Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Those nasty intelligent design creationists — if you can’t neutralize ’em, kill ’em

In case you missed it at the Cannes Film Festival: Directed and co-scripted by British documentary-maker James Marsh, The King is a fascinating psychological drama that puts the boot into the delusions, hypocrisy and cruelty of American Christian fundamentalism. In his first English-speaking role, charismatic Mexican actor Gael Garcia Bernal plays 21-year-old Elvis, son of a deceased Hispanic prostitute, who returns from a stretch in the navy hoping to become part of the family of his father. But Dad is a born-again Christian, now the Reverend Sandow (William Hurt), popular minister of a church in the south eastern Texas port of Corpus Christi. He rejects his son as belonging to a former life, ‘before I became a Christian’. Elvis sticks Read More ›

[off topic] From a Dear Friend of Mine

I received this today from a dear friend that I’ve known and loved since kindergarten. We’re only a month apart in birthdays, were in every grade together through high school, and served together in the Marine Corps in the 1970’s. Just last year summer while I was on vacation in upstate New York and staying at his home for a couple days after our 30th high school reunion, we were struck by lightning at the same time as he was changing the front disc brakes on his wife’s SUV. The lightning hit a power line near the house, travelled into the garage and to the vehicle through the cord on a trouble light, and knocked the crap out of both of us as we were in contact with the vehicle. It might have made him a bit more religious all of a sudden as he had both hands on bare metal whereas I was just touching a painted surface with one hand.

What’s wrong with this picture?

Figure 1

Read More ›

Woody Allen’s Match Point

Woody Allen’s latest film, Match Point, illustrates the depths to which Darwinian nihilism is dragging popular culture. The protagonist, Chris Wilten, murders his pregnant mistress and an innocent neighbor in order to protect his position in his wife’s wealthy family. His philosophical justification for his crime is that human existence is due to pure chance, hence is morally meaningless. Here is a direct quote from the film: It seems that scientists are confirming more and more that all existence is here by blind chance—no purpose, no design. As it turns out, Chris gets off scot free due to a chance event. Anyone willing to take bets how long it will be before we hear defendants in court invoking the Darwin Read More ›

“If you want to learn how cerebral blood flow works, study engineering. Study design.”

[From a colleague:] A few years ago, my brain research took some interesting turns. I was developing a theory of blood flow to the brain, specifically a theory of how the delicate blood vessels in the brain are protected from the strong pulsatility of the heartbeat. I realized that the system in the cranium that affords this protection seems to be designed. That is, it is a tuned mechanism quite analogous to vibration dampers widely used in engineering. I was haunted by the realization that the research that I was doing was essentially reverse engineering. Most of what I needed to know about pulsatile blood flow to the brain was in engineering textbooks! I was surprised as to how little Read More ›

A Reply to Mark Frank

This reply is too long to put in the comments section to the previous post, so I am making a new post.

Frank writes: “There is an important difference between believing things to be true a priori and having faith.”

BarryA replies: It depends on what you mean by “faith.” The first entry in the American Heritage Dictionary is what I mean: “Confident belief in the truth, value, or trustworthiness of a person, idea, or thing.”

Take your example. Yes, it is true that you don’t accept 2+2=4 on faith. But back up a couple of steps and you’ll find faith at a deeper level. You believe this mathematical formula is true, because you believe in the law of non-contradiction, which in turn means you believe we live in a non-chaotic universe in which there is meaning and in which logic prevails. You believe this not because you can demonstrate it to be true (Popper says, correctly I think, that universal statements can never be verified), but because you have a confident belief that it is true – i.e., you believe it on faith.

Read More ›

God’s best gift to intelligent design

You’ve got to wonder what the staffers at the NCSE are thinking when they go to such lengths to assure the public that there’s no problem reconciling evolution and religious faith, only to have Richard Dawkins come along and utter the following (taken from his BBC program “The Root of All Evil?”): The suicide bomber is convinced that in killing for his God he will be fast tracked to a special martyr’s heaven. This isn’t just a problem of Islam. In this program I want to examine that dangerous thing that’s common to Judaism and Christianity as well. The process of non-thinking called faith. I’m a scientist [well, actually, I just talk about science these days] and I believe there Read More ›

