2006

Uncommon Descent is about to become “The Intelligent Design Weblog of William Dembski, Denyse O’Leary, and Friends.” O’Leary is a Toronto-based Canadian journalist and the author of By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg 2004), an investigation of the intelligent design controversy. In addition to being an equal partner with me on this blog, Denyse has also agreed to moderate it. I want to thank DaveScot for his untiring efforts this last half year in moderating this blog. But as he wrote here: Commenting is what I like doing here. Moderating is a pain that I can do without. If appending my comments directly onto others is too much to ask in return for all the time spent moderating then I’m Read More ›

Aside from setting new records in almost all categories June’s growth was larger than normal in that the total number of referring sites grew by over 20% month over month to 38,209. Growth in all other categories was our normal 10%. Way to go everyone! We continue to get our message out to more and more people! I wonder if Panda’s Thumb continued their decline? Maybe our loyal opposition will give us an answer at ATBC.

I finally broke down and this morning added one of those pictures that appear with Blogger comments. As many of you know I proudly served 4 years in the United States Marine Corps and consider that a defining period in my life. The USMC motto is “Semper Fidelis” which means “Always Faithful”. This describes (in order of importance) where our faith is placed: What do y’all think of it?

Here’s your second chance to make this thread productive. Stay on topic. Janiebelle has been booted. NEW RULE AT UD: No more bold insertions into existing comments. I’ve done it as has DaveScot. That’s now a thing of the past. One-comment-one-poster is now the rule.

Brilliant men always betray their wives
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2006/07/13/baaffairs13.xml

Einstein’s affairs should surprise no one, says Desmond Morris. It is all in the genius’s genes

So Albert Einstein did not, after all, spend all his waking hours chalking up complex symbols on a blackboard. According to letters newly released this week, he devoted quite a bit of it to chasing the ladies. And with considerable success.

To many, the idea of Einstein having 10 mistresses does not fit the classical image of the great, remote genius. Why was he wasting his valuable time with the exhausting business of conducting a string of illicit affairs – affairs that would cause havoc with his family life, damaging especially his relationship with his sons?

The answer is that he, like many other intensely creative men, was over-endowed with one of the human male’s most characteristic qualities: the joy of risk-taking.

Every creative act, every new formula, every ground-breaking innovation, is an act of rebellion that may – if successful – destroy an old, existing concept. So every time a brilliant mind sees a new possibility, it is faced with a moment of supreme risk-taking.

The new formula, the new invention, may not work. It may turn out to be a disaster. But the man of genius – such as Einstein – has the courage to plough ahead, despite the dangers, both on and off the intellectual field.

Not that Einstein is by any means an isolated instance. Indeed, far from being the exception he is closer to the norm where great men and sex are concerned. Read More ›

How man’s best friend overcame laws of natural evolution Jan Battles A GENETICIST says he may have solved the mystery of how 350 breeds of dog evolved from a single ancestor, the grey wolf. Matthew Webster of the Smurfit Institute of Genetics at Trinity College, Dublin, and colleagues at Uppsala University, Sweden, say the domestication of dogs may be allowing them to override the natural laws governing evolution. They suggest natural selection, which ensures the survival of the fittest and weeds out genetic mutations that don’t provide a survival advantage, was relaxed when dogs became domesticated. Living with people allowed harmful genetic variations to flourish that would never have survived in the wild. This interference with nature could also explain Read More ›

An objector to ID posed the following question to a friend of a friend: “According to Michael Behe’s view of ID (as developed in Darwin’s Black Box), it seems right to say that the system by which thunder and lightning is generated (composed of the sun, water on the ground to heat up and evaporate, thundercloud, air, ground) would qualify as “designed.” After all, it is, a la Behe, a system of several well-matched, separate, interacting parts accomplishing a function beyond the individual components and in which removing one piece does away with the function. But since it obviously wasn’t designed, the method of design detection given in Behe’s book is fundamentally flawed and gives many false positives. Is this Read More ›

Emergence of protein fold families through rational design Feng Ding1, Nikolay V Dokholyan1¤ 1 University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Biochemistry and Biophysics, Chapel Hill, NC, United States of America PROVISIONAL ABSTRACT Diverse proteins with similar structures are grouped into families of homologs and analogs if their sequence similarity is correspondingly higher or lower than 20-30%. It was suggested that protein homologs and analogs originate from a common ancestor and diverge in their distinct evolutionary time scales, emerging as a consequence of the physical properties of the protein sequence space. Although a number of studies have determined key signatures of protein family organization, the sequence-structure factors that differentiate the two evolution-related protein families remain unknown. Here, we stipulate that Read More ›

For your further amusement from a man who just doesn’t know when to stop. From: RJDownard@snip Date: Fri, 14 Jul 2006 15:39:30 EDT Subject: Uncommon Descent indeed! To: william.dembski@snip Dear Bill You take “all responsibility for any errors” in Coulter’s evolution chapters. Your words, not mine. Coulter has written what she has written. Either you are willing to defend each of her published assertions, or you may repudiate them. You have done neither. Thus the questions I asked remain. As amply evidenced by her prior works, Coulter can get confused entirely on her own. But it is also legitimate to wonder to what extent her published antievolution statements due to your proud tutoring? In my effort to resolve this point, Read More ›

Here is an exchange between Hannah Maxson (a rising senior with a triple major in the sciences at Cornell) and professor Allen MacNeill along with the various members of Uncommon Descent (UDers), Pandas Thumb (Pandas), ISCID, BSG, IDEA, NCSE, and other Cornell students and alumni.
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And while we’re at it, let’s not forget that natural selection also built the chariot, toaster oven, and space shuttle. Go here for another case of nanodesign, unanticipated but readily rationalized by evolutionary theory: http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/07/12/0321217&from=rss.

Mark, evidently hoping others might succeed where he failed, continues to be a shill for anti-Dembski “authors”. Give it up, Mark. There’s no such thing as a Free Lunch.

Ever get frustrated arguing with Darwinists about the illogic of their theory? It’s like arguing with Ma & Pa Kettle about the finer points of arithmetic. I’m sure you’ll agree that the following video captures the dynamic of this debate (the only difference is that Ma & Pa Kettle are a lot more personable than most Darwinists).

[I took this off because it was consuming too much bandwidth. Here it is back again. –WmAD]

(adapted from a discussion at Evolution and Design )

All right guys, a potential area of ID research. Who knows how long it may take to uncover, but here is where Explanatory Filter (EF) methods may help and where IDers can make a killer breakthrough for their theory if they succeed. There will be money, fame, and glory if this enigma is solved by IDers.

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DaveScot summed it up in a previous UD comment perhaps better than I have ever heard it expressed:

…the ballyhooed 150 years of acceptance of Darwinian evolution is irrelevant — it was based on vastly incomplete knowledge of the nanometer-scale machinery and information that drives all of life. Even today we have barely scratched the surface of this nanotechnology marvel that is the DNA-based living cell. All previous bets are off. The modern synthesis can best be described as obsolete — a patchwork quilt of ad hoc hypotheses propping up a failed theory worse than the epicycles used to keep alive the theory that the earth was the center of the universe.

All previous bets are indeed off.
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