Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

MacNeill is on a Roll

Allen MacNeill has jumped into the Sam Harris thread and raises some interesting points.  I am always pleased to find areas of agreement with our (sometime) opponents, such as Allen.  Therefore, I am going to close the comments to the Sam Harris thread and let Allen lead this thread off.  Let me hasten to add that by giving Allen this post, I am not necessarily endorsing his views.   All that follows is Allen’s: Read More ›

Judge Rules DNA is Unique Because it Carries Functional Information

Here is the actual text of Judge Sweet’s opinion that DLH brought to our attention below:

Association for Molecular Pathology v. U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, __ F.Supp.2d __ (S.D.N.Y. 2010): 

The question thus presented by Plaintiffs’ challenge to the composition claims is whether the isolated DNA claimed by Myriad possesses “markedly different characteristics” from a product of nature.  In support of its position, Myriad cites several differences between the isolated DNA claimed in the patents and the native DNA found within human cells.  None, however, establish the subject matter patentability of isolated BRCA1/2 DNA.

The central premise of Myriad’s argument that the claimed DNA is “markedly different” from DNA found in nature is the assertion that “[i]solated DNA molecules should be treated no differently than other chemical compounds for patent eligibility,” Myriad Br. at 26, and that the alleged “difference in the structural and functional properties of isolated DNA” render the claimed DNA patentable subject matter, Myriad Br. at 31.  Read More ›

Just a hack writer, but … question

Yesterday, another hack writer caught up with me, for an interview, and wanted to know: so why do you fight Darwinism … ?

Yuh, I know. Why bother fighting the huge Darwinist tax burden. Of course, Darwinism is false, but so? People’s careers are wrecked if they oppose it.

Among other things, her editor had demanded that I account for the fact that humans share 98% of our DNA with chimps.

I asked her a simple – and, to me, obvious – question: Let’s kidnap a guy off the subway in Toronto. Yes, that is a felony offence, but maybe we can manage the whole thing discreetly and get the charges dropped, if he agrees that it was all a private matter anyway …

(would help if he was a friend or relative – of course, we could, at worst, be charged with wasting police time …)

But now! We’ve got him! We will put a chimp from the local zoo of similar age beside him (securely buckled in, because we would not want anything bad to happen to our man).

If both are more than 30 years old, and are normal specimens, how many people will believe that they are 98% identical? Read More ›

Bipedal walking at Laetoli

The Laetoli trackways from Tanzania were first reported in 1979 and immediately attracted attention because they provided evidence of bipedalism. The tracks were preserved in volcanic ash dated at 3.6 million years. Many at the time thought they looked exactly like human footprints, but few of the researchers were willing to adopt this interpretation. The debate has been extensive and inconclusive, but some positive leads have recently been published. Evidence is now available to answer the question: did the makers of the trackways walk like humans or like apes? “In particular, debates over the origins and evolution of bipedalism revolve around whether early bipeds walked with energetically economical human-like extended limb biomechanics, or with more costly ape-like bent-knee, bent-hip (BKBH) Read More ›

Why Evolutionists Say Evolution is a Fact

Evolutionists say evolution is a fact, every bit as much as gravity is a fact. That is remarkable. We see and even feel gravity everyday. Evolution, on the other hand, entails rather dramatic, one-time, events that were supposed to have occurred long ago, when no one was around to witness them. How could we be sure of such a theory? There must be some extremely powerful and compelling scientific evidence for evolution to make it a fact as gravity is a fact. That is what one would think. But, surprisingly, there is no such evidence. When evolutionists try to explain why evolution is a fact, it is a tremendous anticlimax. Consider this example from evolutionist Massimo Pigliucci:  Read more

Judge rules DNA is unpatentable because it is INFORMATION not extracted chemicals

Judge Robert W. Sweet has turned the biotech patent industry into turmoil.

See: After Patent on Genes Is Invalidated, Taking Stock By ANDREW POLLACK, March 30, 2010

Although patents are not granted on things found in nature, the DNA being patented had long been considered a chemical that was isolated from, and different from, what was found in nature.

But Judge Sweet ruled that the distinguishing feature of DNA is its information content, its conveyance of the genetic code. And in that regard, he wrote, the isolated DNA “is not markedly different from native DNA as it exists in nature.” . . . Read More ›

Comets and Cosmology

I had an exchange recently that brought up the subject of life on comets and its implications for ID. As I reviewed the work on comets, it brought up some surprising connections that I had not seen before. I thought it was worthy of a blog, though somewhat old material. The correspondent complained that comets carrying bacteria do not explain the origin of life. It wasn’t comets. This is like Carl Sagan saying we came from some other place. Well where did that other place come from! I tend to agree with you, comets don’t really solve the origin of life. They merely move it to a distant place. I was as surprised as you that comets had fossilized life Read More ›

Lies Sam Harris Tells Himself

I watched the video of atheist Sam Harris trying to prove that science can form a basis for morality (posted by Dr. Dembski below), and it got me to thinking.  Everyone knows the moral law. It is, as Budziszewski writes, that which we can’t not know. Therefore, like everyone else, Mr. Harris knows that his moral impulses are not arbitrary, that they are grounded on something both necessary and objective. But his atheistic metaphysical premises lead to the inescapable conclusion that just the opposite is true, because if his premises are correct, he is compelled to believe that his moral impulses are contingent and subjective, that they are mere accidental byproducts of the interaction of chance and mechanical law.

