I sent the following [addresses munged to foil email address harvestors]: From : David Springer Sent : Saturday, December 23, 2006 12:41 AM To : bforrest CC : dembski, richard.dawkins, Kenneth_Miller, eugeniescott, ddennett, krauss, patricia.princehouse, pennock, welsberr, kpadian, rthompson Subject : Debate Challenge Dear Professor Forrest, I wanted to make sure that you were aware that Professor Dembski has challenged you to a debate. Topics “Perhaps we can settle the matter of cowardice directly: let Forrest and me debate the matter at a symposium spanning a day with each of us delivering two hour-long lectures and then going toe-to-toe in a final exchange.” Many of the commenters think you will decline but are eager to see it should you take Read More ›

See: Billions of Missing Links
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We used to keep this linked on the sidebar. I added it back.

Comments about Comments
by William Dembski on April 16th, 2005

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Here’s an indicator how the ID debate is shaping up in the UK. Please note the extensive comments at the end of this article at the Guardian website (go here). Intelligent design is a science, not a faith By Richard Buggs Tuesday January 9, 2007 The Guardian . . . If Darwin had known what we now know about molecular biology – gigabytes of coded information in DNA, cells rife with tiny machines, the highly specific structures of certain proteins – would he have found his own theory convincing? Randerson thinks that natural selection works fine to explain the origin of molecular machines. But the fact is that we are still unable even to guess Darwinian pathways for the origin Read More ›

Over on Panda’s Thumb they’re so desperate for something to talk about that when I ban someone it’s front page news over there. Don’t people like Richard Hoppe have more important things to do with their time like making sure the entries in the tree of life are in the proper order? I guess not. Who I ban and why is more important than evolutionary biology these days. Ouch. Read More ›

Over on Panda’s Thumb Steve Reuland uses Darwinian methodology to dispute the notion that medical doctors tend to accept ID in greater percentage than scientists in general. So what’s the first thing ole Steverino does to make his case? Why, he trots out a strawman – ID and “evolution” are mutually exclusive. Here’s a clue for Stevie. You can accept ID, descent with modification from a common ancestor, and a 4 billion year-old earth all at the same time. Not all IDists do but many of us do including me. What you can’t accept if you accept ID is that random mutation filtered by natural selection turned mud into man or bacteria into baboons. Got that? Write that down. I Read More ›

Here is one of Discover’s top 6 genetics stories of 2006. Not only are these people doing intelligent design research — they are engineers! 6 Biologists Crack Open Life’s Tool Kit Intelligent design became a scientific reality this year with the report that researchers had custom-made a lifesaving microbe—one that helps make a much-needed drug against malaria. The feat is one of the first concrete applications of synthetic biology, an emerging field in which scientists reshuffle the components of cellular life in order to produce precisely tailored results. Cobbling together the genes of three different species, chemical engineer Jay Keasling of the University of California at Berkeley transformed a metabolic pathway in yeast that allows the engineered microbe to produce Read More ›

Recently and many times in the past I’ve remarked that life doesn’t have the illusion of design. Design is real. It has the illusion of chance and neccessity. Over at ATBC I noticed a couple members of the anti-ID peanut gallery clucking to themselves that mutations plotted on a fitness curve have a random distribution. IOW there is no predictability in where any one mutation will fall on a fitness curve (harmful/neutral/beneficial). It will be a scattershot plot without any pattern. Thus even if the universe is deterministic and no mutation is truly random they appear random when plotted on a fitness curve. This is just utter dreck. You can predict with almost 100% confidence that any given mutation will Read More ›

Fun facts you should know. For every 1000 species that has ever lived during the history of our planet, 999 of them became extinct in an evolutionary dead end street (no species descended from them). Estimates range up to 5 billion species that have walked, crawled, swam, flew, rooted, or slimed our planet in the past. About 10 million are alive today and we have names for about 1 million of those. The average lifespan of a species is about 10 million years. Most species enter the fossil record abruptly and disappear abruptly looking mostly the same at both entrance and exit. The next time you’re thinking of how random mutation and natural selection works keep in mind that in Read More ›

Here are still two more anti-ID books, recently off the press: Philip Kitcher’s LIVING WITH DARWIN: EVOLUTION, DESIGN, AND THE FUTURE OF FAITH http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0195314441/ref=pe_pe_5050_3468500_pe_snp_441 =-=-=-=-=-=- Francisco Ayala’s DARWIN AND INTELLIGENT DESIGN: http://www.amazon.com/Darwin-Intelligent-Design-Facets-Francisco/dp/0800638026/ref=pd_sim_b_1/105-1985473-5492415

There’s an interesting interview with Ron Numbers in Salon: http://www.salon.com/books/int/2007/01/02/numbers. Here’s an excerpt. . . . More recently, we’ve had the intelligent design movement. I know some people just see this as a new version of creationism, stripping away all the talk about God and religion so you can teach it in the schools. Is that true? RN: There’s a little bit of evidence to support that. But I think that both demographically and intellectually, it doesn’t hold a lot of water. The intelligent design leaders are people, by and large, who do not believe in young earth creationism. So they would accept the Earth’s being four-and-a-half billion years old. RN: That’s not an issue with most of them. They Read More ›

In the comments of Gil’s article about why a greater percentage of engineers vs. scientists are open to the idea of life being a result of intelligent design I remarked that medical doctors are another occupational outlier in there being a larger than expected percentage open to ID. I asked the MDs here if they could comment on that because while I can understand the POV of engineers and mathematicians I couldn’t figure out why MDs would also be an exception. After thinking about it a while it occurred to me that medical doctors, like engineers, understand the cost of mistakes in complex systems better than academic scientists. Orthodox evolution theory is based on the notion that sometimes a mistake Read More ›

In this, Part 2 in a series of posts based on the Q&A section in the recently released DVD, Case for a Creator, I offer the text of Meyer’s response to the question, Why are many engineers intrigued by intelligent design theory? As a software engineer — in both the artificial-intelligence and aerospace research and development fields — I recognized that there were huge problems with the thesis that natural selection and random variation could produce complex information-processing systems, because designing such systems is what I do. Here are Meyer’s comments in answer to the question posed to him above: The origin of a new structure, of a miniature machine, or an information-processing system, or a circuit, is an engineering Read More ›

“I thought creationists were monsters, until I married one.” -Tatiana Hamboyan Harrison

Loving the Enemy -Special to Newsweek

Hat tip to the shimmying atheist Kristine for pointing to this article. Read More ›

The Emerald Cockroach Wasp The emerald cockroach wasp (Ampulex compressa, also known as the jewel wasp) is a parasitoid wasp of the family Ampulicidae. It is known for its reproductive behavior, which involves using a live cockroach (specificially a Periplaneta americana) as a host for its larva. A number of other venomous animals which use live food for their larvae paralyze their prey. Unlike them, Ampulex compressa initially leaves the cockroach mobile, but modifies its behaviour in a unique way. As early as the 1940s it was published that wasps of this species sting a roach twice, which modifies the behavior of the prey. A recent study using radioactive labeling proved that the wasp stings precisely into specific ganglia. Ampulex Read More ›