Uncommon Descent

Archive for November, 2007

30 November 2007

The core is the definition of science itself

idnet.com.au

Your responses to this condensed version of an editorial would be appreciated. (This item is available free as a special feature.)
“Anti-Darwin activism is alive and well. The most insidious movement promotes ‘intelligent design’ (ID) - the notion that some features in nature are best explained by an intelligent cause - as an alternative scientific theory to […]

30 November 2007

From the files: Why intelligent design is going to win, revisited

O'Leary

Douglas Kern at Tech Central Station warned, in 2005 that intelligent design is going to win.
And why was that?
He starts with the claim that ID types are more likely to be fertile than others.
I will not hash that out here except to say this: If it means YOU, you might want to include a budget […]

30 November 2007

History lesson: Eozoon - the dawn - and dusk - of the bogus dawn animal

O'Leary

A golden fossil turned to dross?
According to Natural Resources Canada:
To many mid-Victorian geologists and paleontologists these laminated green and grey rock specimens from altered limestones of the Canadian Shield of Ontario and Quebec were the most important fossils ever found because they constituted evidence of the existence of complex life forms deep in the Precambrian. […]

30 November 2007

Reflections on key recent events: Eminent science journal advises meat puppets to get over “image of God” rubbish

O'Leary

Nothing in the intelligent design controversy is more instructive than a convinced Darwinist making his true position very, very clear.
This happened again recently, I see, when Britain’s elite science journal Nature responded to US Senator Brownback, who had written in the New York Times (May 31, 2007). Pointing out that - when he famously raised […]

29 November 2007

Paul Davies on the Dennis Prager Show (or, A Second Look at the Second Law)

GilDodgen

Paul Davies was recently interviewed on the Dennis Prager show, and a caller challenged Davies with the neg-entropic nature of living systems. Paul’s response was the usual: local, open systems can experience decreases in entropy, as long as the overall system experiences an entropy increase. He gave the example of a refrigerator, which can make […]

28 November 2007

New ID Briefing Packet for Educators

William Dembski

Check out Discovery Institute’s “The Theory of Intelligent Design: A Briefing Packet for Educators.” As part of its response to the PBS-NOVA documentary “Judgment Day: Intelligent Design,” Discovery Institute just released this packet (for free download, see below). The packet contains numerous resources for educators to effectively teach about biological origins in public schools. These […]

28 November 2007

Guillermo Gonzalez — the latest

William Dembski

Backers battle ISU professor’s tenure denial
By LISA ROSSI • REGISTER AMES BUREAU • November 28, 2007
Ames, Ia. — The fight will rage on over Iowa State University astronomy professor Guillermo Gonzalez, who advocated for intelligent design, the theory that disputes parts of evolution, and lost a bid for tenure.
Advocates for Gonzalez said in a […]

28 November 2007

Flowering Plant Big Bang

BarryA

See the story here.
“From the ubiquitous daisy to the fantastical orchid, flowering plant species are as diverse as they are numerous.  It turns out that these bloomers went through an evolutionary “Big Bang” of sorts some 130 million years ago . . . “Flowering plants today comprise around 400,000 species,” said Pam Soltis, curator at […]

28 November 2007

Apology to Prof Lawrence Krauss

idnet.com.au

I would like to apologise to Prof Krauss for a posting which inferred, based entirely on the quotes in a Telegraph UK interview(see here), that he had asserted that observing the universe had adversely changed the universe. Unfortunately the New Scientist paper upon which the Telegraph article is based is not available on line without subscription.
idnet.com.au

27 November 2007

News Release: Harvard’s XVIVO Video

William Dembski

News Release: Harvard’s XVIVO Video
By William A. Dembski | originally posted November 26, 2007 | updated November 27, 2007
Back in September of 2006 I announced at my blog UncommonDescent that a “breathtaking video” titled “The Inner Life of Cell” had just come out (see www.uncommondescent.com/…/the-inner-life-of-a-cell). The video was so good that I wanted to use […]

26 November 2007

Vestigial organs, anyone? The humble appendix begs to differ

O'Leary

Despite its name - which means “hanger on” - the human appendix works for a living, according to recent research (helping kill germs).
As British physicist David Tyler notes, despite the claim of evolutionary biologists from Darwin to the present day that the appendix is junk left over from evolution, the appendix actually has a function […]

26 November 2007

Darwinism predicts “X.” Oh, you tell me the opposite of “X” happened? Well Darwinism predicted that too.

BarryA

Marx (Karl, not Groucho) predicted that under capitalism workers were bound to become more and more dissatisfied and therefore a workers’ revolution was inevitable.  When workers’ conditions actually improved under capitalism, Lenin modified the theory — of course the workers’ lot is improving; the capitalists are bribing them to keep them pacified, just what the […]

26 November 2007

E. O. Wilson on ID

William Dembski

Here’s what E. O. Wilson writes in THE NEW SCIENTIST:
. . . Many who accept the fact of evolution cannot, however, on religious grounds, accept the operation of blind chance and the absence of divine purpose implicit in natural selection. They support the alternative explanation of intelligent design. The reasoning they offer is not based […]

26 November 2007

Melanie Phillips on Secular Fanatics

William Dembski

The real nutters are the fanatics who despise religious belief
by Melanie Phillips
26th November 2007
. . . the antipathy to religious faith goes far wider and deeper than fear of terrorism.
It is the outcome of a dominant secularism which claims that faith and reason are irreconcilable, and that belief in a supernatural creator is the […]

25 November 2007

Time Magazine: Science is Close to Demonstrating Morality is a Function of Brain Activity

