Archive for October, 2006
31 October 2006
crandaddy
South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone–two guys who are not exactly known for refraining from pushing buttons–have made an episode of the show which addresses the topic of opposition to evolution in public schools. It airs tomorrow night at 10:00 EST (9:00 PST) on Comedy Central. Go here for a synopsis […]
Posted in Culture | 13 Comments »
31 October 2006
William Dembski
Mustafa Akyol is some one you should know. Check out his blog, where he describes this latest development in Turkey: http://www.thewhitepath.com/archives/2006/10/turkish_minister_supports_intelligent_design.php.
Posted in Intelligent Design | 11 Comments »
30 October 2006
William Dembski
It’s hard to find a Darwinist more extreme than P. Z. Myers (though they do exist). Darwinian extremists like Myers are the reason these people are so hard to parody (see http://cedros.globat.com/~thebrites.org/index.htm, The Brites, which has temporarily closed its doors).
Have a look at Myers’s most recent escapades: http://www.townhall.com/Columnists/MikeSAdams/2006/10/30/philippians_413. I want to encourage discussion not so […]
Posted in Darwinism, Intelligent Design, Evolution | 19 Comments »
30 October 2006
scordova
Accepted July 2006
Physics of Life Reviews
[Update: thanks to Todd for a link to the full paper:]
Self-organization vs. self-ordering events in life-origin models
[Update: IDers Charles Thaxton, Walter Bradley, and R.L. Olsen were cited as well!! They wrote the book in 1984 which is considered the beginning of the modern ID movement. […]
Posted in Science, Self-Org. Theory, Comp. Sci. / Eng., Intelligent Design | 48 Comments »
29 October 2006
O'Leary
Gareth Cook’s article on the new Harvard origin of life project in the Boston Globe, reads like a press release (except for the very end where he actually quotes Michael Behe). Bill blogged on it, wondering how seriously they would take any evidence of intelligent design.
Starting with $1 million a year, we are told, Harvard […]
Posted in Intelligent Design | 28 Comments »
29 October 2006
William Dembski
How much play do you think ID is going to get in Harvard’s new origin of life initiative:
President Bush recently said intelligent design should be discussed in schools, along with evolution. Like intelligent design, the Harvard project begins with awe at the nature of life, and with an admission that, almost 150 years after Charles […]
Posted in Intelligent Design, Evolution | 8 Comments »
28 October 2006
O'Leary
Recently, an ID-friendly scientist assured me that intelligent design would easily be accepted if only the ID guys would come up with evidence. To my mind, that shows the difficulty people have in understanding what is at stake: the very question of what may count as evidence. Here is how I replied:  ÂÂ
Bench science, like book […]
Posted in Intelligent Design | 94 Comments »
27 October 2006
William Dembski
I seem to recall that Stephen Jay Gould, when pressed about his views on evolution before his death, remarked that he was a “Darwinian” or “Darwinist.” Can someone provide me with the exact quote as well as with the exact reference? (The context: I’m writing about punctuated equilibrium being at best a slight variant of […]
Posted in Darwinism | 9 Comments »
27 October 2006
William Dembski
Earlier a link to the mp3 audio file of the Quinn v. Dawkins radio debate was posted on this blog. The following link has the transcript. Quinn provides an object lesson in how to take apart village atheists.
http://catholiceducation.org/articles/science/sc0086.htm
Posted in Darwinism, Evolution | 20 Comments »
27 October 2006
William Dembski
The Dawkins rampage against religion raises the question why religion in the first place? On strict evolutionary grounds, isn’t religion an adaptation that offers humans survival and reproductive advantages? It’s is not at all clear that atheism offers similar benefits (how many Dawkins-style village atheists were there among our hunter-gatherer ancestors?).
Consider, for instance, the […]
Posted in Darwinism, Evolution | 30 Comments »
26 October 2006
GilDodgen
I am Richard Dawkins’ worst nightmare — a former militant atheist and Darwinist, who finally realized that everything he believed about everything that mattered was wrong. My conversion came from many sources, too numerous to outline in a brief post, but one of them was reason and examination of the evidence.
Since my conversion I have […]
Posted in Religion, Intelligent Design | 67 Comments »
26 October 2006
O'Leary
At Vere loqui, Martin Cothran notes that Richard Dawkins’The God Delusion, provides ammunition to ID advocates.
ID theorists are familiar with the accusation that ID is both unfalsifiable and anyway, already falsified. (The fact that the two claims can be maintained comfortably at once illustrates the extent to which materialism and Darwinism function as ideologies. In […]
Posted in Intelligent Design | 53 Comments »
24 October 2006
William Dembski
Interesting article in WIRED on the unholy trinity Dawkins-Dennett-Harris. Their atheist extremism may be selling books but is it winning converts?
. . . The New Atheists will not let us off the hook simply because we are not doctrinaire believers. They condemn not just belief in God but respect for belief in God. Religion is […]
Posted in Science, Religion, Darwinism | 23 Comments »
24 October 2006
scordova
In preparing a letter to the editor of UVa magazine, I was researching the case of 1996 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, Richard Smalley. I was astonished to discover that he delivered an anti-Darwinian speech during a graduation ceremony and apparently received a standing ovation. I also thought it an appropriate time to remember […]
Posted in Creationism, Education | 24 Comments »
24 October 2006
O'Leary
Courtesy of the McLaurin Institute, I gave a talk last Thursday night at the Murphy Building of the University of Minnesota’s journalism school, on how North American media cover the intelligent design controversy and why the media are really the ID guys’ most useful unintentional ally - second only to Richard Dawkins, in my view. […]
Posted in Intelligent Design | 2 Comments »
23 October 2006
GilDodgen
ID proponents are often accused of using “God-of-the-gaps†arguments. Of course, there are positive arguments for inferences to design in the natural world, but Del Ratzsch makes an interesting point about gap arguments in this interview.