The Information Revolution

Ironically, ancient wisdom, much of it presumably discredited by modern science, is making a comeback and vindicating itself. Consider that living matter was once thought to be fundamentally different than non-living matter. This idea was presumably discredited with the discovery of the chemical synthesis of urea (http://www.medterms.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=5905): Urea is of major historical significance. It was the first organic chemical compound ever synthesized. The German chemist Friedrich Wöhler in 1828 attempted to make ammonium cyanate from silver cyanide and ammonium chloride and, in the process, accidentally made urea. Wöhler wrote his mentor Jöns Berzelius, “I must tell you that I can make urea without the use of kidneys, either man or dog. Ammonium cyanate is urea.” This pioneering experiment disproved the Read More ›

“Genomics and the Irreducible Nature of Eukaryote Cells”

[From a colleague:] Hot on the heels of Embley and Martin (Nature 440, 623-630, 30 March 2006), Kurland and colleagues take the plunge and sever the link between eukaryotes and prokaryotes. Their title refers to the “Irreducible Nature of Eukaryote Cells,” which reads like an echo of Mike Behe. The logic of their argument confirms this: the structures and the genetics of eukaryotes mean that an evolutionary pathway from prokaryotes must be rejected. However, they do not again use the word “irreducible” in their paper. What is clear is that the “simple” pathway that the textbooks have proclaimed for years must now be abandoned. Surely there are lessons here about the way darwinism gives false leads in its appetite for Read More ›

Information-Theoretic Conjecture — $1000 Cash Prize

This problem has been resolved by a professor of mathematics. The solution is elegant. The contest is closed. I love the Internet! –WmAD /\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\ I’m offering the first person who completely resolves the following conjecture $1000 cash. I need a complete error-free proof and I need to be able to use it in my writings (of course, I’ll give full credit to the mathematician who proves it). This conjecture is relevant to the conservation of information.

Gene Induction in Fungi – Lamarckian?

As some of you may recall I wrote that I was experimenting with laboratory propagation of volvariella volvacea (Chinese Straw Mushrooms). Recently, among several other lines of R&D, I was experimenting with hydrogels as a nutrient media. So far I’ve been using them as an agar replacement with mixed results. I think the mixed results are due to uneven moisture distribution in the fine powder form I was using but that’s neither here nor there. Since the hydrogels can be loaded with nutrients at room temperature (the big advantage over agar) I decided to play around with another sterilant that would decompose at temperatures required to melt agar. I’ve been extremely successful using ampicillin at 1mg/20ml to prevent bacterial contamination in agar cultures – haven’t had a single bacterial infection in hundreds of agar plates. Ampicillin however breaks down quickly at temperatures over 60C so it must be added to agar at a critical stage after it’s cooled down (agar melts at 95C) some but before it solidifies (about 40C). This requires pouring fast and keeping a 60C water bath on the bench. However, ampicillin is so inexpensive it can be considered free of cost compared to wide spectrum antibiotics that survive pasteurization and autoclave temperatures. Once poured, ampicillin plates must be refrigerated until use as ampicillin in solution breaks down quickly at room temperature (a matter of days).

Read More ›

Creationist anti-ID bumper stickers?

A student of mine heard second-hand about anti-ID bumper stickers being handed out at a creationism conference. Unfortunately, my student didn’t have any details. Does anyone have any information about this conference or the actual statement on the bumper stickers?

[off topic] John A. Davison

Any of you that might be wondering what happened to John may get a glimpse of it at his new blog New Prescribed Evolution.

[administrative] Spam Attack

In the last 48 hours we’ve had almost 1000 comments attempt to be posted from sources in Europe (“Ripe Network” ISP in Amsterdam to be precise). They’re all promoting different kinds of insurance. This is at least an order of magnitude greater than the normal rate of spam (for perspective we’ve only had 10,000 spam comments total in the last year) and it’s too time consuming to sort through looking for legitimate comments so for the nonce I won’t be doing any more recovering of user comments from it – they’re simply being deleted en masse. For most of you this will have no impact.

ID at the academy (now seen in 36 universities)

here is a quote mine:

A Wakeup Call for Science Faculty

I believe that intelligent design should be taught in college science classes…

-Bruce Alberts, December 2, 2005

Apparently, the critics of ID are taking Albert’s words to heart because 36 universities as reported by ID at the Academy have courses with ID content in them. Joseph Campana at ResearchIntelligentDesign.org is trying to track ID content in various courses at universities in the United States and elsewhere. The list I linked to was gleaned from news sources and word of mouth. If anyone is aware of corrections or additions to the list, feel free to post them here and/or contact the authors of the list.

Unlike the public schools, the universities are viewed even by critics of ID as an appropriate place to discuss ID. Niall Shanks, Eugenie Scott, and even Bruce Alberts are favorable to the idea of ID being discussed in the universities. So “ID in the Academy” is something both sides want (albeit for opposite reasons)!

Read More ›