Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

John Horgan’s reflections on the Templeton Foundation

. . . My ambivalence about the [Templeton] foundation came to a head during my fellowship in Cambridge last summer. The British biologist Richard Dawkins, whose participation in the meeting helped convince me and other fellows of its legitimacy, was the only speaker who denounced religious beliefs as incompatible with science, irrational, and harmful. The other speakers — three agnostics, one Jew, a deist, and 12 Christians (a Muslim philosopher canceled at the last minute) — offered a perspective clearly skewed in favor of religion and Christianity. Some of the Christian speakers’ views struck me as inconsistent, to say the least. None of them supported intelligent design, the notion that life is in certain respects irreducibly complex and hence must Read More ›

Victory for Intelligent Design

I know this is a bit of a repeat of old news, but I thought some of you might appreciate a slightly different take on the McGill failure to put ID in it’s “proper place”. The proponents of what came to be called “intelligent design” are naturally being denounced by “respectable scientific authority,” and since advocacy of “ID” is obviously a career terminator, only about 10 percent of scientists (many safely retired) have done so. But their number is growing, and the movement is regarded by the scientific establishment as a serious danger. See what else Mr. Byfield has to say about it here. From the first article above you might also be interested to note that Alters, the McGill Read More ›

Leave it again to evolution to outdo human design

“Anoxia related diseases are the major causes of death in the industrialized world,” said Goran Nilsson, a professor at University of Oslo. “Evolution has solved the problem of anoxic survival millions of years ago, something that medical science has struggled with for decades with limited success.” http://www.livescience.com/animalworld/060407_anoxic_fish.html –You poor stupid humans. When will you realize that natural selection is smarter than you?

Beckwith in World Magazine

. . . The old guard got rid of Mr. Dembski and then Mr. Sloan, who moved into the largely ceremonial position of chancellor. Still, Mr. Sloan’s Vision 2012 plan for Baylor is still on the books. The new president, John M. Lilley, former president of the University of Nevada, Reno, was a compromise candidate, so Baylor’s future was unclear. Based on information from Baylor faculty members and graduate students to whom WORLD granted confidentiality because their careers would be in jeopardy, here is what happened: Mr. Beckwith came to Baylor in 2003, as associate director of the J.M. Dawson Institute of Church-State Studies, over the objection of the institute’s funder, the Dawson family. Mr. Beckwith had argued for the Read More ›

Evolvability is testable

In the following article, ask yourself if “the protein tape of life may be largely reproducible and even predictable,” what this means for the testability of evolutionary theory and ID should nature be constituted so that no Darwinian pathways exist for certain proteins. Darwinian Evolution Can Follow Only Very Few Mutational Paths to Fitter Proteins Daniel M. Weinreich, Nigel F. Delaney, Mark A. DePristo, Daniel L. Hartl Five point mutations in a particular ß-lactamase allele jointly increase bacterial resistance to a clinically important antibiotic by a factor of 100,000. In principle, evolution to this high-resistance ß-lactamase might follow any of the 120 mutational trajectories linking these alleles. However, we demonstrate that 102 trajectories are inaccessible to Darwinian selection and that Read More ›

A Warped Plan to Save the Earth

A warped plan to save Earth By Dimitri Vassilaros TRIBUNE-REVIEW Friday, April 7, 2006 Eric R. Pianka is Moses, lizard man, self-loathing human debasement, a tenured embarrassment for the University of Texas — and to the Texas Academy of Science, recipient of its 2006 Distinguished Texas Scientist award even though the biology professor wants 90 percent of the human race exterminated. Quickly. Mr. Pianka is the antithesis of anthropocentric. That probably explains why the scientist that Texans consider distinguished says “we are no better than bacteria.” And why he believes Earth can be saved if all but 10 percent of the human race could be killed off without lingering — ideally by the highly lethal airborne Ebola virus because he Read More ›

Teach ID in bio classes — why not teach pornography in bio classes?

. . . [S]ome pornography sites contain the best visual images of human body parts, and a great deal of those sites have interactive learning materials designed to help others emulate effective reproductive strategies. I daresay, some pornographic websites even illustrate the interface of technology and biology, and in this day and age all pupils should understand that. For really advanced Biology classes, specialized websites might even treat the subject of the folly of inter-species mating. . . . MORE

[UPDATE:] $1000 reward and $1000 bet — Pianka again

Uncommon Descent has been scooped by the Pearcey Report: go here. The $1000 reward is herewith withdrawn — the bet still obtains. First, the reward: In discussing with my wife Eric Pianka’s Texas Academy of Sciences speech in which he had audience members switch off cameras and tape recorders because the unwashed masses aren’t ready to hear what he has to say, she remarked that this would have been the time she would have turned on her recorder. I therefore expect a recording of his talk does exist. I’m therefore offering $1000 to the first person who sends me a reasonable quality digital version of Pianka’s speech before the TAS (.wmv or .mp3) that is undoctored and unabridged and that Read More ›

Forget Mims… What Did Doctor “Doom” Pianka’s Students Hear?

