For many years the molecular sequences in the bat genome have not been cooperating, and recent research continues to confirm these findings. If evolution is true, then we must believe that the incredible echolocation ability found in some bats arose multiple times, by evolving independently. That’s not easy for evolutionists to explain. How could such uncanny design details repeat themselves via blind biological variation (no, natural selection doesn’t help)?  Read more

The DNA code, which translates DNA sequences into protein sequences, has always been claimed as extremely compelling evidence for evolution. The code was first described in the mid twentieth century and, among other things, was found to be universal, or nearly so. The same DNA code is used in the cells in your brain and your big toe. The same DNA code is used in different species. The same DNA code is even used across the major kingdoms. All tissues, all species use the same code? Surely they were not independently created—they must have evolved. And if the code varied, on the other hand, evolution would surely be falsified. In one fell swoop, the DNA code not only is another Read More ›

Last month, I noted with pleasure that Dr. Karl Giberson appeared to have extended an olive branch to ID people, and I wrote a reply here in a similar spirit.  It seemed to me then that Dr. Giberson was showing a breadth of mind and a listening attitude that was unusual among theistic evolutionists, and I genuinely wanted to encourage it, and to encourage ID supporters to respond graciously to his overture.

I am disappointed to report that this month, Dr. Giberson has taken two steps backward for his previous step forward, and has displayed a narrowness of mind of exactly the sort that has provoked ID/TE frictions in the past.

I am referring to his Biologos column, published on May 10, 2010, entitled “Would You Like Fries With That Theory?”  The condescension toward the common man implied in the title is matched only by the condescension toward the common man (and others) frankly expressed in this article. Read More ›

Francisco Ayala has taken an aggressive theological stance against intelligent design, even using words like “blasphemy” and “atrocity” to characterize it (go here). But if Ayala feels entitled to make such strong accusations against ID, one might wonder what Ayala’s own theological views are. I therefore emailed him and copied Michael Ruse: Dear Prof. Ayala, I’m writing to inquire whether in any of your writings you lay out your present religious faith (and, if so, where?). I’m copying my friend Michael Ruse because I find his criticisms of ID parallel your own, and yet he makes clear that he himself is an atheist. You, on the other hand, regularly cite your background in the Roman Catholic Church as a priest. Read More ›

The University of Chicago has released some videos of the lectures given on Darwin Day 2009:  Jerry Coyne (University of Chicago)–Speciation: Problems and Prospects Paul Sereno (University of Chicago)–Dinosaurs: Phylogenetic Reconstruction from Darwin to the Present David Jablonski (University of Chicago)–Paleontology and Evolutionary Biology: The Revitalized Partnership Neil Shubin (University of Chicago)–Great Transformations in Life: Insights from Genes & Fossils Robert J. Richards (University of Chicago)–Darwin’s Biology of Intelligent Design

The editor of the Indian Journal AntiMatters is a German physicist, Ulrich Mohrhoff, a long-time resident of India who has published numerous scientific papers on quantum mechanics. Since he had published an article based on chapter 5 of my new Discovery Institute Press book In the Beginning… in AntiMatters (and also my “Epilogue”), we asked him if he would write an endorsement for the new book. He declined, saying while he appreciated my critiques of Darwinism, “it is preposterous to assert that ID is the alternative to materialism.” (I believe this was specifically referring to the introduction to my chapter 6, where I claim that the strongest argument for ID is to clearly state the alternative view, [materialism].) I quoted Read More ›

Biologos has a review of William Dembski’s new book The End of Christianity: Finding a Good God in an Evil World by Stephen Ashley Blake, with an introduction by Darrel Falk.

From Falk’s introduction:

My theological background is Wesleyan. Theological scholars in the Wesleyan tradition are rarely troubled by death before the Fall. It’s a non-issue for most Wesleyans, but it is an issue for many evangelicals. In fact, this one concept may be the most significant barrier blocking many evangelicals from accepting an old earth and coming to grips with the reality of evolution. Dembski, in this book, leaves the realm of math and biology. This time he dons his theological hat and lays out a view that ought to generate much conversation among those troubled by death before the Fall.

