Jack Krebs is crowing about a class on Darwinian dogma put on in conjunction with the Unitarian Universalist “Church”. He plans on preaching to the choir.

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Why the intelligent design lobby thanks God for Richard Dawkins Anti-religious Darwinists are promulgating a false dichotomy between faith and science that gives succour to creationists Madeleine Bunting Monday March 27, 2006 The Guardian On Wednesday evening, at a debate in Oxford, Richard Dawkins will be gathering the plaudits for his long and productive intellectual career. It is the 30th anniversary of his hugely influential book The Selfish Gene. A festschrift, How a Scientist Changed the Way We Think, has been published this month, with contributions from stars such as Philip Pullman. A week ago it was the turn of the US philosopher Daniel Dennett, second only to Dawkins in the global ranking of contemporary Darwinians, to be similarly feted Read More ›

Last month the big joke was three college kids torching 9 churches in Alabama. This month it’s making a mockery of the religion of 8 of 10 Americans. The bungling political ineptitude of the Darwin worshippers is just incredible. They’re their own worst enemy.

Tom Magnuson at ARN “In the News” and Robert Crowther at Evolution News & Views have both reported on a new brochure published by Kansas Science Standards 2005. It’s clear and concise and should really help to dispell any misinformation that has been circulating about.

Lecture at TCNJ on intelligent design Saturday, March 25, 2006 EWING — Dr. William Dembski, a mathematician and philosopher, will lecture on “Understanding Intelligent Design” 7:30 p.m. Tuesday in Kendall Hall at The College of New Jersey. A question-and-answer session will follow. Dembski is the Carl F.H. Henry Professor of Science and Theology at Southern Seminary in Louisville, Ky., where he heads its Center for Theology and Science. He is a senior Fellow with Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture in Seattle, and the executive director of the International Society for Complexity, Information and Design. Dembski has published articles in mathematics, philosophy, and theology journals and is the author/editor of more than 10 books. Admission is free.

In my prior post I said (actually, as one commenter pointed out, I meant to say), ID gives us reason to hope for freedom from Darwinism and its implications with respect to objective morality. One commenter asked what ID has to do with establishing an objective basis for morality. The answer, of course, is nothing. ID is a scientific theory. It is not a system of ethics or even the basis for a system of ethics. As has been pointed out many times, ID says nothing about the nature of the designer or his/her/its ultimate purposes. The designer may be supernatural, but the theory does not posit a supernatural designer; nor is the existence of a supernatural designer necessary for its validity.

That said, ID does have implications for ethics and morality.
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What is the survival and reproductive value of a perfect memory? Let me guess: the woman “AJ” described in the article below also has an uncanny ability to attract mates and has given birth to numerous offspring — all on account of her prodigious memory!

Woman With Perfect Memory Baffles Scientists

Updated 11:50 PM ET March 24, 2006

ABC News.com http://dailynews.att.net/cgi-bin/news?e=pub&dt=060324&cat=scitech&st=scitechdyehard_woman_memory_060320&src=abc

James McGaugh is one of the world’s leading experts on how the human memory system works. But these days, he admits he’s stumped.

McGaugh’s journey through an intellectual purgatory began six years ago when a woman now known only as AJ wrote him a letter detailing her astonishing ability to remember with remarkable clarity even trivial events that happened decades ago.

Give her any date, she said, and she could recall the day of the week, usually what the weather was like on that day, personal details of her life at that time, and major news events that occurred on that date.

Like any good scientist, McGaugh was initially skeptical. But not anymore.

“This is real,” he says.

