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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
(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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Posted to give glimpses of international interest in ID. Korea appears to allow significant freedom of speech and inquiry.
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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 […]
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 […]
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. […]
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].
I now recognize we must all continue to contribute to the evolutionary process. Whenever I get a package of plain M&Ms, I make […]
“For every PhD there is an equal and opposite PhD”
Dr. Caroline Crocker Named First Executive Director of the IDEA Center
Dr. Caroline Crocker Named First Executive Director of the IDEA Center - January 15, 2008
Dr. Caroline Crocker, a biologist featured in the upcoming documentary film Expelled, has been hired as the Executive Director of the […]
“The temperature in Harbin reaches forty below zero, both Fahrenheit and Celsius, and stays below freezing nearly half the year. The city is actually further north than notoriously cold Vladivostok, Russia, just 300 miles away. So what does one do here every winter? Hold an outdoor festival, of course! Rather than suffer the cold, the […]
And don’t use Google, you cheaters! That’s not guessing.
Both passages — arguments about possible modes of evolutionary change — were written by the same scientist. He is offering his own view, not expounding that of others.
Sample 1:
In real life, major evolutionary innovations perhaps had to wait for radical mutational ‘inventions’ that fundamentally altered […]
Click here to sign yourself up as a volunteer to help promote the movie Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed
Not sure? Watch the movie trailer below and then decide if you should help get the message out.
P.S. This YouTube trailer is a little dated. The movie is slated for April release in all major […]
DEBATE: Atheism vs. Theism and The Scientific Evidence of Intelligent Design
Sunday, January 27th at 4pm PST, Stanford University
WHAT:
Stanford University will play host to a debate entitled Atheism vs. Theism & the Scientific Evidence for Intelligent Design. This debate is being organized by student groups at Stanford: IDEA Club at Stanford,The Stanford Review and Vox Clara: […]
The mind does not exist - or anyway it cannot cause anything to happen, right? Well, it would be very convenient for materialists if that could be shown to be true.
Here, commenter Magnan writes, in response to my recent post on dealing with Darwinist hate,
Such a deep dynamic could explain, for instance, why parapsychology is nearly […]
Excerpt:
When a scrap of evidence supports any one of the competing theories of the origin of life, doubts about that theory itself are often not discussed in the article. That practice distorts the overall picture.
To see why, suppose for example that the police are trying to determine which of three suspects stole a car. None […]
Remember the dark days of vestigal organs? You know, back when there was a list of 180 vestigal organs? Or remember the days of junk DNA - when repetitive DNA, large regions of non-protein-coding DNA, and all sorts of mobile DNA were assumed to be non-functional simply because the investigators had assumed […]
I did a local radio show this morning, on which perceptive host Robert White asked me how I cope with hostility in connection with The Spiritual Brain and other books - trolls, votebots, idle anonymous threats, and such.
I think I rather surprised him by pointing out that I didn’t really care much.
Essentially, I can’t do […]
Because of a prediction, a very strong prediction, I made on another thread, I’ve had reason to look into just what has been happening to Darwin’s finches way off on the Galapagos Islands.
Here is a paper published last year in Science Magazine by the Grants, experts in Darwin’s finches. I looked at their […]
Here is a gem for you:
The idea of nanotechnology is founded in the premise that it will be possible to construct machines with atomic scale precision (Feynman, 1961; Drexler, 1981; Drexler, 1986). Biology provides many examples that this is possible; we “merely” need to learn what has been achieved by evolution and copy it. But […]
It is frustrating for me to see that even most ID proponents are ready to concede a Darwinian explanation for any complex structure which does not seem to be irreducibly complex. If someone could show, for example, that the bacterial flagellum could have been constructed through many gradual improvements, would I find a Darwinian explanation […]
On July 7, 2005 Cardinal Christoph Schönborn wrote an article Finding Design in Nature that seemed to level serious criticism at Darwinism and neo-Darwinism. “Now at the beginning of the 21st century, faced with scientific claims like neo-Darwinism and the multiverse hypothesis in cosmology invented to avoid the overwhelming evidence for purpose and design found in modern science,” […]
A commenter quoting George Church on the ribosome in Paul’s thread reminds me of how I came to be on this side of the ID controversy.
For decades I’d uncritically accepted the notion that life could emerge from chemicals bumping together in a primordial soup and that once started it could evolve through mutation and selection […]