For those in the Washington, DC area, the Discovery Institute announced the following on their public website:
Author Lecture with Jonathan Wells

You are invited to meet Jonathan Wells for a special reception, discussion and booksigning at Discovery Institute’s Washington DC office, located at 1015 Fifteenth Street, NW Suite 900, on Wednesday, October 11th from 5:30 to […]

The Darwinists have had your young people long enough to shape, subvert, and corrupt. Send them to www.overwhelmingevidence.com and mobilize this sleeping giant! The old guard is not going to change. The hope of the future lies with our youth. The new overwhelmingevidence.com site is modeled on Xanga and Myspace and aimed at concentrating the […]

In the comments box to my post of yesterday, someone wrote re Hugh Ross speaking at the ID conference in Toronto:
I also find folks like Hugh Ross who’s speaking there in Toronto somewhat unsavory (if I may use such a word). He should be a big supporter of Intelligent Design, yet his article in the […]

Tom English challenged me with this:
I say categorically, as someone who has worked in evolutionary computation for 15 years, that Gil does not understand what he is talking about. This is not to say that he is trying to mislead anyone. It is simply clear that he has never grasped the nature of a simulation […]

Since many IDEA members read this weblog and this could be a point of confusion for other readers, I wanted to clarify something. Thomas D. English is a part of the IDEA Center Advisory Board. Thomas M. English is the Tom English that frequents Uncommon Descent.

BIll Dembski wrote,
E.O. Wilson thinks that after years of reaming religious believers he can now ingratiate himself with them. Fine. Let him and his colleagues give up their monopoly on the teaching and government funding of materialistic evolutionary theories.
Can E. O. Wilson really save the world?
Ivan Semeniuk
New Scientist, 30 September 2006
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/opinion/mg19125711.300-can-e-o-wilson-really-save-the-world.html
Often cited as Darwin’s true […]

This just in from a colleague and posted with his permission. For the record:

I did not withdraw from the Dover case — the Thomas More Law Center fired me over a perceived conflict of interest relating to my role as academic editor of the Foundation for Thought and Ethics (the publisher of the book in […]

The Public Expression of Religion Act of 2005 passed by a 244-173 house vote Tuesday. The bill bans the award of attorney fees in establishment clause cases (like Kitzmiller v. Dover). The ACLU has turned establishment clause cases into a cottage industry for underemployed lawyers. Naturally, they are quite alarmed at this […]

E.O. Wilson thinks that after years of reaming religious believers he can now ingratiate himself with them. Fine. Let him and his colleagues give up their monopoly on the teaching and government funding of materialistic evolutionary theories.
Can E. O. Wilson really save the world?
Ivan Semeniuk
New Scientist, 30 September 2006
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/opinion/mg19125711.300-can-e-o-wilson-really-save-the-world.html
Often cited as Darwin’s true […]

All computational evolutionary algorithms artificially isolate the effects of random mutation on the underlying machinery: the CPU instruction set, operating system, and algorithmic processes responsible for the replication process.
If the blind-watchmaker thesis is correct for biological evolution, all of these artificial constraints must be eliminated. Every aspect of the simulation, both hardware and software, must […]

Dawkins says
Given that 93% of the National Academy does not believe in any kind of personal god, a statistician would expect that at least some members of Congress, if not a majority, would also be atheists. Yet, as far as I can discover, the number of avowed atheists among the 535 members of Congress is […]

A more apt title for Dawkins’ tome, based on his essay describing it, would be The Dawkins Delusion.
More pap from it:
If, as Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel once playfully speculated, life on this planet was deliberately seeded by a payload of bacteria in the nose cone of a rocket, we still need an explanation for […]

Dawkins says
Lamentably, the scientific education of most British and American students omits all mention of Darwinism, and therefore the only alternative to chance that most people can imagine is design.
Hello? Earth to Richard Dawkins. Do you copy?
From What Do The State Science Standards Say About Evolution and Intelligent Design?
The Education Week Review
According to […]

In the extreme, it never arrives at all. A case in point below.
Dawkins says
Intelligent, creative, complex, statistically improbable things come late into the universe, as the product of evolution or some other process of gradual escalation from simple beginnings. They come late into the universe and therefore cannot be responsible for designing it.
In Dawkins’ […]

________________
Quantum computers are a reality and they indirectly speak to the issue of intelligent design and the Many Worlds Interpretation (MWI) of Quantum Mechanics.

