Ed Brayton posts this seemingly virtuous opinion that anonymous ID proponents should not have their real names exposed. Yet among my first experiences with Ed Brayton was him exposing my real name in a public comment on Panda’s Thumb. Ed lifted my real name from a private email I sent to him. I don’t particularly try to hide my real name, which is why Ed got it in a private correspondence, but I don’t advertise it either. Now I ask you, when you catch a guy redhanded in such duplicity how far can you trust him in other matters? About as far as I can throw the Oskaloosa High School Football Team…

Jack Krebs at Panda’s Thumb is all bent out of shape because he wanted to present an opposing view alongside Bill Dembski. He then implies that Bill declined because Bill’s afraid of Jack or intimidated or something. Excuse me, Jack, but you demanding an opportunity to present alongside Bill Dembski and calling him chicken for refusing is like the Oskaloosa High School Football Team demanding to play the University of Texas Longhorns and saying the Longhorns are chickens for refusing. Sorry Jack, but you’re just not in the same league as Bill.

Intelligent Design forum features Dembski & Ruse Jan 12, 2006 By Staff Baptist Press MARIETTA, Ga. (BP)–An upcoming dialogue between a key Intelligent Design proponent and a Darwinian evolutionist from Florida State University reflects the fact that, “Our commitment to truth leads us to believe that we have nothing to fear from public discussion of important topics,” said Robert Stewart, associate professor of philosophy and theology at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. The 7 p.m. Feb. 3 dialogue between ID proponent William Dembski and evolutionist Michael Ruse is the featured event of NOBTS’ two-day Greer-Heard Point-Counterpoint Forum, to be held at Johnson Ferry Baptist Church in Marietta, Ga. MORE

[From an engineer friend of mine–what’s the evolutionary explanation for the synthesis of perfect magnetite crystals in bacteria?] I’m in Houston at a custom short course (all week long) in nanotechnology for [snip] given by a group of profs at Rice Univ. It’s been a very intensive course, but very informative. One interesting thing that came up was the description of a bacteria that is able to synthesize an approximately linear array of the most perfect crystals of magnetite (better than any that experts have been able to do thus far) internally, which it uses to align itself with the earth’s magnetic field so that it can navigate with respect to the oxygen gradient in the mud in which it Read More ›

THE SPECTATOR
Thursday 12 January 2006
Dawkins is wrong about God
Roger Scruton

http://www.spectator.co.uk/article_pfv.php?id=7185

Faced with the spectacle of the cruelties perpetrated in the name of faith, Voltaire famously cried ‘Ecrasez l’infâme!’ Scores of enlightened thinkers have followed him, declaring organised religion to be the enemy of mankind, the force that divides the believer from the infidel and thereby both excites and authorises murder. Richard Dawkins, whose TV series The Root of all Evil? concludes next Monday, is the most influential living example of this tradition. And he has embellished it with a striking theory of his own — the theory of the religious ‘meme’. A meme is a mental entity that colonises the brains of people, much as a virus colonises a cell. The meme exploits its host in order to reproduce itself, spreading from brain to brain like meningitis, and killing off the competing powers of rational argument. Like genes and species, memes are Darwinian individuals, whose success or failure depends upon their ability to find the ecological niche that enables reproduction. Such is the nature of ‘gerin oil’, as Dawkins contemptuously describes religion. Read More ›

Secularists Once Again Call For The Suppression Of Knowledge

by Frederick Meekins

Since the 1920’s or thereabouts, secularists have invoked the imagery of the Scopes Monkey Trial as evidence that conservative Evangelicals are bent on suppressing knowledge in the realms of science and literature.

Most following the news are no doubt aware of the ongoing angst on the part of unbelievers and Modernists regarding the propriety of introducing Intelligent Design into the Biology classroom since in their eyes suggesting anything but the materialist hypothesis (itself a faith-based assumption) diminishes the rigor of so-called scientific education. Instead, they suggest such ideas should be considered as part of the Social Studies or Humanities curriculum.

