Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

The Google Problem

The reason we have been excluded from Google’s index is several mirror sites that automatically copy and republish our content have sprung up. In the past there was only one such mirror site which is Wesley Elsberry’s at http://antievolution.org/buud/ To address this I am going to post a copyright message at the bottom of our webpage saying that all content here is copyright and may not be reproduced without permission. I will then explicitely warn Wesley Elsberry and other mirrors that they are in violation of the law and will copy the warning mail to the abuse address of their respective ISPs that I expect the violations to end immediately. I will also undertake the task of modifying our blog Read More ›

[Off topic:] Google says we no longer exist.

www.uncommondescent.com no longer comes up on Google searches, though it still comes up on Technorati searches. No action was taken on this blog to block search engines from indexing our content. This is all very curious.

Paul Nelson in Oslo, Norway

Paul Nelson will be speaking at the University of Oslo in the afternoon, and then at the Rikshospitalet auditorium in the evening: 21 September 2006 14.15-16.00 University of Oslo Auditorium 2, Georg Sverdrups Hus Blindern “Is Intelligent Design a Theory of Biological Science?” Seminar leader: Professor Nils Roll-Hansen, Univ of Oslo 19.00-21.15 Rikshospitalet Medical Faculty Auditorium “Why Biology Points to Intelligent Design” Seminar leader: Espen Heen Respondent: Prof. Johan F. Storm

Student Video on ID

FIRST PRIZE WINNER Middle School Caitie Adams, Hillary Wood & Anna Viterisi, 8th “Science or Faith: Intelligent Design in Public Schools” Lora Batchelor Middle School Bloomington, IN Insight Communications Air Date: 4/11/06 | Watch Interview Source: http://www.studentcam.org/winners_2006.asp.

A Reply to Mark Frank

Carlos, Mark Frank, and I were discussing design detection over at Alan Fox’s blog, Languedoc Diary, last week when a mountain of work I had allowed to pile up forced me to take a short blogging sabbatical. Well, I’m back (for the moment at least), and I thought I’d post my response to Mark’s last comment here at UD.
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A Mathematician’s View of Evolution

If you haven’t run into this essay from The Mathematical Intelligencer by mathematician Granville Sewell, I recommend it. In a concise and easily accessible fashion he summarizes why a mathematician might be driven to skepticism about orthodox Darwinian theory. I continue to find it entertaining that many Darwinists are convinced that only religious fanatics, the uneducated, and/or not-very-brights don’t buy their arguments.

Is Evolution Repeatable?

One of our commenters here, trrll, made the oft-cited claim that evolution is unrepeatable. I asked what evidence there is of this and he made some unsubstantiated claims. Because of the frequency of such claims here I asked that he back them up before he comments here again. As of now the result of my request is the sound of crickets chirping. To be fair, perhaps trrll didn’t see my last response. If not he’s sure to see this. I posted a paper on the sidebar back in January written by Jean Staune titled Non Darwinian Evolution. Professor Dembski had originally linked to it as an article but I thought it important enough to make a permanent link to it Read More ›

How does natural selection do it? No, this is not a rhetorical question!

Ferns provide model for tiny motors powered by evaporation

Scientists looked to ferns to create a novel energy scavenging device that uses the power of evaporation to move itself — materials that could provide a method for powering micro and nano devices with just water or heat.

“We’ve shown that this idea works,” said Michel Maharbiz, assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science and principal investigator in the group that built the device. “If you build these things they will move. The key is to show that you can generate electricity from this.”

As often happens, the research started while doctoral student Ruba Borno was exploring another idea entirely. Borno was interested in mimicking biological devices, specifically microchannels that plants use to transport water, so Maharbiz gave her a book on plants.

But something else in the book caught her attention – the section on how ferns spread their spores.

“It’s essentially a microactuator,” said Maharbiz, meaning that the fern sporangium transforms one form of energy, in this case heat via the evaporation of water, into motion. When the cells in the outer wall of the sporangium were water logged, the sporangium remained closed like a fist, storing the spores safely inside. But when the water in the outer wall evaporated, it caused the sporangium to unfurl and eject the spores into the environment.

The researchers examined some fern leaves under a microscope. They found that when exposed to light or heat or any evaporation-inducing event, the sporangia opened and released the spores.

“Once we saw that, we thought, ‘Oh, we have to build that,'” Maharbiz said. Read More ›

Are wiki-textbooks going to make room for ID?

Who needs paper? Online texts could be cheaper So, what’s this Global Text Project about? It’s an effort to pool the knowledge of university professors and students around the globe and produce 1,000 university textbooks using wiki technology. The books will span undergraduate subjects from biology to literature to computer science. There are millions of university teachers around the world and tens of millions of students, whose knowledge could be put to greater use, says project instigator Rick Watson at the University of Georgia in Athens. Countless essays and assignments are currently consigned to the waste bin. “It’s an untapped intellectual resource.” … Source: http://www.nature.com/news/2006/060911/full/060911-13.html

Darwinism: A House Divided

Here’s an illuminating book review. We are increasingly seeing two streams of Darwinism — one which says there’s no problem reconciling it with religion; the other which sees the two as completely incompatible. As the reviewer notes: “Stanovich takes the hard line that accepting darwinism has to mean opposing virtually all religious beliefs. He praises fundamentalists as recognizing this point while arguing that mainline churches do not see the incompatibility of science with religion.”  
 

