A few days ago, a friend alerted me to an interesting development: In its Perspectives section, New Scientist - the National Enquirer of popular science magazines - had published a hit piece on the non-materialist neuroscientists, including Mario Beauregard, my lead author on The Spiritual Brain. (”Creationists declare war over the brain” Amanda Gefter, 22 [...]

“Mind-Body Connections: How Does Consciousness Shape the Brain?”, the morning panel of the Beyond the Mind-Body Problem symposium (September 11, 2008), sponsored by the Nour Foundation, UN-DESA, and the Université de Montréal, featured some interesting exchanges featuring a number of non-materialist neuroscientists. Non-materialist neuroscientists think that your mind is real and that it helps shape [...]

Sean McDowell and I did a tag team event in Southern California this weekend. For a description and audio, go here.
The focus was on our book Understanding Intelligent Design.

It’s out! To order go here.

Book Description:
Although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, writes Richard Dawkins, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist. This little book shows that atheism must seek intellectual fulfillment elsewhere decisively demonstrating the need for intelligence in explaining life’s origin. This is the best overview [...]

I just read an Insights article in the July 2008 edition of Scientific American. In a nutshell, biochemist Jeremy Nicholson billed as one of the world’s foremost experts on the metabolome (the collection of chemicals in the body which are byproducts of metabolic processes) is screening thousands of individuals to establish baseline amounts of [...]

Things are changing.
Just recently, Richard Dawkins  conceded that a serious case can be made for a deistic God. (= A God Who Used To Be There)
Plus, Tom Wolfe has distanced himself from “Sorry, but your soul just died.” Apparently, it didn’t die, despite everything you did to kill it.
Now, Harvard cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker - [...]

The Expelled DVD was released October 21, distributed by Vivendi. When I checked early that morning (around 3:30 am), it was doing well for a documentary about the intelligent design guys that almost every legacy film pundit knew he had a duty to trash - if he was going to eat lunch again in Shallow Waters.
By [...]

Melanie Phillips, writing in the Spectator, offers her thoughts on the second debate between John Lennox and Richard Dawkins; this one held at Oxford University Natural History Museum - Tuesday evening 21st October 2008.
Melanie Phillips asks - Is Richard Dawkins Still Evolving? and makes some pertinent points of her own.
Science and Values

The presidential election has loomed large here at UD over the past several weeks. After discussion with key UD administrators, we’ve agreed to set the election aside and put the focus here back on ID (and on topics directly pertinent to ID). Short of the presidential candidates raising ID, the election will no longer be [...]

Our good friend Richard Dawkins is on the march once again:
The sides of some of London’s red buses will soon carry ads asserting there is “probably no God,” as nonbelievers fight what they say is the preferential treatment given to religion in British society.
Organizers of a campaign to raise funds for the ads said Wednesday [...]

I was back at Baylor on Tuesday talking about ID. For the school newspaper article reporting on the event, go here.

Ben Stein’s EXPELLED is finally out today on DVD. If you want to get it as well as a bunch of other nifty ID videos and Jerry Bergman’s new book, click here. Here’s a description of the superbundle:
EXPELLED DVD and Super Bundle Available at ARN
The EXPELLED: No Intelligence Allowed DVD featuring Ben Stein can now [...]

Easy enough to do when like true things that are real problems are happening.
Nevertheless, we have a definite climate trend emerging - more and more climate scientists are admitting anthropogenic global warming is a bunch of crap. Read about some of them:
Lorne Gunter: Thirty years of warmer temperatures go poof

More goodies below the [...]

Recently, I read a book by an American political analyst Jonah Goldberg, Liberal Fascism, which helped me understand a political landscape that I have watched with growing concern: increasingly authoritarian government and increasingly supine citizens.
Culturally, it reached the point recently where the term denialist began to characterize anyone who departs from a consensus - as [...]

It appears that the Waco Tribune abridged Don McLeroy’s op-ed on Texas science standards (that piece was cited a few posts back). Here is the full op-ed (reprinted with Don McLeroy’s permission):
Don McLeroy, guest column:
Biology standards and reasonable doubts
Sunday, October 19, 2008
COLLEGE STATION — Science education has become a culture-war issue. The battle is over [...]

(I submitted this op-ed to the Austin American-Statesman, but - in their wisdom - they decided not to print it. So I am simply posting it here.):
When I first heard that a group of professors who say they speak for 800 Texas scientists “is challenging the idea that discussion of the weaknesses of evolutionary theory [...]

