America and the Barbary Pirates:
An International Battle Against an Unconventional Foe
by Gerard W. Gawalt

Gerard W. Gawalt is the manuscript specialist for early American history in the Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.

Ruthless, unconventional foes are not new to the United States of America. More than two hundred years ago the newly established United States made its first attempt to fight an overseas battle to protect its private citizens by building an international coalition against an unconventional enemy. Then the enemies were pirates and piracy. The focus of the United States and a proposed international coalition was the Barbary Pirates of North Africa.

Pirate ships and crews from the North African states of Tripoli, Tunis, Morocco, and Algiers (the Barbary Coast) were the scourge of the Mediterranean. Capturing merchant ships and holding their crews for ransom provided the rulers of these nations with wealth and naval power. In fact, the Roman Catholic Religious Order of Mathurins had operated from France for centuries with the special mission of collecting and disbursing funds for the relief and ransom of prisoners of Mediterranean pirates. Read More ›

Emile Zuckerkandl, an erstwhile co-author with Linus Pauling, just got accepted a very long piece attacking ID in GENE (go here): Gene Article in Press, Accepted Manuscript doi:10.1016/j.gene.2006.03.025 Copyright  © 2006 Published by Elsevier B.V. Intelligent design and biological complexity Emile Zuckerkandl Department of Biological Sciences, Stanford University and Institute of Molecular Medical Sciences, P.O.Box 20452, Stanford, California 94309 Received 16 October 2005; accepted 15 March 2006. Available online 5 August 2006. ABSTRACT. Before any intelligence can appear, a world endowed with the potential for being experienced as a body of phenomena has to be existent. Indeed, if there is to be an intelligence, there first has to be something intelligible. Hence, when an intelligence is present, “creation” must already Read More ›

Scientist: Dolphins are stupid
Thursday 17 August 2006 12:29 PM GMT

Dolphins are not as clever as previously thought. Dolphins may have big brains, but a South African-based scientist says laboratory rats and even goldfish can outwit them.

Paul Manger of Johannesburg’s University of the Witwatersrand says the super-sized brains of dolphins are a function of being warm-blooded in a cold water environment and not a sign of intelligence.

“We equate our big brain with intelligence. Over the years we have looked at these kinds of things and said the dolphins must be intelligent,” he said.

“The real flaw in this logic is that it suggests all brains are built the same… When you look at the structure of the dolphin brain, you see it is not built for complex information processing,” he said. Read More ›

Interestingly enough, dyed in the wool chance worshippers apply theories of chance even when it means denying things that make perfect sense in light of common descent.

Case in point is Nick Matzke’s article on Panda’s Thumb entitled You *can* teach an old dog new tricks.  In it he expresses amazement at how a dog cancer cell evidently acquired the *new* capability of becoming a free living parasite able to move from dog to dog. Read More ›

The intelligent design movement has celebrated ID-friendly developments within the Roman Catholic Church. A comparably important development is the ascendancy of ID within the insular enclaves of creationism.
Read More ›

If Darwinism is not failing, why would Darwinists now want to evade the name they accepted for nearly 150 years? Yes! Despite a clear history of a century and a half of acceptance, a key Darwinist actually did his best to make it sound like an insult. Read on!

Some wonder why I, a mere journalist, sense that Darwinism is doomed.

Well, I observe and interview people and study how they behave.

One curious fact is that the venerable term Darwinist now makes Darwinists uncomfortable.

This problem hit the top of my intray last year a Canadian church bureaucrat took me to task  because, she insisted that  in By Design or by Chance?, I was “following the ID lead” when I used the term “Darwinism.”

Now, in the early stages of research, I had made a careful study of the terminology used in the debate. I knew that “Darwinism” was commonly used among Darwinian evolutionists – probably only because Darwinism (and Darwinist) is easier and briefer.

So at the time, I dismissed the churchcrat summarily by pointing out the following:

Read More ›

Casey Luskin noted a while back at Evolution News that a recent article in Nature noted that many universes theory is not testable:

Since the early 1980s, some cosmologists have argued that multiple universes could have formed during a period of cosmic inflation that preceded the Big Bang. More recently, string theorists have calculated that there could be 10 [to the]500 universes, which is more than the number of atoms in our observable Universe. Under these circumstances, it becomes more reasonable to assume that several would turn out like ours. It’s like getting zillions and zillions of darts to throw at the dart board, Susskind says. “Surely, a large number of them are going to wind up in the target zone.” And of course, we exist in our particular Universe because we couldn’t exist anywhere else. It’s an intriguing idea with just one problem, says Gross: “It’s impossible to disprove.” Because our Universe is, almost by definition, everything we can observe, there are no apparent measurements that would confirm whether we exist within a cosmic landscape of multiple universes, or if ours is the only one. And because we can’t falsify the idea, Gross says, it isn’t science. (Geoff Brumfiel, “Outrageous Fortune,” Nature, Vol 439:10-12 (January 5, 2006).)