Read More ›

In his evolution apologetic, Science on Trial, Douglas Futuyma argued that the idea that the species were created is obviously false because they not well designed. Evolution, concluded Futuyma, must be true. For instance, Futuyma pointed out that photosynthesis is immensely useful, yet no higher animals have this mechanism. But new research is finding just that. The green sea slug, it seems, is part animal and part plant. As one report explained:  Read more

The burden of proof rests with BW proponents, not ID proponents. For those with inquisitive minds, I suggest checking out David Berlinski’s comments here, starting at 41 minutes. As everyone with any sense knows, David Berlinski — a mindless, born-again, Christian religious fanatic — is masquerading as a secular Jewish mathematician while attempting to impose a theocracy and destroy the entire foundation of modern science. I have, on several occasions at UD, proposed that simple mathematical analysis of the available probabilistic resources — even making unrealistically optimistic probabilistic assumptions at every turn — renders totally absurd the claim that the mechanism of random errors filtered by natural selection can account for what we find in living systems beyond the utterly Read More ›

In 1734 Daniel Bernoulli used cutting edge statistical methods of his day to prove that our solar system must have evolved as a result of a single cause. He who would deny this, concluded the scientist-mathematician, “must reject all the truths, which we know by induction.” Bernoulli’s high confidence was, of course, unwarranted as later years would reveal. But today, almost three centuries later, little has changed.  Read more

In Part 1 we argued that Origin-of-life (OOL) was indistinguishable from creationism, but distinguishable from panspermia. In Part 2, we argued that panspermia had not, in fact, solved the problem of OOL by positing infinite space or eternal time. However, we pointed out that panspermia at least recognized that there was a coupling between space-time and OOL, a coupling we identify with the Fourier Transform. In contrast, most OOL theories suppose life began at two points and a line: a point in time, a point in space (microscopic coacervate, etc.) and a line of serially encoded information (DNA, enzyme, etc.) Our goal for this post, is to elucidate what this FT does to the traditional OOL theory, how this transform Read More ›

In “Triumph of Maya,” New English Review (May 10), Mark Antony Signorelli addresses the poverty of current cultural Darwinism, critiquing it from a Hindu perspective:

When I speak here of Darwinism, I am not referring to the scientific theory of evolution as it is currently expounded, which is a matter for scientists to debate; I am referring to the apotheosis of that scientific theory into an all-explanatory, totalizing doctrine, with all sort of implications of a necessarily philosophical purport. This is the true Darwinism to which I refer,[iv] and which has spread like a pestilence through the corridors of Western academia. Of course, in this respect, Darwinism merely displays that positivism, or scientism, which is one of the grand and stupid prejudices of the modern mind, and arguably lies at the root of all the others. The belief that because science has explained some things well, it can explain all things well, and that therefore the only legitimate form of inquiry partakes of scientific methodology, pervades our era, though nobody now so much as pretends to offer a rational defense of such assumptions. On the occasion that such a defense was attempted, it was a crashing failure. The logical positivists, those masters of sterility, gathered amidst the pallor of early twentieth century decadence for the express purpose of restraining men’s thoughts, for all time, to the wholly material and observable. … Clutching this blatantly self-refuting doctrine in their little withered fists, they warned men that henceforth there would be no more metaphysics. These were men who believed that prakriti [material] was all, and who wished to cajole their fellow man into the like conviction, yet their project ended in such a perfect and irremediable failure that their efforts remain as a kind of startling monument to the absurdity of philosophical presumption. And still, the ranks of the academic materialists are filled with haughty men convinced that the general position of the logical positivists, so nakedly erroneous, is a self-evident truth. We still routinely read the claim, made or insinuated by authors whom we are supposed to take seriously, that metaphysics is a passé and useless discipline, as though a complete and systematic explanation of the universe were possible without a metaphysics, any more than a satisfactory account of wages were possible without an economics, or an explanation of tragedy without a poetics. The Darwinians unreflective belief that scientific explanations alone are valid, then, is hardly unique to themselves, but one which they clearly caught from the linguists, psychologists, and anthropologists with whom they rub shoulders in the dining halls and faculty meetings of our desolate universities.

Funny thing, I just got done proofreading an academic article that exactly fits Signorelli’s description.

For one thing, the authors have an itch to argue away consciousness, a sure sign of trouble. Read More ›

I have just been re-reading R. G. Collingwoods “Essay on Metaphysics”, and am now more that ever convinced that Collingwood’s perspective is incredibly important to the ID debate. Collingwood was a mid-20th Century British Philosopher who was WaynFlete Professor of Metaphysical Sciences at Oxford University, and who worked himself to death. He published many works – all of them in style that is incredibly easy to read, but very challenging to the reader. Unlike many philosophers he was very interested in the natural sciences, and documented the course of Western science in his “Idea of Nature”. Yet, in his last days he warned that natural science, as now conceived in the West, will ultimately destroy Western Civilization. And this would Read More ›