Dave Jarvis offers an interesting variant of the suboptimality anti-design argument at http://joot.com/dave/writings/articles/design.shtml. His variant is based on the recent finding that mammals under certain conditions can regenerate organs previously thought unregenerable. I responded to this line of objection in The Design Revolution, chapter 6 (“Optimal Design”). Here is a relevant portion of that chapter: Read More ›
For anti-ID paraphernalia (including buttons, T-shirts, coffee mugs and more), go here.
Before the Dover trial concludes, I want to offer some remarks about what I take will be its long-term significance. I want to do this now so that critics won’t be in a position to accuse me of spinning or rationalizing the outcome of the trial once it is reached (of course, they’ll still find fault, but that’s par for the course). Read More ›
Last spring The Thomas More Law Center (TMLC) hired me as an expert witness in the Dover area school district case regarding ID (Kitzmiller v. Dover). That case went to trial this week (26Sep05). Because the focus of that case and trial is a book titled Of Pandas and People and because I am the academic editor for the publisher of that book (i.e., The Foundation for Thought and Ethics [FTE]), when FTE tried to intervene in the case, TMLC decided to drop me as an expert witness, citing a conflict of interest. In any event, I did a lot of work on the case, including an expert witness report as well as a rebuttal of the opposing expert witness Read More ›
Authors of Proposed Changes to Kansas Science Standards
Dated March 29, 2005September 27, 2005
To: Members of the Kansas State Board of Education
Re: Letter from THE ELIE WIESEL FOUNDATION FOR HUMANITY dated September 9, 2005, signed by Elie Wiesel and 37 other Nobel Laureates Read More ›
Exhibit 1: Letter by 6 Nobel laureates et al. to all 50 governors of the United States — go here.
Exhibit 2: DEFCON’S top 10 Places Where Science Education is Under Threat — go here.
As these exhibits indicate, the other side is pulling out all the stops. It makes you wonder whether they’ve got something to lose. Read More ›
MISSENSE MEANDERINGS IN
SEQUENCE SPACE: A BIOPHYSICAL
VIEW OF PROTEIN EVOLUTION
Mark A. DePristo, Daniel M. Weinreich and Daniel L. Hartl
“Taken as a whole, recent findings from biochemistry and evolutionary biology indicate that our understanding of protein evolution is incomplete, if not fundamentally flawed.” Read More ›
The Evolutionary Computation Technical Committee of the Computational Intelligence Society recently recently drafted the following statement at its Montreal meeting (go here for the full report; note that the minutes of this meeting will eventually appear here): Read More ›
Guillermo Gonzalez, ID theorist extraordinaire, spoke last night (9/28) at University of Northern Iowa (UNI). He was invited to speak there by the local chapter of Sigma Xi back in August. When the biology professors there caught wind of it in mid-September, they organized a petition statement very similar to the one organized by Hector Avalos et al. at Gonzalez’s home institution, Iowa State University (reported on this blog earlier — go here). As a result, the local media was extremely interested in his talk. Indeed, it was reported in just about every major Iowa paper. Not surprisingly, the auditorium was packed. When Gonzalez arrived last night, he found that someone had posted outside the auditorium a huge blowup of the petition statement with all its signatures and a signup sheet for people to add their signatures. Read More ›
Rob Pennock, as the witness of the hour in the Dover case, is citing me shamelessly. According to the local paper (go here), the quote of the day is: “So long as methodological naturalism sets the ground rules for how the game of science is to be played, (intelligent design) has no chance (in) Hades.”  William Dembski, senior fellow at the pro-intelligent design Discovery Institute. So who does set the ground rules for science? And why should be trust Darwinists like Pennock? Pennock lost my trust a long time ago (go here).
CHURCH/STATE AT DARTMOUTH By William F. Buckley Jr.
Tue Sep 27, 8:06 PM ETThe whole business of whether public schools can permit “intelligent design” to be acknowledged as an alternative to Darwinian evolution in explanation of human life will begin democratic exercises in a courtroom in Pennsylvania this week. There are regular flashpoints on this matter of the separation of church and state. Some of them test out constitutional questions, others merely modi vivendi. A week ago Noah Riner, the president of the Dartmouth Student Assembly, ran into the wrath of orthodox hard-liners.
Societies worse off “when they have God on their side” By Ruth Gledhill, Religion Correspondent September 27, 2005 The Times RELIGIOUS belief can cause damage to a society, contributing towards high murder rates, abortion, sexual promiscuity and suicide, according to research published today…. [For rest of article, go here.] By the way, Gregory Paul, the researcher in question, is a freelance dinosaur paleongologist. One wonders about his expertise in drawing the conclusion that religion is bad for your health. Could it be that he had his conclusion ready to go and massaged the data to fit it? Say it isn’t so.
From today’s Chronicle of Higher Education. And just remember, those are our tax dollars with which he is going to indoctrinate our kids and oppose intelligent design. Here’s a novel thought: Let chancellor Hemenway and his colleagues come up with their own support that does not require the government establishing a secular religion based on evolution. Here is his letter: Read More ›
From: Kenneth Miller [mailto:Kenneth_Miller@Brown.edu]
Sent: Wednesday, September 28, 2005 2:17 PM
Subject: Re: Some other questions…Dear Friend,
You are one of scores of people who have written messages to me as a result of my scientific testimony at trial in Harrisburg, PA. I hope you will forgive the fact that I cannot possibly reply to each of you individually. While I appreciate your comments and respect you right to hold views with which I disagree, I thought it might be helpful to make a few things clear. Read More ›
Colorado Springs Gazette on the Dover case, Tuesday’s edition (9/27/05).