Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

SHOULD BE OFF TOPIC

UD bloggers tend not to automatically follow the experts or the party line. Check out this MSNBC debate between two US Congressmen on whether Global Warming was caused by CO2. When the “denier” started to look as if he was winning on the science, the debate moderator inferred he was a creationist and anti-science. He then forced both men to profess their belief in EVOLUTION. Watch in fear! SORRY THE VIDEO HAS BEEN TAKEN DOWN. TOO UNCOMFORTABLE FOR THEM? A transcript is available here. Anyone who finds the video again please let us know. Here is another one like the other one. http://www.youtube.com/watch? Another is here http://www.youtube.com/watch?

Darwinism and popular culture: A columnist reminds me of its easy, empty phrases

In “A God who bleeds” (July 31, 2009), Jonah Goldberg notes,

Oprah promised Obama would help us “evolve to a higher plane.” Deepak Chopra said Obama’s presidency represented “a quantum leap in American consciousness.” Last month, Newsweek editor Evan Thomas proclaimed that Obama stood “above the country, above — above the world, he’s sort of God.”

Well, however you would vote, you gotta feel at least a bit sorry for a guy who was supposed to be a “quantum leap” and help us all “evolve to a higher plane.”

Popular Darwinism doesn’t need a laugh track, that’s for sure.

Aw, while we’re here anyway, new at The Post-Darwinist Read More ›

Karen Armstrong’s Case for G_d

I have just posted my review of Karen Armstrong’s The Case for God on my university website. Although the book does not spend many pages on ID in name, she clearly objects to the broadly natural theological mentality that provides support for ID. Hers is a very consistently anti-rationalist case for religion.  I’m sure there are people attracted to the position but not me. You can respond to my review here or there.  No doubt I’m not alone in finding it more instructive to review books by those with whom I disagree.

Common ancestry: More on the infant grasping reflex

A while back, I wrote to a correspondent about the infant grasping reflex.

He had written to say that some Darwinist somewhere was fronting the ability of human infants to hang on a couple of minutes as evidence of common descent with chimpanzees, and wondered how I could possibly deal with this evidence. (Well, I guess it would buy the human infant a couple of minutes of life, right? Not an attractive prospect, in my view. Better look elsewhere for human survival.)

Look, I do not have a problem with common descent, until its advocates get up on their hind legs and start arguing for it. One gets some of the worst arguments in the world, fronted by vast academic paraphernalia – and, very often, implied threats if one doesn’t agree thrown in.

Now, the story in question raised the question of what counts as evidence of common descent. Read More ›

Bait And Switch (Intuition, Part Deux)

Once upon a time people thought that the sun revolved around the earth because this was intuitive. They were wrong. Once upon a time people thought that the moon revolved around the earth because it was intuitive. They were right. Therefore, intuition can’t be trusted. Good enough. Evidence eventually confirmed the truth in both cases. Then along came neo-Darwinism in the 20th century. Intuition and the simple mathematics of combinatorics suggest that random errors and throwing out stuff that doesn’t work can’t account for highly complex information-processing machinery and the information it processes in biological systems. There is no evidence, hard science, or mathematical analysis that can give any credibility to the proposed power of the Darwinian mechanism in this Read More ›

The Principle of “Methodological Counterintuitiveness”

I recently posted on op-ed in which I described that the concern in the 1970s was not global warming but global cooling (go here). Critics of that piece are now claiming that I’m misrepresenting the fabulous 70s and that “science” back then was not in fact claiming that the earth was cooling. I recall seeing cited some literature on global cooling from that time, so I wrote the op-ed from memory. I since went to that trusted source — Wikipedia — and looked up the article on “global cooling.” It begins (go here): Global cooling was a conjecture during the 1970s of imminent cooling of the Earth’s surface and atmosphere along with a posited commencement of glaciation. This hypothesis never Read More ›

Satirizing Scientism

I wanted to highlight a friend’s blog dedicated to “Mocking Scientism, Evolutionism, & the Arrogance of the Academy. Warning of the Dangers of Technological “Enhancement” of Human Beings. Exploring the Logic of Intelligent Design.” It covers a nice variety of topics from a new perspective.

Steve Meyer on COAST TO COAST tonight

DNA & Intelligent Design Date: 07-28-09 Host: George Noory Guest: Stephen Meyer Stephen C. Meyer will discuss recent discoveries in cell biology which support intelligent design and reveal that digital computers and living cells are operating on the same principles. SOURCE: www.coasttocoastam.com/show/2009/07/28

Uncommon Descent: Contest Question 7: “Foul anonymous Darwinist blogger exposed. Why so foul?” Winner announced

Uncommon Descent: Contest Question 7: “Foul anonymous Darwinist blogger exposed. Why so foul?” featured the opposite outcome from Contest Question 6. Only one person entered Question 6 (winner announced here), possibly because most of us are sick of hearing the term “crisis” used to mean any situation (in this case, genomics) that someone finds upsetting. That’s good news, really. Maybe we’ll go back to saving “crisis” for the next eruption of Krakatoa or Pinatubo. Basically, there are no “crises” in cosmology or genome mapping.

