Uncommon Descent

Archive for February, 2008

29 February 2008

Melkikh’s Improbability of Darwinism and deterministic evolution model

DLH

Is is said that in the USA one can criticize politics but not evolution, while in Russia one can criticize evolution but not politics. The Russian author Alexey Melkikh provides the most spectacular improbability of Darwinian evolution that I have seen. He then proposes a mode of evolution without mutation. As some readers have asked […]

29 February 2008

Grape Expectations and Interpreting Evidence

GilDodgen

From The Boston Globe: Can expectations influence how we judge the evidence?
SCIENTISTS AT CALTECH and Stanford recently published the results of a peculiar wine tasting. They provided people with cabernet sauvignons at various price points, with bottles ranging from $5 to $90. Although the tasters were told that all the wines were different, the scientists […]

29 February 2008

Is God Really Good?

Granville Sewell

The latest issue of the on-line journal Anti-Matters published by the Sri Aurobindo International Center of Education in Pondicherry, India, includes reviews of Wells and Dembski’s “The Design of Life” and Mike Gene’s “The Design Matrix”, as well as my article “Is God Really Good?”. How is this question relevant to […]

29 February 2008

Finch Biography Now Available

Galapagos Finch

Read the review and insightful excerpts about me at TheBRITES.org.

29 February 2008

Francis Collins speaks at Stanford

idnet.com.au

“5th Feb 2008 Dr Francis Collins discussed his views on science, faith, and the ease with which the two can be reconciled through a rejection of extremes, and an embrace of “harmony in the middle”.
Collins emphasized that science does not provide us with the right instruments to prove the existence of God because God is […]

28 February 2008

How Evolution will be Taught Someday

Granville Sewell

In any debate, it is always good strategy to acknowledge your opponent’s strongest points up front, effectively taking those points off the table. The evolutionist’s strongest points are the fact that science has been so successful to date in finding “natural” (unintelligent) causes in other areas of science, and the fact that the development […]

26 February 2008

Today at The Mindful Hack

O'Leary

North America undergoing religious revolution? No way. Atheism is not growing significantly.
Anti-depressant are definitely NOT the death of the soul, as Tom Wolfe thought
Templeton Foundation offers L2 million pounds to find a non-spiritual source of belief in God

26 February 2008

Wanted: More Greenhouse Gases

DaveScot

Global average temperature in the past 12 months plummeted precipitously erasing all the global warming in the previous century.
Temperature Monitors Report Widescale Global Cooling
Well now, this proves I do make mistakes. My mistake was thinking it would take longer than this for me to be proven right.

26 February 2008

Global Cooling Sets In; Al Gore Apologizes for Trying to Send Everyone Into A Tizzy Over Global Warming

BarryA

 The second part of the headline is false.  The first part is true.  See the article in the Daily Tech here.
 Excerpt: 
All four major global temperature tracking outlets (Hadley, NASA’s GISS, UAH, RSS) have released updated data. All show that over the past year, global temperatures have dropped precipitously.
Meteorologist Anthony Watts compiled the results of all the […]

26 February 2008

Marshall Institute critiques Climate Science

DLH

The George C. Marshal Institute’s 3rd edition of Climate Issues and Questions is a refreshing effort to provide a dispassionate evaluation of 29 major questions regarding the science of “climate change”, and to separate those from political agendas. Their method and effort is well worth considering in light of the current debate over origins of […]

25 February 2008

ID in my Daughter’s Science Class

dacook

I recently assisted my daughter with a most interesting project for her 8th grade science class. The assignment was to learn about a Biome, write a report on it, then design an animal to live in it.
The students were to provide a description of the characteristics of their animal which suited it to life […]

25 February 2008

Interview with Timothy Keller

BarryA

 The Reason for God by Timothy Keller is No. 18 on the NYT bestsellers list.  Over at First Things Anthony Sacramone has a great interview with Keller that includes this on the evolution debate:
 In The Reason for God, you make a very brief argument for the validity of evolution within a limited sphere. It would […]

24 February 2008

Today at The Design of Life blog

O'Leary

Why do scientists sometimes ignore warnings that theories are wrong?
Even great scientists can get it all wrong, and it is interesting to see how and when they do.

23 February 2008

Isn’t It Nice, When Things “Just Work”?

GilDodgen

Here.

23 February 2008

“Another two-fingered salute to the opponents of evolution”

idnet.com.au

New Scientist February 16, 2008 Dan Jones Pg. 40-43 heavily edited. Full text here.
“William Paley, who argued that the natural world is full of designed complexity which must have a creator, would have considered the bacterial flagellum an excellent example. The flagellum, with its intricate arrangement of interconnecting parts, looks no less designed than a […]

23 February 2008

“My Failed Simulation” taken literally at scienceblogs

Granville Sewell

When I first wrote “My Failed Simulation” (now on the discovery.org main page here and at Human Events) it really never even occurred to me that anyone would think I had actually tried such a simulation, or that I was claiming to have tried it. I thought it was pretty obvious that it […]

23 February 2008

Finch and Knuther win 2006 Best Paper Award for “Socio-Chortelist Evolution of Humor: Emergent Jocularity from the Process of Natural Selection”

Galapagos Finch

Finch and Knuther each received an award check for $15,000 plus a gold plated medallion for their evolution of “a man walks into a bar” jokes. Read their paper at TheBRITES.org.

