A Jerry Coyne apologist responded to my pointing out that Coyne misrepresents embryonic development, as evolutionists often do. In his discussion of vertebrate development, Coyne claims that “All vertebrates begin development looking like embryonic fish because we all descended from a fishlike ancestor with a fishlike embryo. We see strange contortions and disappearances of organs, blood vessels, and gill slits because descendants still carry the genes and developmental programs of ancestors.” [79]  Read more

In his 2009 book Why Evolution is True professor Jerry Coyne, whom people pay to teach their children, informs his readers that “All vertebrates begin development looking like embryonic fish because we all descended from a fishlike ancestor with a fishlike embryo. We see strange contortions and disappearances of organs, blood vessels, and gill slits because descendants still carry the genes and developmental programs of ancestors.” [79] There’s only one problem: it isn’t true.  Read more

In 2001 Stephen Meyer, Paul Nelson and Paul Chien wrote a lengthy discourse that explored the scientific challenges that the Cambrian Explosion of life poses to the Darwinian account of animal origins (1).  Central  to their arguments was the idea that biological processes in the organismic context are so tightly integrated that changes in one process invariably require compensatory changes elsewhere (1).  Their illustration of this basic premise seemed intuitive enough:

 “If an engineer modifies the length of the piston rods in an internal combustion engine, but does not modify the crankshaft accordingly, the engine won’t start.  Similarly, processes of development are so tightly integrated temporally and spatially that one change early in development will require a host of other coordinated changes in separate but functionally interrelated developmental processes downstream” (1)

Drawing from examples cited in the biological literature and comments made by opinion leaders, notably geneticist John McDonald and zoologist Soren Løvtrup, the verdict they arrived at was that ”those genes which govern major changes, the very stuff of macroevolution, apparently do not vary, or vary only to the detriment of the organism” (1).  In an effort to model the tight integration of biological processes my sons and I teamed up to assemble a functional multi-component machine better known as the K’Nex Drop-N-Swing.  Not only did we successfully demonstrate how the operability of the ‘Drop-N-Swing’ mechanism was dependent upon the components having precisely the spatial dimensions that they display but we also showed how adjustments to any one of these required concordant adjustments elsewhere in the machine. Read More ›

If anyone thinks that “evolutionary psychology” is a discipline, this should remove all doubt:

The cringeworthy “dad dancing” witnessed at wedding receptions every weekend may be an unconscious way in which ageing males repel the attention of young women, leaving the field clear for men at their sexual peak.

“The message their dancing sends out is ‘stay away, I’m not fertile’,” said Dr Peter Lovatt, a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire who has compared the dancing styles and confidence levels of nearly 14,000 people.

His research has backed up scientific studies showing a connection between dancing, hormones and sexual selection.

Men between the ages of 35 and 60 typically attempt complex moves with limited co-ordination …

Dr Lovatt pointed to research showing that women could gauge the testosterone levels of their dance partners by the style and energy of their moves, and suggested that “dad dancing” may be a way of warning women of child-bearing age that they might be better off looking elsewhere.

– Matthew Moore, “’Dad dancing’ may be the result of evolution, scientists claim Middle-aged men who embarrass their children with flamboyant dance moves now have the perfect excuse – evolution.” 15 Dec 2009

But why read that when you can just check out the Looney Tunes on YouTube? It’s so obvious that this is just popular culture pretending to be science of some kind. Dad is not the chief person who should be embarrassed.

Note: I remember the wedding of one of my children, when my very old dad dragged a recalcitrant grandson onto the dance floor and taught him the steps. Like many retirees in his community, he entertained at seniors’ residences, as part of a country dancing troupe. Life experience causes me to brand “evolutionary psychology” as merely a way for poorly performing academics to attract the attention of popular culture, by relying on assumptions familiar to many, like “Dad can’t dance”.

The fact that the roots of this sort of thing are firmly in popular culture, not science, can be ascertained precisely from the fact that it is assumed that Dad can’t dance. In most cultures, he can and does. Heck, even in my whitebread Canadian culture, he could and did.

My suspicion of evolutionary biology (which I assume may be a science of some kind) is, in part, based on obvious unwillingness to simply confront and denounce all this EP nonsense as the non-science/pseudoscience that it in fact is. I can only assume that their reason is that their own science is so poor that they dare not get a discussion started. They can prove me wrong, of course, by denouncing EP.