Scroll to about 30 lines up from the bottom for testimony of what Pianka told preached to his students in Biology 304 at UT Austin last semester. I don’t root for ebola, but maybe a ban on having more than one child. I agree . . . too many people ruining this planet. The student doesn’t root for ebola but it seems clear the student is implying that Professor Pianka does root for it. Though I agree that convervation biology is of utmost importance to the world, I do not think that preaching that 90% of the human population should die of ebola is the most effective means of encouraging conservation awareness. I found Pianka to be knowledgable, but spent Read More ›

Forget about Pianka — let’s go after Mims for “misleading propaganda”

It was Mims who broke the Pianka story: “I would like to make clear that Mims has dishonestly mischaracterized Dr. Pianka’s statements,” said Kathryn E. Perez, a postdoctoral fellow with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill department of biology, in the petition of support for Pianka. She personally believes that the Texas Academy should consider sanctioning Mims, who is a member of the organization, for what she calls “misleading propaganda.” From INSIDE HIGHER ED And here’s Perez’s actual petition letter: Members of the Texas Academy of Science. I am sure many of you are familiar with the furor over Texas Academy of Science Distinguished Scholar Dr. Eric Pianka’s speech at the TAS Meeting. A member of the Academy Read More ›

Doctor “Doom” Pianka – St. Edwards Transcript

Transcript of St. Edwards Speech MP3 of Seguin-Gazzette Question Stand by for a transcript of the Lamar speech (at the Texas Association of Scientists ceremony) which I’m given to understand makes the St. Edwards speech look rather tame. My take on the St. Edwards speech is it paints Pianka as an alarmist crackpot, and nothing else, confirming my first impression of him trying to be a poster boy for “Keep Austin Weird”. The guy rags on about microbes taking over and putting us in our place. Uh, like duh. Microbes have us for dinner in the end in any case. All Pianka is saying is that they should have us for lunch instead of dinner. The microbes appear to be Read More ›

Possible Link Between Fish and Land Animals Discovered

Discovered: the missing link that solves a mystery of evolution

Alok Jha, science correspondent
Thursday April 6, 2006
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/frontpage/story/0,,1748005,00.html

Scientists have made one of the most important fossil finds in history: a missing link between fish and land animals, showing how creatures first walked out of the water and on to dry land more than 375m years ago.
Palaeontologists have said that the find, a crocodile-like animal called the Tiktaalik roseae and described today in the journal Nature, could become an icon of evolution in action – like Archaeopteryx, the famous fossil that bridged the gap between reptiles and birds.

As such, it will be a blow to proponents of intelligent design, who claim that the many gaps in the fossil record show evidence of some higher power.

Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist, said: “Our emergence on to the land is one of the more significant rites of passage in our evolutionary history, and Tiktaalik is an important link in the story.” Read More ›

Texas Governor Rick Perry Compares Pianka’s Views to Hitler’s

The Gazette-Enterprise The very same day TAS declared its stance, Kathy Walt, press secretary for Gov. Rick Perry, expressed disdain over what Pianka calls his “doomsday talk.” Walt called the scientist’s viewpoints “abhorrent” and likened them to Hitler’s “hate-filled Third Reich.” While some have described Pianka’s words as hyperbole, the governor’s office’s distaste was plainspoken. “Professor Pianka’s gleeful embracing of the destruction of 90 percent of the earth’s population as a necessary and worthy event is abhorrent, as is his notion that human life holds no more value than that of a lizard, bison or rhinoceros,” Walt said.

An Evening With Darwin in New York

Evolutionnews.org has a post and a link to discovery.org where you can find a PDF file of a great article from Crisis magazine, “An Evening With Darwin in New York,” by George Sim Johnston. It concerns the much-celebrated Darwin exhibit at the Museum of Natural History.

Here are a few excerpts:

The show tells us that Darwin’s theory helps us to “understand” the fossil record. This is odd, because the exhibit’s curator, the paleontologist Niles Eldredge, has written extensively about how Darwin’s idea of gradual evolution has never been supported by the fossils and certainly doesn’t explain them.

Read More ›

UM Professors Cast Doubt on…. Evolutionary Theory?

They seem to have gotten the headline wrong, but the content is correct. ID is winning the minds of intellectuals at an accelerating pace: Dr. Schroeder is only one of many intellectuals that are part of the rising tide questioning the science of evolution being taught in text books, where political agendas often create an environment stifling dissension and serious debate. Full article here. Would anyone like to take a shot at why the article title was so far off the content? Call it a Darwinian Slip?