Soon after AJ took over his life, McGaugh teamed with two fellow researchers at the University of California at Irvine. Elizabeth Parker, a clinical professor of psychiatry and neurology (and lead author of a report on the research in the current issue of the journal Neurocase), and Larry Cahill, an associate professor of neurobiology and behavior, have joined McGaugh in putting AJ through an exhaustive series of interviews and psychological tests. But they aren’t a lot closer today to understanding her amazing ability than they were when they started. Read More ›

My name is Barry Arrington. I am an attorney in Denver, Colorado specializing in complex litigation and constitutional law. My passion is defending constitutional liberties, especially those guaranteed by the First Amendment. I am also very interested in Darwinism’s connection to the law. How, you might ask, is a theory of biological origins connected to the law? Good question. I will answer it by recounting an email I sent not long ago to Joseph Bottum, the editor of First Things. I am a great fan of FT and think Mr. Bottum does a great job as editor, but recently he went seriously astray in a post on FT’s blog when he suggested we should deemphasize the debate over Darwinism because Read More ›

Do viruses exploit cells or do cells also exploit viruses? Viruses may have varying roles that we have hardly begun to discover. This conviction is likely to grow stronger as the evidence for the ubiquity and density of viruses in nature accumulates. ‘Coinage’ of plankton — viruses BOSTON, March 24 (UPI) — Sea experiments show there’s a constant shuffling of genetic endowments among tiny plankton, say Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers. The “coinage” the plankton use seems to be a flood of viruses, says researcher Sally W. Chisholm. The MIT team is uncovering a new facet of evolution that may help scientists see how photosynthesizing microbes manage to exploit changing conditions such as altered light, temperature and nutrients. “We are Read More ›

there still remain unanswered many fundamental questions about nature….nothing should be prohibited as a legitimate subject of science, and excluding the supernatural out of hand serves no useful purpose.

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Thanks to MatS for bringing this to my attention in a comment here. I thought it deserved more exposure so here it is.

For your convenience here’s a sample letter from one of the newest heretics: Read More ›

Lynn Barton, college educated home-schooling ex-stock broker mother of two tells it like it is: Like a fierce game of whack-a-mole, wherever I.D.’s politically incorrect head pops up, its opponents rush to smack it back down. I am enjoying all this tremendously. What makes it so much fun to watch is that so far not one of the critics understands it. more here Note: be forwarned that the article isn’t entirely accurate technically. But it should be good fodder for discussion here.

LEGAL EXPERTS ANALYZE THE IMPACT OF THE DOVER INTELLIGENT DESIGN TRIAL DECISION IN THE NEW BOOK, “TRAIPSING INTO EVOLUTION”

Traipsing Into Evolution is the first published critique of federal Judge John E. Jones’s decision in the Kitzmiller v. Dover case, the foremeost trial to attempt to address the constitutionality of teaching intelligent design. In this concise yet comprehensive response, Discovery Institute scholars and attorneys expose how Judge Jones’s Kitzmiller decision was based upon faulty reasoning, non-existent evidence, and an elementary misunderstanding of intelligent design theory.

For more information visit www.discovery.org/csc/traipsing.

Despite Jones’s protestations to the contrary, his attempts to use the federal bench to declare evolution a sacred cow–unquestionable in schools and fundamentally compatible with all “true” religion–are exposed by these critical authors as a textbook case of good-old-American judicial activism.
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Look at this. I suggest in no uncertain terms that threatening anyone or anything because of their political, religious, scientific, or any other belief is NOT acceptable behavior and should not be tolerated by anyone, especially on this blog. Origins, Darwinism, ID, etc. are all complex, highly scientific topics with implications beyond science that are contentious, at a minimum. But being contentious does not mean they should justify violence or threats of violence. So anyone out there reading this blog: if you’re thinking of resorting to violence or even threatening violence against ID detractors, DON”T DO IT. Your actions will only result in hurting inocent people and taking the focus off of our intended target (the science of and theory Read More ›

http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/0600591103v1

“We analyzed a very large set of molecular interactions that had been derived automatically from biological texts. We found that published statements, regardless of their verity, tend to interfere with interpretation of the subsequent experiments and, therefore, can act as scientific “microparadigms,” similar to dominant scientific theories. Read More ›