From Panspermia 10 January 2007 …It is not enough that companies make disclosures of financial information…. In addition it is vital that there be a set of financial intermediaries, who are at least as competent at receiving, processing and interpreting financial information … as the companies are at delivering it — Yale Law professor Jonothan Macey, writing about the financial collapse of Enron. Macey was cited in a New Yorker article suggesting that, prior to its collapse in 2001, Enron’s extreme financial fragility was not concealed from the public — it was disclosed in the company’s own financial statements. The condition went unnoticed because the disclosure information was convoluted and took great effort to understand. Almost everyone relied on Enron Read More ›

Here is a great collection of internet radio interviews by Jason Rennie of the SciPhi Show: The ID Files The ID Files is a compilation of interviews about the recent Intelligent Design Controversy taken from The Sci Phi Show (http://thesciphishow.com). These interviews are with Dr Michael Shermer of the Skeptic Society, Salvador Cordova of the IDEA Centre, Dr Mike Behe of Lehigh University and Nick Matzke from the NCSE. The individuals represent a spectrum of positions on the question of Intelligent Design and these interviews serve as a useful introduction to the issues at stake and the ideas involved.

I’m honored to have the chance to present a post-Darwinist conversion account by one of our Uncommon Descent readers, Dr. David Cook, MD. Physicians like him serve as role models to the young and are a symbol to the scientific community that highly intelligent and scientifically literate people can be skeptical of Darwinian evolution.
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Apparently the design was not so incompetent as to render these Darwinists incapable of composing (dare I say “designing”) this song and then performing it (yes, the performance is poor, but poor design is not the absence of design):

In light of the challenge proposed to ID in the previous post (i.e., “The Intelligent Design Zoo”), here is a parallel challenge directed at materialistic evolutionists: Take the goo depicted in the photo below, autoclave it until none of the organic material here belongs to living cells (i.e., till all the cells are dead), and then try to reconstitute life without teleological guidance. Origin-of-life researchers typically focus on trying to obtain more complicated biomolecules from simpler ones. Here you’ve got all the complicated biomolecules you could ever want. Go to it — show us how, out of the material here once autoclaved, to get a living being that has all the characteristics we ordinarily attribute to life (i.e., reproduction, growth, Read More ›

If the challenge below were met, would it be evidence for ID or for teleportation?

In this, Part 3 in a series of posts based on the Q&A section of the recently released DVD, The Case for a Creator, I offer Jonathan Wells’ comments in response to the question, How do you explain the Cambrian explosion of life? How did it happen? We don’t have the foggiest idea how it happened. Assuming a jellyfish was the common ancestor — I don’t believe that — but how do you turn a jellyfish into a trilobite? How do you turn a jellyfish into a fish with a backbone? How do you do it? I don’t just mean taking a scalpel and rearranging the parts like you’re doing a collage in third-grade art class. We’re talking about a Read More ›

We are often told that “there is no ID research published in peer reviewed journals“. I receive Nature E-Alerts in a number of biological research fields. Almost every time I read the abstracts and even the titles, or spend more time delving into the detail, I hear “Intelligent Design” silently screamed from the pages. Am I deluded, or do others hear it too? Here is a recent example. Sharp boundaries of Dpp signalling trigger local cell death required for Drosophila leg morphogenesis Nature Cell Biology – 9, 57 – 63 (2006) http://www.nature.com/ncb/journal/v9/n1/abs/ncb1518.html Morphogens are secreted signalling molecules that govern many developmental processes. In the Drosophila (fruit fly) wing disc, a specific transforming growth factor (Dpp) forms a smooth gradient and Read More ›

Kevin Wang and Peter Wagenet at ZeitStudios devoted their time and talents to revamping the Uncommon Descent blogsite. What an improvement it is! All of us who are part of UD are in their debt. As with all such upgrades, there are bound to be kinks that need to be ironed out. Please use this thread (or the previous one by DaveScot) to note any issues in the design of the site that need to be worked out. Thanks.

If something isn’t working right in the new layout with your browser, tell us here. Please include some information about your computer (Windows/Mac/Linux) and broswer (Internet Explorer, FireFox, Netscape) and anything else you think might be relevant in duplicating the problem. Thanks.

Over at Telic Thoughts there is a quote from Ian Lowe of the British Centre For Science Education. The quote originated at David Anderson’s BCSE Revealed blog.

At the BCSE website, under the subheading “What BCSE is not” we read:

We do not object to or support religion or atheism.

But David Anderson provides some interesting insights into two of BCSE’s major players.

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Paul Myers has a post at the Panda’s Thumb that points up a fundamental misconception of some evolutionists (go here for his post). The post is titled “American political conservatism impedes the understanding of science.” The point of the post is to chart the acceptance of evolution** among conservatives, moderates, and liberals against education, and the consistent finding is that conservatives, regardless of education, tend to “believe” evolution less than liberals and moderates (though believing evolution goes up across the board with education). But why should disbelieving evolution reflect a lack of understanding of it? Alternatively, does understanding evolution automatically force one to believe it? I remember speaking at the University of Toronto in 2002 when a biologist challenged me Read More ›

DNA researcher Andras Pellionisz has found unwitting friends in the ID community. He observed that while Darwinists like Richard Dawkins are dismissive of his field of scientific research, ID proponents are surprisingly enthusiastic about his work and that of his colleagues. We have thus found here at Uncommon Descent a friend from quarters I would have never guessed in Dr. Pellionisz and his colleagues.

Pellionisz lamented here that it is the ID proponents who show more interest than people like Dawkins in the highly important areas of research within biology [and imho, evolutionary biology is not a highly important field of research, SYSTEMS Biology is]. Pellionisz then added:
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It seems that every day there some new news item from science detailing how scientists in search of an optimal solution to their problem at hand, end up finding their solution in biological nature. This latest from PhysOrg.com shows how, in the nano-world, engineering solutions abound. Is it a marvel of natural selection?

Here you’ll find one instance of what I think, taken together, poses a challenge to Darwinian orthodoxy that it can’t meet.

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There’s an interesting book review in the Guardian (go here). Below is a brief excerpt. The book is about biocomputing. Increasingly it’s looking as though all the interesting biology is really a form of engineering. If I ever became the president of a university (per impossibile), I would dissolve the biology department and divide the faculty with tenure that I couldn’t get rid of into two new departments: those who know engineering and how it applies to biological systems would be assigned to the new “Department of Biological Engineering”; the rest, and that includes the evolutionists, would be consigned to the new “Department of Nature Appreciation” (didn’t Darwin think of himself as a naturalist?). . . . Amos’s fascinating book Read More ›