I’ve just posted two pieces on my designinference.com website about the role of probabilistic reasoning in design inferences. The first is titled “A Primer on Probability for Design Inferences.” This piece is new. The second is chapter 33 from my book The Design Revolution, titled “Design by Elimination vs. Design by Comparison.”
Agreeing Only to Disagree on God’s Place in Science
By GEORGE JOHNSONSeptember 27, 2005
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/27/science/27essa.html?ei=5070&en=a8b05baabb3ce5f6&ex=1128484800&emc=eta1&pagewanted=print… On matters scientific, Dr. Dawkins, who came from Oxford, and Dr. Conway Morris, a Cambridge man, agreed: The richness of the biosphere, humanity included, could be explained through natural selection. [I’ve corresponded with Conway Morris; he regards natural selection as an engine that powers evolution but not as what gives it direction. –WmAD] Read More ›
On the Trail of Intelligent Design By Michael Scott Moore http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/0,1518,376919,00.html … UCSD in [2001] had the only student club in America devoted to intelligent design. It was called the IDEA Club — “Intelligent Design Evolution Awareness” — and its website invited atheists and believers, evolutionist professors and young-Earth creationists, Phys.-Ed. majors and Hindus — absolutely anyone — to come in and wrangle over Darwin. Their openness impressed me. Disagreement and debate were part of the fun, at least in their online manifesto. They just wanted to talk. Sites like “The San Diego Humanist,” by contrast, published mean-minded, antireligious sarcasm. “We atheists and humanists and freethinkers have all been made to feel pretty much apart from the rest of the Read More ›
Letters to the Editor
By REGISTER READERS
http://desmoinesregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050927/OPINION04/509270355/1035/OPINION
September 27, 2005Intelligent designer behind such a planet?
By Hector Avalos
Steven Jay Gould tells us why in Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes. After conceding that critics of evolution had a strong case at the Scopes trial, Gould still thinks their intellectual descendants need to be neutralized: “They are a motley collection to be sure, but their core of practical support lies in the evangelical right, and creationism is a mere stalking horse or subsidiary issue in a political program that would ban abortion, erase the political and social gains of women by reducing the vital concept of family to an outmoded paternalism, and reinstitute all the jingoism and distrust of learning that prepares a nation for demagoguery.” Is this debate about science or cultural control?
In today’s Washington Post, one reads: If Darwin was right, for example, then scientists should be able to perform a neat trick. Using a mathematical formula that emerges from evolutionary theory, they should be able to predict the number of harmful mutations in chimpanzee DNA by knowing the number of mutations in a different species’ DNA and the two animals’ population sizes. “That’s a very specific prediction,” said Eric Lander, a geneticist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, Mass., and a leader in the chimp project. Sure enough, when Lander and his colleagues tallied the harmful mutations in the chimp genome, the number fit perfectly into the range that evolutionary theory had predicted. COMMENT: Darwin’s theory Read More ›
Frank Beckwith’s initial salvo in an online debate with Douglas Laycock: http://legalaffairs.org/webexclusive/debateclub_id0905.msp.
The Dover Area School District trial about the teaching of ID starts today, and you can expect a lot of press coverage concerning it. Yesterday evening, the BBC interviewed me and Robert Boston of Americans United for Separation the Secularization of Church and State regarding Dover (it was a telephone debate). Boston was following the script of the Secular Coalition for America to a tee: ID is biblical creationism with biblical references omitted (so what do you do with Plato, Aristotle, and Antony Flew?); ID has no presence in the scientific community (so what do you do with the recent peer-reviewed publications?); yeah, but 99.9% of publications reject ID (but just moment ago you said it was 100%); etc. Dealing Read More ›
Although it is widely known that Charles Darwin was a man of independent means (approximately US$10,000,000 in current money), recent historiographical studies have unearthed a new source of that money. Previously, it was thought that his wealth all derived from a shrewd marriage and wise investments. It has now come to light that a significant portion of that wealth derived from ownership of a wool factory, wool being the commodity that Darwin used to pull over the eyes of the scientific community.
Sad to say, the imperialist reactionaries against ID (e.g., ACLU and NCSE) have gotten their message out in China better than we have. See the recent report in the People’s Daily Online: http://english.people.com.cn/200509/24/eng20050924_210621.html.
MSNBC has an article titled “Why Scientists Dismiss ‘Intelligent Design'” (go here). In it, Ken Miller argues against ID, and specifically against my claim that undirected natural causes cannot generate specified complexity in biological systems. His argument focuses on the evolution of nylonase: Read More ›
SYNOPSIS: The ocean is a perilous environment for a soft-bodied creature like a sea snail, so nature gives it an advanced nanostructured armor system that is stiff and strong yet lightweight. It’s called a shell. Now MIT scientists show that nature is indeed an expert nanoengineer. For the paper go here: http://www.physorg.com/news6647.html. Imagine a world in which there is no more funding for evolutionary biologists because all the interesting work on evolution is being done by (bio)engineers.
Check out this article on ID from Sydney, Australia: http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/the-trouble-with-darwin/2005/09/23/1126982233685.html. Here’s an excerpt: Last month, the federal Minister for Education, Science and Training, Dr Brendan Nelson, gave intelligent design ministerial imprimatur, telling the National Press Club he thought parents and schools ought to have the opportunity – if they wished – for students to be exposed to intelligent design and taught about it.
My book Intelligent Design: The Bridge between Science and Theology is now out in Spanish: Diseño Inteligente: Un Puente entre la Ciencia y la TeologÃÂa. My good friend and colleague from Colombia, Daniel Andrés DÃÂaz Pachón, is the translator (occasionally he posts on this blog).
From http://www.stephenjgould.org:
The purpose of this website is to urgently organize opposition to the forces of creationism and intelligent design by providing sound scientific refutation to the argument that God is the only alternative to random evolution. Read More ›