Book Review: A rebellious revolution
Gordon M. Burghardt
Trends in Ecology & Evolution, Volume 21, Issue 10 , October 2006, Pages 537-538

Keith E. Stanovich, The Robot’s Rebellion: Finding Meaning in an Age of Darwin, University of Chicago Press (2005) ISBN 0 226 77125 3 US$18.00 pbk (374 pages). Read More ›

ID exam question: When does design become obvious? And a challenge: Write a meaningful English sentence with the greatest number of alliterative M’s.

In the last sentence of my last UD post I wrote: “A microbe did not mysteriously mutate into Mozart and his music, and most people, thankfully, are smart enough to figure out that this is a silly idea.” In a comment I asked: “Is the ‘m’ alliteration in the last sentence of my post by design or by chance? Did you detect it? Explain.” In a follow-up comment I challenged: “Had I written, ‘A microbe did not mysteriously mutate into Mozart and his music, and most people, mercifully, are much too smart to swallow this silly idea,’ would you have detected alliterative design? How many alliterative M’s would it take to make design an obvious, slam-dunk conclusion? Explain.” No one Read More ›

Backgrounder on ID-friendly law prof: Tenure still hangs in balance

Recall Frank Beckwith, that gifted prof at Baylor, who specializes in church-state issues, who was mysteriously denied tenure recently?

Beckwith appealed, was turned down again* – by a narrower margin, it is said – and a decision is expected shortly. What’s come out since the first denial is that his former department chair, who is believed to have undermined Beckwith’s tenure chances, recently resigned amid allegations that he plagiarized the work of Ronald Numbers , a well-known American scholar, best known for his studies of creationism.

As World‘s Mark Bergin notes,

Beckwith is among academia’s foremost pro-life advocates and has written articles supporting the constitutionality of teaching intelligent design. The tenure committee accused him of inappropriately focusing on such areas of expertise in his courses on church-state relations. In his appeal of tenure denial, Beckwith responded that “because these ethical issues are central to the most important and disputed questions in church-state studies today, it seems to me to be not only permissible, but obligatory, for a professor in this area of study to address these issues.”

Well, um, yes. Anyone in the news business knows that stories about abortion or intelligent design lead over the mast. Should Beckwith have asked students to wade through tomes on interstate trucking rules instead? How about “Proper venting for turnips in transit – a federal or state responsibility?” or “Bovine-produced methane gas in re current environment regulations”? Read More ›

What Did the Pope Really Say?

I’m sure you’re all well aware of the very angry reaction of the Muslim world to the remarks that Pope Benedict made the other day. Well, I’ve read the text of his remarks: lo, and behold, his reference to the criticism of Mohammed by a 14th century emporer were, as they say, “taken out of context”. It’s remarkable.

The entire lecture focused rather on the relationship between faith and reason. In the end, it was a critique of what might be termed “scientism”: that is, “the use of human reason in accordance with the dictates of the scientific method is the highest use of intelligence possible”, thus rendering philosophy and theology merely reason’s “step-children”: to be tolerated, but not paid attention to.

The Pope makes one remark that, in the context of the Pope’s recently ballyhooed week-long retreat focusing on evolution, takes on considerable import. From an ID perspective, you know exactly what the Pope is trying to tell the methodological naturalists out there in general, and the Darwinists in particular.

Here’s the quote:

Modern scientific reason quite simply has to accept the rational structure of matter and the correspondence between our spirit and the prevailing rational structures of nature as a given, on which its methodology has to be based. Yet the question why this has to be so is a real question, and one which has to be remanded by the natural sciences to other modes and planes of thought: to philosophy and theology.

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When Improbabilities Become Exponentially Improbable

The first insight I had into the nonsensical nature of the random mutation (RM) part of the RM plus natural selection (NS) hypothesis came through my mathematical studies and experience in software engineering. See here for some probabilistic calculations about the most simple of all computer programs. Of course, Darwinists always ask, How can you know that RM+NS can’t account for all of life? The answer is simple, and it’s called probabilistic combinatorics. The underlying biochemical and information-driven functions of living systems are tightly integrated and controlled by an unimaginably complex, sophisticated, fault-tolerant, self-repairing, self-replicating computer program. Components of such a system cannot be altered to produce significant innovation without the simultaneous, coordinated alteration of the components with which they Read More ›

Does the Pope oppose the blind watchmaker thesis?

Here is the link to the full Vatican Radio published transcript of the Pope’s Regensburg address Sept 12th 2006 together with a relevant extract: http://www.oecumene.radiovaticana.org/en1/Articolo.asp?c=94805 We believe in God. This is a fundamental decision on our part. But is such a thing still possible today? Is it reasonable? From the Enlightenment on, science, at least in part, has applied itself to seeking an explanation of the world in which God would be unnecessary. And if this were so, he would also become unnecessary in our lives. But whenever the attempt seemed to be nearing success – inevitably it would become clear: something is missing from the equation! When God is subtracted, something doesn’t add up for man, the world, the Read More ›