Simon Conway Morris and Steve Fuller start this debate (more). < ![endif]-->

I expect it won’t be long before ID is explicitly used to justify virtue ethics/natural law just as Darwin is used to justify EvoPsycho and EvoEthics. The Return of Goodness by Edward Skidelsky Contemporary liberalism’s insistence that morality is a mere matter of rights and obligations empties life of its ethical meaning. We need a return to the virtue ethics of the pre-moderns, and a renewed conception of the good life. Morality is once again on the lips of politicians and commentators. David Cameron has warned that we are “becoming quite literally a de-moralised society, where nobody will tell the truth any more about what is good and bad.” He is echoed by Richard Reeves, new director of Demos, who Read More ›

Professor Reiss, an Anglican minister, has been forced out of his position at the Royal Society for calling for discussions in the science classroom if children raise questions about intelligent design or creationism. In response some Fellows, including Richard Dawkins, Sir Harry Kroto and Sir Richard Roberts, objected and brought their full weight of authority to bear by calling for his resignation. Now the Darwinistas have got their scalp. BBC – ‘Creationism’ biologist quits job Lord Robert Winston, professor of science and society at Imperial College London, commented: “I fear that in this action the Royal Society may have only diminished itself…. This is not a good day for the reputation of science or scientists…. This individual was arguing that we should engage Read More ›

Dear gentle reader, As someone who has had an ongoing struggle with the Anglican Communion his entire adult life, and to whom the current, obvious, and slow-motion destruction of the entire historical Anglican Church brings no joy, I have a few comments on the anticipated apology of the Church of England, led by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, to Charles Darwin.  Despite indications to the contrary, this clearly has had some thought put into it, as evidenced by the Darwin section of the Church of England and website:  “Charles Darwin: 200 years from your birth, the Church of England owes you an apology for misunderstanding you and, by getting our first reaction wrong, encouraging others to misunderstand you still. “ Read More ›

Have a look at Joel Isaacson’s paper “The Intelligence Nexus in Space Exploration” (click here). I’d like to encourage discussion on this thread concerning what you think about Isaacson’s notion of “fantomarks”?

The Festival of Science in Liverpool, organised by the prestigious British Association, has certainly produced some fireworks this past week. Following Professor Reiss’s comments, Professor Robert Winston has now criticised ‘science delusions’ and a ‘deterministic’ approach to genetics. Winston is well known through the mainstream media in the UK as a leading geneticist. He accuses militant atheists such as Richard Dawkins of damaging science with their rhetoric, commenting that the new atheism is ‘dangerous,’ ‘irresponsible’ and ‘very divisive.’ Winston comments that; “Far too many scientists including my good friend Richard Dawkins present science as…factually correct. And actually of course that clearly isn’t true.” “I think that…it is actually…irresponsible. I think it poo-poos other people’s views of a universe about which Read More ›

Here’s a Discovery Institute podcast:

On this episode of ID The Future, CSC’s Casey Luskin interviews Rodney LeVake, the plaintiff in the Academic Freedom court case LeVake vs. Independent School District #656. LeVake, a former high school biology teacher, informally expressed doubts about evolution to a colleague who then reported him to the principal. LeVake ended up losing his biology position, not because he taught creationism or intelligent design, but merely because he expressed reservations about evolution to a colleague. Listen as he tells his story of clear academic persecution.

Huh? Why isn’t this happening in Canada? I thought we had cornered the Western world market on suppression of thought and speech.

Oh but wait! Here in Canada we actually have a government department, the Canadian Human Rights Commission, whose employees post racist and homophobic garbage on Web sites and then get anyone who responds charged.

So relax, Canucks,we’re still ahead of the Yanks in the “tax-supported goofs + goons” department. Sigh. Guess traditional Canadians like me should continue to check out the latest fashions in bags to wear over one’s head …. or else get serious about fixing the problem (which I am, believe me).

Meanwhile, here are the latest posts at Colliding Universes, my blog about competing theories of our universe: Read More ›

Eric Anderson of evolutiondebate.info just sent me an interesting essay I’m sure UD readers will enjoy, so I reproduce it below. Eric is a regular commenter at UD, and he is a very insightful fellow who writes extraordinarily well. (Since I design computational algorithms as both a profession and a hobby I particularly enjoyed his essay Bits, Bytes and Biology: What Evolutionary Algorithms (Don’t) Teach Us About Biology, concerning the Avida program, and I highly recommend it to UD readers.)

Enjoy!

Are We Alone? Identifying Intelligence with SETI

Eric Anderson

I just got back from a presentation this morning by Dr. Seth Shostak, Senior Astronomer at the SETI Institute, on the topic: “Are We Alone?”

