Archive for December, 2007
31 December 2007
O'Leary
In late October, celebrated (former) atheist Antony Flew’s long-awaited There IS a God, with Roy Varghese, appeared. It is an elegant little book, as one might expect from a British philosopher. Its sparkling clarity does more than illuminate Antony Flew’s change of mind on the subject of God.
Authorship controversy? Well, yes, some argue that Flew […]
Posted in Intelligent Design | 10 Comments »
30 December 2007
O'Leary
Studying all the time? That’s alarming. Quit before your brain develops a saddle shape from the sheer weight of your learning. Take a break and have some fun.
Posted in Intelligent Design | 1 Comment »
30 December 2007
idnet.com.au
Ronald Meester CLICK HERE FOR THE PAPER Department of Mathematics, VU-University Amsterdam,
“William Dembski (2002) claimed that the NoFreeLunch-theorems from op-
timization theory render Darwinian biological evolution impossible. I
argue that the NFL-theorems should be interpreted not in the sense that the models can be used to draw any conclusion about the real biological evolution (and certainly not about any […]
Posted in Intelligent Design | 241 Comments »
29 December 2007
O'Leary
Or perhaps one should ask, how did butterflies start to become caterpillars? Caution: Some pretty radical theorizing here.
Also: Today at the Post-Darwinist
Alley Oop, if you lie to me one more time …
Posted in Intelligent Design | 21 Comments »
28 December 2007
DLH
Making Space for Time - Physicists meet to puzzle out why time flows one way. Scott Dodd. Scientific American, January 2008 p 26,27,28.
This article cites physicists invoking multiverses to explain high order in the early cosmos – and that less order would have prevented universes from surviving or evolving to support intelligent life.
This […]
Posted in Science, Intelligent Design | 8 Comments »
27 December 2007
O'Leary
2006 and 2007 have been years in which a number of key science papers addressed things we know - that ain’t so. One story is the serious challenges to the long contested “molecular clock” theory.
[ … ]
In the science literature, many adjustments are offered to make the fossil record and molecular data match. Of course, […]
Posted in The Design of Life | 34 Comments »
26 December 2007
Flannery
Another Darwin Biography
Ecclesiastes tells us, “Of making books there is no end,” and nowhere is that a greater truism than in the ever growing corpus of Darwiniana. At present writing OCLC (Online Computer Library Center), the world’s largest bibliographic database, lists 14,129 books and articles with occurrences of Darwin, Darwinism, or Darwinian in the title. […]
Posted in Biography, Darwinism | 13 Comments »
25 December 2007
O'Leary
Stephen Jay Gould, the great American paleontologist, liked to say - particularly in A Wonderful Life, that if the tape of evolution were replayed a million times, a species like ours would not necessarily evolve. He made this point in, and a debate rages to this day about whether he meant chance, as Daniel Dennett […]
Posted in The Design of Life | 22 Comments »
24 December 2007
O'Leary
Tiktaalik, an early fossil fish with sturdy forefins, helps illustrate the difference between the approach of scientists who are convinced Darwinists and that of scientists who view the problems of evolution primarily in terms of information theory (intelligent design).
The Darwinist says, There! - we have found a missing link, so now we KNOW! what happened (because […]
Posted in The Design of Life | 9 Comments »
24 December 2007
Galapagos Finch
Blame placed on discarded Mutation Paste. Details at TheBRITES.org
Posted in Intelligent Design | 2 Comments »
23 December 2007
O'Leary
You’d think astronomers would be happy to sponsor the latter idea but then you must have been out of town when Guillermo Gonzalez’s story broke.
Read Denyse O’Leary’s interview with Gonzalez here. Also, Gonzalez on intelligent design - both non-falsifiable and already falsified? Howzzat?
Also: Defeat organized stupidity. Buy and read The Design of Life!
Posted in Intelligent Design | 17 Comments »
23 December 2007
O'Leary
Bill Dembski asked me to post some excerpts from this interview that Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard and I did with American radio host Dennis Prager, on the difference between the mind and the brain (as set out in our book The Spiritual Brain, Harper One, 2007). I finally got a chance to transcribe a bit […]
Posted in Intelligent Design | 12 Comments »
23 December 2007
idnet.com.au
HERE IS THE LINK
A taste “INTRODUCTION
When on board H.M.S. ‘Beagle’, I began patiently accumulating and reflecting on all sorts of facts, which seemed to throw light on the origin of species. I have not been hasty in coming to a decision. I am well aware that scarcely a single point is discussed here on which […]
Posted in Intelligent Design | 5 Comments »
22 December 2007
GilDodgen
Last week, The Design of Life: Discovering Signs of Intelligence In Biological Systems was in the 17,000-20,000 range at Amazon.com. Since the Darwinist-sponsored negative-review spam campaign (with “reviews” written mostly by people who obviously had not read the book), and as of this writing, the book is sitting at about 3,000, and is:
#1 in Books […]
Posted in The Design of Life, Darwinism, Biology | 19 Comments »
22 December 2007
Galapagos Finch
Must greet everyone with “Merry Christmas” and wear Expelled T-Shirts. Details at TheBRITES.org.
Posted in Intelligent Design | 26 Comments »
21 December 2007
William Dembski
In my last post, I mentioned the prospect that THE DESIGN OF LIFE would, with the help of our Darwinist friends, become a companion volume to Ben Stein’s EXPELLED: NO INTELLIGENCE ALLOWED (www.expelledthe movie.com — check out also www.getexpelled.com).