But, Luskin writes, “National Academy of Sciences member and Nobel Laureate Leonard Susskind was given print-space–in fact he had a highlighted box-quote–saying that we should not reject the multi-verse hypothesis on the grounds that it isn’t testable.”

Nature reports:

Susskind, too, finds it “deeply, deeply troubling” that there’s no way to test the principle. But he is not yet ready to rule it out completely. “It would be very foolish to throw away the right answer on the basis that it doesn’t conform to some criteria for what is or isn’t science,” he says. (Geoff Brumfiel, “Outrageous Fortune,” Nature, Vol 439:10-12 (January 5, 2006)

I love it! “It would be very foolish to throw away the right answer on the basis that it doesn’t conform to some criteria for what is or isn’t science …” Why so foolish? Because, while it doesn’t conform to science, it does conform to materialism? Read More ›

Someone recently brownbagged me this: Apparently, a shrill screed has been accepted for the science journal Gene on “Intelligent design and biological complexity”, announcing that Europe so far blissfully seems to have remained relatively immune to the intellectual virus named “intelligent design”. This virus certainly is a problem in the country in which I have lived over the last thirty years, the United States, where about 40% of the people are said to believe that evolution never took place, that evolution is just a theory, not a fact, and a wrong theory at that. To give themselves an edge, the “creationists” – the dominant stripe of anti-evolutionists in the United States — have decided some years ago (Pennock, 2003) to dress Read More ›

“sophophile”  wonders whether I’ll reconsider my statement that Darwin doesn’t matter if Michael Shermer has to write a book on why he matters – on the basis of sophophile’s research into book titles. [sophophile: Oh, WHY don’t these people have proper names? Isn’t this “Internet handle” thing becoming a bit childish after all these years?]  At any rate, sophophile  writes: Denyse O’Leary insists: First, I find the title of Shermer’s book interesting. If Darwin really mattered, Shermer wouldn’t be writing a book insisting that he does. Let’s test that reasoning on a few other book titles taken from Amazon.com: Why Religion Matters Class Matters Why Gender Matters Science Matters Why Geography Matters Race Matters Why Sinatra Matters Culture Matters Why New Orleans Read More ›

In a recent book, Michael Shermer, who ” once aspired to Christian ministry, now is one of the most hostile critics of Christianity” (according to Touchstone Magazine‘s Russell D. Moore), holds forth as follows: In a feature article in the Christian magazine Touchstone, [William] Dembski was even more direct: ‘Intelligent Design is just the Logos theory of John’s Gospel restated in the idiom of information theory.’ Make no mistake about it. Creationists and their Intelligent Design brethern do not just want equal time, they want all the time they can get. First, I find the title of Shermer’s book interesting. If Darwin really mattered, Shermer wouldn’t be writing a book insisting that he does. I mean, who writes a book called Read More ›

Read More ›

I take a very low view of “climates of opinion.” In his own subject every man knows that all discoveries are made and all errors corrected by those who ignore the “clmate of opinion.” –C. S. Lewis, THE PROBLEM OF PAIN

Two replies to the insufferable Jim Downard: (1) http://www.evolutionnews.org/2006/08/the_vampires_heart_a_response.html (2) http://www.evolutionnews.org/2006/08/anticipatory_erudition_a_respo.html On avoiding design inferences: Before you infer intelligent design, keep in mind that grass-cutting shears share an extremely high similarity with scissors which are used to cut paper. Since a paper stencil was apparently used in the origination of the grass-pattern, it’s likely that a pair of scissors was used to cut the stencil. This makes it plausible to assume that the grass-cutting shears were co-opted from scissors, because both are clearly homologous structures based upon their similarity. Moreover, paper is made of plant material, and grass a plant. This could account for the origin of the stencil itself. Finally, Virginia has metal resources which could account for the Read More ›

Read More ›

Recently, I blogged on Google videos on the ID controversy, and to entice readers, offered the video Octopus eats shark, where the eight-legged wonder surprises its keepers (octopi gave this film EIGHT thumbs up): Zoologist Norbert Smith, for whom Octopus eats shark is a favourite, offered a comment on the octopus (cephalopod) as a creature unlikely to be the victim of a stupid shark, as the zoo curators had originally assumed*: Cephalopods are certainly the most intelligent of invertebrates. While attending college, I built a 100 gallon refrigerated salt water aquarium and kept a small octopus, crabs, starfish and other tide pool critters…not an easy task for one living in western Oklahoma. The tank was divided by a vertical glass petition Read More ›