He comments:
…the SETI program is a gap-searching project — trying to find signals which nature alone couldn’t or wouldn’t produce, […]
Posted in Intelligent Design | 38 Comments »
23 October 2006
William Dembski
Blogger David Anderson, who has a first-class degree in Mathematics from Oxford University, is putting a bit of pressure on the British Centre for Science Education, quite successfully, it seems. He has uncovered good evidence that they have been less than forthright in the course of some recent parliamentary lobbying:
http://bcse-revealed.blogspot.com
Posted in Science, Education | 8 Comments »
23 October 2006
O'Leary
Marilynne Robinson, author of Gilead, which won both the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and 2005 National Book Critics Circle award, says what needs to be said, and no more, about Oxford Professor of the Public Understanding of Science Richard Dawkins’ inane crusade against religion And she says it brilliantly in “Hysterical scientism: The ecstasy […]
Posted in Intelligent Design | 15 Comments »
22 October 2006
William Dembski
In reading the following, keep in mind that evolutionists who put out this drivel are themselves evolutionary dead ends, destined for the dustbin of history:
Evolutionary theorist Oliver Curry of the London School of Economics expects a genetic upper class and a dim-witted underclass to emerge.
The human race would peak in the year 3000, he […]
Posted in Darwinism, Evolution | 27 Comments »
20 October 2006
William Dembski
The first paragraph of the following quote appeared in a comment to Gil Dodgen’s post on the Quinn v. Dawkins debate on Irish radio. The succeeding paragraph is quite illuminating and included here. Question: What evidence (since Dawkins is so big on evidence) would help us to decide whether attributing responsibility to others for their […]
Posted in Darwinism, Intelligent Design, Evolution | 90 Comments »
20 October 2006
crandaddy
At least I hope it’s just confusion. If not, then it looks an awful lot like persecution of a man for his personal views. To see what I’m talking about, go here. It’s stuff like this that makes me glad to see that a rival to Wikipedia is “days away from launching” […]
Posted in Intelligent Design | 21 Comments »
20 October 2006
Patrick
When it comes to discussing open systems aren’t we getting a little ahead of ourselves here? There are still some very basic problems to solve before getting into hand-waving over the evolution of computers and human minds.
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/0605863103v1
Solutions with as little as 1% enantiomeric excess (ee) of D- or L-phenylalanine are amplified to 90% ee […]
Posted in Self-Org. Theory, Darwinism, Biology, Evolution | 13 Comments »
20 October 2006
Scottus
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hO9OFOcdB0Q
Enjoy.
Posted in Just For Fun | 16 Comments »
19 October 2006
GilDodgen
Sorry for the serial posts, but so much is happening. David Quinn, a well-known Catholic commentator and journalist in Ireland recently debated Richard Dawkins on Irish radio.
Dawkins comments in the debate: “I’m not interested in free will… Just as before Darwin, biology was a mystery — Darwin solved that…”
David Quinn is one sharp cookie. (I […]
Posted in Intelligent Design | 19 Comments »
19 October 2006
GilDodgen
For those who are convinced that Darwinism has no meaningful philosophical or theological implications I offer the following quotes from biology textbooks. Special thanks go to ID colleague Casey Luskin.
Posted in Intelligent Design | 13 Comments »
19 October 2006
GilDodgen
In a previous UD post I commented on an article by mathematician Granville Sewell, “A Mathematician’s View of Evolution.†Since then Granville and I have corresponded and he forwarded a follow-up piece entitled, “Can Anything Happen in an Open System?”
The essence of the thesis is as follows:
If an increase in order is extremely improbable when […]
Posted in Intelligent Design | 42 Comments »
19 October 2006
scordova
I mentioned earlier my delight that the GMU Provost was willing to put his good name behind Francis Collins book tour: GMU Provost hosts The Language of God.
Well, the talk happened and it was amazing! Francis Collins gave his Christian testimony tonight pretty much along the lines of his book. He recounted […]
Posted in Intelligent Design | 50 Comments »
18 October 2006
Patrick
http://www.ffame.org/sbenner/cochembiol8.672-689.pdf
The opening discussion:
To decide whether life has a common chemical plan, we must decide what life is. A panel assembled by NASA in 1994 was one of many groups to ponder this question. The panel defined life as a ‘chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution’ [16]. This definition, which follows an earlier definition by Sagan […]
Posted in Self-Org. Theory, Science, Comp. Sci. / Eng., Darwinism, Biology, Evolution | 54 Comments »
18 October 2006
William Dembski
George Levine has a new book, Darwin Loves You. The book is silly and superficial, and would not be worth notice except that it serves as Exhibit A for the fact that Darwinism has become a religion, or at least, a “comprehensive doctrine” in the sense of Rawls (John, not Lou), and hence NOT something […]
Posted in Darwinism, Evolution | 8 Comments »
18 October 2006
O'Leary
Non-Darwinian evolutionary biologists may start to speak up in greater numbers as more ID conferences are held. An ID conference sometimes spotlights those who do not want to be called Darwinists or Darwinians, irrespective of their views on ID.
Readers may recall that at our University of Toronto ID conference a couple of weekends ago, I […]
Posted in Intelligent Design | 8 Comments »
18 October 2006
scordova
The Sci Phi Show interview with Michael Behe is now available! Check it out!
Here is the link Michael Behe on Sci Phi Show.
Posted in Intelligent Design | 2 Comments »