This movie review may seem off topic, but it raises important questions about the abuse of science in our culture.

GORE’S HOT AIR
By KYLE SMITH

May 24, 2006 — AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH
http://www.nypost.com/movies/66485.htm

AL GORE’S global-warming documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth,” is sure to get an Oscar nomination for Best Documentary, but Gore should campaign for Best Actor, too.

Avoiding the usual vein-popping diatribes, he comes across as learned, calm and folksy. But much of what Gore says in this slide show he gives to people whose minds are not yet fully formed (undergraduates, actors) is absurd, and his assertions often contradict each other.

He implies that no reputable scientists dispute anything he says – basically, that the ice caps are melting and people on the 50th floor of the Empire State Building had better learn to swim. But there is wide disagreement about whether humans are causing global warming (climate change preceded the invention of the Escalade) and about whether we should be worried about the trends. Look carefully at Gore’s charts and you’ll see that the worst horrors take place in the future of his imagination. Read More ›

Scientists take cues from nature to solve modern tech mysteries
GREG BLUESTEIN
Associated Press
http://www.macon.com/mld/macon/14740340.htm

EXCERPT: On his Web site, William Dembski, a leading activist for the intelligent-design movement, cattily dissected the Georgia Tech center. “Here’s how it works: we find some amazing system in the biological realm, determine how to reverse engineer it, and then design and build a parallel system to serve our needs. But of course, the original system evolved by blind trial-and-error tinkering … To think that it was actually designed because we had to design its human counterpart is just plain stupid.”

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ATLANTA – One of the greatest challenges for robotics engineers is building a machine that actually walks like one of us. Capturing the organized fall that allows humans to get around rather gracefully has, in most cases, come off as – well – rather robotic.

Scientists in the rapidly maturing field of biologically-inspired design believe in turning to organic processes and embracing biological principles to solve such scientific stumpers. They argue that technology can learn much from the world’s most rigorous process: Evolution.

“If you think of organisms as products, all the bad ones have been recalled. Those that have survived evolved over millions of years,” said Marc Weissburg, a biology professor and co-director of Georgia Tech’s Center for Biologically Inspired Design.

Man has always looked to nature for its inspiration, capturing the sun to create fire and copying birds to achieve flight. But in the last 30 years, that tendency has been honed into a scientific field that is enjoying a growing number of devotees.

Two centers dedicated to the field have opened up within the last year, one at Georgia Tech in Atlanta and another at the University of California, Berkeley. And last month, dozens of researchers in the field gathered in Atlanta to share their experiments, in what observers said was an encouraging sign of its coming of age.

A range of projects probing rat whiskers, fish jaws and worm brains made up a Noah’s Ark-sized display of the innovations the field could yield. Read More ›

No paleontologists reported finding any transitional forms today – yet another stunning confirmation of the theory of punctuated equilibrium.

Seriously, I hope some of our Darwinists friends who post comments on this site can help me understand how evolutionary theorists deal with their cognitive dissonance when they consider the issue of gradualism and the general absence of transitional forms from the fossil record.

Now on the one hand, you have Charles Darwin, who understood that if his theory were true there must have been a whole universe of transitional species. He understood that the fossil record did not support this view, but hoped that in the future this would be remedied by determined paleontologists finding ever more proof of his theory.

“But just in proportion as this process of extermination has acted on an enormous scale, so must the number of intermediate varieties, which have formerly existed, be truly enormous. Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and serious objection which can be urged against my theory. The explanation lies, as I believe, in the extreme imperfection of the geological record.”

Origin of Species, chapter 6

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http://www.designerspeaks.com/watch.php?clip=6&

Skeptics, ever selective in their skepticism, remain convinced that SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) is a legitimate scientific program. But applying methods of design detection to biology — well that’s just plain stupid. See Robert Camp’s piece here. Design from biology fairly smacks us over the head. What about design from SETI (i.e., convincing proof of alien intelligence)? We’re still waiting for a shred of evidence — in this regard Michael Crichton hit the nail on the head: http://www.crichton-official.com/speeches/speeches_quote04.html.

This is a picture of the famous geneticist JBS Haldane (no kidding). He is notoriously known for “Haldane’s Dilemma” which is a current rage in ID circles.

Genetic Entropy & the Mystery of the Genome
by John Sanford (October 2005)

In retrospect, I realize that I have wasted so much of my life arguing about things that don’t really matter. It is my sincere hope that this book can actually address something that really does matter. The issue of who we are, where we came from, and where we are going seem to me to be of enormous importance. This is the real subject of this book.

Modern Darwinism is built on what I will be calling “The Primary Axiom”. The Primary Axiom is that man is merely the product of random mutations plus natural selection. Within our society’s academia, the Primary Axiom is universally taught, and almost universally accepted. It is the constantly mouthed mantra, repeated endlessly on every college campus. It is very difficult to find any professor on any college campus who would even consider (or should I say dare) to question the Primary Axiom.

Late in my career, I did something which for a Cornell professor would seem unthinkable. I began to question the Primary Axiom. I did this with great fear and trepidation. By doing this, I knew I would be at odds with the most “sacred cow” of modern academia. Among other things, it might even result in my expulsion from the academic world.
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