22 February 2008

Today at the Overwhelming Evidence blog

O'Leary

Just plain big? How do animals get that way?
Why the exploding palm tree explodes - or why it doesn’t
Frog from hell? Well, that’s how Nature News is telling it. Apollyon, check your e-mail. The frog is loose again.

22 February 2008

Intelligent Design: Did Biological Life Require It?

O'Leary

February 19, 2008
K.D. Kalinsky
(Note from Denyse: An ID theorist asked me to publish this essay on detecting design in nature. It is exactly as the scientist gave it to me except that
- I have linked the sections for easier Web handling
- all the notes have been moved to the end.
- I don’t see a […]

22 February 2008

Why isn’t ALL life extinct?

DaveScot

In another thread talking about engineers’ perspectives on the machinery of life the topic of entropy came up. Engineers have to deal with entropy in all their designs and the very best efforts at dealing with it only serve to slow it down and never stop it.
So one of my big questions isn’t why […]

22 February 2008

Simpler DNA coding designed

DLH

A simpler cheaper system has been developed to code in DNA. This implicitly recognizes the more complex coding in native DNA. (The news article also assumes the evolutionary doctrine of “junk DNA”.) The contrast with hard drives, this low density coding method and natural DNA shows the very high coding density in DNA.
————————
Human genome may […]

22 February 2008

David Berlinski and The Devil’s Delusion

GilDodgen

David Berlinski is my favorite secular Jew and quintessential iconoclast. How could one not adore a guy who is a mathematician, no advocate of any religion, a Darwin skeptic, and phenomenally eloquent in both English and French, with a great penchant for ironic humor?
His latest opus is The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions, […]

21 February 2008

Miller’s “Evolutionary Design” - an oxymoron or Trojan horse?

DLH

“Evolution” is defined so broadly as to prevent refutation. That requires that the whale of “macroevolution” (simple organism to human beings) must be swallowed along with the gnat of “microevolution” - any mutation or change = “evolution”.
Now Kenneth Miller is attempting to transform the Design vs Evolution argument, by claiming nature reveals “evolutionary design” - […]

21 February 2008

Today at the Post-Darwinist: Another ex-dhimmi for Darwin

O'Leary

Jonathan Wells reflects on how almost everything Darwin believed is being disconfirmed:
There was a time when I would half-heartedly join in the chorus that praises Darwin as a great scientist, even though some of his ideas were mistaken. Now, when I look for Darwin’s positive contributions to biology, I see only that he made a […]

21 February 2008

Where does the pursuit of science lead?

DaveScot

Recently I wrote an article about where disbelief in Darwin leads. It generated a lot of good discussion. Now I’d like to pose the question where does the pursuit of science, in particular the quest for material explanations of life, lead?

21 February 2008

Merely a Theory

William Dembski

Evolutionists continue to be much exercised about evolution being treated as “merely a theory,” arguing that to identify it as such is as disreputable as treating gravity or the second law as “merely a theory.” But consider, as a close colleague recently reminded me:
The late Ernst Mayr, a Harvard professor called “the Dean of American […]

20 February 2008

Animal and Human Mind: Darwinists Want it Both Ways

dacook

The cover story of the current (March 2008)issue of National Geographic is “Inside Animal Minds.”
It is an interesting, persuasive, and I’m sure quite unintentional argument against the Darwinist position that mind is an illusory epiphenomenon of the material brain.
The article presents truly interesting examples of studies involving dogs, elephants, fish, primates, sheep, octopus, dolphins, and […]

20 February 2008

Dhimmi for Darwin no more!

O'Leary

Okay, I have probably got myself into a peck of trouble by deciding to just say what I think about Darwinism and Evolution Sunday and all that.
I used to be tremendously polite to senior clergy, teachers, and opinion leaders who know that you must obey the system and say nice things about Darwin, whether or […]

20 February 2008

Reverse-engineer the brain – NAE’s grand challenge

DLH

One of the grand engineering challenges issued by The National Academy of Engineering is to Reverse-engineer the brain.
If the NAE considers it possible to Reverse-engineer the brain, does not that imply that the brain may have been engineered in the first place? i.e., as in designed by an intelligent agent? As you read […]

20 February 2008

Design of life blog: The puzzling exploding palm tree

O'Leary

Jane Harris has a new article at Design of Life blog about a newly discovered genus of palm in Madagascar (yes, that’s right, a GENUS):
“New findings in science: self-destructive palm puzzles botanists”
The tree waits about 100 years to flower and then explodes in tonnes of flowers and then just dies.
I’m glad local trees in the […]

20 February 2008

Today at Access Research Network: My review of Darwin Day in America

O'Leary

Darwin’s theory of evolution - essentially, that life, including human life, occurs without purpose and perishes without consequence - popularized points of view that would have been considered unacceptable to most Westerners in earlier times. Indeed, that has always been its greatest appeal, to judge from the thousands of editorials on how Darwin’s great feat […]