By way of background, I had an email exchange with Dr. Shostak some time ago regarding Guillermo Gonzales, so I was somewhat guarded about what to expect from his presentation.(1) I was hoping to have the opportunity to perhaps ask a question or two from the floor, but in fact was able to do much more than that. Dr. Shostak not only took my main question from the floor, but was kind enough to spend several minutes with a few of us afterwards, taking additional questions and providing follow up.
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Professor Michael Reiss, director of education at the Royal Society, has argued that science teachers in the UK should allow alternatives to evolution to be discussed in the science classroom such as creationism and intelligent design. Banning such discussions he argues is counterproductive and only serves to alienate school children from science, especially with so many children from Muslim, Christian and Jewish backgrounds in the state education system. He commented that; “My experience after having tried to teach biology for 20 years is if one simply gives the impression that such children are wrong, then they are not likely to learn much about the science…” Reiss, who is an ordained Church of England Minister, was speaking at the British Association Read More ›

Steve Fuller, an agnostic sociologist who has chosen for his subject the debate between intelligent design and Darwinism has come under predictable attack from widely publicised Darwinoid trolls and has responded.

Kudos to New Humanist for having the good sense to actually ask for a response, instead of sitting, fat and contented, like a toad in a hole, spouting … whatever a fat, contented toad spouts.

Given this evidence, I must perhaps revise my opinion of secular humanists. Maybe not all are useless tax-supported sludge, launching government-funded persecutions. Some may actually enjoy a serious exchange of ideas. Well, I like those sorts of revisions. Moving people into the category of “interesting” is always good.

Meanwhile, Steve Fuller has also written a play:

He expects the play to stir up Darwinists, even though its aim was not to “beat (the Darwinists) over the head” or argue that they had to believe in God. He said he was seeking to show that the evidence base Darwin had to work with had “really shifted a lot”.

Writing a dramatic work had been an interesting experience, he said. “(It) requires a different kind of thinking from normal academic work. You have to lay the stuff out much more slowly than you would if you were writing a paper, where someone has the option of rereading.”

Professor Fuller wrote the play, Lincoln and Darwin: Live for One Night Only!, as a “creative” replacement to the usual symposium he would be expected to give in his capacity as president of the sociological section of the BA festival.

He hopes to stage the work at next year’s festival of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

It is hard to imagine that the American Association for the Advancement of Science would be as open as New Humanist. Too much public money, too many orgmen involved.

But, in my view, Fuller’s troupe should go to the AAAS Festival nonetheless, perform the play on the outskirts, and use viral marketing to guarantee a bigger crowd for their show than for the boring establishment sludge.

That would perfectly mirror the intelligent design controversy in North America.

Then all we need is more useless pundettes who flunked Grade Six math freaking out over why anyone supposes that the universe shows evidence of design. Pundette cannot get through her own day without sixteen image assistants/consultants, so that proves her point conclusively, right?

Yuh. Camera Two, dolly in to cleavage.

Also just up at the Post-Darwinist:

Intelligent design and elite culture: Why evidence would not convince many top people that there is design in the universe Read More ›

I can’t make stuff like this up. New Scientist reports: Superstitions evolved to help us survive Darwin never warned against crossing black cats, walking under ladders or stepping on cracks in the pavement, but his theory of natural selection explains why people believe in such nonsense. Typical chance worshipper bore-me-to-tears opening. But this gets really good at the end: However, Wolfgang Forstmeier, an evolutionary biologist at the Max Planck Institute of Ornithology in Starnberg, Germany, argues that by linking cause and effect – often falsely – science is a simply dogmatic form of superstition. “You have to find the trade off between being superstitious and being ignorant,” he says. By ignoring building evidence that contradicts their long-held ideas, “quite a Read More ›

I found this paper fascinating and well worth reading. Particularly interesting for me was the idea that phages (viruses that infect bacteria) are like a postal delivery system for biotic information. This is something I’ve proposed before except I’ve also included retroviruses that infect higher orders of life. I proposed it as an answer for ID skeptics asking about what mechanism might an intelligent designer use to direct the course of evolution. The entire paper is available here. One of the authors (Sheldon) is a UD member and if we’re lucky he might be willing answer any questions you might have in the commentary. Cosmological Evolution: Spatial Relativity and the Speed of Life Robert B. Sheldon (a) and Richard B. Read More ›

This isn’t intelligent design, per se, but just something that popped up on the Drudge Report and caught my attention. It’s about a research article that appeared in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry where the researchers conclude that marijuana use causes earlier onset of psychosis.

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David Deamer, a distinguished professor of zoology at UCSC, in an interview with Susan Mazur gives us his theory of information as it relates to genetics. Deamer: I think genetic information more or less came out of nowhere by chance assemblages of short polymers. Am I being unfair in interpreting the phrase “more or less came out of nowhere” as “poof”? I report. You decide.

HT to irrepressible UD member/author “Jerry”