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.
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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…this book is poised to become the authoritive textbook on the theory of intelligent design.
(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 ›
When I blogged recently on the media coverage of the intelligent design controversy, I remarked, “Then the big challenge is to find a publication that actually wants the real story. That means readers who want the real story. Only those readers can help you.”
A commenter wrote to ask,
Do you have any ideas on where we will find such readers? Should we be concentrating on informing believers? Will this be resisted by interested parties? Will we then divide our house? Should we concentrate on convincing religious and political power brokers?
ID is often accused of being a media beat up rather than a scientific controversy. Will we reinforce that view if we concentrate on media?
These are challenging questions, so let me take them in turn:
– Do you have any ideas on where we will find such readers? Anywhere there are Internet-linked terminals. There is no shortage of people who question the worldview of the ”Darwinoids”, as a journalist friend calls them. The difficulty is that we are in a transitional phase between reliance on print/broadcast media and reliance on the Internet. The latter operates fundamentally differently from the former because it does not empower the big over the small. Don’t believe me? Look what the Swift Vets did to John Kerry, or the pajamaheddin did to Dan Rather. The swifts and the pajamas were nobodies – apart from the fact that both groups knew something that the public would be very interested to discover.* In the legacy media, both groups would be promptly stifled because they did not fit the story template that had already been hammered out. (Everyone who mattered knew that Kerry was a good officer, you see, and Bush was a bad airman.)
Only on the Internet could these nobodies have succeeded because anyone who can use a search engine could find out what they had to say. Read More ›
From the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works… Renowned Scientist Defects From Belief in Global Warming – Caps Year of Vindication for Skeptics Washington DC – One of the most decorated French geophysicists has converted from a believer in manmade catastrophic global warming to a climate skeptic. This latest defector from the global warming camp caps a year in which numerous scientific studies have bolstered the claims of climate skeptics. Scientific studies that debunk the dire predictions of human-caused global warming have continued to accumulate and many believe the new science is shattering the media-promoted scientific “consensus” on climate alarmism. Claude Allegre, a former government official and an active member of France’s Socialist Party, wrote an editorial on Read More ›
Two biologists claim to close a “major gap in Darwin’s theory” of evolution.
(excerpt)
Darwinian evolution is widely advertised to be a fact, as firmly established as the shape of the Earth. Defenders of the theory insist that there is no scientific controversy over it, and people who question or criticize it are typically accused of being ignorant or religiously motivated. Yet every few years a book comes along — written by scientists — claiming to remedy some major flaw in evolutionary theory.
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1. Paul Nelson is such a cool and brilliant guy
2. I’ve never met him before
3. There are lots of extras at the event he is speaking at, such as:
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