Richard Dawkins says
As an outsider, I observe American culture polarizing fast, and religion is at the center of the action.
Side note: Dawkins’ essay disappeared from his website after 3 days. I wonder if the thumbsters will accuse him of deleting embarrassing articles as they accuse us of doing? Something tells me Dawkins’ […]

Leave it to Jonathan Wells to tell it like it is:
. . . The truth is Darwinism is not a scientific theory, but a materialistic creation myth masquerading as science. It is first and foremost a weapon against religion – especially traditional Christianity. Evidence is brought in afterwards, as window dressing.
This is becoming increasingly obvious […]

A colleague of mine added Of Pandas and People to the Wikipedia’s list of Banned Books at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banned_books. It clearly qualifies under the American Library Association’s definition of a successfully challenged book:
A challenge is an attempt to remove or restrict materials, based upon the objections of a person or group. A banning is the removal […]

the presence of a creative deity in the universe is clearly a scientific hypothesis. Indeed, it is hard to imagine a more momentous hypothesis in all of science….the God Hypothesis is a proper scientific hypothesis
Richard Dawkins

Whoa!

Here’s a first in Canada, maybe: A conference at the University of Toronto (September 29-20, 2006) on intelligent design and the universe/life that is not just the usual “God and science” snore - at least the organizers will do everything in their power to keep it from being the usual theistic evolution cop-out snooze. Here’s […]

To help us see what random mutation and natural selection can really do, this book takes an unusual approach. In order to get a realistic idea of the power of Darwinian evolution, it leaves behind most of the popular images—dinosaurs, wooly mammoths, pretty Galapagos finches—to focus mainly on the invisible foundation of biology, the molecular […]

ID is quietly advancing in the mother state of one-fourth of the American Presidents. I do not know if the advance of ID in Virginia means anything to Richard Dawkins, but 4 of his 17 scheduled stops in his God Delusion world-wide book tour will be in the Virginia/DC area! Coincidence?

A key problem with the argument over Darwinian evolution (evolution by natural selection acting on random mutations) is that so few actual examples of speciation (new species forming) have ever been observed that we really have no way of knowing for sure whether Darwin had the right idea.
I suspect that explains precisely why acceptance of […]

No friend to religion, Andrew Brown nonetheless says that Richard Dawkins’s “incurious and rambling” diatribe against religion “doesn’t come close to explaining how faith has survived the assault of Darwinism, opening with
It has been obvious for years that Richard Dawkins had a fat book on religion in him, but who would have thought him capable of […]

Over at Evolution News and Views there is a notice about a new organization in the UK, Truth in Science, that seeks “…to promote good science education in the UK. Our initial focus will be on the origin of life and its diversity.”
From their website:
For many years, much of what has been taught in school […]

I first got interested in alligators when I discovered, from zoologist Norbert Smith, that the “reptilian brain” theory - according to which alligators cannot show emotion because the mammalian brain (which they don’t have) must evolve first - can’t be true.
Alligators are quite capable of showing emotion or curiosity about anything that they are capable […]

Paul Nelson spent yesterday morning in the editorial offices of Dagbladet, the main daily newspaper in Oslo, and fielded reader’s questions via the Internet. Approximately 1,000 emails came in. Here is the exchange: http://www.dagbladet.no/nyheter/2006/09/20/477320.html.
Note that the title of the Dagbladet piece, “Hadde Darwin Rett?” means “Was Darwin Right?”

There’s a big “evolution of religion” conference coming up in Hawaii: http://www.evolutionofreligion.org/index.php. Daniel Dennett is among the featured speakers. Here’s a brief description of another featured speaker:
On Sunday evening the Rev. Michael Dowd, who has been called “North America’s evolutionary evangelist,” will share his experience of teaching and preaching a sacred, meaningful view of cosmic, […]

I just learned that Frank Beckwith has been awarded tenure at Baylor. This is a huge development for Baylor, signifying a decisive reversal for the forces of secularization that have done everything in their power of undermine Baylor’s Christian identity. Note that Frank was opposed because of his openness to ID (not outright support) and […]

I’m informed that simple blockquotes are dangerous when trying to stay in Google’s good graces. I’m also informed that providing a comment in front of a blockquote, which thus constitutes new material, is a way of keeping Google happy. Hence this comment. The blockquote below is self-explanatory.
Not in Our Classrooms: Why Intelligent Design Is […]

I came across this quote from 1906 today: 
“Each of us was, at the beginning of his existence, a simple globule of protoplasm, surrounded by a membrane, about 1/120 of an inch in diameter, with a firmer nucleus inside it.” 
Ernst Haeckel, Last Words on Evolution (London: A. Owen & Co., 1906). 
One wonders if the process that […]