2006

Science and Intelligent Design By Norbert M. Samuelson The purpose of this paper is to examine some specifically philosophical questions about the current debate in selected North American public schools about including what is commonly called “intelligent design” (ID) as part of the schools’ official science curriculum. The issues I will raise focus around two broad questions: First, what is the logical status of the arguments for and against ID? Second, may the arguments presented for ID be considered “scientific”? My analysis will be grounded in two related but nonetheless distinct disciplines of intellectual history – the history of western philosophy and the history of modern western European science. Based on my historical analysis I will suggest some tentative answers Read More ›

A new course on ID has been offered at Cornell. This is the same school where the interim president of Cornell, Hunter Rawlings, declared war on ID and where a brave band of pro-ID students (like Hannah Maxson) and faculty (like Professor Mark Psiaki and Professor John Sanford) stood up in defiance. Cornell offers course on intelligent design

A Scientist’s Scientist John Barrow wins 2006 Templeton Prize By Julia Vitullo-Martin When Selfish Gene author Richard Dawkins challenged physicist John Barrow on his formulation of the constants of nature at last summer’s Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowship lectures, Barrow laughed and said, “You have a problem with these ideas, Richard, because you’re not really a scientist. You’re a biologist.” For Barrow, biology is little more than a branch of natural history. “Biologists have a limited, intuitive understanding of complexity. They’re stuck with an inherited conflict from the 19th century, and are only interested in outcomes, in what wins out over others,” he adds. “But outcomes tell you almost nothing about the laws that govern the universe.” For physicists it is the Read More ›

Our very own Bill Dembski has decided to resign his post at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville and has accepted the position of research professor of philosophy at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas. On behalf of everyone at Uncommon Descent, I wish you the very best, Bill! To read more, go here. Welcome Back Home, Bill!

Everyone was wondering why the Seguin Gazette-Enterprise pulled all the Pianka stories. Well, none of us guessed and in hindsight it was rather obvious. At least it should have been obvious for me. The traffic generated by the stories was overwhelming the Gazette’s server. As of this minute two followup Pianka stories that weren’t linked by Drudge et al are back online. Forrest Mims explains it here. Update: Panda’s Thumb was informed by someone in the main office outside Seguin, as no one in Seguin would tell them anything, that the articles were removed in an unlikely accident. Forrest Mims on the other hand lives in Seguin, is a columnist for the local paper, and undoubtedly knows everyone there, says Read More ›

March was yet another month of steady growth in interest in Uncommon Descent as can be seen in the following Webalyzer graphs. December was an anomaly due to a very popular blog linking to a single post with a downloadable file in it (see the corresponding spike in (red bars) bandwidth). Lay a ruler across the tops of the total hits (green bars) or the number of visits (yellow bars) to see the slope of the average monthy growth. It works out to about 10% growth per month which means a doubling approximately every 7 months due to compounding.

So for all our authors and commenters… CONGRATULATIONS and THANK YOU! There’s steadily growing interest in what we have to say. And don’t forget about our advertisers. Clicking on the ads to see what they have to say helps defray the operating cost of our server.

One of Eric Pianka’s favorite sayings is “What good are lizards? What good are YOU?”. Well Eric, I’m a contributing member of the species that is developing the ability for the earth’s ecosystem to get off the third rock from the sun and secure a foothold on other worlds in other solar systems so that when this rock gets baked it won’t be the end of the line for life. The big picture, Eric, is that if life is confined to this planet it is a goner. Planets you see are things that are born, exist for a while, then die. If the life that’s on them doesn’t relocate itself then it dies too. If you look at the core Read More ›

Arthur Asuncion at UCI sends this notice about an ID event at UCI. I posted the following comment: Dear Arthur, I just spent some time at the iDesign UCI site. Thanks so much for sending the link. It’s a terrific resource. It is going to be very interesting to watch the Intelligent Design versus Blind-Watchmaker-Evolution debate in coming years, because technically competent people who have a reasonably well-integrated knowledge of modern hard science (mathematics — especially combinatorics — chemistry, physics, and software engineering), know way too much for very many of them to buy BWE for much longer. The first of the two main reasons that those with the above-mentioned technical knowledge and experience are holdouts, and continue to accept Read More ›

