Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Recent forum on ID at University of Iowa

Here are two short articles from the Iowa State Daily. One was from just before the forum and the other just after. http://www.iowastatedaily.com/news/2005/10/19/News/U.Of-I.Joins.Regent.Institutions.In.Intelligent.Design.Discussion-1106604.shtml http://www.iowastatedaily.com/news/2005/10/21/News/Iowa-Continues.Intelligent.Design.Discussion-1106703.shtml

“The Golden Record”

From a colleague: A common criticism of ID is that the design inference ONLY works when you know something about the potential designer. Since we know nothing about the potential designer for ID, it’s theory is useless and unproveable. But then I stumbled upon the Golden Record (http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/spacecraft/goldenrec.html) and realized this is ID in reverse. We are the unknown designer sending our design out into the universe to be detected. Science thinks it won’t get mistaken for a ‘natural object’ so we must conclude that the recipients don’t need to know anything about humans in order to conclude it was designed. Tell me how the “aliens” can know this Golden Record is not the product of unintelligent processes (nature) and Read More ›

“Nature’s design and engineering is truly inspirational”

In another article (http://www.physorg.com/news8333.html), one reads: “It’s amazing that butterflies have evolved such sophisticated design features which can so exquisitely manipulate light and colour. Nature’s design and engineering is truly inspirational.”

Butterfly wings work like LEDs
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4443854.stm

When scientists developed an efficient device for emitting light, they hadn’t realised butterflies have been using the same method for 30 million years. Read More ›

ID “disses” faith

. . . Intelligent design disrespects faith, discounts faith, destroys faith. . . http://www.mysanantonio.com/opinion/columnists/sives/stories/MYSA112005.3H.ives.1a957b69.html

“Science Friction” in Australia

Science friction: God’s defenders target 3000 schools
By Linda Doherty and Deborah Smith

November 14, 2005

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2005/11/13/1131816809073.html

Up to 3000 schools have been targeted in a DVD blitz aimed at challenging Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution in favour of an “intelligent designer”. Read More ›

Nothing Personal, We Just Don’t Like ID

UI faculty sign on against intelligent design in science
By William Dillon, Staff Writer

11/16/2005

http://www.zwire.com/site/tab1.cfm?newsid=15586126&BRD=2700&PAG=461&dept_id=554314&rfi=6

More than 150 faculty members at the University of Iowa have signed a statement denouncing the use of intelligent design in science. Read More ›

Stephen Jay Gould’s Contempt for the John Templeton Foundation

Yesterday Charles Harper issued a press release taking to task Daniel Golden for his piece in the Wall Street Journal in which he suggested that the John Templeton Foundation has been a patron or sponsor of Intelligent Design (for the press release, go here). In that press release, Harper ritualistically underscored just how much money and effort the John Templeton Foundation has spent on critiquing ID. In particular, he noted that Read More ›

ID at Cornell — An Unfolding Story

Intelligent Design: Professors discuss teaching the controversial subject November 15, 2005 By Xiaowei Cathy Tang Cornell Daily Sun, Senior Editor http://www.cornellsun.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2005/11/15/43798727eb0ab . . . . For I.D. proponents, the challenge of specified complexity is how to mathematically model the difference between design and chance. Senior Lecturer Art Lembo, crop and soil sciences, said that although currently no satisfactory solution exists, this challenge is worthy of exploration. He said that the ability to differentiate empirically between design and randomness holds far-reaching potential for other areas of science. Applications include “scanning faces on airport monitors to find terrorists, making inferences about locations of non-point source pollution or determining whether O.J. killed Nicole,” he said. . . .

Noam Chomsky — If your taste for iconoclasm extends only so far

The following conflation of intelligent design and global warming is unworthy of Chomsky the scholar (as opposed to Chomsky the activist). Chomsky uncritically takes as the definition of ID what he has read in the popular press. It might interest readers of this blog to know that I hold in my files a note (dated February 26, 1997) from Chomsky on MIT stationery commeting favorably on one of my early papers on information and ID (namely, “Intelligent Design as a Theory of Information” — which ultimately became chapters 3 and 4 of No Free Lunch). Chomsky in his private moments has in fact been a critic of evolutionary theory, a fact reflected in Daniel Dennett’s criticisms of Chomsky in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea.

Evolution, ecology and `malignant design’

Noam Chomsky says the Bush administration’s hostility toward scientific inquiry puts the world at risk of global-warming disaster

NOAM CHOMSKY
SPECIAL TO THE STAR
Nov. 13, 2005

President George W. Bush favours teaching both evolution and “intelligent design” in schools, “so people can know what the debate is about.”

To proponents, intelligent design is the notion that the universe is too complex to have developed without a nudge from a higher power than evolution or natural selection. Read More ›

Coming up in FIRST THINGS: Christoph Cardinal Schönborn

[From http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/?p=72] The January issue of FIRST THINGS will include a reflection by Christoph Cardinal Schönborn on the intelligent design/evolution controversy. His article is occasioned by physicist Stephen Barr’s argument in the October issue, “The Design of Evolution.” Barr, in turn, was responding to Cardinal Schönborn’s earlier op-ed piece on these questions in the New York Times, which received a great deal of attention. In the issue following Schönborn’s reflection, Barr will have a further evaluation of the state of the question. So what is FIRST THINGS up to here? We are not distancing ourselves from the intelligent design movement. The champions of that movement have rendered a signal service in exposing the non-scientific philosophical dogmatism of many evolutionists. Nor Read More ›