Remember Thomas Henry Huxley — Darwin’s bulldog? Well, in Kenneth Miller, we’ve found Darwin’s B.S. Artist. For half-truths, misrepresentations, and sheer bloviating, this man is impossible to beat. His recent “review” (if it may be called that) of Expelled for the Boston Globe takes the cake. Let’s go through it, comparing his claims with reality:

CLAIM 1: He starts by calling intelligent design “repackaged creationism” that “can’t seem to produce any evidence”: “No data, no science, no experiments, just an attempt to sneak a narrow set of religious views into US classrooms.”

REALITY 1: How does science explain the origin of first life — the cell, which is the only life we know? Does Miller have an evolutionary explanation that requires no recourse to intelligence? The cell contains high-tech machinery. Why isn’t this evidence for design? Is the RNA World about to explain the origin of life? Hardly. Of course there’s evidence for intelligent design — if there weren’t, Miller wouldn’t be spending so much time denying it.

CLAIM 2: “Neither Steinberg [sic — Sternberg?] nor any of the other people featured as martyrs in ‘Expelled’ lost jobs as a result of their advocacy of Intelligent Design.” Read More »

In this essay Richard Dawkins proposes the following:

In fact, natural selection is the very opposite of a chance process, and it is the only ultimate explanation we know for complex, improbable things… We need a better explanation [than design by space aliens], such as evolution by natural selection or an equally workable account of the painstaking R&D that must underlie complex, statistically improbable things.

An equally workable account? An “ultimate explanation”? R&D? R&D is research and development. R&D is design. The logic and terminology of design is inescapable, even by those who deny that design exists.

Richard Dawkins is certainly not a stupid person, but I find it amazing that he cannot see the obvious problem here. Natural selection is not random, but it does not create anything; it only throws stuff out.

The F-35 fighter aircraft (for which our company is designing a new pilot ejection parachute), did not come about by throwing out the Wright Flyer biplane, and then throwing out the Piper Cub, and then throwing out the F-16. The impotence of natural selection as a creative force is transparently and logically evident.
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California’s top court legalizes gay marriage

Hat Tip to Wesley Elsberry’s message board for homozygous church burnin’ ebola boys After the Bar Closes.

Assessment of the reliability of climate predictions based on comparisons with historical time series by Koutsoyiannis et al. explore: “How well do the models capture the scaling behaviour of the real climate, by assessing standard deviation at different scales.” By their results they specifically throw down the gauntlet of “falsifiability” challenging IPCC to its very foundations. (Is it “scientific” or poltical.) Thought provoking on the role of science and verifiability in the public sphere. (Emphasis added) ———————
Abstract
As falsifiability is an essential element of science (Karl Popper), many have disputed the scientific basis of climatic predictions on the grounds that they are not falsifiable or verifiable at present. This critique arises from the argument that we need to wait several decades before we may know how reliable the predictions will be. Read More »

In “The Neural Buddhists” (New York Times, May 13, 2008), David Brooks (yes, he of the BoBos, the bohemian bourgeois*) references Tom Wolfe’s dramatic 1996 article “Sorry, but your soul just died,”

.. in which he captured the militant materialism of some modern scientists.To these self-confident researchers, the idea that the spirit might exist apart from the body is just ridiculous. Instead, everything arises from atoms. Genes shape temperament. Brain chemicals shape behavior. Assemblies of neurons create consciousness. Free will is an illusion. Human beings are “hard-wired” to do this or that. Religion is an accident.

In this materialist view, people perceive God’s existence because their brains have evolved to confabulate belief systems.

Uh huh.

Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard and I took it all to pieces in The Spiritual Brain. There was no basis whatever from the new neuroscience for that view - on the contrary, the new neuroscience was killing it!