Mike Gene at Telic Thoughts, without having seen a transcript of the Lamar speech where the recording devices were ordered off (the published transcript is only the last 5 minutes of a 45 minute speech), decides that Forest Mims is a liar man of terrible misjudgement and misunderstanding. Mike Gene, who has surely read the student review saying Pianka PREACHES that 90% of the population SHOULD be wiped out by airborne ebola, a student review of Pianka’s class that echoes what Mims heard in the Lamar speech, must also think this student is a liar person of terrible misjudgement and misunderstanding too. I’m very disappointed in Mike Gene, whoever he is. No wonder Mike Gene refuses to identify himself. Wusses Read More ›

. . . My ambivalence about the [Templeton] foundation came to a head during my fellowship in Cambridge last summer. The British biologist Richard Dawkins, whose participation in the meeting helped convince me and other fellows of its legitimacy, was the only speaker who denounced religious beliefs as incompatible with science, irrational, and harmful. The other speakers — three agnostics, one Jew, a deist, and 12 Christians (a Muslim philosopher canceled at the last minute) — offered a perspective clearly skewed in favor of religion and Christianity. Some of the Christian speakers’ views struck me as inconsistent, to say the least. None of them supported intelligent design, the notion that life is in certain respects irreducibly complex and hence must Read More ›

I know this is a bit of a repeat of old news, but I thought some of you might appreciate a slightly different take on the McGill failure to put ID in it’s “proper place”. The proponents of what came to be called “intelligent design” are naturally being denounced by “respectable scientific authority,” and since advocacy of “ID” is obviously a career terminator, only about 10 percent of scientists (many safely retired) have done so. But their number is growing, and the movement is regarded by the scientific establishment as a serious danger. See what else Mr. Byfield has to say about it here. From the first article above you might also be interested to note that Alters, the McGill Read More ›

“Anoxia related diseases are the major causes of death in the industrialized world,” said Goran Nilsson, a professor at University of Oslo. “Evolution has solved the problem of anoxic survival millions of years ago, something that medical science has struggled with for decades with limited success.” http://www.livescience.com/animalworld/060407_anoxic_fish.html –You poor stupid humans. When will you realize that natural selection is smarter than you?

. . . The old guard got rid of Mr. Dembski and then Mr. Sloan, who moved into the largely ceremonial position of chancellor. Still, Mr. Sloan’s Vision 2012 plan for Baylor is still on the books. The new president, John M. Lilley, former president of the University of Nevada, Reno, was a compromise candidate, so Baylor’s future was unclear. Based on information from Baylor faculty members and graduate students to whom WORLD granted confidentiality because their careers would be in jeopardy, here is what happened: Mr. Beckwith came to Baylor in 2003, as associate director of the J.M. Dawson Institute of Church-State Studies, over the objection of the institute’s funder, the Dawson family. Mr. Beckwith had argued for the Read More ›

In the following article, ask yourself if “the protein tape of life may be largely reproducible and even predictable,” what this means for the testability of evolutionary theory and ID should nature be constituted so that no Darwinian pathways exist for certain proteins. Darwinian Evolution Can Follow Only Very Few Mutational Paths to Fitter Proteins Daniel M. Weinreich, Nigel F. Delaney, Mark A. DePristo, Daniel L. Hartl Five point mutations in a particular ß-lactamase allele jointly increase bacterial resistance to a clinically important antibiotic by a factor of 100,000. In principle, evolution to this high-resistance ß-lactamase might follow any of the 120 mutational trajectories linking these alleles. However, we demonstrate that 102 trajectories are inaccessible to Darwinian selection and that Read More ›

A warped plan to save Earth By Dimitri Vassilaros TRIBUNE-REVIEW Friday, April 7, 2006 Eric R. Pianka is Moses, lizard man, self-loathing human debasement, a tenured embarrassment for the University of Texas — and to the Texas Academy of Science, recipient of its 2006 Distinguished Texas Scientist award even though the biology professor wants 90 percent of the human race exterminated. Quickly. Mr. Pianka is the antithesis of anthropocentric. That probably explains why the scientist that Texans consider distinguished says “we are no better than bacteria.” And why he believes Earth can be saved if all but 10 percent of the human race could be killed off without lingering — ideally by the highly lethal airborne Ebola virus because he Read More ›