Expelled wins the next legal step.

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Sampling a song can be fair use, rules US court

OUT-LAW News, 21/08/2008

The producers of a film defending the anti-evolutionary theories of Intelligent Design probably did not infringe copyright when they used a sample of John Lennon’s song Imagine in the film, a New York court has ruled.

Judge Richard B Lowe III ruled in the Supreme Court of the State of New York that “fair use is available as a defence in the context of sound recordings.” Past rulings outlawed the use of even very short music clips without copyright holders’ permission.

Premise Media Corporation and others produced Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, a film which claimed that exponents of Intelligent Design theory are being unfairly criticised and censored for their association with it. . . . Read More ›

For those with a penchant for masochism, check out Ken Miller on the Dennis Prager show discussing his book about how ID is threatening America’s soul. (The Miller segment begins at 11 minutes.) As usual, Ken completely misrepresents ID and ID theorists, and argues that the ID movement threatens to destroy science in America. Miller argues that ID proponents view science as a “cultural construction” and “relativistic knowledge” instead of the objective search for truth. He claims that the ID movement seeks to undermine the view that science is a way to find out the truth about nature, and that it tells stories to support a worldview (gag). Dennis challenges Miller to explain how belief that there is design in Read More ›

The paper whose abstract lies below the fold has been cited as supportive of intelligent design here by my friend Casey Luskin of the Discovery Institute . I’m afraid I disagree with Casey’s analysis but I don’t have access to the full paper and would welcome review of my take on it from someone with access and expertise in virology. I’ve never agreed that ID, per se, predicts that “junk DNA” isn’t really junk. That’s a prediction based on young earth creationism. If an omnipotent designer created a perfect human genome 6,000 years ago then we might reasonably expect most of it today would still be functional. Design detection in and of itself does not predict any specific state of perfection or decay in the design. Thus the common assertion that “ID” predicts junk DNA will have function is not strictly an ID prediction at all but rather a young earth creation science prediction. Failure to make the origin of the predictions clear in these cases is a big reason why we keep getting slapped down in courts. It’s too transparent that design detection alone doesn’t predict things about junk DNA. You have to add in some young earth creationism to get there.

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I’ve been thinking today about the ACLU’s favorite former liquor control board member (i.e., Judge Jones) and his decision in the Dover case.  In my post today I want to focus on only one of Jones’ many errors – his reliance on the subjective motives of the Dover school board members in striking down the ID policy in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School Dist. 400 F.Supp.2d 707, 748-762 (M.D.Pa. 2005).  I will demonstrate that under very clear United States Supreme Court precedent, the subjective motives of a policy maker are simply irrelevant in determining whether the policy violates the Establishment Clause.

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I blogged on this almost a year ago here: Front loading passes peer review in Cell Cycle Cell Cycle has a policy of making articles availabe without subscription after one year passes from initial publication. It’s been just over a year. The full paper is at: http://www.landesbioscience.com/journals/cc/article/shermanCC6-15.pdf

Yes, Calgary Herald columnist Rob Breakenridge has felt the need to respond to my response to his abuse of anyone who does not worship Darwin. Could anyone here help Breakenridge’s readers understand better why the world in general does not worship Darwin?

My op-ed piece published in The Calgary Herald, Saturday, August 16, 2008, responding to radio host and commentator Rob Breakenridge, with links to sources:

In rebuttal – Theory needs a paramedic, not more cheerleaders

Denyse O’Leary

Re “What is it about evolution theory that Albertans don’t get?” (August 12, 2008), Rob Breakenridge has cobbled together key talking points of the American Darwin lobby. The resulting column is an excellent illustration of why one should not write about big topics without basic research.

The 2005 Judge Jones decision in Pennsylvania, to which Breakenridge devotes much of his column, has not crimped the worldwide growth of interest in intelligent design. That is no surprise. A judge is not a scientist, and Jones cannot plug gaping holes in Darwin’s theory of evolution. Evolution is—contrary to its (largely) publicly funded zealots— in deep trouble, for a number of reasons.

The history of life has not been the long, slow “survival of the fittest” transition that classical evolution theory requires. Life got started on Earth soon after the planet cooled. All the basic divisions of animal life took shape rather suddenly in the Cambrian seas, about 550 million years ago. Later, there was, for example, the “Big Bang” of flowers and the Big Bang of birds, where many life forms appear quite suddenly.

Modern human consciousness is one of these leaps, judging from the superb cave paintings from recent millenniums. The creationists whom Breakenridge derides may be wrong on their dates, but not on much else.

