See here. No commentary should be required.

On a list I moderate, there’s been some discussion about whether ID should stay with the bacterial flagellum as its mascot or switch over to the ribosome. Staying and switching both have merit (though note that a switch would not signal that Darwinists have explained how the flagellum originated — they are as clueless as ever). In the meantime, take your pick: For ribosome mascot paraphernalia, go here. For bacterial flagellum mascot paraphernalia, go here.

Satellites have been accurately measuring the temperature of the troposphere all over the face of the earth since 1979. You can view a map of the globe with all temperatures above and below average mapped out in red (above) and blue (below) month by month for over 25 years. Anyone can plainly see that global warming is regional. Near the equator, both above and below it, is almost always uncolored or blue. South America, Central America, and the lower U.S. are experiencing cooling. Most of Africa is cooling. Austrailia is cooling. Southern Europe and Southern Asia are cooling. The air over almost all the Pacific and Mid, and South Atlantic is cooling. Greenland is heating up. Northern Asia and Northern Read More ›

In a piece at Time Online, More Spin from the Anti-Evolutionists, senior writer Michael Lemonick attacks ID, the Discovery Institute, the signatories of the Dissent From Darwin list, and Michael Egnor in particular.

Dr. Michael Egnor (a professor of neurosurgery and pediatrics at State University of New York, Stony Brook, and an award-winning brain surgeon named one of New York’s best doctors by New York Magazine) is quoted: “Darwinism is a trivial idea that has been elevated to the status of the scientific theory that governs modern biology.” You can imagine the ire this comment would provoke from a Time science journalist.

The comments section is very illuminating as Dr. Egnor replies to and challenges Lemonick.

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Global warming alarmists today remind me of the scientific consensus on controlling forest fires 40 years ago. How many of you recall seeing Yogi Smokey the Bear adverts saying “Only YOU can prevent forest fires”? In fact, as we learned the hard way, fire suppression turned out to be a bad thing. Nature had adapted herself to periodic forest fires. Certain trees had become resistant to harm from low intensity fires but would be destroyed in fires where 50 years worth of fuel had accumulated. Periodic fires cleared the landscape and species that had adapted to freshly cleared ground cover got their turn at bat. Decades of fire suppression set up our forests for disaster. Similarly, the earth has undergone Read More ›

I was at the Dembski-Shermer Debate at Bridgewater College in Bridgewater Virginia last night. I had the privilege of finally meeting both William Dembski and Michael Shermer for the first time in person. They spoke to a crowd of about 350 people from Bridgewater College, James Madison University, and the surrounding community. The crowd was diverse from high-school educated carpenters to PhD trained scientists and philosophers. Symbolic of the diverse mix of people was an American pastor of a rural church and his wife, a Russian laser physicist!

Dembski won the debate, but I must salute Shermer’s honorable and courageous performance in the face of overwhelming odds. Read More ›

Here’s a show that was a lot of fun! Australian science journalist Robyn Williams, author of Unintelligent Design: God Isn’t as Smart as She Thinks She Is and I go at it, with Sheridan Voysey of Open House Australia trying to moderate. I must at some point say more about Williams’ interesting book, summarized at Amazon,

Why make the earth, the solar system, our galaxy and all the rest when the Garden of Eden was all that was wanted? And then there’s lifespan. During long periods of human history, the life expectancy of men was a mere 22 years and children were lucky to toddle, let alone grow up. Why the waste? And shouldn’t we sue God for sinus blockages, hernias, appendix flare-ups and piles, not to mention bad backs? Using all sorts of examples from the natural and scientific world Robyn Williams takes on the stalking monster of fundamentalist religion and creationism in a short, wicked and witty debunk of intelligent design. This is a book to infuriate the Christian fundamentalists and amuse the rest of us.

Williams is fundamentally – so to speak – confused about the difference between intelligent design, optimal design, and perfection, as I pointed out at the time. Read More ›

I just love being eventually proven right but vindication usually doesn’t come to me this quickly. As I was trying to tell Mike Dunford, including my now prophetic-appearing conjecture that manmade CFC-caused ozone depletion is a real global warming culprit, unlike the mythical C02 effect…

Last year, Bromwich’s research group reported in the journal Science that Antarctic snowfall hadn’t increased in the last 50 years. “What we see now is that the temperature regime is broadly similar to what we saw before with snowfall. In the last decade or so, both have gone down.”

–David Bromwich, Professor of Atmospheric Sciences, Department of Geography, Byrd Polar Research Center, Ohio State University

Thanks for playing, Mike. Better luck next time.