Brooks, author of BoBos in Paradise, acknowledges, Read More »

Flagella-like Propulsion for Microrobots Using a Nanocoil and a Rotating Electromagnetic Field
Bell, D.J.   Leutenegger, S.   Hammar, K.M.   Dong, L.X.   Nelson, B.J.  
Inst. of Robotics & Intelligent Syst., ETH Zurich

Abstract
A propulsion system similar in size and motion to the helical bacterial flagella motor is presented. The system consists of a magnetic nanocoil as a propeller (27 nm thick ribbon, 3 mun in diameter, 30-40 mum long) driven by an arrangement of macro coils. The macro coils generate a rotating field that induces rotational motion in the nanocoil. Viscous forces during rotation result in a net axial propulsion force on the nanocoil. Modeling of fluid mechanics and magnetics was used to estimate the requirements for such a system. The fabrication of the magnetic nanocoils and the system setup are explained. Experimental results from electromagnetic actuation of nanocoils as well as from their propulsion in both paraffin oil and water are presented. This is the first time a propulsion system of this size and motion-type has been fabricated and experimentally verified.

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What difference would a real live ET make to your faith (whatever it is?)

Ted Peters, a researcher in the field of science and religion and author of SCIENCE, THEOLOGY, AND ETHICS (Ashgate 2003), is conducting a survey. The central question is this: Would contact with extraterrestrial intelligent life affect religion on earth? Would you be wiling to participate? The questionnaire is very brief and would take only 5 minutes to fill out. Although we will tabulate the data anonymously and will take every step to maintain confidentiality, please note we cannot guarantee full confidentiality when receiving email responses. Thank you. Ted Peters, Principle Investigator, is professor of systematic theology at Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary, the Graduate Union, and the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences. Julie Froehlig, Research Assistant, is a student at PLTS.

I found the survey questions interesting, but I couldn’t really answer most of them decisively.

For example, I have no idea what the religious opinions of an extraterrestrial would be. It would be just my luck to run into a hopelessly conflicted alien who believes that space travel is sinful … but it feels so good anyway that he just can’t … and so his shrink says … (O’Leary yawns and switches off tape … )

Go vote at Survey Monkey. You can leave comments too.

Also, just up at the Overwhelming Evidence blog:

Prof thinks profs’ intellectual sneers at public are not great TV, and he sure is right

Check your calendar … is it still Orwell’s 1984 where you live?

Science teacher symposium: Answer student questions without getting sued or fired

In some ways, bonobos (pygmy chimps) are more similar to humans than to other chimps

How fares the Expelled film? Still No. 5 - and who’s ahead of it anyway?

David Attenborough, 81, to make one last film - on evolution

Recently, Mark Bergin of World Magazine tried a novel approach to the Baylor tenure controversy:

Employing Google’s scholar-specific search engine, which limits results to academic journals, WORLD performed controlled searches for the names of each of this year’s 30 tenure candidates. In general, those faculty members receiving tenure have published with greater frequency since arriving at Baylor in 2002. And specific comparisons between individuals in particular fields reveal similar disparities.

However, Bergin is reluctant to simply leave the matter there - advisedly in my view.

A focus on publications alone tells against long term research that might turn up more substantial findings. Colleagues and department heads might be more aware of valuable longer projects.

And, as Frank Tipler has pointed out, many papers are cited by nobody at all, which implies that the authors published so as not to perish. Publications that nobody cites should not be equivalent to publications cited by several other research studies.

Considerations like these could be part of the reason why the faculty senate is unhappy that President Lilley overruled so many of their decisions.

Now, whether Lilley’s program for improving the university is a bad idea or whether he just hasn’t convinced enough people that it is a good idea, I don’t know. But an army without soldiers isn’t going anywhere. And that is what he has, now that the faculty senate has voted against him.

Reporter Bergin is not convinced that there is an anti-Christian purge afoot, as Bill has thought. Read More »

Was one woman who lived 150,000 to 200,000 years ago the ancestress of all of us? Science may not be sure, but pop culture is.

Part One: Our Mitochondria: A piece in the puzzle of our origins?

Part Two: What Does Our Mitochondrial DNA Say About Human Ancestry?