Breakenridge hopes that we can enlighten backward Albertans by teaching more “evolution” in Alberta schools. But that won’t help. Textbook examples of evolution often evaporate when researchers actually study them (instead of just assuming they are true). Read More ›

In a Dec 21, 2005 American Spectator article, Jay Homnick wrote: It is not enough to say that design is a more likely senario to explain a world full of well-designed things…Once you allow the intellect to consider that an elaborate organism with trillions of microscopic interactive components can be an accident…you have essentially “lost your mind”. How has it happened that a majority of our intellectuals have lost their minds? I think I can explain. When one becomes a scientist, one learns that science can now explain so many previously inexpliable phenomena that one comes to expect that nothing will escape the explanatory power of our science forever (though the big bang, quantum mechanics and the fine-tuning of the Read More ›

When I first started covering this beat, about six years ago, it was pretty straightforward. Earnest people were trying to convince me that blind cave fish losing their eyes was just the same thing as creatures developing eyes in the Cambrian. Bacteria junking fancy equipment to survive antibiotic assaults was just the same thing as creating the equipment in the first place.

Life forms, I was told, self-assemble gradually from their component parts via natural selection, without design or purpose, just the way the Corvette had.

Shut up, they explained.

So what’s different now? Unbelievable explanations, not content to remain small and unbelievable, have grown grand and incomprehensible. Increasingly, I hear that there are many universes, and ours just happens to work. Richard Dawkins flirts with this, and here’s another quite recent attempt to make the multiverse plausible.

I am told, those other universes must be out there because if they aren’t, we have no explanation for the fine tuning of our universe, and Darwinism doesn’t work.

As Antony Flew says, it’s like the boy whose teacher wouldn’t believe that the dog ate his homework. So the boy changed his story: A huge pack of dogs ate his homework.

The story must be true because Read More ›

Nick Matzke’s problematic evolutionary narrative of the Type Three Secretory System (TTSS) into the bacterial flagellum quickly made it into a peer reviewed journal while the response from the ID camp took two years longer. Our position, which I mentioned several times in the past, was that the flagellum preceded the TTSS in nature and thus the TTSS represents a devolution from flagella rather than flagella being evolved from a TTSS. Nick had it ass-backward. No surprise there. Devolution is much easier than evolution, Nick. Always look for devolutionary explanations first. I’d like to say that devolution being far easier than evolution is something that ID predicts but alas, it’s predicted by nothing more than common sense. Of course ID Read More ›

We’ve come a long way since Laplace’s nebular hypothesis… Solar System Is Pretty Special, According To New Computer Simulation ScienceDaily (Aug. 8, 2008) — Prevailing theoretical models attempting to explain the formation of the solar system have assumed it to be average in every way. Now a new study by Northwestern University astronomers, using recent data from the 300 exoplanets discovered orbiting other stars, turns that view on its head. READ ENTIRE ARTICLE

I would like to introduce  retired Australian political science prof Hiram Caton’s new Web site on the pious Darwin legends that currently infest popular media. 

Caton, a friend and associate of the late David Stove, author of Darwinian Fairy Tales, has done extensive research on the real story behind Darwin and his Origin of Species – and no, it is not the pious legends you will be hearing on public television. Bet you guessed that.

Both Caton and Stove are recognized as agnostic philosophers with limited use for pious legends in science, as in religion (must be something in the air Down Under?)

Anyway, here is Caton’s beginning stab at hauling away the trash (and his deceased colleague would be proud):

^Belief that the Origin was a ‘revolutionary’ scientific breakthrough conflicts with the fact that public opinion was at the time saturated with the evolution idea. It was so widespread that in 1860 the showman P T Barnum put on display a freak, styled Zip the Pinhead, alleged to be the ‘missing link’ between apes and humans. Read More ›

Having reported news on the ID scene for about five years now, I could give a number of reasons why I think ID is slowly winning the intellectual battle, but let me focus on just one for now: The increasingly preposterous claims made by anti-ID zealots.

At the high end, we have this editorial in New Scientist, in which we are advised,

But perhaps we have the very notion of intelligence wrong. Scientists are beginning to see that the toughest problems – how to control complex traffic flows, for example – are better solved through the random evolution or self-organisation of artificial systems than by human reasoning (see “Law and disorder”). Such thinking appears to be moving towards the mainstream, as societies increasingly face complex problems that overwhelm the human mind. Engineers are finding that their task is not so much to find solutions as to design systems that can discover their own.

If the NS editors were right, we should see non-life evolving slowly into life all around us, but for some reason we don’t. The most fundamental lesson early biologists learned was that life does not self-organize – i.e., it is NOT spontaneously generated; it is passed on, life to life.

Not only should spontaneous generation be true if they are right, but so should magic, Magic, after all, is simply another name for sudden self-organization.

That’s right folks – just toss the bedclothes into the air and they’ll come down in a perfect mitred-corner bed. Just toss whatever into the stew pot, sans cookbook, and you’ll evolve a gourmet dinner. How generations could have come and gone, and no one ever noticed that before is beyond me. Cinderella’s* fairy godmothers, after all, did the housework via self-organizing sprinkles of magic dust.

My point is that if they need to descend to arguments like this in order to avoid considering design, they might as well start examining design seriously. It’s not going away; in fact, the signal is getting louder all the time.

And what’s all this stuff about “complex problems that overwhelm the human mind”? Read More ›

A friend of mine told me about this interesting link: www.chrismartenson.com/crashcourse Regardless of whether you agree with the economic philosophy presented here, it suggests a useful approach to presenting ID.