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Steve Fuller reviews Francis Collins

God and science: You just can’t please everyone
A Review of Francis Collins’s The Language of God

By Steve Fuller
From NewScientist 26 August 2006, p. 48.

Denying the real conflict between religion and science is a sure formula for confusion, finds STEVE FULLER.
————–

Let me start by declaring an interest: I am that Steve Fuller who gave evidence for the defence in the trial over whether intelligent design should be taught alongside evolution in school in Dover, Pennsylvania, last year. And books like this persuade me that I did the right thing.

*The Language of God* is by Francis S. Collins, director of the Human Genome Project for the U.S. National Institutes of Health. He became a born-again Christian after reading C. S. Lewis’s *Mere Christianity* as a biochemistry graduate student. Collins is now part of the American ScientificAffiliation, a group of 3000 Christians which aims to render science consistent with its beliefs.

Collins’s mission is to deny any real conflict between God and Darwin. He wants to square things for scientists who don’t want intelligent design on their doorstep but who also don’t want to examine their own beliefs too closely. Read More ›

Catholic hierarchy on slippery slope

Once the discussion of biological origins opens up in the way the good Cardinal proposes (see below), it’s over for standard evolutionary theory. To be sure, the distinction between “evolutionism” as philosophy and “evolution” as science is valid and at first blush may seem like a way to keep evolution safe. But this distinction is one that the figureheads of evolution, such as Richard Dawkins, Jerry Coyne, and Francisco Ayala, deliberately muddy to preserve evolution as materialism’s best safeguard.

As this discussion opens up, people are increasingly going to “get it,” and as they do they’ll realize that Darwin’s legacy is the biggest scam in the history of ideas. Right now what keeps the theory afloat is not overwhelming evidence (yes, there are “mountains and mountains of evidence” as Richard Dawkins puts it, but the quality of this evidence in establishing evolution’s grandiose claims is abysmal). Rather, what keeps the theory afloat is strict enforcement of ideological purity.

With Catholic leaders like Cardinal Schönborn taking the lead in opening up the discussion, this scam will become increasingly difficult to perpetuate. Any bets when the Darwinian house of cards will come crashing down? I’m not talking about nobody believing it anymore. Rather, I’m talking about people not having any longer to show undue deference to it — a new age when they can ridicule it openly, and its defenders must actually defend the theory rather than merely sneer at those who disbelieve it.

Cardinal Schönborn Proposes Evolution Debate
Calls for More Science, Less Ideology
Date: 2006-08-25, Code: ZE06082508
http://www.zenit.org/english/visualizza.phtml?sid=93781

RIMINI, Italy, AUG. 25, 2006 (Zenit.org).- Cardinal Christoph Schönborn is
proposing an ideology-free debate on the theory of evolution, and wants to
clarify the Church’s position on the topic. Read More ›

Feeding frenzy at the PT

[From a colleague who sometimes posts here in the comments:] Like fresh meat tossed into a pit of jackels, Jonathan Wells’ newest book The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design has sent the Panda’s Thumb crowd into a feeding frenzy. Right now there are at least 4 opening posts devoted to taking the book, apparently, chapter by chapter, and “demolishing” (or is it “destroying” or perhaps “eviscerating”) nearly every sentence Jonathan wrote (or so it seems). I find it very telling that they attribute so much power and influence to Jonathan that nearly every sentence in his book simply must be shown to be wrong. To join the fun, go here: http://www.pandasthumb.org and see for yourself. Simply amazing.

Wistar Convention, Salem Hypothesis and Music

einstein violin

The most well-known recorded clash between non-biologists and biologists over evolutionary theory was at Wistar 1966 :

a handful of mathematicians and biologists were chattering over a picnic lunch organized by the physicist, Victor Weisskopf, who is a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Read More ›

Artificial Intelligence and the Game of Checkers

I was going to post this as a comment in Salvador’s thread (https://uncommondescent.com/index.php/archives/1481) but it became too long, so I’m posting it as a new topic.

On the subject of computer checkers I have some observations. I hate to brag (okay, I lied!) but I am one of the world’s leading authorities on this subject.

I know David Fogel. He is a very bright researcher and a really cool, nice guy. (Plus, he is a very talented pianist and musician. We have shared our piano CDs. Is there some correlation between music, mathematics and computer science?)

There are three essential elements in an artificial-intelligence (AI) games-playing computer program:

1) A move generator. The board and pieces must be represented in the computer’s memory, either as arrays or bit-maps. An algorithm must be devised to generate moves based on the rules of the game.

2) A tree-search algorithm. This is even more complex and requires sophisticated software engineering. The game tree explodes exponentially, so an alpha-beta minimax algorithm is employed. Other sophisticated algorithms must be used to curtail the exponential explosion: quickly accessible hash tables that contain previously-seen positions, iterative deepening with best-move prediction accessed from the hash tables, use of killer moves and move sorting based on a history heuristic, and much more.

