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How little we know about the only planet known to be teeming with life …

A team of Penn State University researchers have used genetic data to formulate a plan of action to prevent the extinction of the Tasmanian devil. (Credit: Stephan C. Schuster, Penn State University)

In “A Home Before the End of the World” (Design Observer Group, 06.09.11), Adelheid Fischer reminds us,

To date, only about two million species of plants and animals have been identified and described. An estimated 10 million species still await discovery, description and naming. But this taxonomic handshake is just the beginning and tells us little about how organisms actually make their day-to-day living in the world — and therefore how they might also be of use to us.Our ignorance is truly staggering. According to some estimates, 95 percent of organisms in the soil alone are unknown to science. Read More ›

Major novelist thinks co-author Leonard Mlodinow mostly wrote “no God needed” book, headlined as by “Stephen Hawking”

Mlodinow2
Leonard Mlodinow, Grand Design co-author (or battery pack, if industry experience is anyguide)

Umberto Name of the Rose Eco (not the person you’d immediately expect to not like Stephen Hawking’s latest effort, The Grand Design) apparently doesn’t like it. That’s according to Vox Day’s translation from the Italian.

Yes, for one  thing, Eco thinks the book was mostly written by co-author Cal Tech physicist Leonard Mlodinow:

the book is fundamentally a work of the second author, whose qualifications are described on the cover as having written some episodes of “Star Trek”.UD News would pay no attention to such speculations, but for the fact that Eco is a writer by trade (and a very accomplished one), and writers excel at picking apart different voices in a multi-authored work.

Anyway, Eco has a number of more germane beefs:  Read More ›

You can’t have them, atheists!

The atheist blog Ungodly News has just released a Periodic Table of Atheists and Antitheists. While I admire its artistry, I deplore its lack of accuracy. At least three of the people listed as atheists or anti-theists were nothing of the sort: Albert Einstein, Mark Twain and (in his final days) Jean-Paul Sartre. I realize that the last name will shock many readers. I’ll say more about Sartre anon.

I’m a great admirer of Einstein (who isn’t?) and a fan of Mark Twain, whose house I visited in December 1994. And I thoroughly enjoyed reading Sartre’s Les Mains Sales (Dirty Hands) in high school. When he wrote that play in 1948, Sartre was a militant atheist, but as we’ll see, Sartre’s views changed in his final years. These three authors I treasure, so I say to the atheists: you can’t have them!

There are three more people on Ungodly News’ periodic table who, in the interests of historical accuracy, I have to say don’t belong there either: Charles Darwin, Thomas Henry Huxley and Bill Gates. All three are (or were) agnostics, not atheists, and as I’ll argue below, while these thinkers all reject the claims of revealed religion, none of them deserves to be called an anti-theist. It is an undeniable historical fact, however, that the ideas disseminated by Darwin and Huxley have caused many people to lose their faith in God.

Atheists love to claim Albert Einstein as one of their own, but he was nothing of the sort.

[This post will remain at the top of the page until 6:00 am EST tomorrow, June 28. For reader convenience, other coverage continues below. – UD News]

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Yeast evolve multicellularity? Actually, Darwinists still searching for Hat Rabbit Eject button.

At Creation-Evolution headlines, Dave Coppedge asks, “If This Is Evolution, What Is Trivia?” (June 24, 2011): New Scientist printed a dramatic headline, “Lab yeast make evolutionary leap to multicellularity.” A leap of the imagination, as it happens. This challenge to Darwinian evolution turned out to be a cinch, it went on to claim: “In just a few weeks single-celled yeast have evolved into a multicellular organism, complete with division of labour between cells,” reporter Bob Holmes announced. “This suggests that the evolutionary leap to multicellularity may be a surprisingly small hurdle.” Trouble is, other evolutionists aren’t buying it. For one thing, William Ratcliff and colleagues at the University of Minnesota “set out to evolve multicellularity” in yeast cells by centrifuging Read More ›

Terry Eagleton: Leave Darwinism to earthworms and mildly intelligent badgers

In “Who needs Darwin? (22 June 2011), a New Statesman review of George Levine’s The Joy of Secularism: 11 Essays for How We Live Now, Terry Eagleton gets it mostly right about Darwinism’s take on religion:

None of these writers points out that if Christianity is true, then it is all up with us. We would then have to face the deeply disagreeable truth that the only authentic life is one that springs from a self-dispossession so extreme that it is probably beyond our power. Instead, the volume chatters away about spirits and Darwinian earthworms, animal empathy and the sources of morality.

But earthworms is precisely what the Darwinists have got. And the humble earthworm still believes Darwinism. Read More ›

Someone’s wrong. Who is it?

P. Z. Myers, writing over at Pharyngula: Neo-Darwinism does not predict that early development will be conserved. Neo-Darwinism does not predict that early development will be conserved. Neo-Darwinism does not predict that early development will be conserved. …That early stages should be more resistant to change is not a prediction of evolutionary theory; it’s an inference from molecular genetics, that genes at the base of a long chain of essential interactions ought to be less likely to vary between species. What that doesn’t take into account is that genes are part of the great cloud of environmental interactions that go on to generate a selectable function, and that if the environment in which the gene is expressed changes, it can Read More ›

William Lane Craig is “disingenuous,” and he “shocked” Larry Krauss in a recent debate?

