Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Programming and the development of life

When you really analyze them, most of the strongest arguments against ID as an explanation for the development of life are of the form: “this just doesn’t look like the way God would have created things.” Perhaps not, but we are finding more and more that it does look very much like the way “we” design things. As far back as 1985, in my first book about PDE2D here and more recently in a Mathematical Intelligencer article here , I pointed out that life developed much the way software “develops”: minor improvements are made in small increments, but major improvements always involve one or more large irreducibly complex steps, and appear suddenly (in the fossil record, or in software releases). Read More ›

Barbara Forrest up to her old tricks

As you link to read the following by Barbara Forrest, ask yourself if ID proponents are really that big a threat to the body politic and if in fact it isn’t the dogmatic materialists, such as Barbara, who pose the bigger threat to our democratic institutions. Also ask yourself who is drawing on public funds to promote his/her point of view (hint: the notorious “Wedge Strategy” is not tax-supported). www.centerforinquiry.net…Forrest_Paper.pdf

ID friendly popular culture and science mag

Check out Salvo, a lively Christian popular science and culture magazine that deserves a zillion more subscribers and will reward you handsomely for your support.

Go here for a free excerpt from my book By Design or by Chance?, for example.

Hard pill as it is for me to swallow, the other columnists are all probably better than me, so be sure to just get lost in the site.  Sassy, yes. Crude, no.

And remember to feed the kitty.

You can read
The Privileged Planet
An excerpt from Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay W. Richards’ groundbreaking book on the ways in which our place in the cosmos is designed for discovery
by Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay W. Richards
Science and the Church
What it means to question Darwinism
by Herbert London

Read More ›

Jerry Coyne responds to Behe

Coyne contra Behe in The New Republic; Behe contra Coyne at Amazon; and now Coyne contra Behe at TalkReason. The following comment by Coyne caught my eye: Both Richard Dawkins (in his review of The Edge of Evolution in The New York Times) and myself have noted Behe’s remarkable reluctance to submit his claims to peer-reviewed scientific journals. If Behe’s theory is so world-shaking, and so indubitably correct, why doesn’t he submit it to some scientific journals? (The reason is obvious, of course: his theory is flat wrong.) Let me suggest another reason: Coyne is wrong and doesn’t want Behe upsetting his applecart.

MIT’s Department of Biological Engineering

Here’s how MIT describes its department of biological engineering. Does the research here fall more readily under ID or Darwinism? Biological Engineering [BE] was founded in 1998 as a new MIT departmental academic unit, with the mission of defining and establishing a new discipline fusing molecular life sciences with engineering. The goal of our biological engineering discipline, Course 20, is to advance fundamental understanding of how biological systems operate and to develop effective biology-based technologies for applications across a wide spectrum of societal needs including breakthroughs in diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of disease, in design of novel materials, devices, and processes, and in enhancing environmental health. The innovative educational programs created by BE reflect this emphasis on integrating molecular and Read More ›

Michael Behe’s Amazon Blog

Behe’s Amazon blog was noted in comments at UD, but it deserves top billing: go here. Refer to it as the negative reviews of The Edge of Evolution keep coming out from the Darwinian materialists.

An eloquent but bogus non-review by Dawkins

Dawkins displays his formidable command of the English language in Inferior Design, a review of Michael Behe’s book, The Edge of Evolution. Of all the anti-Behe reviews I’ve read, this was the most convincing, at least on rhetorical grounds, but certainly not on evidential nor scientific grounds.

Dawkins is a master of rhetoric. Only he could take a clear example of intelligently designed evolution (dog breeding) and offer it as a convincing “proof” of Darwinian evolution. He writes:

Read More ›

IDURC Announces 2007 Casey Luskin Graduate Award

The Intelligent Design Undergraduate Research Center (IDURC) is proud to present the 2007 Casey Luskin Graduate Award, presented annually to a deserving college graduate for excellence in student advocacy of intelligent design. The recipient of the 2007 Casey Luskin Graduate Award will remain anonymous for the protection of the recipient. The many students, professors, and scientists who have been denied degrees or tenure, and removed from positions and jobs for no other reason than acceptance of—or even sympathy to—intelligent design theory is very telling of the importance of keeping these bright young minds out of the crosshairs of those opposed to open-minded investigation and critical thought. The recipient of this year’s award is a graduate earning degrees in chemistry and Read More ›

The One Percent Myth, and the Open Puzzle of Macroevolution

Gather ’round the fire, children, and I’ll tell you the whole sad story. Once upon a time, Mary-Claire King and the late Allan Wilson published a paper — that became a widely-cited classic — about the genetic similarity of chimps and humans. “Evolution at Two Levels in Humans and Chimpanzees,” Science 188 (1975):107-116 was, alas, cited far more for proving the genetic near-identity of chimps and humans than for its much more interesting, deeper and more disturbing message: no one really understands how macroevolution occurs. In brief: King and Wilson compared the chimp vs. human amino acid sequences of several proteins (such as cytochrome c, hemoglobin, and myoglobin), and found the sequences either identical, or very nearly so. Their conclusion? Read More ›

Dawkins vs. Lennox at the University of Alabama: Get Your Tickets Now

Richard Dawkins you know, but John Lennox, his Oxford colleague in mathematics and the philosophy of science, may require a brief introduction. Professor Lennox is the author of the forthcoming book God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? and has lectured around the world on mathematics, science, and theology. I first met John in Southern California 11 years ago, have spent time with him in Istanbul and Hungary, and regard him as one of the wisest scholars I know. The Alys Stephens Center at the University of Alabama (Birmingham) will be the site of the October 3, 2007, debate between Dawkins and Lennox. This promises to be a newsworthy, well-attended event.