Check out the following Danish ID website: www.intelligentdesign.dk. The organizer of this site is also helping to start a Danish Society for Intelligent Design. ID has gotten much media coverage in Denmark over the last year and interest in the topic there is growing.

Check out my new blog on the neuroscience issues that border on the intelligent design controversy, the Mindful Hack: First two stories: 1. Blindness: Spiritual blindness worse than physical? 2. Sigmund Freud … fallen so far and so fast?   Note: The Post-Darwinist will continue as before, and I will continue to contribute to this and all blogs I am not locked out of. Mindful Hack tracks my latest co-authored book, The Spiritual Brain (co-authored with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard), currently in copy editing.

I have a running debate with a couple of coworkers about how (in their opinion) stupid biological taxonomy is because taxonomists don’t simply choose a species concept and stick with it.

Apparently, his co-workers are not trained biologists (except for undergrad degrees) and complaining about taxonomy does ease their way through a dreary day, no doubt.

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A Brazilian friend advises me that Great Errors in Science , which highlights the importance of academic freedom in the sciences, is available in Portuguese. He explains more at his Portuguese-language blog. Apparently, three articles were written by Brazilian “Ivy league equivalent” professors that my friend has the good fortune to know. My friend, who has a copy, quotes, Science is not only a vital activity for the survival and development of humanity. It is also one of the most beautiful productions of human intelligence. But only the acceptance of its limited character, partial and uncertain can avoid that it transforms itself into a fossilized belief system But that, of course, is precisely what Darwinism has become, complete with ridiculous hagiography. Read More ›

Praying for an ‘A’ might not impress your prof About 30 percent of community college professors considered intelligent design as a serious scientific alternative. Fewer than 6 percent of professors at elite universities took that position. (HT: my friends at the Discovery Institute for alerting me to the article)

Touchstone now has Jonathan Witt’s review of Francis Collins’ The Language of God in their online archive: http://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=19-08-032-f.

1984: Semi-Meiosis as an Evolutionary Mechanism 1993: The Blind Alley 1998: Evolution as a Self-Limiting Process 2000: An Evolutionary Manifesto 2000: Ontogeny, Phylogeny and the Origin of Biological Information 2003: Do We Have an Evolutionary Theory? 2004: Julian Huxley’s Confession 2004: Is Evolution Finished? 2005: A Prescribed Evolutionary Hypothesis 2006: Darwinism as Delusion: A Response to Richard Dawkins

The intelligent design controversy has certainly spilled out of its original home among non-materialist Americans.

Here are some useful leads: For Britain, “Infighting among the Darwinists”, Media and Darwinists still ID’s best friends, and the manipulations around what UK PM Tony Blair supposedly said (scroll down). Then there is Quebec (Canada), the Muslim world, and the Catholic Church’s distancing itself from Darwinism. National Center for Science Education also notes the following, no doubt with some overlap with the above.

A recent article in Time made clear that American pundits actually believed that “I.D. lost some of its journalistic heat last December when a federal judge dismissed it as pseudoscience …” (a legal decision in Pennsylvania in 2005).

Just how they could possibly have believed that remains a mystery to me. But I must stop and remind myself that these people probably also believe in, for example, “evolutionary psychology.”  Read More ›

Here’s a study on E. Coli. They force the bacteria to “mutate” to process glycerol. After six days, sure enough, a kinase shows up to handle the glycerol. But what is a “surprise” is that RNA polymerase shows up besides. It seems that two simultaneous mutations took place. But, of course, this is ONLY a surprise if you think RM+NS brought it about.

The authors say:

Mutations also appeared in a second, unrelated gene for an enzyme called RNA polymerase. “That was a surprise to almost everybody because RNA polymerase is involved in one of the core processes of any cell,” said Palsson. “You wouldn’t expect that gene to change because a wide variety of cellular process would be affected; it’s like replacing the wiring system in a building when a light bulb burns out. But we repeated the experiment more than 50 times and mutations in the RNA polymerase gene appeared again and again.”

I also enjoy the hesitation you almost hear as the reporter has to backtrack somewhat from RM+NS (listen for the word “presumably”):

All the mutants arose in the experiments presumably as the result of naturally occurring errors in copying DNA into daughter cells during cell division.

We here at UD have a better idea about what’s going on.

Here’s the link to the article.
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On September 16th, 2006 uncommondescent.com was mysteriously dropped from indexing by google.com. Deindexing means that any google search would never return a hit to uncommondescent.com. We became blogona non grata at google. We were never given a reason beyond we were in violation of webmaster guidelines. Not knowing how, we tried everything we could think of to fix it, including the new WordPress Theme “Cutline”, a sitemap, and shutting down an unauthorized mirror site (antievolution.org/buud). We know that google reevaluated us after all this (it’s in the webmaster report) and we were still not reindexed. The next automatic cycle for evaluations was coming up in December but we had nothing new to try so we held out little hope. Then Read More ›

Yesterday I reported statements by Professor Tim McGrew, Chair of the Philosophy of Science Department at Western Michigan University. Here are some updates as more information has rolled in.
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The following was brought to my attention as an example of how a lot of bad science passes the so-called peer review process at well respected publications like Nature. It’s specifically about pencil-whipped temperature data in global warming but is more broadly about a flawed peer review process in general. Especially flawed when the paper under review is supportive of consensus science like Global Warming or Neo-Darwinian Evolution. Can you say “rubber stamp”? FLAWED NATURE PAPER ON GLOBAL WARMING Douglas J. Keenan, November 2006

You be the judge. I welcome commentary and contrary accounts as the comment by McGrew has not been independently confirmed. Here is what professor Tim McGrew had to say:

Let me put that more bluntly: Myers is lying through his teeth. Literally. He is actually that dishonest.
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The Design of Life

…this book is poised to become the authoritive textbook on the theory of intelligent design.

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(Note: Unexpectedly, this months-long problem has just got solved, shortly after the bloggers started complaining publicly about it. – d.)   Web guy Micah Sparacio permits me to publicize this problem at the Post-Darwinist, so I thought I would mention it here too, for the benefit of our blog readers and commenters: On approximately the 19th of September, the blog operated by Bill Dembski and friends  Uncommon Descent was delisted from the Google search index. No reason has ever been given for why the site was delisted, despite requests for reinclusion. This blog has tens of thousands of legitimate links, especially from trusted institutions of higher education. This blog had been around for well over a year. This blog has Read More ›