Yet such gestures of enlightened magnanimous compromise are little more than a canard. For when it becomes time to examine the metaphysical issues within what liberals previously promoted as the appropriate venue for such a discussion, they then cry Separation of Church and State. Thus, what they really want is a monopoly on the perspective taught across all of public education. Read More ›

Bill! This is a perfect opportunity for plush toy deployment! Get on the horn with Ellerbee and get on the show.

Nick News Explores Issues Surrounding the Teaching of Evolution and Intelligent Design in Schools

Nick News with Linda Ellerbee: God, Science, Politics and Your School – Sunday, Jan. 22, 8:30 p.m. (ET/PT) on Nickelodeon

NEW YORK, Jan. 11 /PRNewswire/ — In Nick News with Linda Ellerbee: God, Science, Politics and Your School, airing on Nickelodeon, Sunday, Jan. 22, 8:30 p.m. (ET/PT), award-winning journalist Linda Ellerbee and Nick News take a look at the on-going controversy surrounding the teaching of the theory of intelligent design alongside the theory of evolution in public school science classes.

“The goal of this show is not to debate the issues of evolution, intelligent design, or creationism,” said Ellerbee. “We just want to give kids a better understanding of what all the shouting is about, not to mention the court cases that have resulted already, and some that are shaping up. We also wanted to hear from kids affected by these disputes.” Read More ›

Broward County will be selecting a new biology book soon. One has a few paragraphs on Intelligent Design in it. We can have none of that! Critics say they don’t want intelligent design in schools because it’s based on faith, not science. So publishers of the second book, Biology: The Dynamics of Life, have offered to remove the page containing the passages. And Superintendent Frank Till has said he would cut the page to eliminate the controversy if teachers pick the book. Read The Whole Article Here

http://www.livescience.com/animalworld/060110_bee_fight.html

Proponents of intelligent design, which holds that a supreme being rather than evolution is responsible for life’s complexities, have long criticized science for not being able to explain some natural phenomena, such as how bees fly.
……….
Proponents of intelligent design, or ID, have tried in recent years to promote the idea of a supreme being by discounting science because it can’t explain everything in nature.

“People in the ID community have said that we don’t even know how bees fly,” Altshuler said. “We were finally able to put this one to rest. We do have the tools to understand bee flight and we can use science to understand the world around us.”

Read More ›

. . . “There are cultural forces at play here which go very deep,” Dembski said. “This is about our creation story, how we came about.” Dembski cautioned that any school board that adopts intelligent design in its curriculum must justify it on scientific, rather than religious, grounds to survive a legal challenge. http://www.courier-journal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060111/NEWS0101/601110436

. . . Dembski is the author of “The Design Revolution: Answering the Toughest Questions About Intelligent Design” and a senior fellow with Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture in Seattle. Organizers asked three Kansas University scientists critical of intelligent design to also speak at the event, but all declined. Brown said organizers could have used corporate funds distributed by the university for the event if there had been KU scientists on the roster. Brown said he offered to change the speaking format to make the invitation more attractive to the KU professors, but that didn’t work. MORE

Two biology textbooks with 2004 copyright dates feature Haeckel’s faked drawings (slightly redrawn and colorized). They are: Raven & Johnson, Biology Sixth Edition (ISBN: 0072921641) Voet & Voet, Biochemistry (ISBN: 047119350X) Further evidence for the longevity of evolutionary theory.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/the-blue-mountains-passage-that-made-darwin-wonder/2006/01/10/1136863239665.html

Randomness Is Unpredictability
Antony Eagle
Exeter College and Oxford University, Oxford OX1 3DP, UK
antony.eagle@philosophy.oxford.ac.uk

The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 2005 56(4):749-790; doi:10.1093/bjps/axi138

The concept of randomness has been unjustly neglected in recent philosophical literature, and when philosophers have thought about it, they have usually acquiesced in views about the concept that are fundamentally flawed. After indicating the ways in which these accounts are flawed, I propose that randomness is to be understood as a special case of the epistemic concept of the unpredictability of a process. This proposal arguably captures the intuitive desiderata for the concept of randomness; at least it should suggest that the commonly accepted accounts cannot be the whole story and more philosophical attention needs to be paid. Read More ›