Dr. Guliuzza gives key arguments of detecting design in sexual reproduction, in contrast to evolution and order caused by natural law.
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Creationist speaker makes case for intelligent design Dan Boyer, Michigan Tech Lode 03/25/2009
Dr. Randy Guliuzza

. . .asserted that he was not making an argument about design based on the absence of information but from form and function. “If reproduction isn’t fully functional right from the beginning there are no offspring” and nothing for natural selection to work on, he said. Read More ›

I must move on to other stories about false knowledge infesting the sciences and social sciences, but realized that I should notice this comment to this post: Bottom line is that even if the Gage story is wrong it does not show what is currently known about TBI. Whether Gage is true or not does not invalidate or falsify this, although O’Leary seems to imply this and I guess hopes it will stick. I replied: Taylor, I am glad I came back one last time. You speak as a true Darwinist!! It is clearly of NO consequence to you that the Phineas Gage story is probably false – as long as it fronts your agenda. You are not ashamed of the Read More ›

There is a lot of confusion about dualism.  Few people today hold to Cartesian substance dualism, but that is often the straw man that materialist opponents to dualism attack.  Over at O’Leary’s Phineas Gage post Dr. Vincent Torley asks:  “Why are we wasting our time debating a completely discredited theory (Cartesian dualism) which most Christians don’t accept and which the Christian Church has never accepted, anyway?”

He then goes on to explan: Read More ›

I’m currently writing an essay on computational vs. biological evolution. The applicability of computational evolution to biological evolution tends to be suspect because one can cook the simulations to obtain any desired result. Still, some of these evolutionary simulations seem more faithful to biological reality than others. Christoph Adami’s AVIDA, Tom Schneider’s ev, and Tom Ray’s Tierra fall on the “less than faithful” side of this divide. On the “reasonably faithful” side I would place the following three: Mendel’s Accountant: mendelsaccount.sourceforge.net MutationWorks: www.mutationworks.com MESA: www.iscid.org/mesa

I periodically get emails from individuals who are sympathetic to ID but then read Francis Collins’ THE LANGUAGE OF GOD and find themselves wondering what to think. Thus I recently received the following email: Dear Dr. Dembski, I … have read, I think, three of your books — the most recent “The Design Revolution”. I have been thoroughly convinced of your position in these books. I was encouraged by a friend of many years, who was Professor of Science at … for 40 years … to consider the book by Francis S. Collins — “The Language of God”, which I have just read. This was in exchange for his reading “The Design Revolution.” I’ve not heard from him after reading Read More ›

I was at dinner the other week with a voluble atheist religion professor who, in defense of a materialist view of the human mind, raised the subject of Phineas Gage (1823-1860). Ah yes, the man whose personality changed completely after a horrific accident, a staple of Introductory Psychology.

Anyone who has taken Psychology 101 or read popular neuroscience books has probably heard Gage’s story, which upholds the “frontal lobe” theory of personality. (= You are your frontal lobes.)

The story is that in 1848, a tamping rod went through Gage’s head and totally changed his personality. He was “no longer Gage.” Which demonstrates that the mind and the self are an illusion created by the buzz of neurons in the brain. A textbook case.

I pointed out over dinner that there are good reasons to doubt this story. The prof was, of course, withering. Hundreds and hundreds of psych texts have told Gage’s story, he informed me, so how could it be false or questionable?

Well, I have written for newspapers most of my adult life, and one thing I know is this: Printing more copies of any type of information does not make it true. It makes it more widely disseminated.

A distant relative of the Textbook Case sent me an article by University of London historian Zbigniew Kotowicz, “The strange case of Phineas Gage,” History of the Human Sciences (Vol. 20 No. 1, pp. 115-131), which offers the story you and six hundred others in Psych 101 may not have heard.

Read More ›

Here are excerpts from The Design Matrix by Mike Gene:

Metaphors such as “fear”, “cost”, “abhor” and “angry”, commonly share the projection of consciousness onto the world. Metaphors such as these represent the human tendency to view the world through anthropomorphic glasses. However, the metaphors employed by molecular biologists are not of this type.
….
Metaphors typically break down when we begin to take them literally.

[but] The design terminology that is used in the language of molecular biology does not break down when interpreted literally
….

there is a basic and literal truth to the use of design terminology in molecular biology–these technological concepts are just too useful. Metaphors are certainly useful when explaining concepts to other human beings, yet the design terminology often goes beyond pedagogy–it provides true insight into the molecular and cellular processes. An understanding of our own designed artifacts, along with the principles required to make them, can guide the practice of molecular biology.