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Lawrence Krauss/Peter Ellis

Paul Lucas offers atheist physicist Lawrence Krauss’s reflections on his debate with William Lane Craig (June 23, 2011), in interview with Michael Payton and Theo Warner. Krauss seems to regret it now and has nasty things to say about sponsor Campus Crusade for Christ, as well as Craig:

PM: … Craig draws a distinction between “Is there evidence..?” and “Is there compelling or good evidence?”. So it appears that he was under the impression that his only burden in the debate was to say that there was some evidence for God. I think that was evident in his equation, sort of meaningless equation that he put on…


LK: Yeah absolutely meaningless and disingenuous in the extreme. The use of those pseudo-equations at the beginning shocked me and it was only after the fact that it really upset me because it really indicated that he had no interest in explaining anything but rather hoodwinkin the students who were there.

Is Craig disingenuous? A hoodwinker? Is Krauss, called by Scientific American “one of the few top physicists who is also known as a “public intellectual“, a sore loser?

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Song birds claimed to use grammar

In “Finches tweet using grammar,” Clare Pain (ABC , 27 June 2011) reports The scientists played jumbled-up birdsongs to individual finches to see whether the birds responded with the usual burst of calls to the jumbled songs. To their surprise they found that there were some jumbled songs that elicited a call-burst response and some that did not. Even more surprising: all the birds responded in the same way. If one bird ignored a jumbled call, all the other birds ignored that call too. It seems that the order of syllables matters to the birds, and that suggests grammar in action. The birds, the researchers say, do better than monkeys would. “Our results indicate that syllable sequences in birdsongs convey Read More ›

Why there is no “scientific” explanation for evil

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American actor Edwin Booth as master villain Iago, c. 1870/Martin H.

Recently, there have been a number of attempts to use science to make evil intelligible. Canadian columnist David Warren reflects here, regarding a recent riot in Vancouver:

I am trying to draw attention to the very “zero” at the heart of that mob, and ultimately, any violent mob. The participants behave in ways that are finally unintelligible. To say they behave as animals would be unfair to animals, which are purposeful, and even merciful by comparison. (What they have no business with, they leave alone.)

It’s not that the books don’t explain anything. They tend to explain – either well or badly- Read More ›

Hideous Misrepresentations, Outright Lies, and Demagoguing of ID at wikipedia

For those who trust wikipedia as a neutral and objective source of information, check out this. I use wikipedia for looking up mathematical formulae, and technical information concerning aeronautical, mechanical, electrical, and software engineering — all relevant to my work. In such realms it is a great resource. But as a resource concerning ID, it is the equivalent of TV faith-healing con-artistry.

Cosmology: String theory – a first step to understanding it …

Douglas and Dine and their co-workers have taken the first steps in finding the statistical rules governing different string vacua. I can’t comment usefully on this, except to say that it wouldn’t hurt in this work if we knew what string theory is. – Nobelist Steven Weinberg, The Nature of Nature , p. 550 A second step? In the same book (which you can win in our most recent contest), ID-friendly cosmologist Bruce Gordon offers a brief explanation, which shows that he doesn’t think much of string theory, any more than anti-ID Weinberg does. Enter the contest or buy the book. Really.

Sociologist: Darwinism is the astrology of science

Steve Fuller, professor of sociology, University of Warwick
photo courtesy University of Warwick

And its biggest asset right now is public funding and court judgments.

Steve Fuller, agnostic sociologist at Warwick University (Britain) and author of Dissent over Descent, gives us an entertaining picture of astrology in the decades  before its collapse that unmistakably echoes Darwinism today:

… in the four centuries that separated the early Oxford scholastics from Newton, astrology grew in secular importance, resulting in the field’s knowledge claims becoming “unfalsifiable,” the specific quality Popper attributed to pseudoscientific theories. In other words, astrologers refused to submit to a public test that might reveal a fundamental error in their theories.

[As in arch-Darwinist Richard Dawkins refuses to debate, despite fellow Oxford atheist’s chastisement? ] Read More ›

New atheist Sam Harris explains why he thinks but little of old-fashioned theistic evolutionist John Polkinghorne

The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values New atheist and PhD neuroscientist Sam Harris on theistic evolutionist John Polkinghorne:

… here is Polkinghorne describing the physics of the coming resurrection of the dead:

If we regard human beings as psychosomatic unities, as I believe both the Bible and contemporary experience of the intimate connection between mind and brain encourage us to do, then the soul will have to be understood in an Aristotelian sense as the “form,” or information-bearing pattern, of the body. Though this pattern is dissolved at death it seems perfectly rational to believe that it will be remembered by God and reconstituted in a divine act of resurrection. Read More ›

Uncommon Descent contest: List the ten most significant ID books of the last 25 years

Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution
World's most evil book says Darwin was wrong about some things

[Contest closed for judging.] Contest judged here.

Recently, a list was posted to Listverse identifying Michael Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box as “#1 in a list of 10 books that screwed up the world” because “Despite much refutation from the Scientific community, many fundamentalists still use this as a “source” for proof that evolution is not true.”

At the time, we noted,

Also rans include Mein Kampf (7) and the The Manifesto of the Communist Party (3)

[ … ]

And this beats der Fuehrer? So World War II was for nothing? Wow.

The list’s author tried to cover his base by asserting that his 10 through to 1 list order isn’t supposed to mean anything. Just an accident with numbers, like the universe itself?

Lists can be fun. So here’s the contest: Read More ›

This just in: Most Americans believe in God

… as usual: Despite the many changes that have rippled through American society over the last 6 ½ decades, belief in God as measured in this direct way has remained high and relatively stable. – Frank Newport, “More Than 9 in 10 Americans Continue to Believe in God: Professed belief is lower among younger Americans, Easterners, and liberals,” Gallup (June 3, 2011) The new atheists have played a central role, sources say, in strengthening belief in God.