Archive for October, 2007
31 October 2007
O'Leary
Following up on Grant Sewell’s interesting discussion of consciousness as a hard problem for Darwinism, and my response:
In “Brave Newark World”, law prof and columnist Mike S. Adams exposes an Orwellian world of reprogramming inside the dorms at the University of Delaware:
Presently, students are actually pressured or even required to take actions that outwardly indicate […]
Posted in Intelligent Design | 11 Comments »
31 October 2007
BarryA
In a prior post the order of a deck of cards was used as an example of specified complexity. If a deck is shuffled and it results in all of the cards being ordered by rank and suit, one can infer design. One commenter objected to this reasoning on the grounds that the specified order […]
Posted in Intelligent Design | 69 Comments »
31 October 2007
Granville Sewell
The biggest problem of all with Darwinism, in my opinion, is one that is almost never discussed by either side. In my Dec 2005 American Spectator article (updated version here) I tried to express the problem as follows: “When you ask [the modern scientist] how a mechanical process such as natural selection could cause […]
Posted in Intelligent Design | 44 Comments »
31 October 2007
BarryA
In a prior post DRG wonders how could Behe’s EoE inform the development of drugs that fight antibiotic resistant bacteria? Today’s WSJ, for example, describes the problem of MRSA and other superbugs that defy existing antibiotics. Given the expense of the pharmaceutical development process, an ID-oriented research program ought to reduce the cost of development by […]
Posted in Intelligent Design | 9 Comments »
30 October 2007
BarryA
Alex Tee Neng Heng and David C. Green think they have demonstrated that the “monkeys typing” hypothesis is true here. The class is assigned the task of identifying their blunder.
Posted in Intelligent Design | 65 Comments »
30 October 2007
BarryA
As Michael Behe discusses in the article I linked in my last post, Darwinists Kenneth Miller and Francisco Ayala reject ID, because they believe it makes God (if one assumes God is the designer) culpable for all of the pain and misery in the natural world. Ayala goes so far as to suggest that ID […]
Posted in Intelligent Design | 29 Comments »
30 October 2007
BarryA
See here: www.amazon.com/gp/blog/A3DGRQ0IO7KYQ2/…
Posted in Intelligent Design | 8 Comments »
30 October 2007
William Dembski
A friend of mine and I have been reading Antony Flew’s new book THERE IS A GOD. Flew had been the English-speaking world’s most prominent atheist until Richard Dawkins assumed that role. A few years ago, Flew announced his conversion to theism (though not full-blown Christianity). This caused a stir at the time, but true […]
Posted in Science, Religion, Philosophy | 19 Comments »
29 October 2007
BarryA
I was looking at some numbers concerning the Cambrian explosion. The results were quite stunning to me.
Simple life, we are told, emerged 3.8 billion years ago, and the Cambrian Explosion occurred 550 million years ago. In a single 10 million year period (taking the longest estimate), 95% of the animal phyla appeared. The math:
For the first 85% […]
Posted in Intelligent Design | 27 Comments »
29 October 2007
DaveScot
The two most recent books I’ve read are Biochemistry Professor M.Behe’s Edge of Evolution and Cornell geneticist J.Sanford’s Genetic Entropy.
Edge of Evolution I found to be amazing. It presented a case history of a eukaryote (P.falciparum) that has replicated billions of trillions of times within a span of a few decades. More importantly […]
Posted in Intelligent Design | 38 Comments »
29 October 2007
DaveScot
HT to Phil Johnson for giving me the link.
As I’ve been saying, Global Warming isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Check this out…
Warming Revives Flora and Fauna in Greenland
By SARAH LYALL
October 28, 2007
The New York Times
NARSARSUAQ, Greenland — A strange thing is happening at the edge of Poul Bjerge’s forest, a place so […]
Posted in Global Warming | 2 Comments »
29 October 2007
DaveScot
This is just too funny to pass up.
As a preemptive strike against any commenters who feel a need to say “Aha! ID is all about religion” put a sock in it. I filed this under “Humor”.
HT to Jon Wells for giving me the link to this article.
Atheism: An Intellectual Revolt or Pelvic Rebellion?
By […]
Posted in Humor | 27 Comments »
28 October 2007
idnet.com.au
Package models and the information crisis of prebiotic evolution
Daniel A. M. M. Silvestre, Jos´e F. Fontanari
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0710/0710.3278v1.pdf
The coexistence of different types of templates has been the choice solution to the information crisis of prebiotic evolution, triggered by the finding that a single RNA-like template cannot carry enough information to code for any useful replicase. In principle, […]
Posted in Intelligent Design | 12 Comments »
27 October 2007
O'Leary
In a recent column, Marvin Olasky observes
New York Times columnist John Tierney recently offered a materialist version of “intelligent design”: All of us are actually characters in a computer simulation devised by some technologically advanced future civilization.
Fanciful to the extreme, sure, but the growing number of such theories — life comes from the past (Mars, […]
Posted in Intelligent Design | 2 Comments »
27 October 2007
BarryA
. . . so long as the predicted event is safely 100,000 years in the future:
Human race will split into two different species
The human race will one day split into two separate species, an attractive, intelligent ruling elite and an underclass of dim-witted, ugly goblin-like creatures, according to a top scientist. 100,000 years into the future, sexual […]
Posted in Intelligent Design | 52 Comments »
26 October 2007
William Dembski
Below is a fascinating report in the NYTimes about a long-retired professor who found that his work was being cited by “creationists” and THEREFORE decided to retract it. But, as an attorney friend points out, the very concept of “retraction” is inapplicable here. A retraction is something the original author is entitled to do ONLY […]
Posted in Science, Evolution | 38 Comments »
25 October 2007
O'Leary
Bill Dembski asked about design vs. mechanism , and quite a long thread ensued. I thought I’d post my own thoughts here, to break up the thread a bit.
