2006

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.

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 GILDERNational ReviewJuly 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 by greed, where 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 ›

This just in from a trusted colleague: Your “uncommondescent.com” blog is such an important source of useful and thought-provoking information and is so widely read, that it hurts me to see it deteriorate into ad homonem attacks and name-calling, as it has lately. I am quite aware that the other side uses such tactics almost to the exclusion of logic, but I’m convinced that responding in kind is not effective (I certainly understand the temptation, and do it myself frequently), staying on the high road and sticking to the issues, even showing respect for opponents who don’t disserve it, really gets people’s attention, because it is such a rare tactic in today’s world. I have more than once told friends Read More ›

A colleague sent me this. I’d like to ask contributors to this thread to list other books published before the advent of the ID movement that, like this, were (1) non-religiously motivated and (2) regarded conventional evolutionary theory as “a fairy tale for adults.” “A Biologist’s View,” Jean Rostand, Wm. Heinemann Ltd., 1956. French biologist Jean Rostand–“one of the leading European biologists,” according to the jacket of this 1956 book–hardly fits the popular stereotype of an intelligent design activist. He writes, for example: “I am quite incapable of taking seriously a ‘revelation’ supposedly made to our ancestors in the remote past,” and “I believe firmly in the evolution of organic nature,” and again “the only kind of truth I believe Read More ›

We keep getting told that the Dover (Kitzmiller) decison was the end of Intelligent Design. Judge Jones ruled that ID is just creationism in a cheap tuxedo. Yet physicist and regular contributor to Panda’s Thumb, Mark Perakh, is still struggling to dispute Dembski’s design detection math. I don’t get it. Is Mark in the business of arguing with cheap tuxedos or have rumors of ID’s death been highly exaggerated?

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Uncommon Descent is part of the relentlessly enthusiastic online ID community that is committed to opening minds to the truth about our origins.

I hope this essay will enlighten readers on the art of seeing through the misrepresentations used against ID proponents and their literature. Combating misrepresentation is vital to defeating the Sith Lords of Darwinism. But the first step in combating misrepresentation is first recognizing it, and recognizing it is a primary skill for one aspiring to become a Jedi Master in the internet ID wars.

I normally don’t respond to any of Ed Brayton’s pap (see here and here) but he’s become apoplectic on this and he’s contradicting his good friend and attorney Tim Sandefur who wrote about a right to a jury in the Dover case. Read More ›

More for amusement than anything else, I sometimes check the latest reviews of my books and those of my colleagues on Amazon. Here’s the beginning and end of a review of Icons of Evolution (authored by my good friend Jonathan Wells) posted three days ago:

***********************************************
A review by a medical researcher, June 27, 2006
Reviewer: Ian R. Peters (Boulder, CO USA)

I want to make 2 things clear before I start discussing this book.

(1) I have read this book thoroughly. I have taken the time to analyze the
arguments that Jonathan Wells makes.

(2) I am a medical researcher and have quite a bit of background on this
subject. This is not to say that I’m infallible, because as Wells clearly
demonstrates a biology degree can mean that you can still be wayyy off base.
Still, I would like to point out that I have some knowledge of the subject.

Wells’ book is a product of someone who has little or no understanding of
the subject matter. A perfect example is his discussion on homology. Wells
tries to show that the argument for evolution is a circular one because, he
says, evolutionists use analogous structures as support for evolution and
vice versa. But the thing is, we biologists don’t use JUST homologous
structures as evidence for evolution. There’s a whole lot of evidence that
is taken into account including genetics, biochemical systems and
comparative embryonic analysis.

…[snip]…

The theory of evolution has helped us to better understand the world around
us, including how/why bacteria adapt to antibiotics and how we can fight
avian flu. Without it, I know that the work that I and countless others do
would not have any meaning. Modern biology has given us a lot and evolution
provides the framework for it all.

If you think this book is right and evolution is a work of fiction, then
just be glad that your doctor knows better. We need more trained biologists
in this country to help keep our world healthy and I fear works like this
one will deter young people from becoming productive scientists.
*****************************************

Curious, I looked up Ian R. Peters on the University of Colorado-Boulder web site (I found him here). He’s a 5th year senior (i.e., undergraduate) in biological sciences and philosophy.

Isn’t Darwinism wonderful? It empowers someone who has not yet earned a bachelor’s degree to call himself a “medical researcher” and tell Jonathan Wells — with a Ph.D. in biology and twenty years of experience in medical laboratories — that he has “little or no understanding of the subject matter.”

But Darwinism doesn’t merely empower. It also nourishes self-esteem. It’s why we desperately need courses in evolutionary logic:

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Spider silk and diatom silica structures are just accidents. We can’t design stuff like this ourselves but when we take these two complex things found in nature and combine them then all of a sudden it’s a design! Wheeeeee! Aren’t we smart! Novel nanocomposites from spider silk–silica fusion (chimeric) proteins