Michael Shermer has a piece on confirmation bias in the current SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN (go here). He writes: . . . In science we have built-in self-correcting machinery. Strict double-blind controls are required in experiments, in which neither the subjects nor the experimenters know the experimental conditions during the data-collection phase. Results are vetted at professional conferences and in peer-reviewed journals. Research must be replicated in other laboratories unaffiliated with the original researcher. Disconfirmatory evidence, as well as contradictory interpretations of the data, must be included in the paper. Colleagues are rewarded for being skeptical. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. We need similar controls for the confirmation bias in the arenas of law, business and politics. Judges and lawyers should call Read More ›

Cosmological fine-tuning for the existence of life is so well established that it is essentially beyond question at this point, unless one is willing to put blind faith in wildly-fantastic speculation about an infinitude of in-principle undetectable alternative universes. A huge amount of complex, specified information was clearly infused into the origin-of-the-universe process. Not only did matter, energy, space, and the physical laws of the universe come into existence at this point, but time itself did as well. This means that the cause of the universe must exist outside of matter, energy, space, the physical laws of the universe, and even time. This raises an interesting question about design and temporal supernatural intervention: If the source of the universe exists Read More ›

… it’s probably a duck. I was reading John Lynch’s blog Stranger Fruit and ran across this comment by Tiax who is a frequent commenter from the loyal opposition here: It strikes me as odd that they would use the word ‘intuitive’ when the folks at Uncommondescent are so happy to point out the very intuitive nature of design detection. “This looks very designed to me” is often a good enough rationale It strikes me as odd that people who have no problem believing that a few fossilized bone fragments or teeth “that look like a transitional species” is always a good enough rationale to call it a transitional species would complain about us calling something with the appearance of Read More ›

How is it that when cognitive psychologists and computational intelligence engineers detect user intent, they are doing science, but when ID theorists detect design in biological systems, they aren’t? There’s a double standard here. ID might fail as a science — methods of design detection might be defective or fail to yield a positive result, but to say that their application does not even constitute science, as Judge John E. Jones III ruled in Kitzmiller v. Dover, is on its face ludicrous. Consider the following letter from a colleague: Bill, I wondered if science did any studies on “intent detection” so I searched Google. The focus has always been on the phrase “design detection” so it never occured to me Read More ›

Should public schools censor scientific evidence just because it challenges Darwin’s theory of evolution? Or, should teachers present ALL the scientific evidence, including both the strengths and weaknesses of evolutionary theory? The overwhelming majority of Americans believe that when biology teachers present the scientific evidence supporting Darwin’s theory of evolution, they should also teach the scientific evidence against it. According to the Kansas State Board of Education: “Regarding the scientific theory of biological evolution, the curriculum standards call for students to learn about the best evidence for modern evolutionary theory, but also to learn about areas where scientists are raising scientific criticisms of the theory.” However, there are some in Kansas, and around the country, now using their voices to Read More ›

Here’s my proposal: XX = Paranoid Delusion YY = Mental Health I solicit other comparisons for this thread.

Robert Savillo, an unknown in the evo-ID wars, has entered the fray with an attack against Ann Coulter’s treatment of evolution in her new book Godless (go here for Savillo’s screed). Savillo takes me to task for letting Ann’s “Flatulent Raccoon Theory” pass editorial scrutiny: Ann Coulter’s “Flatulent Raccoon Theory” Robert Savillo Media Matters for America June 2006 . . . According to the weblog of William Dembski, a supporter of intelligent design, all of the above-mentioned falsehoods, misinformation, and distortions can be attributed to his “generous tutoring.” The evidence reveals that Coulter’s two chapters on the theory of evolution display her own ignorance toward the subject while providing an avenue to make ad hominem attacks against scientists, progressives, and Read More ›

Thanks to Reed Cartwright at Panda’s Thumb for pointing out Miller’s lame response.

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Stephen Hawking and Thomas Hertog recently published an article that should be of interest to many of us. When the normal “bottom-up approach” is applied to cosmology, one ends up with a finely tuned universe as we all know. Hawking has apparently been busy trying to find a way around that “problem” with a “top down approach”.

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The Discovery Institute is backing public school related legislation in Ohio calling for teaching the controversy in evolution and global warming. By naming global warming evolution isn’t getting “singled out” so this weakens the argument that teaching criticisms of consensus science is religiously inspired.

Of course the usual suspects at the Panda’s Thumb still claim the global warming anti-alarmists are religiously inspired. Give me a break. The global warming issue is about economics not religion.

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Discovery Institute attorney and scientist (and IDEA co-founder) Casey Luskin has posted this article on more of Ken Miller’s mis-steps under oath and in public. See: Ken Miller’s “Random and Undirected” Testimony. Luskin earlier pointed out Miller’s misrepresentations under oath here. I figured you all might want a thread to discuss this, so here it is!

JanieBelle made the following comment in a previous UD thread about the possibility of alternative living systems: “In order to rule out chance, don’t we have to rule out the chance of any possible kind of life? Do we know for an absolute fact that silicon or bzywhateverium can’t make life?” Pick up a copy of Michael Denton’s second book, Nature’s Destiny: How the Laws of Biology Reveal Purpose in the Universe. This book was recommended to me by Michael Behe when I chatted with him after a lecture he delivered at the University of California, Irvine. Denton addresses this very question in his second tour-de-force work. As it turns out, life other than we know it here on earth Read More ›

(Adapted from a discussion at Evolution and Design and from material in Trevors and Abel’s peer-reviewed paper, Chance and necessity do not explain the origin of life, featured in Cell Biology International, 2004.)

The Explanatory Filter in ID literature outlines a textbook method for detecting design. If one finds a physical artifact, the artifact is inferred to be designed if the features in question are not explainable by naturalistic explanations, namely:

1. natural law, or
2. chance

(I will explain later why I define “naturalistic explanations” this way.)

However, two objections often arise:

A. How can we be sure we won’t make some discovery in the future that will invalidate the design inference?

B. How can we be sure we’ve eliminated all possible naturalistic causes, particularly since we have so few details of what happened so long ago when no one was around?

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Evolution and Me ‘The Darwinian theory has become an all-purpose obstacle to thought rather than an enabler of scientific advance’ GEORGE GILDER National Review July 17, 2006 . . . Turning to economics in researching my 1981 book Wealth & Poverty, I incurred new disappointments in Darwin and materialism. Forget God — economic science largely denies intelligent design or creation even by human beings. Depicting the entrepreneur as a mere opportunity scout, arbitrageur, or assembler of available chemical elements, economic theory left no room for the invention of radically new goods and services, and little room for economic expansion except by material “capital accumulation” or population growth. Accepted widely were Darwinian visions of capitalism as a dog-eat-dog zero-sum struggle impelled Read More ›

[This just in from yet another colleague:] Somewhere (I can’t find the reference) I read recently in something by an anti-ID, pro-stochastic-macroevolution writer a crowing remark that a spider hatched in isolation immediately starts to build a perfect web and gets it perfectly right on the first attempt. From one point of view a spider web is a “simple geometrical/combinatorial object” [like a crystal] that wouldn’t take too many binary info-bits to specify, but I conjecture that the “instruction manual” for BUILDING a spider web probably could be shown to require more than 500 binary bits (and therefore be “physically impossible” to have arisen by any combination of natural law and chance). Also it seems unlikely to get to a Read More ›