3) A terminal-node evaluation function which attempts to ascertain the value of a position statically, since the tree search must terminate at some point. These values are backed up through the search tree with the alpha-beta minimax algorithm.

Most of the playing strength of these programs comes from the tree search (which is not possible without the move generator), since humans have a hard time keeping track of this much detail.

Fogel and his team of software engineers programmed elements 1 and 2, without which element 3 (the product of the genetic algorithm) would have been completely useless. The fitness function was the definition of a win at the end of the tree search: no moves left for the opponent. This was a goal defined by the programmers. The leaf-node evaluation function is not essentially strategic; “strategy” is mostly a byproduct of the tree search.

This is not to say that Fogel’s research is meaningless. It is intriguing and worthwhile. What all this means is that a cleverly designed trial-and-error process, combined with a lot of even more clever software engineering and human-devised algorithms, can produce interesting and productive results.

It should be noted that human-crafted (i.e., intelligently-designed terminal-node evaluation functions) totally trounce Blondie’s eval function with ease.
Read More ›

Information, Materialism and Free Will

The existence of information is a fundamental refutation of materialism. Information has no mass. It has no physical dimensions. And it can exist in multiple places at the same time. It has no physical or materialistic properties whatsoever. Put a gigabyte of information on your computer’s blank hard disk, and check out how much more the disk weighs. Back up your hard disk and that information will exist in two places at the same time. You can transmit that information at the speed of light (at which speed nothing with rest mass can travel). Life is not fundamentally based on atoms, molecules and chemistry. These represent the media and low-level mechanism in which life’s information is stored and expressed. As Read More ›

Darwinists need to recruit Paris Hilton to sell their product . . .

Right now this is how Darwinists are selling their product:

Watch this video:
http://www.accolo.com/Accolo-Rethink-Recruiting.wmv

This is how they need to sell their product:

Go here: http://www.spicyparis.com/index.html.

Here’s what recruiting the right people means to an ad campaign (which is what Darwinism has become): Read More ›

Pope Benedict XVI has replaced an evangelizing Darwinist, Dr. George Coyne

Vatican Astronomer Replaced by Bruce Chapman

Chapman writes:

Pope Benedict XVI has replaced an evangelizing Darwinist, Dr. George Coyne, as director the Vatican Observatory, according to Zenit News. A Jesuit with a doctorate in astronomy, Dr. Coyne in recent years made himself the public scourge of Darwin critics and scientific proponents of intelligent design. Increasingly his theology resembled that of “process theologians” who believe that God is still learning and could not have known what his world was becoming.
Read More ›

Pim Van Meurs Misses the Mark Again

On Panda’s Thumb Pim Van Meurs preaches confidently to the choir that we are all biased in that we see faces in natural objects created by chance.  Evidently the take-home point Pim wishes to make is that this is equivalent to seeing machinery in natural objects created by chance.  So I guess for Pim a cloud that looks sort of like a face is the same as a robotic protein factory driven by abstract digital program code and a library of abstract digital specifications for thousands of complex proteins, where some of those proteins are parts of the factory itself.  Yeah, Pim.  It’s just my internal bias that makes me see a complex machine there and wonder how it was possibly constructed by chance.  Well, at Read More ›

Congratulations Dave Thomas!

Dave has proven beyond a doubt that intelligent agents can construct useful trial and error algorithms.  As long as the way the trials are conducted and the way the results are judged is well specified then trial and error algorithms work!  Of course we all learn to search for solutions using trial and error as children.  Or so I thought.  Maybe Dave Thomas is just discovering it now and thinks he’s stumbled onto something revolutionary.  The $64,000 question remains unanswered.  Who or what specified how trials in evolution were to be conducted?  The only answer I’ve heard  from chance worshippers is that some mystical chemical soup burped out a living cell containing a protein assembly machine called a ribosome driven by an abstract digitally encoded control Read More ›

If the evidence for Darwinian theory were so great, why keep slamming ID? Just present it!

================ Excerpt from Current biology Volume 16, Issue 16, 22 August 2006, Pages R619-R620 doi:10.1016/j.cub.2006.07.041 Copyright © 2006 Published by Elsevier Ltd. Q & A: Roger Hendrix Pittsburgh Bacteriophage Institute and Department of Biological Sciences, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15260, USA Available online 21 August 2006. ================= …. Q: Given the prominence of the evolutionary perspective in your work, can you comment on the current efforts to present ‘Intelligent Design’ as an alternative to biological evolution in public schools in America? A: It is a sorry commentary on the state of public understanding of science that a large fraction of the US population is willing to accept that Intelligent Design (ID), essentially a tarted-up version of creationism, and evolution Read More ›