Jeffrey Bada inherits Stanley Miller’s “scientific posessions” and finds untold riches …
click here for article in WIRED SCIENCE
If you want the truth about Miller-Urey, which was a bridge to nowhere, see my forthcoming book with Jonathan Wells: HOW TO BE AN INTELLEC-TUALLY FULFILLED ATHEIST (OR NOT) — this book is about the origin of life. [...]

Remember the big stir about Lenski’s 20 year experiment with E. coli where the bugs “evolved” the ability to digest lactose citrate and this was touted as overwhelming evidence of evolution? And remember our response that until the mechanism behind it was discovered that it might not be much “evolution” at all?
As [...]

Don McLeroy, who heads the Texas State Board of Eduction, has an editorial in my local paper:
…Texas is adopting new science standards. Scientists representing evolutionists and calling themselves the 21st Century Science Coalition say that creationists on the State Board of Education will inject religion into the science classroom. Should they be concerned? No. This [...]

I share concerns expressed here that this blog is becoming too political. I’m of a mixed mind about this. I see the upcoming presidential election as pivotal for our nation and for the place of ID in the wider culture (I foresee an Edwards v. Aguillard type case going against ID if Obama gets to [...]

I’m filing this under education and intelligent design because it points out that a certain segment of the public veers radically from everyone else and it’s the same segment that radically opposes intelligent design.
From Gallup 10/16/08 presidential tracking poll:
Education: Obama%/McCain%
High School or less: 42/48
Some College: [...]

What think you of the “bizarre” strategies for walking used by artificially evolved organisms? (Posted by Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing, October 2, 2008)?
This is a project of Darwin@home, which tries to simulate evolution in unused computing space.
Oddly enough, the narrator says at one point, “It seems complex beyond the reach of human ingenuity.” It [...]

From what I can determine, this is a true story:
A Mindful Hack reader writes,
The state of Maine gave a test to about 15,000 eighth-graders to assess their writing skills, including their ability to form a logical position. When the state refused to release the results, a newspaper filed a Freedom of Information Act request and [...]

Surprisingly, whether you are left or right may not matter as much as you might think, according to an interesting new political litmus test.
Whether you are authoritarian vs. libertarian may predict your politics just as effectively.
Hat tip to Franklin Carter , Editor and Researcher, at the Freedom of Expression Committee of the Book and Periodical [...]

Yeah, me too. Amazing how fast a red herring gets pushed off the front page when there’s a real problem to talk about. But just to keep you updated a little I offer these:
Boise gets earliest snow on record
Valley shivers as winter weather makes a premature appearance
and related to the global cooling we [...]

Bill Maher’s “Religulous” documentary mocking religion in the United States opening weekend box office revenues were 10% higher than “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed”. Our atheist Darwinian friends proclaimed that Expelled was a flop. By that standard so is Religulous.
Correction: That should read our atheist and theistic Darwinian friends… the common denominator [...]

British physicist David Tyler looks at a recent find in cichlid fish which has been vastly overhyped as evidence for new species. He means hype like this Nature News story (1 October 2008), which proclaims “What you see is how you evolve: Differences in vision could give rise to new species.”
Here’s the abstract of the [...]

   In a new spin to the “Random Mutations and Natural Selection produces all the wonderful things we see around us” belief system, mature aged geneticist (of “I’ve spent a long time working on snails, although I have now moved into slugs” fame) Steve Jones of England seems to harp back to the days when old [...]

A computer engineer of some importance has written to say that he thinks me a bit off the mark here, where I deny that computers actually think. He writes,
modern computers are often programmed to be adaptive, in that rules are given for learning (e.g, generalizing or updating “beliefs”) based on experience. So in fact computers [...]

Commenting on the fact that scientists are typically poorly trained in philosophy of science, one friend remarks,
As a Ph.D. student in biology I was actively discouraged from taking courses in philosophy — or, for that matter, any courses outside my department, including evolution. My adviser’s attitude was that I should focus exclusively on my own [...]

In another venue where I participate this article published at arXiv, Evidence for Correlations Between Nuclear Decay Rates and Earth-Sun Distance, and previous articles from the same source published in recent months, is undergoing a lively discussion.
In a nutshell, a couple of earth based research programs measuring the half lives of radioisotopes have a significant [...]