Steve Meyer’s new book from HarperOne, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design, will be in bookstores next week. The book’s companion website, www.signatureinthecell.com, is now live. Check it out.

Joseph Campbell died in 1987 but remains influential. In this revealing video, Campbell clarifies why he left the Roman Catholic faith of his youth — EVOLUTION: While many try to reconcile their faith with evolution, many find in evolution reason to leave the faith. Just because there’s no strict contradiction between the two doesn’t mean that the two aren’t in tension. Campbell felt the tension and left the faith. SOURCE: www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJmNBxbExuA Postscript [added 06.14.09, 7:40AM CST]: It’s interesting to see Campbell disparage the biblical cosmology for being several millennia old and thus out of touch with current cosmologies — myths that impact our lives being myths that are compatible with contemporary cosmologies, according to Campbell. But when I studied ancient Read More ›

Are cracks appearing in the Darwinian facade? There appears to be increasing recognition in at least some genomic centres that Darwin needs to be laid quietly to rest as scientific discoveries progress. Professor John Dupre of Egenis for instance writes in the Genomics Network Newsletter – April 2009 – Does Genomics Need Darwin? (p.23) “Whereas until recently it was thought that the vast majority of the genome (>98%) not directly involved in coding for proteins was ‘junk’, perhaps selfish DNA involved in its own project of colonizing the genome, this view is now widely discredited. At least 70% of the genome appears to be transcribed, and it is increasingly suspected that much of this is involved in regulation of genome expression. Especially prominent Read More ›

If you are in Gotham City this weekend you can attend Brian Greene’s and Tracy Day’s World Science Festival. Greene wants the festival to celebrate great scientists in addition to science, as a way of encouraging public interest and generating excitement in the minds of future students. That’s a great idea (one of many from the brain of Brian Greene). But this year’s choice of “great scientist,” evolutionist Edward O. Wilson, may not generate the type of excitement we need. Continue reading here.

Fred Hoyle was an atheist, but also a freethinker who embraced intelligent design. I have just been re-reading his 1983 book, The Intelligent Universe, and I think Hoyle’s viewpoint deserves a more honest consideration than it usually receives. Hoyle was a very famous Cambridge (UK) physicist, astronomer, and cosmologist. He supported the idea of an eternal universe and worked out how it might be possible – a theory called The Steady State. He did not like the idea that the universe had a beginning, a notion he famously deprecated in public using the term “Big Bang”. The name stuck. Eventually, so much evidence accumulated for the Big Bang that Hoyle was left almost alone in holding to the idea of Read More ›

Wouldn’t be any surprise around here. I wonder if my next Uncommon Descent contest should be about why “it ain’t so, even though it looks like it.”

Evolution Deceit, an interesting Turkish creationist book, is good at assembling and clearly explaining the arguments against Darwinism that you can be pretty sure the average lay person will not hear from conventional TV nature programs. It does, however, get some Western intellectual history wrong. This example attracted my attention, of course: Quoting British journalist and broadcaster Malcolm Muggeridge, I myself am convinced that the theory of evolution, especially the extent to which it’s been applied, will be one of the great jokes in the history books in the future. Posterity will marvel that so very flimsy and dubious an hypothesis could be accepted with the incredible credulity that it has. – Deceit, p. 164, The End of Christendom (Grand Read More ›

At African Ota Benga – the missed link, I posted a comment I thought I would enlarge on:

In my experience, in order to avoid acknowledging Darwinism’s contributions to racism, typical Darwinists perform a little two-step: Darwin = good non-racist; Haeckel = bad racist.

So we blame the “bad” German [WWII losers] for what every “good” British/North American Darwinist [WWII winners] really thought.

And for all I know, what every actual living Darwinist really thinks today. Read More ›

At ID_The_Future Casey Luskin interviews Rich Akin from Physicians and Surgeons for Scientific Integrity. Dr. Akin shares why he founded this organization for ID-supporting doctors and the misinformation about his organization on Wikipedia. To listen as Dr. Akin explains more about PSSI International, go here.

Given how routinely evolution fails to explain biology, it is remarkable that scientists still believe in the nineteenth century idea. One of the many problems areas is adaptation. Evolution holds that populations adapt to environmental pressures via the natural selection of blind variations. If more fur is needed, and some individuals accidentally are endowed with mutations that confer a thicker coat of fur, then those individuals will have greater survival and reproduction rates. The thicker fur mutation will then become common in the population. This is the evolutionary notion of change. It is not what we find in biology. Under the hood, biology reveals far more complex and intelligent mechanisms for change, collectively referred to as epigenetic inheritance. You can Read More ›

In another thread a fellow who goes by Legendary made some rather derisive comments about a suggestion I once made, concerning making computer programs that purport to model biological evolution more realistic. The suggestion was half serious and half tongue-in-cheek, since it would be impractical.

My argument was as follows: Computer programs that purport to model biological evolution invariably isolate the effects of “mutations” to only those aspects of the “organism” that have a chance of helping the organism approach the desired goal (EQU in the case of Avida, for example). But this ignores an extremely important aspect of modeling living systems.

Random mutations, if they are truly random, will affect, and potentially damage, any aspect of the organism, including its ability to survive and reproduce. The computer program, OS, and hardware represent the features of the simulation that keep the organism alive and allow it to reproduce, but this is artificially isolated from the effects of mutations.
Read More ›