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A Simpler Origin for Life

“My own PhD thesis advisor, Robert B. Woodward, was awarded the Nobel Prize for his brilliant syntheses of quinine, cholesterol, chlorophyll and many other substances. It mattered little if kilograms of starting material were required to produce milligrams of product. The point was the demonstration that humans could produce, however inefficiently, substances found in nature. Unfortunately, neither chemists nor laboratories were present on the early Earth to produce RNA.”

–From Scientific American, by Robert Shapiro, professor emeritus of chemistry and senior research scientist at New York University, author or co-author of over 125 publications, primarily in the area of DNA chemistry.

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On another forum, ID colleague John Calvert of the Intelligent Design Network posted the following letter concerning the recent actions of the Kansas State Board of Education. With his kind permission I reproduce it here for the edification of UD readers. The behind-the-scenes details are rather disturbing. It is clear to me that the anti-ID crowd is in defensive meltdown mode.

Before reading John’s letter check out Phillip Johnson’s rather prophetic words from Darwin On Trial, first published in 1991:

Darwinian evolution with its blind watchmaker thesis makes me think of a great battleship on the ocean of reality. Its sides are heavily armored with philosophical barriers to criticism, and its decks are stacked with big rhetorical guns ready to intimidate any would-be attackers. In appearance, it is as impregnable as the Soviet Union seemed to be only a few years ago. But the ship has sprung a metaphysical leak, and the more perceptive of the ship’s officers have begun to sense that all the ship’s firepower cannot save it if the leak is not plugged.

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A new journal is coming out that wouldn’t be necessary if we weren’t so much trouble: Outreach and Education in Evolution, published by Springer Verlag. As a seminary professor (among other things), I usually associate the word “outreach” with proselytizing and missionary zeal. For people who aren’t religious, those Darwinists sure have learned a lot from religion. . . . A father-and-son team—a world-renowned evolutionary biologist and a highly skilled and sophisticated science high school teacher—have decided it’s time to help science educators fight back against the strong pressure creationists are exerting on public education. In the new journal Outreach and Education in Evolution, to be published by Springer starting in March 2008, editors-in-chief Niles and Greg Eldredge intend to Read More ›

Go here and you’ll be able to download a “Comparison Document” that shows how the new Kansas Science Standards deviate from the old. The change that particularly struck me was the following: Old characterization of science: “scientific knowledge describes and explains the natural world.” New characterization of science: “scientific knowledge describes and explains the physical world in terms of matter, energy, and forces.” Besides defining intelligent design out of existence, this new definition defines what have traditionally been regarded as distinctly human traits, such as free will and consciousness, which science studies, also out of existence. It’s all to the good that the scientific materialists have introduced this ideologically charged definition of science, perhaps not for the Kansas students who Read More ›

Here is a quote mine for the day which I found in an article Bill referenced earlier (see: Start the revolution without ID). The quote is by one of the world’s leading scientists, Carl Woese:

we regard as rather regrettable the conventional concatenation of Darwin’s name with evolution

I agree. Let me suggest that if the conventional concatenation is “Darwinian evolution” a better concatenation would be “designed evolution” or even (hehe) “created evolution”.
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In Flock of Dodos, or Pack of Lies?, Jonathan Wells describes how Darwinist Randy Olson filmed a scene to argue the point that Haeckel’s embryos are not in recent biology text books.

Olson concedes that the drawings are fraudulent, but he states on camera that “you don’t find them” in recent textbooks. In one scene, Olson hands Kansas attorney (and Darwin critic) John Calvert a recent biology textbook and challenges him to find Haeckel’s drawings in it. Taken by surprise, Calvert can’t do it. Afterwards, Olson displays a 1914 textbook containing the drawings but claims they haven’t been used since then. The film then compares Icons of Evolution to a supermarket tabloid.

Calvert later faxed Olson pages from a recent textbook containing Haeckel’s drawings, but Olson gives no hint of that in his film. Read More ›

A recent essay in PLoS biology bemoans that researchers are not using the term “evolution” nearly often enough in research papers. The essay lays out the horrendous possibilities that this could mean: A critical question is whether avoidance of the word “evolution” has had an impact on the public perception of science. To investigate this, we examined whether the use of the term “evolution” in the scientific literature affects the use of this word in the popular press, i.e., whether there is evidence for “cultural inheritance” of word use. We searched articles on antimicrobial resistance in national media outlets, such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, Fox News, and the BBC (Text S1). Our results showed that the Read More ›