In the event that THE DESIGN OF LIFE becomes such a companion volume, a colleague sent […]
Posted in The Design of Life | 21 Comments »
20 December 2007
William Dembski
THE DESIGN OF LIFE is being shamelessly manipulated by the Darwinists at Amazon (go here). Not only are they posting negative reviews that give no indication that the reviewers have read the book but they are also voting up their negative reviews so that these are the first to be seen by potential buyers.
The […]
Posted in The Design of Life, Intelligent Design | 113 Comments »
20 December 2007
DLH
A thoughtful article by a perceptive engineer. A good example of priming the Origins Debate pump.
——————————
Let’s open minds, textbooks to intelligent design theories
Intricacies of Earth life-forms, microscopes challenge evolution ideas
Gordon Rose, Letter, Indianapolis Star Dec. 15, 2007
“In our school systems today, science, with its dramatic and continual advancement in knowledge, has to be one of […]
Posted in Darwinism, Intelligent Design, Education | 118 Comments »
20 December 2007
DLH
How do science skeptics and those introducing paradigm shifts get their papers published in the face of politically correct coercion by a dogmatic majority and lemming press? Persistence, and banding together may help. Following is a fascinating report by the US Senate that may result in a critical mass begin to form against the […]
Posted in Global Warming, Off Topic, Science | 3 Comments »
20 December 2007
DaveScot
Their hypothesis featuring the boogeyman Carbon Dioxide is falling apart before their eyes. Hurricane activity set record lows the past two years right after the alarmists shamelessly tried capitalizing on the 2005 killers Katrina and Rita by saying it’ll only get worse from here. There hasn’t been any net global warming in the […]
Posted in Global Warming, Off Topic | 14 Comments »
20 December 2007
DaveScot
Yet another ancestor to modern whales is hypothesized. It’s hard to believe people get paid to produce stuff like this.
Whales may be related to deer-like beast
By SETH BORENSTEIN
AP Science Writer
Wed Dec 19, 6:55 PM ET
WASHINGTON - The gigantic ocean-dwelling whale may have evolved from a land animal the size of a […]
Posted in Humor, Just For Fun, Biology | 72 Comments »
19 December 2007
O'Leary
Bill Dembski has drawn my attention to the Darwinists who vote up negative reviews at Amazon of Design of Life, his textbook supplement with Jonathan Wells, on whose behalf I blog at Design of Life blog. He writes,
The Design of Life has 13 five-star reviews and 4 one-star reviews. None of the one-star reviews give […]
Posted in The Design of Life | 24 Comments »
19 December 2007
William Dembski
A friend of mine emailed me the following quotes from Mike Gene’s new book THE DESIGN MATRIX, available from Amazon.com here.
“The vast majority of scientists do not view Intelligent Design as science and I happen to agree with them.” (pg. xi)
“I should make it explicitly clear from the start that I did not write this […]
Posted in Intelligent Design | 35 Comments »
19 December 2007
DaveScot
In a private listserv the question was recently asked by one of the participants:
Just out of curiousity, what would we consider to be the fundamentals of biology? Obviously, you can do biology without trying to shove everything into Darwinian just-so stories.
Professor Dembski thought my answer worth repeating on Uncommon Descent so here it is:
The […]
Posted in Intelligent Design, Biology | 13 Comments »
19 December 2007
GilDodgen
This is a recurring challenge that most recently reared its head in a comment concerning my essay, Why Mathematicians, Computer Scientists, and Engineers Tend to be More Skeptical of Darwinian Claims.
The argument goes like this (as presented by the commenter in the link provided above):
The majority of degreed computer scientists, engineers, and mathematicians have completed […]
Posted in Comp. Sci. / Eng., Darwinism, Biology | 29 Comments »
18 December 2007
O'Leary
The blog for the Design of Life textbook supplement went live this morning (I’m the lead blogger).
The first three posts:
Posted in Intelligent Design | 7 Comments »
18 December 2007
DaveScot
The New York Times is giving lip service to a letter signed and sent by 100 scientists to the UN Global Warming conference in Bali. The letter essentially said that climate change is natural, unstoppable, and attempts to control climate change rather than adapt to it only serves to make the problem of adapting […]
Posted in Global Warming, Off Topic | 10 Comments »
17 December 2007
BarryA
Dr. Sewell’s post below generated a fairly heated debate, but it is not my purpose to address the substance of his claim or his opponents’ responses. Instead, I was fascinated by a couple of the commenters’ calls for “compromise” between the ID camp and the NDE camp.
As a general matter, “compromise” is a very fine thing, and if […]
Posted in Intelligent Design | 72 Comments »
17 December 2007
William Dembski
Watch the faces of the judges as this fellow walks on the stage. Based on his looks and the fact that he is a cell phone salesman, they initially misjudge him. Sometimes you have to stop believing what everyone is telling you and start listening to your passion.
Click here: Phone Salesman Amazes Crowd - Video
Posted in Off Topic | 33 Comments »
17 December 2007
William Dembski
As you read this article from the Washington Post, ask yourself how far such research would get without enzymes and a host of other materials “borrowed” from existing life-forms. “From scratch” properly should mean “made only with chemicals available in a realistic prebiotic environment.” That’s not what we’re dealing with here. And even if we […]
Posted in Informatics, Science, Intelligent Design, Evolution | 60 Comments »
17 December 2007
GilDodgen
Larry Moran’s presentation in a comment in Granville Sewell’s UD post, I found not particularly persuasive, for the following reasons. I’m not interested in definitions of science; I’m interested in how stuff actually works. I’m perfectly amenable to being convinced that the complexity, information content, and machinery of living systems can be explained by stochastic […]
Posted in Science, Comp. Sci. / Eng., Darwinism | 86 Comments »