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Design inference

Dave Coppedge on how whales give evidence for the design of life

Coppedge: The Illustra Media documentary Living Waters: Intelligent Design in the Oceans of the Earth shares amazing information about humpback whales: their enigmatic songs, their multiple adaptations for aquatic life that defy the evolutionary mechanism, and the “miraculous web” of blood vessels that refrigerates the male reproductive organs to safe levels for sperm production. Read More ›

Intelligent Design=Pattern Recognition

This Phys.Org press release isn’t about a particularly interesting scientific paper. However, what the authors tells us about how this paper came to be is very interesting. And, I may add, very revealing. Listen to what they have to say about their “aha” moment: Inside some of the data that a standard mapping algorithm normally clips out, Zhang and postdoctoral fellow Xiaolong Chen, Ph.D., recognized that the clipped pattern in the DNA looked like an L1 inside of the FOXR2 gene. In a moment of serendipity, Diane Flasch, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow who previously worked with L1s, recognized the signs of an L1 regulatory element. The researchers performed a special technique that sequences longer regions of DNA to decode the Read More ›

L&FP, 55: Defining/Clarifying Intelligent Design as Inference, as Theory, as a Movement

It seems, despite UD’s resources tab, some still struggle to understand ID in the three distinct senses: inference, theory/research programme, movement. Accordingly, let us headline a clarifying note from the current thread on people who doubt, for the record: [KF, 269:] >>. . . first we must mark out a matter of inductive reasoning and epistemology. Observed tested, reliable signs such as FSCO/I [= functionally specific, complex organisation and/or associated information, “fun-skee”] beyond 500 – 1,000 bits point to design as cause for cases we have not observed. This is the design INFERENCE. Note, inference, not movement, not theory. Following the UD Weak Argument Correctives under the Resources tab, we can identify ID Theory as a [small] research programme that Read More ›

Shades of “junk DNA”? Tiny bubbles are NOT “cellular debris”

EVs, which are found in human fluids including urine and blood, may be used in liquid biopsies as biomarkers for disease because healthy and sick cells package different EV cargo. It’s getting harder all the time to find genuine junk in the human body. Just as well that Nathan Lents, author of Human Errors: A Panorama of Our Glitches, from Pointless Bones to Broken Genes, probably isn't listening. Read More ›

Charming bacteria set off virus bombs in their neighbors

Researchers aren't yet sure if it happens outside the lab. If it is the case, then it is another example of a life form having strategy that raises the question, “Could it really have randomly evolved with no underlying intelligence in nature?” Lot of those questions piling up. Read More ›

Isn’t the famous Drake Equation a sort of design filter for intelligence?

Whatever the fate of current ET detection projects, a Design Filter like design theorist William Dembski’s beats squabbling about the probability without collecting any data. Read More ›

Templeton is trying to have agency, directionality, and function in life forms without underlying intelligence

Purpose statement: There is a growing recognition that biological phenomena which suggest agency, directionality, or goal-directedness demand new conceptual frameworks that can translate into rigorous theoretical models and discriminating empirical tests. Read More ›

More on Dr Kojonen’s Darwinist evolution is an expression of deeper design thesis,

as, it is worthy of further consideration (which is not the same as an endorsement). I headline a comment: [[Kojonen develops his case further: I will . . . argue in this book that the teleological order of biological organisms can still, in a rationally permissible way, be understood as a sign of the divine reality, even in an evolutionary cosmos. [ –> a if not necessarily the main thesis] . . . . According to [American Botanist, Asa] Gray (1860), evolution actually “leaves the question of design just where it was before,” because the biological design argument does not in any way depend on whether God created living organisms directly, through miracles, or through a secondary cause such as Read More ›