Anyway, by contrast, 198 people responded to Contest Question 7. Now, to recap, the topic had come up unexpectedly. An avatar blogger, “Canadian Cynic,” had been posting obscenities for years against Canadian women (wives, mothers, grandmothers, sisters, daughters) who espoused traditional values. I somehow got in his sights because of my interest in the intelligent design controversy.

The problem wasn’t so much with the vile stuff he said but with the fact that no one knew who he was. But the enterprising Wendy Sullivan, the “Girl on the Right”, found out, and allowed the world (his clients, colleagues, suppliers, acquaintances, neighbours, anyone who might be interested, really) to know that that is how he spends his time when he is not developing or writing about software.

That’s all we wanted, really. Just to end the secrecy. The rest, we were pretty sure, would take care of itself. Okay, so that’s history, but it raised an interesting question for Contest 7: Why do so many Darwinists spout so much filth, hostility, and aimless detraction?

In other words, why would stuff that earns applause at Panda’s Thumb and After the Bar Closes get you kicked out of Uncommon Descent? And, incidentally, Darwin and his associates would doubtless be much more comfortable at Uncommon Descent than at Panda’s Thumb or After the Bar Closes? What cultural change does this signify?

The part I find most interesting is that in polls, people like Canadian Cynic would doubtless proclaim themselves great defenders of the rights of women, more volubly maybe than men who would never behave that way in print.

Most of our 198 entries responded to one aspect or another of this charged issue., but a number were genuine entries. After reading them over and thinking about them, I found I could not choose between two entries, EndoplasmicMessenger at 105 and Cannuckian Yankee at 163, so I am declaring them joint winners. Both need to provide me with a postal address at oleary@sympatico.ca if they wish to receive their free copy of the Expelled DVD.

Here are their entries, reproduced: Read More ›

H. L. Mencken on the “urge to save humanity”

H. L. Mencken once remarked that “the urge to save humanity is always a false front for the urge to rule it.” I made much the same point in a recent op-ed about our new science czar John Holdren (go here). I first became aware of the quote from a July 24th article in INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY on climate change. Here are some highlights:

Ignoring Science
By INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Friday, July 24, 2009 4:20 PM PT

Climate Change: A new scientific paper says that man has had little or nothing to do with global temperature variations. Maybe the only place it’s really getting hotter is in Al Gore’s head.

Because he must be getting flustered now, what with his efforts to save the benighted world from global warming continually being exposed as a fraud.

The true believers will not be moved by the peer-reviewed findings of Chris de Freitas, John McLean and Bob Carter, scientists at universities in Australia and New Zealand.

Warming advocates have too much invested in perpetuating the myth. (And are probably having too much fun calling those who don’t agree with them “deniers” and likening skeptics to fascists.)

But these scientists have made an important contribution to the debate that Gore says doesn’t exist.

Their research, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, indicates that nature, not man, has been the dominant force in climate change in the late 20th century. Read More ›

Are Evolutionists Delusional (or just in denial)?

My friend Paul Nelson has the patience of Job. He writes that evolutionists, such as PZ Myers and Jerry Coyne, “need to think about [their theological arguments] more deeply.” In one moment evolutionists make religious arguments and in the next they claim their theory is “just science.” Their religious arguments, they explain, really aren’t religious arguments after all. Gee, that was easy. In light of such absurdity, I don’t have much confidence that evolutionists are going to think more deeply about this. But it would be nice if they would stop misrepresenting science. And it would be nice if they would stop using their credentials to mislead the public. In short, it would be nice if they would stop lying. Read More ›

The Foresighted Paradigm Shift

I’ve heard geneticists say we’re in the middle of a paradigm shift, and that no one really understands what’s going on. I even read an article the other day showing how at least one creature DELETES portions of its own DNA during certain stages of development. Basically, the long-held ideas from even a couple years ago are being modified. Until scientists can look at an arbitrary line of code and say “this does this or that” I would not say any idea is “certain”.

Lamarck’s specific hypothesis had been rejected once Mendel found a mechanism for inheritance. Lamarckism was so obviously wrong. Darwin came up with something that was just the opposite. It was obviously true and easily understandable. It is easy and true within a certain scope, although it’s inadequate to explain certain biological features. Hence the modern synthesis and the current attempt to formulate a new synthesis of ideas, which may or may not succeed. Read More ›

‘That Wild-Haired Man And That Dapper Fellow’- Homing In On The Secret Of Life

Synopsis Of The Third Chapter Of  Signature In The Cell by Stephen Meyer
ISBN: 9780061894206; ISBN10: 0061894206; Imprint: HarperOne
 
Watson, with his wild hair and perfect willingness to throw off work for a Hedy Lamarr film, and Crick, a dapper and no longer especially young fellow who couldn’t seem to close the deal on his dissertation“(p.59).  These are the uninspiring words that Stephen Meyer uses to describe the two men who would ultimately unravel the structure of DNA and thus ring in the molecular biology revolution. 

With the chemical composition of DNA sufficiently well established, the world of science appeared poised for a major shake-up in its understanding of heredity.  Still, the road of discovery up until that time had been anything but a ‘walk in the park’.  While important details concerning the components of DNA had been ironed out as early as 1909, several erroneous turns at the beginning of the twentieth century had thrown biologists ‘off piste’ into thinking that protein and not DNA lay at the heart of heredity. Read More ›