Monthly Archives: September 2012
Poll: Atheists 15% – God involved 78%
| September 30, 2012 | Posted by DLH under Christian Darwinism, Creationism, Evolution, Intelligent Design, Origin Of Life, theistic evolution |
Gallup has updated their origins survey: Which of the following statements comes closest to your views on the origin and development of human beings? 1) Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process, 2) Human beings have developed over millions of years from less… more
The TSZ and Jerad Thread, continued
| September 30, 2012 | Posted by kairosfocus under Functionally Specified Complex Information & Organization, ID Foundations, Science, worldview issues and society |
Part of me feels like letting the TSZ thread go to a full 1,000 comments, but then my sense of responsibility to UD’s bandwidth budget kicks in. So, let us continue the discussion of the topics from the thread on TSZ issues and Jerad’s concerns continue here. To prime the pump, let me clip two… more
Evolution (Not) Crucial in Antibiotics Breakthrough: How Science is Actually Done
| September 29, 2012 | Posted by Cornelius Hunter under Intelligent Design |
Where is the best place to find low-cost, easy-to-produce, natural, robust and non toxic antibiotics? Easy, in our own bodies. Nature so often provides the solutions we are looking for and, as an aside, that is why the preservation of species from extinction is so important. In this case the solution is natural antibiotics which… more
A “remarkable fact”
| September 29, 2012 | Posted by David Anderson under Darwinism |
Let’s take again that quotation out of Richard Dawkins’ “The Greatest Show on Earth (pp. 332-333)”, published as many ages ago as the year 2009, quoted at http://www.evolutionnews.org/2012/09/in_debate_brita_1064521.html Leaving pseudogenes aside, it is a remarkable fact that the greater part (95 percent in the case of humans) of the genome might as well not be there,… more
Front Loading, Is That You Knocking?
| September 28, 2012 | Posted by PaV under Intelligent Design |
At PhysOrg.com, here’s something hot off the press. Here are some delicious quotes from the PO blurb: Researchers, led by Dr David Ferrier of The Scottish Oceans Institute at the University of St Andrews, found that some modern-day animals like sponges, comb jellies and placozoans (a flat, splodge of an animal with no head, tail,… more
Mathematics and Theology
| September 28, 2012 | Posted by johnnyb under Culture, Mathematics, Religion, Science |
I thought you all might be interested in an article I wrote titled Mathematics and Theology: Seeing to Infinity. The basic purpose of the article is to show how the “limit” concept from mathematics can be incorporated into theological reasoning. The larger purpose is to get theologians thinking more deeply about mathematics as a tool… more
Beyond the Power of Accident
| September 27, 2012 | Posted by Cornelius Hunter under Intelligent Design |
Just over a century ago a gracefully aging scholar quietly left the world with these wise words: Read more more
That’s exactly what we predicted
| September 27, 2012 | Posted by David Anderson under Humor |
Here’s a good one, over at Evolution News: http://www.evolutionnews.org/2012/09/in_debate_brita_1064521.html Dawkins, 2009: DNA… it’s full of junk… which is just as Darwinism predicted… how embarrassing for those creationists who say it shouldn’t be! Dawkins, 2012: DNA… it’s not full of junk… which is just as Darwinism predicted… nothing for the creationists to take advantage of here, move… more
Are crows capable of reasoning about hidden causal agents? Five reasons for skepticism
| September 25, 2012 | Posted by vjtorley under Intelligent Design |
There has been much discussion in the blogosphere about a recent study entitled, “New Caledonian crows reason about hidden causal agents,” in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (doi: 10.1073/pnas.1208724109, PNAS September 17, 2012) by Alex Taylor, Rachael Miller, and Russell Gray, demonstrating that crows have a tendency to attribute the movements of… more
Something to Scratch Your Head About
| September 24, 2012 | Posted by PaV under Darwinism, Evolution, Genomics |
At PhysOrg they have a blurb about a paper showing that an organism that is 99.99% (!!) identical has, nevertheless, found a way of dealing with the presence of Uranium in completely different ways. Absolutely fascinating! Obviously we’re dealing with two very different environments—one is in a volcanic spring, and the other is atop a… more
The Bacterial Flagellum Revisited: A Paradigm of Design
| September 24, 2012 | Posted by Jonathan M under Irreducible Complexity |
