2006

http://www.umc.pitt.edu:591/m/FMPro?-db=ma&-lay=a&-format=d.html&id=2297&-Find

Schwartz hearkens back to earlier theories that suggest that the Darwinian model of evolution as continual and gradual adaptation to the environment glosses over gaps in the fossil record by assuming the intervening fossils simply have not been found yet. Rather, Schwartz argues, they have not been found because they don’t exist, since evolution is not necessarily gradual but often sudden, dramatic expressions of change that began on the cellular level because of radical environmental stressors-like extreme heat, cold, or crowding-years earlier. Read More ›

Michael Ruse: Darwinist talks with Points about ID and evolution in the classroom

03:36 PM CST on Sunday, January 29, 2006

Do you think there is anything at all to the intelligent design argument from irreducible complexity?

No. I think it’s “creationism lite” tarted up to look like science to get around the constitutional separation of church and state.

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Jonathan Sarfati has a piece at Answers in Genesis titled “ID theorist blunders on Bible: Reply to Dr William Dembski.” In it he remarks (quoting me):

Misrepresenting the Church Fathers
Dr William Dembski [WD]: “Let me concede that young earth creationism was largely the position of the church from the Church Fathers through the Reformers.”

This makes a pleasant change from progressive creationist Hugh Ross, who has long claimed that most of the church believed in long creation days. See the articles under Church Fathers and Reformers for documentation.

WD: “(though there were exceptions, such as Origen and Augustine).”

This is simply not true. Read More ›

“This high degree of organization of prokaryotic [organisms that lack nuclei] genomes is a complete surprise, and this finding carried many implications that biologists might not have considered before,” said Bernhard Palsson, a professor of bioengineering at UCSD’s Jacobs School of Engineering and adjunct professor of medicine and co-author of the analysis. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/01/060130154134.htm Ask yourself why, if evolution is all it’s cracked up to be, biology keeps encountering “complete surprises” like this. Ask yourself, as well, why a professor of bioengineering rather than a straight biologist is finding these complete surprises. Could it be that engineering (the field that studies design) offers better insights than a materialist, reductionist biology that attributes the emergence of biological complexity to blind material forces?

The dodos have come to Kansas
Filmmaker’s documentary a sold-out premiere in his hometown
By ROBERT W. BUTLER

The Kansas City Star
Posted on Tue, Jan. 31, 2006
http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/13751749.htm

Randy Olson is no dodo. But he knows one when he films one.

And he also knows that using a stupid bird to tout his movie about the combatants in the evolution-intelligent design shout-fest would raise a ruckus.

“It’s working perfectly,” Olson, the self-described “polite Michael Moore,” said of his dodo-driven publicity campaign. “Really driving people crazy.”

Olson’s feature-length documentary “Flock of Dodos: The Evolution-Intelligent Design Circus,” will have its world premiere Thursday at the Glenwood Arts Theatre in Overland Park. It’s already sold out. He expects a lively reception. Read More ›

Viewpoint: Two Notions of Intelligence in Design
By Lloyd Eby

World Peace Herald Contributor
Published: January 30, 2006
Source: http://www.wpherald.com/storyview.php?StoryID=20060130-090253-1504r

WASHINGTON — Some critics of intelligent design (ID) ask, “How can the designer of biological species be intelligent, given that so many species have come into existence and then disappeared. How can an intelligent designer design some of the mistakes and monstrosities found in nature, such as disease causing bacteria or malaria-carrying mosquitoes?” As one such critic put it, “Really, where is the intelligence there? Even if you can make the case that God ‘predesigned’ everything, I doubt you can make the case for intelligence in the design.” Read More ›

Steve Fuller: Designer Trouble
Darwinism has had it all its own way for too long, Warwick’s controversial sociologist tells Zoe Corbyn
The Guardian, Tuesday January 31, 2006
http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/profile/story/0,,1698284,00.html

In 1981, in a courtroom in Little Rock, Arkansas, Michael Ruse testified that “creation
science”, the faith-based explanation of life’s beginnings, was not science at all. “In my
opinion,” Ruse told the court, “creation science is religion.” It was the first time in
America’s fraught struggle over evolution that a philosopher of science had taken the
stand and his words made a big impression on Steve Fuller, then a 22-year-old PhD student.

“It set a precedent because, up to that point, the only people allowed to testify on the
nature of science were professional scientists,” Fuller recalls.

These days, Fuller is a professor of sociology at Warwick University. Last October, in
Dover, Pennsylvania, he too found himself giving evidence in court. But unlike Ruse, a
champion of Darwinian evolution, Fuller took the stand as an expert witness in support of
intelligent design. Fuller argued that ID – the idea that some systems are so complex they
must have been designed by an intelligent agent – should be added to the science
curriculum. He lost. The Dover judgment concluded ID was the progeny of creationism and
couldn’t be taught as science. “The judge in the Dover case went back to the old standard
of what the experts say,” says Fuller. Read More ›

http://internationalreporter.com/news/read.php?id=845

I have been invited to be a contributing author at Uncommon Descent, so I thought I would take this opportunity to introduce myself, and to explain the reasons for my interest in, and passion for, intelligent design, both as an intellectual endeavor and what I view as potentially the most profound revolution in the history of science.

Why does ID represent such a revolution? It is becoming increasingly clear that efforts to cram the evidence into purely materialistic causational categories are failing catastrophically on many fronts.
Read More ›

I have consistently argued that intelligent design neither rules out the common descent of life on Earth (Darwin’s single Tree of Life) nor restricts the implementation of design to common descent, as if that were the only possible geometry for the large-scale relationships of organisms. Thus, with regard to this forum, the truth or falsity of common descent is an open question worthy of informed discussion. To open up Uncommon Descent in this way reflects not just the ID community’s diversity of views on this topic but also the growing doubts about common descent outside that community. For instance, W. Ford Doolittle rejects a single “Tree of” and argues instead for an intricate network of gene sharing events. Likewise, Carl Read More ›

Here are some excerpts from The Plausibility of Life, by Marc W. Kirschner and John C. Gerhart. While reading the book, I find that along the way the types of statements which follow are to be found almost everywhere .

One of the objections (disingenuous, in my opinion) that the Darwinists have to ID is that “we don’t know who the designer is; therefore, how can we possibly identify his designs?” Well the following quotes make it quite clear that the designer’s designs are easily identified. All’s you have to be to detect the design is be a graduate of an engineering school. No wonder lots of ID proponents have engineering backgrounds (including myself.).

Here are just some quotes:

“In this turtle, males are produced at lower temperatures 78° F (26° C) and females at higher, 88° F (31° C), the opposite of the alligator. In a flip-flop circuit, not unlike a thermostat that would gratify any engineer, a small difference in the level of a regulator of estrogen synthesis can be amplified into one of two states, a high-estrogen state (female development) or a low-estrogen state (male development). . . .The result is a bistable switch driven one way or the other by the temperature dependence of the production of SF-1 protein.” (p. 94) . . . .

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In browsing the New Mexicans for Science and Reason site and the Oynate Man prank (which I’d seen before but since it’s so hilarious enjoyed reading again) I came across this statement in the April Fool article explaining what would constitute real evidence against evolution: Read More ›

Often when we ask the evolutionist what might falsifiy the notion that humans evolved sometime in recent epochs from previous non-human animal species they tell us that discovery of human and dinosaur fossils in the same strata would falsify it. Read More ›