If one’s premises lead to a conclusion that one knows to be untrue, one has a choice. One can either reject those premises and try to find better ones more congruent with the facts, or one can cling to those premises in the teeth of the facts. If one chooses the latter option, it will become necessary to tell lies to oneself in an effort to reduce the dissonance that must inevitably result from that choice. Here we see Mr. Harris tenaciously clinging to premises that have been falsified by his own experience and telling himself (and everyone else who will listen) whoppers to reduce his dissonance. Let’s consider the obvious lies Mr. Harris tells himself. Read More ›

Scientific American: The Banality of Evil (ution)

Katherine Pollard’s Scientific American article from last year, about what makes humans different from chimpanzees, is an unfortunate example of the banality of evolution. Charles Darwin’s theory, updated to account for a variety of surprise evidences, is taken as fact and this leads to a remarkable level of credulity. Whatever we find in biology, it must be the product of evolution. This leads evolutionists away from a whole range of possible investigations and interesting questions. Instead, they drone on with the same, tired, evolutionary explanations that are so predictable. Here are a few passages of note from Pollard’s article:  Read more

Francis Beckwith’s Biography Pertaining to ID

At Biologos, Francis Beckwith has written what appears to be a biography of his interactions and considerations with Intelligent Design in two parts: Part 1 and Part 2. Thomas Cudworth has already done a wonderful job of explaining and engaging the content of the two-part blog. Since I had already started my response to Beckwith (before seeing Cudworth’s entry), I thought I would go ahead and publish my entry.

Beckwith’s definition of ID is that, at its core, ID is comprised of the arguments of irreducible and specified complexity:

At the time I was never fully at ease with the Behe/Dembski arguments that relied on notions of specified and irreducible complexity (which I now see as the essence of the ID movement).

There is, of course, the “fine-tuning of the universe, and our privileged place in it” argument that comprises ID, as propounded by Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay Wesley Richards in their book The Privileged Planet. This cosmological form of ID, along with the biological position, was what convinced Antony Flew to convert to deism from atheism. The point it that ID is not confined to biology, to begin with, nor is it confined to arguments of negations of natural causes, as Beckwith seems to assume in his assessment of irreducible and specified complexity. ID is comprised of positive arguments, not only that chance alone (non-intelligence) cannot account for the particulars in nature that appear designed, but that the formation and information of nature requires an intelligence. This is a positive argument in and of itself, regardless of how the design gets implemented (whether it’s through nature or through some other medium, doesn’t really matter to ID). It’s really an argument about intelligence v. non-intelligence.

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Evolution’s Appeal

Scientific problems with evolution don’t really matter. This genre of thought scratches too many itches to let science bring it down. Traditionally those itches have mainly been theological and philosophical. Now, as the evolutionary narrative subsumes human nature, new itches emerge. Geoffrey Miller, an evolutionary psychologist, provides a peek into this latest addition to evolution’s appeal. This quote appears in a fancy, inside cover advertisement run by the John Templeton Foundation, in the May 2009 Scientific American:  Read more

Can You Derive Ethics from Science?

For those of you who don’t know, TED is a convention of (usually) world-class thinkers who each give a 15-minute talk about a subject. Many of the people in TED are thought leaders. Some of them, however, get in merely because they have written a popular or controversial book. In one of this year’s TED talks, Sam Harris demonstrated that he has no grasp on the basic concepts of either philosophy or ethics.
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Thomism and Intelligent Design

Given the frequent criticisms against ID by some neo-Thomists it may be useful to consider here briefly the problem of compatibility between Thomism and ID (or at least what ID is in my view). To analyze some of the neo-Thomists’ critiques I will examine for example the recent article “Intelligent Design and Me”, part I/II, by Francis Beckwith at the Darwinist Biologos site (here and here). Read More ›

40-Million Tax Dollars to be Wasted on Venerating Darwin

From the NCSE: Congratulations to NESCent

NCSE is happy to congratulate the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent) on the renewal of its grant from the National Science Foundation. According to a March 2, 2010, press release, NESCent was awarded a five-year grant renewal in the amount of $25 million, to continue its core programs in evolution research, informatics, and education through 2014.

and NESCent Press Release

This is the second major NSF grant that NESCent has received, which brings the total funding for the Center to $40 million. The grant will enable the Center to continue its core programs in evolution research, informatics and education through 2014.

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