In his excellent paper, Jeffrey Koperski argues very well that ID has been unjustifiably excluded from rational scientific consideration. He says that motives imputed to ID proponents should not color consideration of the validity of the theory, and that excluding a theory on definitional grounds is not historically or logically valid. He argues not so well that ID goes further than the data demands. He says there are other competing theories that require less radical movement by consensus science, and evolutionary theology. What do you think? “ID arguments about the limited explanatory power of mutation and natural selection fit comfortably within Conway Morris’s picture. Both agree that new kinds of explanations are needed that would lead to a more general theory of biology. Read More ›

Paul Gillin, a veteran technology journalist and formerly editor-in-chief of ComputerWorld, thinks that legacy mainstream media (MSM) are toast.

Sure, lots of people think so, and yet another techhead’s view wouldn’t matter – except that I keep hearing the same thing from journalists who hoped it wasn’t true, and used to say it wasn’t. From Gilpin:

Why now? People have been wrongly forecasting the death of newspapers for years. Why is this time different?

The first decade of the consumer Internet was very different from that which we’re now entering. Web 1.0 was the display Internet. It was a decade when organizations put their brochures online and users got comfortable with the idea of a global network. Search tools were rudimentary, Web content was difficult to create and interactivity was limited.

Yes, Paul! And even worse, Yapster the Terrier was more likely to have a Web page than his master’s business was. Yawn. Not much of a threat to established media, that. But …

That’s all changed. It’s now easy for individuals to create Web content. Computing power, storage and bandwidth costs are declining rapidly. The open-source software movement has dropped the price of software to near zero. Search engines have become a more effective marketing channel than e-mail. Google AdSense and affiliate marketing networks can generate income for Web site operators, even at low traffic levels. Today, a small group of people with a few thousand dollars and a good idea can build a self-sustaining Web franchise in a matter of months. You couldn’t have done that five years ago.

Layered on top of that is a demographic shift that is about to move a large new group of Web-savvy consumers into the economic mainstream. This new generation simply doesn’t have the loyalty to established media that their parents do. And they don’t read newspapers at all.

Don’t read newspapers? No, and for good reason. At my local convenience store, the guy flogging subscriptions to the Globe & Mail couldn’t even give away a pile of free papers. For one thing, now that Toronto makes us pay for recycling by the size of the bin, who wants a big pile of newsprint?

I’m more skeptical of Gilpin’s claim that the “new journalism” doesn’t need to be accurate because industrious armies of readers will correct stories, and that’s okay. Okay for whom? For people who don’t need accurate information?

If I need to know the expected overnight temperature in Toronto tonight, I’ll go with the Weather Network’s Internet forecast, right or wrong – because one thing that hasn’t changed is that there are only 24 hours in a day and I can only invest a tiny amount of time in finding out – and I don’t need one hundred commenters’ opinions on the subject. In general, a system that cannot distinguish between informed and uninformed opinion will likely be replaced by one that can. But we shall see.

Now, how will this affect the ID controversy? Well, let’s see: Darwin’s mob will lose the considerable advantage they gained from the formula pro-Darwin stories generated by the legacy MSM. They will, however, still have the advantage that so many of them are supported by the taxpayer, and they may gravitate increasingly toward political action to silence dissent.

One thing about predicting the future is that it is riskier than predicting the past.

Also: Just up at the Post-Darwinist

Jailed Canuck media mogul Conrad (Tubby) Black endorses ID-friendly Jindal for McCain’s veep. Go Tubs! Read More ›

Cross-posted at The Christian Watershed

On May 8, 1945 the German government officially surrendered to the Allied Forces, thus ending the War in Europe (the War in the Pacific would continue another three months). The Nazis was a horrible government that aside from its treatment of the Jewish people and other “unwanted,” regularly practiced infanticide. Their justification for such an action was they believed the perfect human (read: healthiest human) was the Aryan human; all other babies of unwanted races or that were not healthy at birth were killed off.

