Below is a recent post from evolutionnews.org describing Ken Miller’s criticism of my approach to detecting design as he gave it on a recent BBC program. I was interviewed for the program, but had no idea that Richard Dawkins would be narrating it or that Ken Miller would be given the final word in assessing my contribution to the ID debate (I was not given a chance to see Miller’s response prior to the program’s release, much less the opportunity to respond to it in the program). In fact, I didn’t even know what the title of the program was until I received the DVD from the BBC. Titled “The War on Science,” it was immediately clear where this was Read More ›

Over at evolutionnews.org Casey Luskin blogs about how Ken Miller, in a BBC documentary entitled A War on Science, distorts and misrepresents Bill Dembski’s methods for inferring intelligent design. Ken’s constant distortion of ID theory is very revealing. He can’t address the real arguments, evidence, or logic, so he makes stuff up. It’s like what Judge Jones said regarding irreducible complexity, that Behe ignores co-option, as though co-option is a real phenomenon and not just a made-up story that defies evidence and logic. Miller continues this silly tradition with reference to the Type 3 secretory system, as if this should end all debate about the power of Darwinian mechanisms to produce highly complex and functionally integrated biological machinery. Personally, I Read More ›

Mutations create variation in the gene pool, and the less favorable mutations are removed by natural selection, while more favorable ones tend to accumulate, resulting in evolutionary change. To give our children and children’s children the advantage of accelerated evolution, it is now possible to speed evolution with a new food supplement from Finch’s Foods. Details are HERE. [Caution: May Cause Birth Defects]

Here is neuroscientist Mario Beauregard’s article in Progress in Neuroscience, identifying areas of progress in non-materialist neuroscience. Yes, that’s right. Beauregard is doing something that is supposed to be unthinkable for a neuroscientist. He is blowing off materialism, based on evidence. The skinny: Materialist neuroscience argues that the mind does not really exist. The mind is merely the functions of the brain or a simulacrum thereof. So you do not really have a mind, let alone a soul or free will. Materialist neuroscientists have not proven this proposition; it is a logical deduction from the materialism they have already accepted. Go here, here, and here for a few examples. Non-materialist neuroscience means neuroscience that assumes that the mind really exists. Read More ›

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If you’ve been part of the ID debate, none of this is news: Here is the film’s website: www.indoctrinate-u.com.

Well, Bill sure put Darwin’s big E (eugenics) out there for everyone to see , The reckless, degraded, and often vicious members of society, tend to increase at a quicker rate than the provident and generally virtuous members. Or as Mr. Greg puts the case: “The careless, squalid, unaspiring Irishman multiplies like rabbits: the frugal, foreseeing, self-respecting, ambitious Scot, stern in his morality, spiritual in his faith, sagacious and disciplined in his intelligence, passes his best years in struggle and in celibacy, marries late, and leaves few behind him. … “ … and wouldn’t you know that the squalid, unaspiring Irishman has hardly sobered up from the Feast of St. Patrick, when … The thing about human eugenics is that Read More ›

British paper currency — the 10-pound note — features Charles Darwin. (The custom is that the notes all have the Queen on one side and a famous Briton on the other. The notes are in denominations 5, 10, 20, and 50; there are no 1-pound or 2-pound paper notes, these are coins). A couple of days ago the Bank of England issued a new 20-pound note, using new security features, and took the occasion to change the “famous person.” This is a news-worthy cause for British Darwin-doubters, who should urge that Darwin be dumped from the 10-pound note whenever there is a new security-upgrade version, on grounds that he is the chief prophet of the materialist religion, and his presence Read More ›

Every now and again when I want to feel good about our shared humanity, I curl up with Darwin’s DESCENT OF MAN and read passages like the following: The reckless, degraded, and often vicious members of society, tend to increase at a quicker rate than the provident and generally virtuous members. Or as Mr. Greg puts the case: “The careless, squalid, unaspiring Irishman multiplies like rabbits: the frugal, foreseeing, self-respecting, ambitious Scot, stern in his morality, spiritual in his faith, sagacious and disciplined in his intelligence, passes his best years in struggle and in celibacy, marries late, and leaves few behind him. Given a land originally peopled by a thousand Saxons and a thousand Celts—and in a dozen generations five-sixths Read More ›

Remember those disclaimers such as “this paper in no way endorses intelligent design” or “this article in no way challenges evolutionary theory” (see here for instance). Well here’s a disclaimer that appears right at the start of a forthcoming book on evolutionary computation — one that is being published through a recognized academic outlet: Disclaimer: The Editors are not endorsing evolution as a scientific fact, in that species evolve from one kind to another. The term “evolutionary” in the evolutionary computation (EC) simply means that the characteristics of an individual changes within the population of the same species, as observed in the nature. Way to go!!

My lead author on the book The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist’s case for the existence of the soul, Mario Beauregard, has an article coming out in Progress in Neurobiology which describes a number of studies in non-materialist neuroscience.

(Non-materialist neuroscience = the mind exists and uses the brain but is not the same thing as the brain. Please, nobody, write to me to ask how this is relevant to ID. Use your imagination.)

Neuroimaging techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) can now show the ways in which people reorganize their brains by changing their minds. However, their ability to do this is in direct conflict with materialist theories of mind, according to which the mind either is simply the brain at work or is a side-effect of brain processes – or perhaps does not even exist. As Beauregard writes, Read More ›

Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams seems determined to think for himself about evolution, despite flak from a Darwinist “ass hat” (his term). Although not an intelligent design supporter, Scott makes some of the very points that the ID guys and other non-Darwinians make about the Darwinist interpretation of the fossil record:

I’ve been trying for years to reconcile my usually-excellent bullshit filter with the idea that evolution is considered a scientific fact. Why does a well-established scientific fact set off my usually-excellent bullshit filter like a five-alarm fire? It’s the fossil record that has been bugging me the most. It looks like bullshit. Smells like bullshit. Tastes like bullshit. Why isn’t it bullshit? All those scientists can’t be wrong. Read More ›

In a comment to one of my posts of yesterday, on the popular myths (and ridiculous hagiography) around Darwin, someone responded, “I am not seeing the ID relevance of this article.”

Really not? Okay then, let me unpack it. When I started covering the ID controversy in depth (about 2002 onward, while writing By Design or by Chance? ), I quickly became aware that the Darwin myths were the single most important reason why – irrespective of any evidence whatever – average educated people could not imagine that Darwin and his heirs might be mistaken in their interpretation of the history of life. Read More ›

Here’s how Cambridge’s Jim Enderby’s review of some recent Darwin books begins: On the morning of November 24, 1859, Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species made its first appearance and the world changed forever. An age of faith was plunged into profound religious doubt, and believers of every kind rose to pronounce anathema on Darwin’s godless tract, sparking a fresh battle in the long-running war between science and religion. But while the reactionaries raged, the scientific community soon came to accept natural selection, and the rediscovery of Gregor Mendel’s work in 1900 (which marked the founding of modern genetics) set the seal on Darwin’s triumph by providing the missing piece to his puzzle – a scientific understanding of just Read More ›

In a recent article in the New York Times magazine, by Richard Panek, we read a very well written but surprisingly pessimistic assumption about what physicists can learn about the universe: If so, such a development would presumably not be without philosophical consequences of the civilization-altering variety. Cosmologists often refer to this possibility as “the ultimate Copernican revolution”: not only are we not at the center of anything; we’re not even made of the same stuff as most of the rest of everything. “We’re just a bit of pollution,” Lawrence M. Krauss, a theorist at Case Western Reserve, said not long ago at a public panel on cosmology in Chicago. “If you got rid of us, and all the stars Read More ›