Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Why Darwinism is losing – the big picture

Just this morning I was reflecting on the curious case of Misshelver, whose response to Mike Behe’s Edge of Evolution was to misshelve it in the bookstore. She is, of course, the popular culture version of the academics who need to get rid of gifted astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez – not because he is incompetent, but quite the opposite. He makes a good case for the unusually favourable position of Earth. Now apparently, a number of angry people have also written to the Philadephia Inquirer, rattled that the paper published a positive review of Edge that actually describes its argument, unlike some prominent reviews. If I had no other reason for thinking that Darwinism is losing the intellectual battle, the sheer Read More ›

Fewer than half of climate scientists endorse anthropogenic global warming

A recent survey of climate change articles in science journals finds fewer than half of the authors endorse anthropogenic global warming theories. The so-called consensus has now collapsed to a minority position. I love being right. Linked by The Drudge Report:

Breaking: Less Than Half of all Published Scientists Endorse Global Warming Theory

DAILYTECH

SURVEY: LESS THAN HALF OF ALL PUBLISHED SCIENTISTS ENDORSE GLOBAL WARMING THEORY; COMPREHENSIVE SURVEY OF PUBLISHED CLIMATE RESEARCH REVEALS CHANGING VIEWPOINTS

Michael Asher
August 29, 2007 11:07 AM

In 2004, history professor Naomi Oreskes performed a survey of research papers on climate change. Examining peer-reviewed papers published on the ISI Web of Science database from 1993 to 2003, she found a majority supported the “consensus view,” defined as humans were having at least some effect on global climate change. Oreskes’ work has been repeatedly cited, but as some of its data is now nearly 15 years old, its conclusions are becoming somewhat dated.

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What if we DID find irreducibly complex biological features?

In any debate on Intelligent Design, there is a question I have long wished to see posed to ID opponents: “If we DID discover some biological feature that was irreducibly complex, to your satisfication and to the satisfaction of all reasonable observers, would that justify the design inference?” (Of course, I believe we have found thousands of such features, but never mind that.) If the answer is yes, we just haven’t found any such thing yet, then all the constantly-repeated philosophical arguments that “ID is not science” immediately fall. If the answer is no, then at least the lay observer will be able to understand what is going on here, that Darwinism is not grounded on empirical evidence but a Read More ›

Exhuming the Peppered Mummy

Paul Nelson highlighted new developments in the Peppered Myth story here. Now Jonathan Wells, a scientist at the Discovery Institute, offers a more detailed analysis in Exhuming the Peppered Mummy. Enjoy!!! A friend of mine tells me that the only things he remembers about evolution from his high school biology course are photos of black and white peppered moths resting on light and dark tree trunks. They were presented as THE classic case of Darwinian evolution in action, explaining how a trait that enhances survival could be acquired through an unguided material process. Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, most biology textbooks featured photos of peppered moths (scientific name: Biston betularia) on tree trunks.1 Canadian textbook-writer Bob Ritter Read More ›

“Rationalist” encyclopedia stumbles onto non-materialist neuroscience

Rationalwiki is an online encyclopedia struggling to be born. Judging from the copy I saw August 29, 2007 (which will probably change), it appears to be written by a group of people who see themselves as the guardians of reason, progress, and enlightenment, against “the anti-science movement” and “crank ideas”. Nowadays, theirs is a pretty crowded field, in which hordes of half-educated and indifferently talented placeholders aim their resentment at anyone capable of questioning materialist dogmas. Read more here (but NOT if you are drinking milk, okay?)

Alister McGrath Swept off the Cutting Room Floor

Early this year I described how Richard Dawkins interviewed Alister McGrath for the BBC production THE ROOT OF ALL EVIL and then decided to leave him on the cutting room floor (go here). That interview is available at Google Video here. In watching it, ask yourself if it would have made for a less biased program if Dawkins had dropped Ted Haggard and substituted Alister McGrath.

Flash! Stu Pivar is unsuing PZ Myers

I just heard from a source I think reliable that Stuart Pivar has dropped his lawsuit against PZ Myers. ‘Bout time, too. I stand by my comment of earlier today: Incidentally, I do not expect PZ to lose his pajamas to the Pivar writ. Defamation suits generally require a demonstration of harm. PZ verbally assaults people more or less on a daily basis, and who can really claim to have been harmed thereby other than himself? Had he thought of choosing his targets more carefully and aiming more accurately, he might run risks that are not foreseen in the present case. Let the Internet police itself.

Intelligent design east: What might it look like?

Tenzin Gyatso, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama , was chosen the spiritual and political leader of the Tibetan Buddhists as a small child in 1940. (He was believed to be the reincarnation of the Thirteenth Lama.) After a failed 1959 revolt against the 1949 Chinese takeover of Tibet, his government has been exiled at Dharamsala, India, along with tens of thousands of Tibetans. The Lama would be a theocrat if he were not in exile. However, he is not at all most people’s idea of a theocrat. He is an intensely curious man who has made friends with great philosophers of science and scientists, such as Karl Popper, Carl von Weizsäcker, and David Bohm. He also championed interreligious understanding, all the Read More ›

Renowned Technology Pioneer Trashes neo-Darwinism (part 1)

Rob Crowther interviews renowned pioneer of technology Walt Ruloff in Expelling Dogma: Executive Producer Walt Ruloff and Expelled(part 1). Ruloff relates how “disruptive technologies” advanced the high-tech industry and how neo-Darwinism is a science stopper because it prevents the evolution of “disruptive technologies”. He expresses the highly negative consequences of neo-Darwinism to the advancement of medical research, advancement of science, and the matriculation of large numbers of scientists through the educational system. Enjoy! I foresaw this. Recall, I was the one who described: How IDers can win the war. Ruloff said it better than I ever could.