63 years later we are faced with a Nazi-like mentality once again – this time, however, the threat is occurring in the nations that defeated Nazism in the first place. The London Times has reported that parents are on the verge of having an easy, non-invasive procedure done to determine if their child has Down’s Syndrome. If so, the parents are then left with the choice to abort the pregnancy or prepare for a child with special needs.

I must ask, how is this way of thinking any different from the Nazi mentality of killing off weaker children in order to have a better society? I know that such a question will automatically get people to accuse me of downplaying the Holocaust, attempting to compare a medical procedure to the horrors of the Holocaust, and that somehow I’m an anti-Semite for bringing this issue up (even though I’m an ethnic Jew), but I believe it is a very legitimate question. How is the mentality that it’s okay to abort a child with Down’s Syndrome – because he won’t lead a productive life, is weak, and will be “inadequate” according to our definition of normal – any different from the Nazi way of thinking? Read More ›

Here are two emails I received, one from the Academic Freedom Consortium, which backs the recent Louisiana legislation allowing public school teachers to present material critical of Darwinian evolution, another from the skeptic society (Center for Inquiry), saying it’s all a ruse for sneaking religion into the science curriculum and therefore violates the First Amendment.

Please forward this information to our supporters. In Ohio, the Critical Analysis of Evolution lesson plan was repealed partly because the state board of education received 14,000 emails opposing to it. The other side, as you can see below, wants to do the same here. Fortunate, Gov. Jindal has his head screwed on straight and Louisiana is not Ohio. Still, it will strengthen his hand if he sees our support.

FROM THE GOOD GUYS:
—– Original Message —–

From: AcademicFreedomPetition.com
To: ajm@InternationalScientificProjects.org
Sent: Friday, June 20, 2008 7:00 PM
Subject: Tell Governor Jindal To Sign Academic Freedom Legislation

——————————————————————————–

Tell Governor Jindal You Support Academic Freedom

Click here and send Governor Jindal a message of support and let him know Louisiana should lead the way to academic freedom and freedom of scientific inquiry by signing the LSEA into law. Read More ›

Core ID and ID-compatible hypotheses have various predictions. For example, there’s the confirmed predictions related to junk DNA and genetic nature of the platypus, the predictions about designer drugs, long-term preservation mechanisms for conserving information that is not currently implemented, and retroviruses being capable of being used to implement designed changes. At this time the scientific research we have so far does not provide conclusive positive evidence for some of these predictions, although there are tantalizing glimpses that such predictions may become known to be true. There’s also some types of observed changes that happen so rapidly and repeatedly that they would seem to defy being within the domain of strictly Darwinian processes. But such research is just beginning. (And Ken Miller claims that ID cannot make predictions and research cannot occur…)

But then there’s the predictions specific to ID-compatible hypotheses such as front-loading.
Read More ›

An anthology that I started ten years ago is, with the help of two good friends and colleagues, finally out. It is titled The Patristic Understanding of Creation: An Anthology of Writings from the Church Fathers on Creation and Design and can be ordered here. For the table of contents, go here. This is the first book from my own imprint, Erasmus Press (www.erasmuspress.net). The plan is to publish books, journals, and curriculum materials through it — despise not the day of small beginnings! Here is the cover illustration. Further down is the preface.

PREFACE

This anthology might have been published in 1998. Instead, it now appears in 2008, ten years later. For many books, ten years is an eternity and spells the difference between a book that is current or passé. Fortunately, the writings of the Church Fathers are of perennial interest. Going back to Roman and Byzantine times, these writings are basic to Christian theology and have set the standard for how Christians understand creation.

The need for this anthology has persisted – and indeed grown more urgent – in the years since it was first conceived. In the summer of 1998, the journal Origins & Design published a dialogue featuring Jonathan Wells, John Mark Reynolds, and Howard Van Till (available online at www.arn.org/odesign/od191/od191.htm). Van Till, in the mid-1990s, had published a number of articles arguing for creation’s “functional integrity,” by which he meant that God, in creation, had given the world all the capacities it needs to organize and transform itself.

