Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

“Case For a Creator” Event at Biola University

Want to hobnob with Lee Strobel, Craig Hazen, Jay Richards, JP Moreland, John Bloom, William Lane Craig, Jonathan Wells, Steve Meyer and Michael Behe on December 7? There is no charge and attendees will be offered a free copy of the new Illustra Media DVD, The Case For A Creator. Contact: 1-888-332-4652 http://www.biola.edu/academics/scs/apologetics/events.cfm#formation I’ll be there.

DNA as the Repository of Intelligence

Here’s an article just in from PhysOrg.com. What Professor Shepherd proposes should prove to be very enlightening. He used his algorithm on the book, Emma, by Jane Austen, and was able to break up 80% of the text–minus punctuation marks and inputted just as a string of letters–into words and sentences without any knowledge of grammar. Just think of what analogies can be drawn if they end up breaking up 80% of DNA into grammatical wholes! Here’s a quote: Professor Shepherd originally tested his computer programme on the entire text of Emma by Jane Austen after removing all the spaces and punctuation, leaving just a long impenetrable line of letters. Despite having no knowledge of the English vocabulary or syntax, Read More ›

Darwinian indoctrination required at UCSD? Or will the other side be heard someday?

I posted earlier the fact that 40% of freshman in UCSD’s sixth college reject Darwinism, and that this so alarmed administrators, drastic steps were taken to indoctrinate more students. UCSD is also the school where IDEA was born, and apparently wherever there are hotspots of interest in the topic of ID, money will be invested by some universities to try to extinguish it. See this post by Casey Luskin at evolutionnews.org, University of California, San Diego Forces All Freshmen To Attend Anti-ID Lecture.
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Rewriting How the Solar System Formed

I work for an aerospace R&D company. One of our projects was functioning as a subcontractor for the recent Stardust mission. You can read about it here: http://stardust.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.html As a result of the data collected from the Stardust mission, previous assumptions about the formation of the solar system are being overturned. Today, the Stardust program manager copied all the Stardust research contributors with a congratulatory note that included the following comment: A week and a half ago the science team met — 120 of the more than 200 scientists around the world working on the particles brought back, and they are already rewriting the texts on how the solar system formed, with the discovery of refractory minerals that require very Read More ›

Peer review: Gold standard or gold in them thar hills?

Here is a piece I just put up elsewhere, in five parts, on peer review. Introduction Part One: If peer review always worked before, why doesn’t it work now? Part Two: How bad can it get? Pretty bad. Part Three: How the system is slowly becoming more open and dynamic, whether anyone wants it to or not Part Four:How will we know if a more open system works better?

Another example of reductive evolution? More bad news for Darwinism

In information science, it is empirically and theoretically shown that noise destroys specified complexity, but cannot create it. Natural selection acting on noise cannot create specified complexity. Thus, information science refutes Darwinian evolution. The following is a great article that illustrates the insufficiency of natural selection to create design.

Key to zebrafish heart regeneration uncovered

“Interestingly, some species have the ability to regenerate appendages, while even fairly closely related species do not,” Poss added. “This leads us to believe that during the course of evolution, regeneration is something that has been lost by some species, rather than an ability that has been gained by other species. The key is to find a way to ‘turn on’ this regenerative ability.”

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Textbook Watch: Did ID folk invent Marx, Freud, and Darwin as the “textbook triad” of materialism?

Discovery Institute notes the following from Douglas Futuyma’s Evolutionary Biology (1998, 3rd Ed., Sinauer Associates), p. 5: Darwin showed that material causes are a sufficient explanation not only for physical phenomena, as Descartes and Newton had shown, but also for biological phenomena with all their seeming evidence of design and purpose. By coupling undirected, purposeless variation to the blind, uncaring process of natural selection, Darwin made theological or spiritual explanations of the life processes superfluous. Together with Marx’s materialistic theory of history and society and Freud’s attribution of human behavior to influences over which we have little control, Darwin’s theory of evolution was a crucial plank in the platform of mechanism and materialism… This is especially interesting in view of Read More ›

Design arguments Does bad design mean no design?

In Of Designers and Dunces, Roddy Bullock entertaininglyly addresses the claim made by Professor Donald Wise of the University of Massachusetts that defects in the human body show that there is no design in nature. Unwise person: I’ll admit it’s art, but it’s bad art. Wise person: But you will agree that it is the work of an artist. Yes? Unwise person: No. A “bad design” claim, if sustainable, might come better from a medical doctor than a geologist, but medical doctors do not appear to be among materialism/Darwinism’s fans.

Intellectual freedom: Do we have to fight that battle all over again?

We wrestle with significant questions regarding the mind and the brain: Is the mind an illusion? Is it merely the buzz created by neurons? Is it an immaterial reality? One thing we will certainly need to sort all this out is academic freedom: Pundit David Horowitz brings us up to date on his academic freedom campaign: In September 2003, I began a national campaign to persuade universities to adopt an academic bill of rights, aimed at extending traditional academic-freedom protections to students and restoring objectivity and fairness to classrooms. Mounting such an effort is not easy. Getting the issue of campaign finance reform on the national radar, for example, reportedly required some $120-million and the work of several major public-interest organizations. Read More ›

We Is Junk

The quote below is taken from this week’s Nature magazine.

Since joining the blogosphere over two years ago, when challenged, I’ve invoked a scenario pretty much like the one the paper summary is making. I suspect Dave Scot has been making this argument for a longer period than that.

While still preliminary, I have to say that when Nature magazine starts running articles saying that “gene regulation— not the creation of new genes — has moulded the traits that make us unique”, then all that can be said is (a la Allen MacNeil): “Darwinism is dead. Long live evo-devo.” Is the war over?

Anyone who has ever put together self-assembly
furniture knows that having the right parts
is important, but what you do with them can
make or break the project. The same seems
to be true of the vast amounts of DNA in an
organism’s genome that used to be labelled as
junk. Studies now indicate that this DNA may
be responsible for the signals that were crucial
for human evolution, directing the various
components of our genome to work differently
from the way they do in other organisms.

The findings seem to bolster a 30-year-old
hypothesis that gene regulation — not the creation
of new genes — has moulded the traits that
make us unique.

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The Flat Earth Myth

Anyone who writes “Is your Earth still flat?” is trading on an anti-Christian myth promoted by late-nineteenth century Darwinists. Although many of you probably already know this, it’s worth repeating periodically. Below is the text of a handout distributed at the 2002 Ohio School Board Debate between Kenneth Miller, Lawrence Krauss, Stephen Meyer and Jonathan Wells. THE FLAT EARTH MYTH “The earth isn’t flat – end of story.” So says Case Western Reserve University physicist Lawrence Krauss, according to the Cleveland Plain Dealer. “We don’t have to have classes or be sensitive to the issues of those who believe that, because they’re wrong.” Defenders of Darwinian evolution sometimes compare their critics to believers in a flat earth. According to the Read More ›

Lee Spetner responds (briefly) to Tom Schneider

Tom Schneider, “Mr. Information Theory” for the pro-Darwin side, criticized Lee Spetner (author of Not a Chance) for a probability calculation characterizing evolutionary processes. Here is a reply by Spetner that I’m posting with his permission: Someone just brought to my attention the website http://www.lecb.ncifcrf.gov/~toms/paper/ev/AND-multiplication-error.html which criticizes a probability calculation I made. . . . Schneider is mistaken. He evidently did not take the trouble to understand what I was calculating. My calculation is correct. The probability 1/300,000 is the probability that a particular mutation will occur in a population and will survive to take over that population. If that mutation occurred it would have to have had a positive selective value to take over the population. If that occurred, Read More ›