Also, just up at The Mindful Hack Read More ›

I recently came across a very interesting post at Watts Up With That? which provides an object lesson in how to demolish the claims of neo-Darwinian evolution.
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I’m not going to write too much. Just read this article and thump your head. If this isn’t an all-out admission of the validity of Dembski’s approach, then what is? I wonder if the Royal Society knew these authors were creationists? The article itself is open. Here it is. BTW, the authors determine the Pictet symbols to be a language. As to the title of this thread, I consider languages to be designed. If you have a differing opinion, I would love to hear what it is!

Today, there seem to be many vested interests in scientific consensus. Universities and science associations often make use of the concept when explaining the importance of science in society and in making pronouncements on issues of public significance. Consensus is relevant to funding agencies, who focus their awards on science that appears to be building on an existing knowledge base. It is a factor in peer review, for it is much harder to get unorthodox ideas past the journal review processes. It influences the media: who is regarded as an ‘expert’ and who should not get exposure because of their unorthodox ideas. How refreshing, then, to find the Royal Institute of Philosophy offering some cautionary words in an editorial: “One Read More ›

In my previous 4 posts, I attempted to demonstrate how the definition of life as an information threshold, combined with the non-locality of information, and the inversion of space-time at an “event horizon” give us a handle on the origin-of-life (OOL). But what I failed to do, was to give a complete example. While racking my brain, I realized that Craig Venter’s claim to have made artificial life was a perfect example. Now I know all the criticism of Venter: he copied an existing genome, he used a living cell to culture his copy, his copying machine involved biological reagents, etc. But grant me the privilege of pretending that he accomplished what he really wanted to demonstrate, and that was Read More ›

World renowned physicist Stephen Hawking says “science will win” in a recent interview with ABC news’ Diane Sawyer. From the interview:

But exploring the origins of time inevitably leads to questions about the ultimate origins of everything and what, if anything, is behind it all.

“What could define God [is thinking of God] as the embodiment of the laws of nature. However, this is not what most people would think of that God,” Hawking told Sawyer. “They made a human-like being with whom one can have a personal relationship. When you look at the vast size of the universe and how insignificant an accidental human life is in it, that seems most impossible.”

When Sawyer asked if there was a way to reconcile religion and science, Hawking said, “There is a fundamental difference between religion, which is based on authority, [and] science, which is based on observation and reason. Science will win because it works.”

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A few years ago I debated an evolutionist who claimed that the human embryo’s gill slits are powerful evidence for evolution. The idea is that as new species evolve, their embryonic development tends to build upon the embryonic development stages of the ancestral species. Imagine a 10-story building is constructed, and then years later a few more stories are added to the top of the building. The first 10 stories would remain unchanged. Similarly, nineteenth century evolutionists expected that the embryonic development of an organism would reflect its evolutionary history.  Read more

It took 20 skilled people working for a decade, and an estimated $40 million of funding, but the outcome is spectacular. It is described as “a defining moment in the history of biology and biotechnology” by Mark Bedau, editor of the journal Artificial Life. The BBC News headline was succinct: ‘Artificial life’ breakthrough announced by scientists. The Economist declared: “Artificial life, the stuff of dreams and nightmares, has arrived“. The research paper claims to have made a synthetic cell, and uses the word “creation” in the title. “We refer to such a cell controlled by a genome assembled from chemically synthesized pieces of DNA as a “synthetic cell”, even though the cytoplasm of the recipient cell is not synthetic. Phenotypic Read More ›

Michael Ruse decides that Darwin had no impact on Hitler in this piece.  He decides that Hitler couldn’t have been influenced by Darwin, because Darwin would have been appalled by Hitler.

Finally, when you turn to Hitler himself, the story is murky. To put the matter politely, he was not a well-educated man. There is no evidence he studied Darwin’s writings or much about them. At most, he was picking stuff up off the street or from the barroom or from the doss house where he lived in Vienna before the War. And when you look at Mein Kampf in more detail, the story seems less straightforward. Just before the apparently Darwinian sentiments quoted above, [“Those who want to live, let them fight, and those who do not want to fight in this world of eternal struggle do not deserve to live.”] he wrote: “All great cultures of the past perished only because the originally creative race died out from blood poisoning.” What he is really on about is the Jews. Darwin would have been appalled at such a connection.

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