Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Ian Musgrave’s “Intelligent Design Challenge”

I received the following email dated 1.31.08 from Ian Musgrave: Dear Dr. Dembski Determining where a genome has been produced or altered by an intelligent designer is a matter of some importance. Consider the claims that the HIV virus was engineered as a biowarfare weapon, or the concern that virulence genes from other organisms could be inserted into viruses and bacteria to “weaponise” them. For example the engineered mouse pox virus that turned lethal (Nature. 2001 May 17;411(6835):232-5 see also Nat Genet. 2001 Nov;29(3):253-6) and limits on the sequencing of the 1918 strain of the flu to stop flu from being weaponised (Fed Regist. 2005 Oct 20;70(202):61047-9,). A method that could reliably detect the action of human intelligent design in Read More ›

DNA is the Blueprint of All Life

Here’s an article from PhysOrg saying something that has been said on this blog for years. The experimenters were working with gold crystals, trying to build different structures. Here’s some of what they write in this summary article: “He likens the process to building a house. Starting with basic materials such as bricks, wood, siding, stone and shingles, a construction team can build many different types of houses out of the same building blocks. In the Northwestern work, the DNA controls where the building blocks (the gold nanoparticles) are positioned in the final crystal structure, arranging the particles in a functional way. The DNA does all the heavy lifting so the researchers don’t have to.”

Scientific Consensus: The Last Bastion of Scientific Uncertainty

I was reading an exchange on anthropogenic global warming between Dr. George Somero, the David & Lucile Packard Professor in Marine Sciences at the Hopkins Marine Station (pro) and Dr. Roy Spencer, recipient of NASA’s Medal for Exceptional Scientific Achievement and principle research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville (con) where the usual points were exchanged. I was struck by Spencer’s closing statement as being particularly applicable to the design vs. chance controversy regarding organic evolution. Spencer closed his response to the question of scientific consensus in anthropogenic global warming thusly: “Scientific ‘consensus’ is only resorted to when uncertainty exists.” Next time someone brings up the appeal to authority fallacy regarding evolution this is a great response to Read More ›

Details Of Nuclear Pore Complex With Spin

 (Credit: Image courtesy of Rockefeller University) From ScienceDaily (Jan. 30, 2008) A cell’s membrane-bound nucleus uses hundreds to thousands of nuclear pores as its gatekeepers, selective membrane channels that are responsible for regulating the material that goes to and from a cell’s DNA. Rockefeller scientists have nailed down the first complete molecular picture of this huge, 450-protein pore and their findings provide a glimpse into how the nucleus itself first evolved. The group gathered and analyzed massive amounts of data to come up with a rough draft of the structure of the nuclear pore. The scientists’ results have given them a peek into the early evolution of eukaryotic cells. Compartmentalization was made possible by membranes and coating complexes, which act “like Read More ›

Dr. Geoff Simmons vs PZ Myers Debate

I’ve just received the following notice from PSSI (Physicians and Surgeons for Scientific Integrity), of which I am a member. I’m taking the liberty of posting it up here in case anyone else is interested in this debate. Fresh from our What Darwin Didn’t Know events in Spain, Dr. Geoff Simmons, author of What Darwin Didn’t Know and Billions of Missing Links is scheduled to debate evolutionist PZ Myers, who runs the caustic pro-Darwinism blog Pharyngula. The one hour debate will begin at 1 PM PST tomorrow (Thursday) on radio station KKMS, AM 980 in Minneapolis. You can listen to the debate live on the web by logging onto http://kkms.com/LocalHosts/15/ and clicking on the Listen Live button at the top. Read More ›

Reminder about “Who Designed the Designer?”

Permutations of the question “Who designed the designer?” are trite, easily addressed, and if you read the moderation rules you’ll find that comments using this and other trite arguments are deleted. There is not enough data to make any determination of who designed the designer. When and if we can identify the designer of organic life on this planet we might have some data to work with in determining the origin of that agency. Until that situation changes, maybe SETI will give us some data someday, there’s no point in asking the question over and over again.

Ignorance: Inspired and Promoted by Mainstream Media

A family friend, who is a brilliant electrical engineer, recently spent some time at our home for a holiday get-together. The topic of ID came up and he asked me how I could possibly have bought into such a silly idea. I quizzed him about what he knew about ID. I asked him about which prominent ID theorists he was familiar with, and mentioned a few, along with the titles of their books. He had never heard of any of them, and was completely unfamiliar with any ID literature or even elementary ID concepts. As it turned out, he had gotten all of his information about ID from the mainstream media, and didn’t have the slightest clue what ID is Read More ›

Thought for the Day

From Nietzsche’s The Gay Science: Thus the question “Why science?” leads back to the moral problem: Why have morality at all when life, nature, and history are “not moral”? No doubt, those who are truthful in that audacious and ultimate sense that is presupposed by the faith in science thus affirm another world than the world of life, nature, and history; and insofar as they affirm this “other world”—look, must they not by that same token negate its counterpart, this world, our world?—But you will have gathered what I am driving at, namely, that it is still a metaphysical faith upon which our faith in science rests—that even we seekers after knowledge today, we godless anti-metaphysicians, still take our fire, too, Read More ›