BarryA

From the December 3 issue of Time:
 ”Morality and empathy are writ deep in our genes.  Alas, so are savagery and bloodlust.  Science is now learning what makes us both noble and terrible.”
“The deeper that science drills into the substrata of behavior, the harder it becomes to preserve the vanity that we are unique among earth’s […]

25 November 2007

7 Minute Expelled Preview

Patrick

25 November 2007

The Sri Aurobindo International Center in India

Granville Sewell

The Sri Aurobindo International Center of Education, in Pondicherry, India, has recently launched a new on-line journal Anti-Matters , which naturally has a strong Eastern flavor, but is solidly anti-materialist and anti-Darwinist; it provides further evidence that ID, at least the rejection of Darwinism, is not a uniquely American Christian phenomenon. The editor, […]

25 November 2007

Taking Science on Faith

idnet.com.au

SCIENCE, we are repeatedly told, is the most reliable form of knowledge about the world because it is based on testable hypotheses.
The problem is that science has its own faith-based belief system. All science proceeds on the assumption that nature is ordered in a rational and intelligible way, that the universe is governed by […]

23 November 2007

We have the hat, but where’s that rabbit? High levels of information in “simple” life forms

O'Leary

In Tuesday night, a guest speaker spoke to my adult night school class in why there is an intelligent design controversy. He talked about the central problem of evolution: The fact that high levels of information are present in life forms that are supposed to be early and simple.
Some guests attended the talk, and one of […]

22 November 2007

The Origin of Life: Unsolved problem now shopped to off-market solutions?

O'Leary

In a most interesting recent article in Scientific American (November 19, 2007), origin of life expert Paul Davies coments:
The origin of life is one of the great unsolved problems of science. Nobody knows how, where or when life originated. About all that is known for certain is that microbial life had established itself on Earth […]

21 November 2007

Cyclic microevolution with cyclic weather

DLH

Posted by DLH at , PBS Nova Discussion on Judgment Day,
The Design of Life, Nov. 13, 2007
It appears that the predictive essence of (micro) evolution is summarized in the principles we learned in kinder garden. Namely:
The Grand Old Duke of York
The grand old Duke of York,
He had ten thousand men.
He marched […]

21 November 2007

Human Origins: The Darwinian left discovers “group selection”

O'Leary

At the Huffington Post, Dan Agin has announced that  Dawkins’s famous selfish gene is laid off. Terminated. Pink slipped. Out of a job:
For nearly half a century, the evolution of human behavior has been presented to the public framed by the ideas of Edward O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins, and a cohort of sociobiologists, evolutionary psychologists, and media gene-mongers. The scientific […]

20 November 2007

The Evolution of Flying Squirrels

William Dembski

I never quite believed in the evolution of flying squirrels from regular squirrels (i.e., by increasing skin folds that allowed for better and better gliding) until I watched this video:

20 November 2007

Darwinism and popular folklore: Neanderthal man died out on account of equal opportunity?

O'Leary

Music to some ears this: According to a recent article in the boston Globe, Neanderthal man died out because Neanderthal woman had to help him hunt.
The Neanderthal extinction some 30,000 years ago remains one of the great riddles of evolution, with rival theories blaming everything from genocide committed by “real” humans to prehistoric climate change.
But […]

20 November 2007

From the academic literature: Fred Flintstone vs. the law

O'Leary

Here are some thoughts from law profs Brian Leiter (University of Texas at Austin - School of Law & Department of Philosophy) and Michael Weisberg of the University of Pennsylvania on why evolutionary biology is so far irrelevant to law. Note in particular,
We argue, in particular, that (a) evolutionary psychology is not entitled to assume […]

20 November 2007

He said it: Origin of life pioneer Leslie Orgel on challenge of OOL research

O'Leary

Some sources treat the origin of life as if we had any idea how it really happened. But that is most certainly not the case. One key topic of The Design of Life is origin of life (OOL) - specifically the reasons why it is so difficult to figure out (Chapter 8).
In the context, it […]

19 November 2007

Publisher braces for controversy as definitive book on intelligent design hits market

O'Leary

NEWS Release 

Contact:
Aaron Cook at TimePiece PR & Marketing

 
(214) 520-3430 or acook@timepiecepr.com

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Publisher braces for controversy as definitive book on intelligent design hits market 
DALLAS – November 19, 2007 – The Foundation for Thought and Ethics has just published The Design of Life. This definitive book on intelligent design (ID) comes as a shot across […]

18 November 2007

Thanks to Phillip Johnson (or, Darwinism in its Death Throes)

GilDodgen

On a private listserve which shall remain unnamed, I posted the following to Phillip Johnson. Phil deserves a tremendous amount of gratitude for his insight and courage.
Dear Phillip,
Neither you nor I have any notion of the magnitude of the ripple effects that have emanated from Darwin On Trial, but I can tell you this: That […]

18 November 2007

Dr. Markus Raze Investigates One of Today’s Most Compelling Open Problem in Random Mutation

Galapagos Finch

“If enough second amendment whackos with rifles shot enough road signs, would they eventually generate the great books of history in braille?”
Details at TheBRITES.org.

18 November 2007

“Cheryl Crowe’s Single Sheet Really Really Clean Tissue” declared unsafe by the ACU

Galapagos Finch

Tissue designed by same genetic algorithm responsible for the Slow Down Slide. Details at TheBRITES.org

16 November 2007

Modularity and Design

idnet.com.au

The road to modularity Günter P. Wagner, Mihaela Pavlicev and James M. Cheverud Nature Reviews Genetics Volume 8 Dec 2007 
“From our reading of the literature, origin of modularity research is still mostly based on model analysis rather than data. It is likely that we have not yet fully explored the range of theoretical possibilities to […]