it turns out, not understanding the science shouldn't have been such a big deal since the form of his argument was obviously silly. At least I thought it was obvious. Here's the way it went ...

1. By making assumptions A, B, C, and D and constructing equations E and F he is able to predict that no protein will have more than X amount of information.


2. By making a few assumptions about protein families it is possible to measure the amount of information in a folded domain by plugging the data into his equations. It turns out that most proteins have more than X information.


3. Therefore God exists (i.e., the protein must have been intelligently designed).

This are (at least) two major flaws in this argument and it doesn't take an expert in computer science or biochemistry to detect them.

First, when you formulate a scientific hypothesis you test it against scientific reality. If the predictions of your hypothesis are not fulfilled then your hypothesis is falsified. At that point it's back to the drawing board. You need to reconsider your assumptions or your equations because they were not successful. That's how science is done but that's not how Intelligent Design Creationism is done.

Second, the sudden appearance of God in the conclusion is illogical. There's no mention of God intelligent design in the premise. It just pops out of the argument without any warning. This is not how logic works and it's certainly not how science works.

I tried to point this out last night but nobody in the audience was paying attention and Durston was in no mood to discuss logic after having spent close to two hours practicing something else.

We have a word to describe people who can't construct a simple logical argument. It seems to have slipped my mind .... what is it ..... oh, yeah, now I remember ... IDiot.

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Axe, D. (2000) Extreme Functional Sensitivity to Conservative Amino Acid Changes on Enzyme Exteriors. J. Mol. Biol. 310:585-595.

axe, D. (2004) Estimating the Prevalence of Protein Sequences Adopting Functional Enzyme Folds. J. Mol. Biol. 341:1295-1315.