ERV’s challenge to Michael Behe

[continued from Dr. D.A. Cook’s thread, Where Did Sea Anemones Get Human Genes?]

Michael Behe has certainly given his critics a thrashing at his Amazon weblog. When I saw Mike taking Ken Miller to task for Miller mischaracterizing Lipids as Proteins (a sophomoric mistake by Miller), I knew Mike was slamming the best the Darwinist could muster onto the floor. Behe single handedly defeated Ken Miller, Sean Carroll, Jerry Coyne, Michael Ruse, and Richard Dawkins, and thus earned the title “Darwin Slayer”.
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Michael Majerus: Peppered Moths DO Rest On Tree Trunks, And Incidentally, God Doesn’t Exist

Last week at the European Society for Evolutionary Biology (ESEB) meeting in Sweden, Michael Majerus of Cambridge University — one of world’s leading experts on the peppered moth, of textbook fame — gave a plenary lecture where he argued that his observations over the past 7 years, in his own garden in the UK, had corrected the shortcomings of Kettlewell’s classic experiments. Bottom line: peppered moths truly are “the proof of Darwinian evolution.” Really. You can read his talk for yourself, here (click on the first link, “Stop Press,” for the pdf). Majerus is unlikely to persuade skeptical evolutionary biologists that the peppered moth story, even when told with Kettlewell’s shortcomings corrected, is a good model for evolutionary theory generally. Read More ›

Where Did Sea Anemones Get Human Genes?

Another surprise for Darwinists has been found in the genome of the lowly, primitive sea anemone.

In an article published in Science and summarized here
we discover that:

The newly decoded DNA of a few-centimeter-tall sea anemone looks surprisingly similar to our own, a team led by Nicholas Putnam and Daniel Rokhsar from the U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute in Walnut Creek, California, reports on page 86. This implies that even very ancient genomes were quite complex and contained most of the genes necessary to build today’s most sophisticated multicellular creatures.

The work is truly stunning for its deep evolutionary implications,” says Billie Swalla, an evolutionary developmental biologist at the University of Washington, Seattle.

Ill say it is. Just how the heck is the Darwinian paradigm going to explain this? Advanced genetic programs installed before there was any chance of natural selection acting on them. Yikes! Another finding in the real world not predicted by, or even possible within, the Darwiniam paradigm. Another surprise for Darwinists.
Sooner or later they’ve GOT to start questioning underlying assumptions. (Naive, ain’t I?)

One of the big surprises of the anemone genome, says Swalla, is the discovery of blocks of DNA that have the same complement of genes as in the human genome. Individual genes may have swapped places, but often they have remained linked together despite hundreds of millions of years of evolution along separate paths, Putnam, Rokhsar, and their colleagues report.

To repeat the obvious question, where the heck did these codes come from?
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Improved symbol for the Clergy Letter Project

The NCSE is shamelessly pandering to religious interests to advance their cause, and because I really like the NCSE, I’d like to help them out in their recent campaign to support The Clergy Letter Project.

The Clergy Letter Project is an attempt to recruit religious groups to support Darwin. To that end, let me suggest a symbol which the Clergy Letter Project should adopt to set apart the churches which have formed an alliance with Charles Darwin.

It is the symbol which Darwin himself swore by, and what better way for churches who are part of the clergy project to honor Darwin than by adopting a symbol which Darwin himself was so fond of.

The symbol I suggest is Darwin’s walking stick. Here is what it looks like as reported by the BBC news:
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Darwinist threat to sue pro-ID filmmakers? Friend of the studio thinks they have no case

I just heard from a contact who knows his way around that studio who saw my recent post about the anonymous warning that Darwinists might sue the makers of the Ben Stein Expelled film. The film does not flatter them, and perhaps they’d want to at least stop it from opening on Darwin’s birthday next February. Said studio rat writes, Read More ›

Calculating God author Rob Sawyer wins top China sci-fi prize

Canadian science fiction writer Rob Sawyer, author of The Calculating God, which explores the idea of intelligent design, has won China’s top science fiction prize. CHENGDU, CHINA, 26 AUGUST 2007: Robert J. Sawyer of Mississauga, Ontario, Canada, today won China’s top science-fiction award, the Galaxy Award, in the category “Most Popular Foreign Author of the Year.” The award, voted on by Chinese readers, was presented at the Chengdu International Science Fiction and Fantasy Festival, the largest science-fiction conference ever held in China. (The last international SF&F conference in China was held ten years ago, in 1997.) Chinese translations of Sawyer’s novels are published by Science Fiction World, headquartered in Chengdu, and his short stories have appeared in SCIENCE FICTION WORLD Read More ›