12 Discoveries That Have Changed the Debate about Design

What is Intelligent Design? Simply put, the theory of intelligent design holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection.

“This most beautiful system of the sun, planets and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being.” Isaac Newton

Michael Kent, a Fellow with the Center for Science and Culture, has been presenting his “12 recent discoveries that have changed the debate about design in the universe”, and is in the process of turning his presentation into videos.

The 12 discoveries are: 

1. The universe (space-time, matter, energy) had a beginning.
2. The laws of physics, the fundamental constants, and the initial conditions of the universe are fine-tuned to allow for the possibility of life.
3. Protein sequence space is far too large to be searched and highly functional sequences (i.e., enzymes) are incredibly rare (~ 1 in 10⁷⁷).
4. The number of genes in the simplest free-living organism is about 450.
5. Life is based on a digital information processing system.
6. Molecular machines and sophisticated software algorithms are essential to all life-forms.
7. Random mutation + natural selection has severe limitations as a creative mechanism that are now well understood.
8. So many highly improbable factors make Earth habitable that it is VERY unlikely that another truly “Earth-like” planet exists in our galaxy.
9. The “junk DNA” paradigm has been shown to be false. Most, if not all, non-coding DNA has function.
10. The Cambrian (and other) explosions in the fossil record are not consistent with the Darwinian model of gradual evolution.
11. Extensive post-translational processing (editing) of genes occurs in eukaryotes: the spliceosome and the splicing code.
12. Genes extensively overlap in the same or opposite directions within a stretch of DNA (overlapping codes).

You can learn more about these discoveries, as well as follow links to Kent’s presentation and videos, in this article from Evolution News & Science Today.