A book for your local school library, just in time for Darwin Day …

Here’s an interesting recent book, just the thing for Darwin Day, I guess: Apes or Angels?: Darwin, Dover, Human Nature, and Race by Cornelius J. Troost. Here’s his publisher’s blurb, abbreviated a bit: APES or ANGELS?: It speaks the truth about Darwin’s views on human origins and race. Contrary to the beliefs of most academicians and educated readers, Darwin had two dangerous ideas instead of one. … The second idea is rarely mentioned in politically correct America- that the human races are different in sometimes significant ways. Indeed, inequality is a normal condition of nature. Darwin’s clash with Christianity is winding down because modern science is a foundation of western culture and it fully accepts the truth of natural selection Read More ›

Prediction, prediction, who’ll bet the RENT on a prediction?

Recently, a hoo-haw among some Darwinists vastly spiked traffic to one of my blogs, The Post-Darwinist, out of all proportion to usual interest levels. It had to do with some predictions I had made.

People who can force the taxpayer to fund their activities are generally mega rotten at understanding the point of view of people who make a living offering goods and services to a public that actually has a choice in the matter. But that is a story for another day.

Anyway, predictions, predictions. What does Darwinian evolution predict? Read More ›

The alignment nightmare (part 1)

Alignment is probably the most difficult and least understood component of a phylogenetic analysis from sequence data. — David L. Swofford and Gary J. Olsen, chapter on Phylogeny Reconstruction, in Molecular Systematics (Sinauer, 1990, eds. D.M. Hillis and C. Moritz), p. 417. Twenty years ago, as a 2nd-year graduate student, I attended the first Molecular Evolution Workshop at the Marine Biological Laboratory-Woods Hole. (There’s a comical Expelled-type story from my two weeks there, involving the workshop director Mitchell Sogin, which I might tell here some time. I did design the workshop t-shirt, however, which most of the participants bought.) The overwhelming lesson I brought home from the workshop, aside from the pricey beauty of that part of Cape Cod, was Read More ›

Understanding Intelligent Design Theory – The Seoul Times

Posted to give glimpses of international interest in ID. Korea appears to allow significant freedom of speech and inquiry. ———————————- Special Contribution By Babu G. Ranganathan The Seoul Times, Global Views Jan 28, 2008 Understanding Intelligent Design Theory Imagine finding a planet where robots are programmed so that they can make other robots just like themselves from raw materials. Now, imagine an alien scientist visitor coming to the planet and, after many years of studying these robots, the alien scientist visitor comes to the conclusion that since science can explain how these robots work, operate, function and reproduce there’s no reason to believe that there was an ultimate intelligent designer behind them. The analogy above certainly is not perfect but Read More ›

Design of Life: Extinction – and so, good night, the final curtain …

Textbooks often don’t discuss extinction – the death of all members of a species – in any detail. No surprise there, it’s a frustrating and depressing topic. Frustrating because museums would bid billions to bring back a live tyrannosaur. And depressing because good answers are often not available. So discussion can lurch dangerously into the realm of folklore. When that happens, folklore wins hands down over fact. The extinction of the entire superorder of dinosaurs [1] which marked the close of the Cretaceous era – perhaps mainly due to an asteroid hit – has become a pop culture icon that now supports a variety of views and causes. Pop culture need not – and does not – address the real Read More ›

OOL is a Sticky Situation

Experimenters have recently found that genes–whereby they mean particular sequences of DNA–can “find” one another without the intervention of proteins or other factors. It appears to be strictly an effect caused by electrical charges along the DNA strand; the longer the ‘gene’ (that is, sequence length), the greater theapparent ease in ‘finding’ one another. The experimenters feel that this finding is a help for figuring out what happens during homologous recombination.

Here’s part of what they say: The researchers observed the behaviour of fluorescently tagged DNA molecules in a pure solution. They found that DNA molecules with identical patterns of chemical bases were approximately twice as likely to gather together than DNA molecules with different sequences.

Professor Alexei Kornyshev from Imperial College London, one of the study’s authors, explains the significance of the team’s results: ‘Seeing these identical DNA molecules seeking each other out in a crowd, without any external help, is very exciting indeed. This could provide a driving force for similar genes to begin the complex process of recombination without the help of proteins or other biological factors. . . .’

The article from ScienceDaily is here.

I have an OOL question: This study strongly suggests that similar DNA sequences have a preferential attraction for one another. And the longer the similar sequence, the greater the attraction. If that is the case, then, if a particular ‘gene’ began to ‘replicate’, wouldn’t the replicated ‘genes’ congeal together?

Read More ›

Thanks for Your Support … Evolution of M&M’s

Thank you for your support! Dembski’s copyright infringement charges have been dismissed and, after all the shenanigans of you ID crazies, I am back in North Dakota [Details Here].

TheBRITES.org

I now recognize we must all continue to contribute to the evolutionary process. Whenever I get a package of plain M&Ms, I make it my duty to test the strength and robustness of the candy as a species. To accomplish this, I subject M&M’s to repeated trials of survival of the fittest. Taking two candies between my thumb and forefinger, Read More ›