Here are five things I know that may be useful to someone:
Posted in Intelligent Design | 11 Comments »
25 October 2007
BarryA
In my last post I referred to Richard Dawkins’ assertion that a state organized according to Darwinian principles would be a fascist state. In response some of the commenters alluded to Dawkins’ statement that he is “anti-Darwinian” when it comes to politics. Dawkins, the commenters said, believes we can “rise above” our Darwinian impulses. The […]
Posted in Intelligent Design | 55 Comments »
25 October 2007
DaveScot
In the ISCID Brainstorms forum Emeritus Professor of Biology John A. Davison challenged my assertion that atmospheric CO2 increases are a good thing for plant growth. He said while it might apply to trees it doesn’t apply to grasses such as rice which don’t yield more grain in an elevated CO2 environment. He […]
Posted in Global Warming, Off Topic | 12 Comments »
24 October 2007
BarryA
As irksome as Richard Dawkins can sometimes be, one must nevertheless admire his occasional outbursts of honesty. Over at First Things Fr. Ed Oakes refers to an interview Dawkins gave to an Austrian newspaper, Die Presse (July 30, 2005), in which he said: “No decent person wants to live in a society that works according to Darwinian laws. . . […]
Posted in Intelligent Design | 41 Comments »
24 October 2007
DaveScot
The long and the short of it is that Global Warming alarmists were wrong again. They correctly predicted that the Amazon rain forest would get drier. What they didn’t predict is that it would get greener as it got drier. It seems rainforest growth is limited by sunlight. As it experienced […]
Posted in Global Warming, Off Topic | 2 Comments »
23 October 2007
William Dembski
Although ID continues to gather supporters, it happens now and again that erstwhile ID supporters lose their enthusiasm and jump ship. One such former supporter is a very prominent European scientist. I met him first in 2004, when he was still attracted to ID. Now he is no longer. I asked him about this recently:
Question: […]
Posted in Intelligent Design | 93 Comments »
23 October 2007
DaveScot
The global-warming hucksters
Excerpt from Buchanan’s article:
Put me down as a disbeliever.
Like the panics of bygone eras, this one has the aspect of yet another re-enactment of the Big Con. The huckster arrives in town, tells all the rubes that disaster impends for them and their families, but says there may be one last chance […]
Posted in Global Warming, Off Topic | 18 Comments »
23 October 2007
O'Leary
Last Saturday afternoon, I was working quietly in my office, when the phone rang. I recognized the number of course (416 367-2000) - the Toronto Star has had that number about as long as I can remember. A reporter wanted to know what Christians were planning to do to celebrate October 23.
October 23? Well, in […]
Posted in Intelligent Design | 10 Comments »
22 October 2007
William Dembski
Ben Stein will be on the O’Reilly Factor tonight talking about his upcoming movie/documentary EXPELLED: NO INTELLIGENCE ALLOWED.
Update: If you missed it on TV click me for the segment.
Further update: Or watch it here from YouTube:
Posted in Intelligent Design | 32 Comments »
22 October 2007
Patrick
Horizontal Gene Transfer (HGT) is now being invoked fairly often as a magic wand by Darwinists. So what experimental evidence do we have?
Genome-Wide Experimental Determination of Barriers to Horizontal Gene Transfer
Horizontal gene transfer, in which genetic material is transferred from the genome of one organism to another, has been investigated in microbial species mainly through […]
Posted in Intelligent Design | 15 Comments »
22 October 2007
O'Leary
The news I’ve heard about new Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal is that he threatens to break with a centuries-old Bayou tradition by being both a governor and an honest man. But also, this just in from the New York Times:
Mr. Jindal is a technocrat and a Roman Catholic convert, a policy aficionado well-versed in free-market […]
Posted in Intelligent Design | No Comments »
21 October 2007
O'Leary
Apparently, a vast fracas started on the Small Dead Animals blog, sparked by some alarmblog comments about my course in the intelligent design controversy starting this coming Tuesday evening at the University of Toronto. I posted this response.
Posted in Intelligent Design | 9 Comments »
21 October 2007
DaveScot
Reprinted by permission from Imprimis, a publication of Hillsdale College.
August 2007
“Global Warming: Man-Made or Natural?”
S. Fred Singer
Professor Emeritus of Environmental Sciences, University of Virginia
S. Fred Singer is professor emeritus of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia, a distinguished research professor at George Mason University, and president of the Science and Environmental […]
Posted in Intelligent Design | 10 Comments »
21 October 2007
DaveScot
Atlanta is becoming increasingly distressed over a drought that has reached “exceptional” level threatening to leave more than 3 million city residents without tap water if the drought persists more than a few more months. What happened to the increasingly frequent and severe Atlantic hurricanes that so-called “global warming” was supposed to produce? […]
Posted in Global Warming, Off Topic | 3 Comments »
20 October 2007
O'Leary
Watson is currently suspended from chancelor duties.
Watson’s own institute has itself been linked to historical Darwinian racism, even though it dutifully denounced him.
Also, here’s a spoof interview from The Brites on the reaction of a paragon of political correctness, trying to hold together Darwinism and egalitarianism. (Of COURSE it doesn’t work. As I point out […]
Posted in Intelligent Design | 13 Comments »