Adam Rutherford argues that we need to meddle more, not less, with the genes of biological organisms. Writing in the Guardian Comment is Free Synthetic biology: ‘playing God’ is vital if we are to create a better future for all – The present gains and future benefits of synthetic biology are too great for it to be written off with fear-mongering maximshe is critical of environmentalists and religious groups for apparently seeking to restrict scientific discovery. However, he muddies the waters by confusing scientific discovery with technology. He writes for instance

“That accusation has been made in attacks against many of the major scientific advances of the modern era, including Watson and Crick’s description of the structure of DNA in 1953; the birth of the first IVF baby, Louise Brown, in 1978; the creation of Dolly the sheep in 1997; and the sequencing of the human genome in 2001. In all these scenarios, it’s not clear exactly what “playing God” actually means.” Read More ›

Leading evolutionist Jerry Coyne presented Geospiza fortis as an evidence for evolution at a recent talk at Harvard in what continues to be a good example of the strong metaphysics and weak science behind evolution. Recall that the Galapagos finches provided one of Darwin’s many metaphysical argumentsfor his idea that the species must have arisen on their own. As Carl Zimmer explained in his book Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea:  Read more

Belated congratulations to creationist Dr. Todd Wood for having his paper published in the peer reviewed Journal of Evolutionary Biology!

See: Using creation science to demonstrate evolution
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In our final video for the Engineering and Metaphysics conference, we have Dr. Walter Bradley, famous in ID circles for his book, The Mystery of Life’s Origin. Here Dr. Bradley shares with us his work on helping relieve poverty in third-world countries through engineering. He also tells us about practices that people attempt to use to relieve poverty which are unhelpful. This is a great summary of the practices that work and the practices that don’t work. If you have trouble with this, you can see it at the following URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X92BDBku6g4 I hope you enjoyed the Engineering and Metaphysics conference! It was great to get to know everyone, and to get to spend time talking about these things with Read More ›

In spite of the crystal clear message from science that evolution is not a good hypothesis evolutionists continue to add confusion and uncertainty to promote their mythology. One tactic evolutionists use is to interpret evidence in terms of evolution and then claim the result as evidence for evolution. That is not only bad science, it is fallacious. Conclusions cannot also be premises. Yesterday’s installment from evolutionist Dennis Venema is yet another example of this never ending display of petitio principia.  Read more

Intelligent Design is relatively new in its present form. Proponents often argue that there are features of biology that look like engineering, and in particular, that the programming of life, the DNA software that goes along with the cellular hardware, is analogous to the programming of computers. However, we haven’t yet been able to fully unpack the implications of that, partly because both computer science and genomics are developing disciplines. The following is merely  a speculative suggestion in the hopes of inspiring further investigation: Could it be that the designer(s) of the genomes of living organisms made use of code libraries in order to do so, as is done in computer software engineering? A code library is a suite of Read More ›