Van Till’s bogey, throughout these discussions, was what he called “extra-natural assembly” – that God subsequent to creation needed to intervene for nature to accomplish things that, left to herself, nature could never do. For Van Till, a world requiring extranatural assembly is unworthy of the deity. More worthy, according to him, is for God to create a world that is “fully gifted” with all the capacities it might ever need to accomplish God’s purposes. Van Till portrays a God who creates a world that, once created, requires further intervention as a miser: such a Creator ungenerously withholds from the world capacities that it might usefully have possessed to carry out its business (which Van Till calls its “formational economy”). Read More ›

Unraveling these crop circles constitutes a design inference that doesn’t just tell us that something was designed but also tells us something about the knowledge of the designer: SOURCE: go here.

I’ve known Karl Giberson over a decade. In the early days, he was a respectful critic of ID. That now seems to have changed with the publication of his most recent book, Saving Darwin: How to Be a Christian and Believe in Evolution (go here for the Amazon listing). The subtitle is curious. Ordinarily one believes in a religion and attains competence in a field of scientific inquiry (does it matter if I believe that quarks really exist? isn’t it enough that I can apply the standard model?). Giberson’s subtitle inverts our ordinary epistemic attitudes (was it intentional?). The title is more interesting still — Saving Darwin. Why should anyone want to save Darwin? Aren’t his ideas strong enough so Read More ›

Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection, which was already as well established as the theory of gravity, has taken a big leap forward. According to the New Scientist (see Dave Scot’s post earlier today), E.Coli bacteria have evolved the ability to digest citrate, after only 44,000 generations. “It’s the first time evolution has been caught in the act of making such a rare and complex new trait,” says New Scientist reporter Bob Holmes. Biologists have known for a long time that the same mechanism that induces drug resistance in bacteria is responsible for the evolution of human brains and human consciousness, but this new experiment is spectacular confirmation of this theory. Now that evolution through natural selection is more Read More ›

Since I don’t believe in angels, devils, and things of that nature understand that the devil in the title is a metaphor for positive atheists. I wanted to point out that as soon as the atheists have vanquished the more blatant god bothering creationists from post-modern western civilization they’re going to go after the so-called theistic evolutionists. If any one of the theistic evolutionists thinks that the likes of Richard Dawkins, PZ Myers, or their ilk are going to be happy working side by side with serious theists of any stripe then they have another think coming. I wrote in a comment that theistic evolutionists are spineless appeasers. So too are the positive atheists who embrace them. It won’t last. Read More ›

In New Scientist we find the following article: Bacteria make major evolutionary shift in the lab A major evolutionary innovation has unfurled right in front of researchers’ eyes. It’s the first time evolution has been caught in the act of making such a rare and complex new trait. This is in reference to the E. coli culture in Richard Lenski’s lab that after 20 years and 44,000 generations became able to digest the citrate in their agar. Nevermind that E. coli can normally digest citrate in anaerobic conditions and that being able to digest citrate in aerobic conditions is a very common ability in many different bacterial species. Also nevermind that aerobic citrate metabolism has been reported in E. coli Read More ›

There’s an interesting story in today’s Washington Times (go here) on Louisiana’s new science policy (shortly to be signed into law by Governor Jindal) advocating that both strengths and weaknesses of evolutionary theory be taught in the public school science curriculum. The other side (ACLU, NCSE, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, etc.) are claiming that such a “strengths and weaknesses” or “teach the controversy” approach to teaching evolution is a thinly veiled attempt to bring religion into the classroom. After all, so they claim, there is no legitimate controversy over evolutionary theory (it’s as well established as gravity!), so those who would question it can only do so because they are creationists wanting to inject religion into Read More ›

In the month of June we have: Saving Darwin: How to Be a Christian and Believe in Evolution (Hardcover) by Karl Giberson, released June 10, 2008. Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America’s Soul (Hardcover) by Ken Miller, released June 12, 2008. Thank God for Evolution: How the Marriage of Science and Religion Will Transform Your Life and Our World by Reverend Michael Dowd (pictured above), released June 19, 2008.

I watched Miller on the Colbert Report last night. Then I saw this comic. Interesting parallels…