Here’s an email from someone I banned from this blog. If you can’t see why I’ve lost all patience with people like this, then you need to be spending your time elsewhere in cyberspace.
William,
Is there the slightest possibility you might ‘open’ your ID forum to dissenting views?
You have some very dedicated apostles stroking your online […]

http://www.fields.utoronto.ca/audio/05-06/public_lectures/kadanoff

[Updated links 30nov05:
http://www.macon.com/mld/macon/news/nation/13286369.htm
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/1110AP_Creationism_Class.html]
[From a colleague:] The University of Kansas is flexing its anti-religion muscle again, this time by announcing the introduction of a new course in the Religion department: “Creationism, Intelligent Design and Other Religious Mythologies.”
To be taught by a professor of religion, no scientists allowed. God forbid that the students would hear both […]

Not much new here except for some observations about my time at Baylor, observations I was finally in a position to share, not being on the Baylor faculty anymore. –WmAD
William Dembski: An Intelligent Voice in the Design Debate
An interview by Glenda Mathes
(appeared in the 28sep05 vol24, no2
issue of Christian Renewal)
Dr. William A. Dembski is one […]

FAVORITE QUOTE: “Edwards says conservative evangelicals are responsible for the framing of the intelligent design debate. ‘Evangelicals thrive on being embattled­—their identity is tied up into being attacked and their defending principles,’ Edwards says. ‘Being attacked by science only validates their position.’”
Let me just add that being attacked by theologians like Edwards further validates my […]

[From a colleague and friend:]
D’aucuns disent aveugle l’horloger qui a concu la vie, mais c’est son horologe
qui nous frappe tous de cecite: les uns aveugles par tant d’intelligence, les
autres etant les pires aveugles parce qu’ils n’en veulent rien voir.
[Some call blind the watchmaker who conceived of life, but it is his watch that
strikes all of […]

In September, Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show devoted several programs to the topic of evolution (”Evolution, Schmevolution — Who’s Right, Who’s Full of It”). What’s more, I appeared on one of those programs (go here and here).
In those programs, Stewart & Co. had some lines that were not only funny but also memorable. The […]

Critics of ID often charge that unless we have explicit knowledge of the designer, we cannot infer design. Thomas Reid, in critiquing David Hume, showed that this charge is unfounded. To see this, go here.

Benjamin Franklin realized that software is eternal two centuries before Alan Turing came to that realization. As a young man in 1728, Franklin composed his own mock epitaph, which read:
The Body of
B. Franklin
Printer;
Like the Cover of an old Book,
Its Contents torn out,
And stript of its Lettering and Gilding,
Lies here, Food for Worms.
But the Work shall […]

The transcripts for the American Enterprise Institute’s October 21, 2005 shindig on ID (”Science Wars: Should Schools Teach Intelligent Design?”) are now available here: http://www.aei.org/events/filter.all,eventID.1169/transcript.asp.

Let me encourage you to think seriously about supporting this organization: http://www.scimednet.org. Its mission statement is “To challenge the adequacy of scientific materialism as an explanation of reality.”

[From a colleague:] There’s an interesting article in the American Scientist from last year that is worth revisiting. It examines whether the genetic code is optimized for reducing the impact of point mutations. Apparently it is according to the author. Given that there are exponentially large numbers of potential codon usages, if the […]

Ask yourself, Why do biological systems exhibit molecular machines at the smallest level permissible by the properties of matter? “Evolution” provides less and less a convincing answer.
Molecular motors
9 November 2005
http://www.iop.org/EJ/news/-topic=1009
A new special issue of Journal of Physics: Condensed Matter edited by Joseph Klafter and Michael Urbakh contains invited papers from some of the world’s […]

I’ve reported on this blog about the current president of Cornell, Hunter Rawlings, and his recent diatribe against ID (search under “Rawlings” on this blog). Interestingly, the past president of Cornell, Frank Rhodes was very much in the same mold. I heard him speak at a C. S. Lewis Foundation event at Cambridge in 1994 […]

[From a colleague:] Last night CNN devoted almost 45 minutes to the ID controversy. CNN’s Religion and Values correspondent Delia Gallagher did the segment on Paula Zahn Now. Most of the show consisted of the usual spin, but Mike Behe got lots of air time and came across well. My favorite part […]

