http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8372603330420559198&q=spore If you ever felt the need to play the role of the Intelligent Designer here is the game for you! I think Spore could be more aptly titled “Intelligent Design: The Game”. After all, notice in the presentation that evolution is always via design by the player and not a mechanism like the modern synthesis. Of course, that game would take forever and would likely go nowhere. 😉 Now let’s just hope our own Intelligent Designer isn’t like Will Wright and decides to take his UFO and nuke our planet. 🙂

Perhaps Miller & Co. need to cut to the chase and take out a contract on key ID players. As I recall from the three years I lived in Rhode Island (I went to a prep school there), Providence, the city in which Brown University (Miller’s employer) is located, has an effective mob presence. “Why is this a big deal?” asked Miller. The answer, according to Miller, is the future of science in America. We are raising a generation of people who are going to be suspicious of science, and that has huge implications for scientific fields. Other countries will be moving ahead in science, leaving the United States behind. “What is at stake is, literally, everything,” said Miller. MORE

“In the name of human vitality WHERE is the charm in that useless, dispiriting, discouraging fatalism which broke out so horribly in the eighteen-sixties at the word of Darwin, and persuaded people in spite of their own teeth and claws that Man is the will-less slave and victim of his environment? What is the use of writing plays?—what is the use of anything?—if there is not a Will that finally molds chaos itself into a race of gods with heaven for an environment, and if that Will is not incarnated in man.…”

“CARSON CITY — Longtime Las Vegan Steve Brown does not oppose the teaching of evolutionary theory in the public schools. Nor does he support teaching alternative views such as intelligent design or creationism. But Brown, a masonry contractor who has lived in Las Vegas for more than 30 years, does want the schools to teach the theory of evolution in what he calls the right way, which means acknowledging that much of the theory is just that — theory…” More here.

http://www.umich.edu/news/index.html?Releases/2006/Feb06/r021406

Researchers who speculate about human origins have come up with three main scenarios for how we ended up with our unique traits, Zhang said. The first possibility is that we acquired completely new genes that other apes don’t have. Another is that some of our genes have taken on different functions through mutation.

It’s also possible that we humans lost some genes along the way, and those losses provided opportunities for changes that otherwise could not have occurred. Read More ›

The Phil Johnson Festschrift volume titled Darwin’s Nemesis has now left the printers, and I hold in my hand a copy that InterVarsity just sent to me. It looks good and will, I trust, help move the ball forward. It should be available from Amazon shortly.

Turning nature’s design into scientific breakthrough By Stefanie Olsen Staff Writer, CNET News.com Published: March 1, 2006, 4:00 AM PST . . . Pax’s projects also take a cue from a design theory called biomimicry, coined by Janine Benyus, who wrote a seminal book on the subject in 1997. Biomimicry argues that nature uses only the energy it needs, fits form to function, and recycles everything. So why not design products the same way? . . . MORE