Over at Panda’s Thumb Ian Musgrave opens his article Random Nonsense with
Over at Uncommon Descent William Dembski is linking to the random mutation site with approval.
Hello Ian? Is anyone home?
That article was written by Gil Dodgen not William Dembski. Your attention to detail is underwhelming and not at all surprising. It’s characteristic of the quality of everything you boys write.
A fellow named William sent me, in a personal e-mail, the link below. I won’t disclose any further information about William, just in case his entire life and career might be destroyed by the DI (the Darwinian Inquisition). Have fun mutating any originally meaningful sentence into your next great novel! http://www.randommutation.com/darwinianevolution.htm
Ritualistic denunciations against ID by the scientific community continue apace. Unfortunately, most of those who write these denunciations have little familiarity with ID. In addition, they tend to be spindly academics without the fire in the belly to express the appropriate outrage against ID. I would therefore like to offer my services, for a modest fee, to write denunciations of ID for any reputable science organizations needing to put ID in its place. Below is a sample of my work. Only serious inquiries please!
Below is the abstract to one of the strangest papers you’re likely to encounter in a refereed science journal. It mixes ancient creation accounts with history and science and philosophy. The interesting ramifications for ID are the following: (1) the author concludes that the central issue in biology is information (though he seems to locate it inside the cell), (2) he openly discusses philosophy and religion in the paper. Perhaps this journal would be open to ID papers that don’t explicitly argue for design but deal with information-theoretic approaches to biological complexity. Oh, by the way, the author also includes the obligatory disclaimer: “This work does not support the Intelligent Design movement in any way whatsoever.” (Just kidding.)
EXCERPT: Among experts who actually examine the causes of change on a global scale, many concentrate their research on designing and enhancing computer models of hypothetical futures. “These models have been consistently wrong in all their scenarios,” asserts Ball. “Since modelers concede computer outputs are not “predictions” but are in fact merely scenarios, they are negligent in letting policy-makers and the public think they are actually making forecasts.”
Scientists respond to Gore’s warnings of climate catastrophe
“The Inconvenient Truth” is indeed inconvenient to alarmists
By Tom Harris
http://www.libertypost.org/cgi-bin/readart.cgi?ArtNum=145842“Scientists have an independent obligation to respect and present the truth as they see it,” Al Gore sensibly asserts in his film “An Inconvenient Truth”, showing at Cumberland 4 Cinemas in Toronto since Jun 2. With that outlook in mind, what do world climate experts actually think about the science of his movie?
Professor Bob Carter of the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University, in Australia gives what, for many Canadians, is a surprising assessment: “Gore’s circumstantial arguments are so weak that they are pathetic. It is simply incredible that they, and his film, are commanding public attention.” Read More ›
The October 30, 2005 issue of the Vital Theology newsletter (www.vitaltheology.com) summarizes an interview with Alan Padgett, whom I know from a Templeton funded Oxford seminar at which I spoke (on ID) in June 2001 and at which he was a participant (this was still in the days when I used to be invited to Templeton events). We had a whole week together, so I don’t see any excuse for the following remarks by him. Quoting from the newsletter: Current debates [over ID] center on two false assumptions. The first is that evolution must imply that God does not exist. The second is that there is something wrong with the theory of evolution, so it must be defeated to promote Read More ›
Denyse O’Leary’s post today at her Post-Darwinist blog takes Simon Conway Morris to task for attacking ID on bogus theological grounds (go here). Her post has finally moved me to begin a series here at UD on ID’s Cultured Theological Despisers. I had been thinking about doing this for some time. In fact, I already have one post on this blog (also titled “ID’s Cultured Theological Despisers” — go here) in which I challenged Conway Morris’s abuse of theology against ID. I now intend to make such postings, challenging a range of theologically motivated attacks on ID, a regular feature of this blog. With regard to Simon Conway Morris, I’ve known him since the spring of 2000, when he spoke Read More ›
I’m suffering from a severe case of cognitive dissonance. http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,199695,00.html Those of us with room-temperature IQs are perpetually assured that there is overwhelming evidence for Darwinian gradualism in the fossil record. So, after reading the news release linked above, I asked myself, “Self, why is this big news?” I guess I just don’t get it. Why has the missing link in bird evolution just been found, when I have been assured for years that there is overwhelming evidence in the fossil record that the enigma of bird evolution was already solved? Sigh. I’m apparently too stupid to understand Darwinian logic.
The following Google graph shows trends for searches on “intelligent design”: http://www.google.com/trends?q=Intelligent+Design&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all. Click on the “regions” tab. It shows that Australia has about half the searches for ID that the US does. Given that Australia’s population is about 20 million, that means that if the US population is 250 million, Australia searches for ID on average 6 times more per person than does the US. And given that Denmark has only a quarter of the population of Australia, Danes must be searching for ID >20 times more than Americans. International interest in ID is growing.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M56HQRovUqA
I thought GilDodgen’s June 10 post about the odds of writing a simple computer program by chance was very interesting. It put me in mind of the old “infinite monkey theory.” You know the one: “If infinite monkeys were typing on infinite typewriters, sooner or later they would type out the complete works of the Bard. I googled it and found this site http://user.tninet.se/~ecf599g/aardasnails/java/Monkey/webpages/index.html that is testing it out. They have a random number generator simulating the monkeys. When I looked they had typed 8.91 raised to the 71st power of pages, and the most they had been able to get was 37 letters from Shakespeare. See this site now: http://everything2.com/title/Monkey+Shakespeare+Simulator
Well, it started up at the end of May, so it’s not all that new. This goes to show you that conservatives can be just as close-minded as anybody else. What we need now is liberal support for ID and we’ll be all set! Go here to check it out.
In reading the following excerpt from a Cal Berkeley newsletter, ask yourself what contribution, if any, conventional evolutionary theory is making to the study of these biochemical systems. As an acceptable answer, try NIL. In recent years Oster and his colleagues created a groundbreaking model of ATP synthase, an enzyme that synthesizes ATP, the universal fuel molecule that powers all cells. ATP synthase is essentially a factory built around two rotary motors. One of the motors forces the other to rotate as a generator that cranks out ATP. Oster’s contribution was in showing how the two motors generate their torque from very different fuel sources. The first motor is essentially electric. It’s powered, Oster explains, by a transmembrane electro-chemical potential Read More ›
Ann Coulter’s ‘Godless’ Debuts at No. 1 June 14, 2006 By Kimberly Maul After lambasting the widows of Sept. 11 and spanking Matt Lauer for “getting testy,” conservative political writer Ann Coulter sold more than 48,000 copies of her book, Godless: The Church of the Liberalism, as tracked by Nielsen BookScan. This will put the book at No. 1 on The Book Standard’s Nonfiction Chart and Political Science Chart and No. 2 Overall when the charts publish tomorrow. MORE
Intelligent design will open doors to scientific exploration which Darwinism is too blind to perceive. The ID perspective allows us to find designed architectures within biology which are almost invisible to natural selection. Thus, the ID perspective is a far better framework for scientific investigation than the Darwinian perspective. What do I mean, and how will I justify my claim?
Let me illustrate my point with some anecdotes. I was piloting a small airplane in the spring of 2002. My airplane suffered a potentially serious systems failure during the flight. Read More ›