Going back to my undergraduate days, I have long been struck by the engineering elegance and intrinsic beauty of that familiar icon of intelligent design, the bacterial flagellar nano-motor. In tribute to this masterpiece of design, I have just published a detailed (31 pages, inclusive of references) literature review in which I describe the processes… more
Junk for Brains
| September 24, 2012 | Posted by PaV under Intelligent Design |
We all know that Darwinists have junk for brains [ ]and this proves it. It appears that “long non-coding” RNA’s (lncRNA) play a role in the brain’s pineal gland, which is involved in circadian rhythms and such. This ‘junkiest’ of junk functions in activating, blocking or altering the activity of genes or influencing the function… more
Here’s That New Paper Showing the Genetic Regulation Hiearchy
| September 23, 2012 | Posted by Cornelius Hunter under Intelligent Design |
Ever since Mendelian genetics was incorporated into Darwinism, evolutionists have believed that the gene is king. Genes, they thought, determine an organism’s design or, in technical jargon, the genotype specifies the phenotype. This fit their view that the species originated from the natural selection of biological change which did not arise initially as a consequence… more
You Are What You Your Mother Eats
| September 22, 2012 | Posted by Cornelius Hunter under Intelligent Design |
New research continues to reveal biology’s complex adaptation capabilities broadly referred to as epigenetics. Simply put, individuals not only respond physiologically to environmental challenges by modifying their DNA, they also pass such adaptations on to their progeny. It is, by any other name, the inheritance of acquired characteristics, a concept evolutionists have resisted for almost a… more
Medical Practice, Biological Science, and the Power of a “Differential Diagnosis”
| September 21, 2012 | Posted by StephenB under Intelligent Design |
Because science is a search for causes, its practitioners are ethically bound to keep an open mind about the nature of those causes. The whole point of investigating any given phenomenon is to find a reasonable answer to the question, “why is this happening?” or “why did it happen?” In that spirit, the researcher develops… more
Here’s an Example of Evolution’s Unavoidable Anti Realism
| September 21, 2012 | Posted by Cornelius Hunter under Intelligent Design |
Though evolutionists think of themselves as realists—ruthlessly objective investigators interested only in truth—their naturalistic constraint ultimately leaves them with only anti realism. This is because any a priorirestriction of the answer might exclude the true answer. If I decide my math homework must contain only odd numbered answers, then I’ll be wrong on those problems whose… more
Physicist Sean Carroll suggests that someday science can rule out God — revealing his philosophical agenda under the holy lab coat, yet again
| September 19, 2012 | Posted by kairosfocus under Philosophy, Physics, Science, worldview issues and society |
This morning, as I opened up my computer, the following Yahoo News headline leaped out: Will Science Someday Rule Out the Possibility of God? By Natalie Wolchover | LiveScience.com Over the past few centuries, science can be said to have gradually chipped away at the traditional grounds for believing in God. Much of what once… more
“I’m Walkin’, Yes Indeed I’m Walkin’” But Not Because It’s Necessarily a Better Way to Get Around
| September 17, 2012 | Posted by Barry Arrington under Intelligent Design |
At the Smithsonian: Why hominids evolved upright walking is one of the biggest questions in human evolution. One school of thought suggests that bipedalism was the most energetically efficient way for our ancestors to travel as grasslands expanded and forests shrank across Africa some five million to seven million years ago. A new study in… more
It seems that TSZ objector to design, AF, insists on the long since corrected canard that design is a “default” inference
| September 17, 2012 | Posted by kairosfocus under Design inference, Functionally Specified Complex Information & Organization, ID Foundations |
UD commenter Joe notes: Alan [Fox] amuses by not understanding the definition of “default”. He thinks the design inference is the default even though it is reached via research, observations, knowledge and experiences. To put this ill-founded but longstanding objection to the design inference — it is tantamount to an accusation of question-begging – to… more
Mutation Protocols: Cut-And-Paste DNA with Built-In Tuning Knobs
| September 15, 2012 | Posted by johnnyb under Intelligent Design |
We have been discussing lately the idea that mutations, rather than being haphazard, may actually be directed by cellular machinery. In a recent volume of the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, several scientists presented evidence in favor of this view. One of these scientists has a paper on what he calls “mutation… more