Part Three: African Eve - when pop culture falls in love with science

Richard Pearcey traces how a Darwinian worldview leads to “delegated fascism”. These are critical issues in debating the societal CONSEQUENCES of Evolution vs Intelligent Design, (as distinct from the scientific origin theories themselves.) ———————————

Abortofascism and Free-Market Homicide

By Rick Pearcey, Pro-Existance, May 12, 2008
In a column titled “Atheism and Child Murder,” Dinesh D’Souza comments on his recent debate with Princeton ethicist and atheist Peter Singer:

Some of Singer’s critics call him a Nazi and compare his proposals to Hitler’s schemes for eliminating the unwanted, the unfit and the disabled. But as I note in the debate, Singer is no Hitler. He doesn’t want state-sponsored killings. Rather, he wants the decision to kill to be made by you and me. Instead of government-conducted genocide, Singer favors free-market homicide.

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From Darwin and design: historical essay:

“The only distinct meaning of the word ‘natural’ is stated , fixed or settled ; since what is natural as much requires and presupposes an intelligent agent to render it so, i.e. to effect it continually or at stated times, as what is supernatural or miraculous does to effect it for once.”

 second edition of Origin of species (1860)

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Journalist Susan Mazur continues her series of remarkable articles about dissenters from neo-Darwinism with a compelling interview of Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, professor of cognitive science at the University of Arizona, and co-author (with Jerry Fodor) of the forthcoming book What Darwin Got Wrong.

In the interview, Piattelli-Palmarini points out that many academic biologists muffle their unhappiness with the received neo-Darwinian theory, either out of fear of being ostracized, or from worries about being exploited by intelligent design advocates. Jerry Fodor’s quips about having to join the federal Witness Protection Program, because of his public dissent from neo-Darwinian theory, lend some humor to this reality. If Expelled could be expanded to a multi-part television series, interviews with non-Darwinian evolutionary theorists such as Piattelli-Palmarini — who makes his loathing of ID explicit (see the interview) — would add richness to the complex landscape of opinion, circa 2008.

Piattelli-Palmarini argues that the role of natural selection is limited by the logic of complex developing systems, such as seen in the animal phyla. While selection clearly operates, he says, its power is confined to minor adjustments:

Of course, there is natural selection all around us (just think of the flu virus, mutating and adapting every year, to our detriment) and inside us (just think of our antibodies and our synapses and the pancreas cells and the epithelial cells). The point is, however, that organisms can be modified and refined by natural selection, but that is NOT the way new species and new classes and new phyla originated.

It’s a stimulating interview; check it out.

The essay by Jeffrey Schloss - excerpted in considerable part here - worriting about the “walls” the Expelled documentary is creating is a classic.

Real Christians, presumably, wouldn’t demand an accounting about the rapidly growing evidence against Darwinism and other materialist isms. And real Christians wouldn’t make a film about the people who get Expelled for doing so.

(Of course, all ID sympathizers are Christians, right? Hear that, Ben? David? Gerald?)

Schloss’s essay illustrates the fact that theistic evolutionism (vending Darwin to the masses on behalf of Christ) is dead. Dead because it is a solution to a problem that does not exist any more. Read More »

In an essay that is ten times the length of the following extracts, Jeff Schloss, a Christian College professor, weighs in on Expelled. He says Expelled misses the central issues. Unfortunately his essay also missed the central issue. His own personal religious views have led him to write the way he does.

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Last week the Wall Street Journal published a brief list of the scientific problems with evolution, supplied by John West of the Discovery Institute. Scientists are well aware of these problems but it is probably worthwhile to spell them out occasionally in a major newspaper. Even more worthwhile were the responses supplied by evolutionist Dr. Eric Meikle. [1]

Meikle is the Outreach Coordinator at the National Center for Science Education and has several decades of experience in evolution research, teaching and advocacy. Not surprisingly Meikle’s responses to West’s four problems are typical. They can be found throughout the evolutionary literature, from popular treatments to textbooks, and they speak volumes.

The evolutionist’s response to fundamental problems with his theory is reminiscent of a salesman. “Don’t worry, just trust us” is the message which otherwise is void of any scientific depth. Evolution is a fact, even if we don’t have a clue how it happened.

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