Why is it that some metaphors are no where near as effective for describing biology as well other metaphors, especially design metaphors?

Mike Gene recognizes qualitatively the enigma that others recognize quantitatively. There is an improbable coincidence between the architecture of human-made systems and the architecture of biological systems. Recognition of these coincidences is the recognition of specified complexity, and recognition of specified complexity is the recognition of design. Outside of biotic reality, there are no other assemblages of matter in the universe which fit design metaphors more exactly than those found in biology.
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I posted this news item about GM crops on the Science and Values blog and would be interested in starting a discussion about how intelligent design proponents view genetically modified crops. If design in nature is ‘optimal’ then can that be improved through human intervention? What does ID predict, perhaps that GM crops will always be sub-optimal? Read More ›

Here’s a useful link to the response to efforts to pretend that scientists whose research convinces them that the universe shows evidence of design do not face persecution. (I’ve covered the persecution for years. To say it is not happening is, to me, like saying 9-11 didn’t happen. It is always possible for an ideologue to construct an alternate reality – a legend in his own mind, in which the event is not happening. He likes his alternate reality, of course.) [Evil Disco warning] Most of the falsehoods in circulation about the film can be traced to a website called “Expelled Exposed” set up by the pro-Darwin National Center for Science Education (NCSE) as part of its PR effort to Read More ›

So why are these University of Colorado at Boulder people – and New Scientist – determined to prove that God must have created life?

Look, I don’t care, but consider this:

Just when claims for Akilia, as evidence of life at 3.82 billion years ago have not held up, some researchers are even more ambitious than that.

As reported in New Scientist, Oleg Abramov and Steve Mojzsis of the University of Colorado in Boulder suggest that life could have existed on earth as early as 4.4 billion years ago:

They were using a computer model and they assumed that these primeval life forms were extremophiles (simple, extremely hardy life forms).

… heat from the impacts would not have penetrated very deeply into the underlying solid crust. The layer heated to the sterilisation point, about 110 ̊C, would be only about 300 metres thick. High-temperature ‘extremophile’ microbes, like those in the hot springs of Yellowstone National Park, would have survived at greater depths, down to their limit of about 4 km.

Mojzsis argues that the Late Heavy Bombardment of Earth by asteroids “pruned, rather than frustrated, life.”

That conclusion is reasonable, says Kevin Zahnle of NASA’s Ames Research Center in California.

It certainly is, if you are looking for an argument that God created the first life on Earth. I wonder if either he or New Scientist have thought this one out ….

Abramov and Mojzsis will present their research to the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Texas on March 23. Here’s the .pdf.

In fairness, I must warn you that I consider New Scientist the National Enquirer of popular science magazines, and I am also wary of computer models in these situations. So I would just wait and see.

See also: Podcast: Chemist Charles Garner on chemical evolution; Why the Huygens probe – sadly – probably won’t tell us much; Mars red but not dead?; NASA says, could be life on Mars, could be rocks; Origin of life: What can the Saturnian moon Titan tell us?; Origin of life: Alien origin taken seriously? Ghost of Francis Crick smiles wanly; Origin of life: A meatier theory? Or just another theory?; Origin of life: There must be life out there vs. there can’t be life out there; Origin of life: Oldest Earth rocks may show signs of life, in which case … ; Origin of life: Positive evidence of intelligent design?; Origin of life: But is being greedy enough?; Origin of life: Ah, that “just so happens” intermediate series of chemical steps; Why should the search for Darwin’s “warm little puddle” be publicly funded?

Also just up at Colliding Universes: Read More ›

If you have decided that a multiverse makes more sense than a designed universe, chances are, you will rethink after you see this:

“Time Travelling the Universe,” produced by Rob Bryanton of What You Ought to Know.

See also: Read More ›

Here’s a quote from THE CHRISTIAN ORDER going back more than a decade: The Pontifical Academy of Evolutionists Despite being widely accepted even at the highest level in the Church, there has never been any authoritative teaching approving of evolution. Hence the reaction of the worldwide media to the Pope’s message to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences on October 25th 1996. The ambiguous phrase that evolution is “more than just a theory” was greeted with glee by the materialistic press as an official admission of the collapse, under the weight of scientific research, of the Church’s traditional beliefs in Adam and Eve and any literal sense of Genesis.(37) Yet by no stretch of wishful thinking can the Pope’s message, arguably Read More ›

Here