Let me say very clearly here that I’m not denying the EXISTENCE of slam-dunk credible evidence for evolution. What I’m denying is the existence of credible PEOPLE to inform me of this evidence.
http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2005/11/intelligent_des_1.html

Students join debate on intelligent design
Campus clubs set up to defend concept
By Lisa Anderson
Tribune national correspondent
Published November 25, 2005
ITHACA, N.Y. — Dappled with autumn leaves, the manicured campus of an Ivy League university in upstate New York may seem far from the cornfields of Kansas or the rural towns of central Pennsylvania, but it represents […]

Intelligent Design Network Australia — www.idnet.com.au. The unveiling of this website coincides with the distribution of Unlocking the Mystery of Life to 3000 high schools.

Thomas Lessl: Science and Rhetoric
Interviewed by Paul Newall
http://www.galilean-library.org/lessl.html
Thomas Lessl is Associate Professor in the Department of Speech
Communication at the University of Georgia. His work involves the rhetoric
of science, looking in particular at the meeting of science with the public
sphere. I was fortunate enough to be able to ask him some general questions
about rhetoric as well […]

[Update 11/23/05:] The following email is self-explanatory. I had posted it previously, but then withdrew it because it seemed that the rebuttal might still be published. It’s now been weeks and it still hasn’t happened. Note that I’ve blogged about the BAAS before (go here).
Dr. Dembski,
In the recent past the BAAS editor was […]

http://web.media.mit.edu/~picard/RUR2.html

Let me humbly suggest that CNN puchase a copy of my book The Design Inference (Cambridge University Press, 1998) to determine whether its explanation for the “X” that flashed over the VPs face during his speech holds up. In particular, what are the odds that this program glitch just happened to kick in right as […]

Here’s the home page of the professor offering this course: http://members.aol.com/pmirecki/pmcv.htm
U. of Kansas Offers Creationism Study
Tuesday, November 22, 2005
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,176354,00.html
LAWRENCE, Kan. — Creationism and intelligent design are going to be studied at the University of Kansas, but not in the way advocated by opponents of the theory of evolution.

Check out the following review of Bernard D’Abrera’s wonderful book on butterflies:
http://www.designinference.com/documents/2001.12.dAbrera_review.htm. Below
is my favorite picture in the book (p. 60; note the caption; emphasis in the original):

The so-called leaf butterfly, Kallima limborgi not
pretending to be a leaf! Malaysai, 1992.

The power of evolution to bring about remarkable biological designs never ceases to amaze me. Scratch that. The power of evolution to delude its followers into thinking it can bring about remarkable biological designs never ceases to amaze me. That’s better.
Butterfly’s Navigation Secret Revealed in Flight Simulator
By LiveScience Staff
http://www.livescience.com/animalworld/050504_butterfly_navigation.html
The monarch butterfly is known to use […]

The Darwin exhibition frightening off corporate sponsors
By Nicholas Wapshott in New York
(Filed: 20/11/2005)
An exhibition celebrating the life of Charles Darwin has failed to find a corporate sponsor because American companies are anxious not to take sides in the heated debate between scientists and fundamentalist Christians over the theory of evolution.
The entire $3 million (£1.7 million) […]

The battle of Intelligent Design vs. evolution is popularly cast as Christianity vs. science, religion vs. Enlightenment. At the nation’s largest Baptist university, the battle is Christian vs. Christian, and all the bloodier. . . . MORE

Paul Myers, the Foghorn Leghorn of evolutionary thinkers, offered the following memorable quote a few months back. I preserve it here for the record books. Let the humiliation of ID proponents continue and intensify.

Mark Psiaki comments at length on Cornell University President Hunter Rawlings’s state of the university address criticizing ID: http://www.rso.cornell.edu/idea/rawlings_speech_w_mlp_comments.pdf. For earlier postings on Hunter Rawlings’s address, search under “Rawlings” on this blog.

From: “Biosciences” [biosciences @mail.medicine.uiowa.edu]
To: [select U of Iowa faculty — ID proponents were bypassed]
Dear colleagues:
The issue of “Intelligent Design” has received a great deal of attention in recent months. Local interest in this issue spawned a recent panel discussion “Intelligent Design: in your classroom?” sponsored by the student group, U of I Freethinkers. The […]