Here’s a podcast interview where I reveal key secrets of the evil conspiracies I am part of, while discussing The Spiritual Brain . I also Wedge “the Edge“, and explain why I don’t drink coffee while reading materialist interpretations of spirituality – because choking with laughter while drinking coffee is, like, a bitter experience. I take mine without sugar. Also: Should tenure disappear?, The Scientist asks ID friendly TV pastor dead at 76. Why you will more likely succeed if you are easy to indoctrinate How things change in science Research stuff, resources, or fun that somebody threw over the transom

Once again I direct our readers to First Things.  This time Amanda Shaw discusses how imaginary numbers, once rejected as “Impossible, irrational, delusionary, absurd, untrustworthy, fictitious, imaginary,” are now a staple of everyday math.  See http://www.firstthings.com/ Is there an analogy to ID here?  The fact that imaginary numbers were not part of the math “system” did not mean they were not out there waiting to be used by those who were willing to look beyond the blinders of the existing paradigm.  Now, as has been argued at this site before, ID can be fit within the existing scientific paradigm; but even if this were not the case, the point is should we cling to a limiting paradigm that prevents us Read More ›

“In science, parsimony is preference for the least complex explanation for an observation. This is generally regarded as good when judging hypotheses. Occam’s razor also states the ‘principle of parsimony.’”  See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parsimony In the post below (“Multiverse of the Gaps”), I point to a recent paper in which a Darwinist attempts to get around the extremely small probability (less than 1 in 10 raised to the negative 1,018) of life emerging by chance by invoking an infinite “multiverse.”  The question for the class today is which is the most parsimonious hypothesis:  One designer or infinite universes?

Chronicle of Higher Education, Tuesday, September 4, 2007 chronicle.com/daily/2007/09/2007090406n.htm Baylor U. Removes a Web Page Associated With Intelligent Design From Its Site By ELIZABETH F. FARRELL Another controversy over the study of intelligent design is brewing at Baylor University. Officials at the institution, in Waco, Tex., have removed from the university’s Web site a personal Web page created by Robert J. Marks II, a professor of engineering, that outlined his work in an “evolutionary informatics” laboratory. A lawyer representing Mr. Marks said Baylor’s actions amount to viewpoint discrimination and a suppression of his client’s academic freedom. A mirror site of the laboratory’s Web page describes evolutionary informatics as merging the theories of evolution and information, and “investigating how information makes Read More ›

“Never shrinking from controversy, and sometimes deliberately provoking it, this book serves as a lively introduction to a field where neuroscience, philosophy, and secular/spiritual cultural wars are unavoidably intermingled.”—Publishers Weekly

The belief that the mind does not exist apart from the brain dominated the twentieth century. But can we really dismiss our thoughts and feelings, or furthermore, our religious and spiritual experiences, as simply outcomes of the firing synapses of our brain? In THE SPIRITUAL BRAIN, authors Dr. Mario Beauregard and Denyse O’Leary present the groundbreaking evidence that the mind cannot be simply reduced to physiological reactions in the brain. Read More ›

Irony again.  I love it.  How many times have ID proponents been accused of resorting to the “God of the gaps” to explain the hard questions? For years Darwinists have said, essentially, “yes, the questions are hard, but we’re working on them and the answer is just around the corner.  No need to invoke design, especially if you believe God may have been the designer.”  (O’Leary’s “promissory materialism”) Now the Darwinists appear to be giving up and invoking a gap filler of their own.  I call it the “multiverse of the gaps.”  This article is an example:  http://www.biology-direct.com/content/2/1/15 The author, an avowed Darwinist, gives up on Darwin to ever explain the origin of life.  He admits: “to attain the minimal complexity Read More ›

On Thursday (12.07.06) I learned it was definite that Baylor University was revoking a postdoctoral fellowship that I held in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Last month (11.06) I was appointed as Senior Research Scientist in that department to work on a project in information theory with Prof. Robert Marks. That project was funded through a grant that he procured specifically for me to work with him. Here are the facts: Read More ›

I mentioned My retreat from public view, but I have a few loose ends to tie up.
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In his review of ID biochemist Mike Behe’s Edge of Evolution, which caused many to wonder whether he had actually read the book he was reviewing, Richard Dawkins indulged in a long and seemingly irrelevant riff on dog breeding. He hoped to convince his readers that complex and fantastical intracellular machines come about by chance (and mind comes from mud) on account of the vast variety that humans can produce by selective breeding of dogs.

Correspondents have pointed out that Dawkins is counting on his readers’ ignorance of a fundamental fact about dog breeding- that is depends on existing traits and does not introduce new ones. One writes, for example, Read More ›

Kudos to Anthony Sacramone over at First Things for his hilarious (and insightful) take on the latest self help super-bestseller.  See here.  http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/?p=833  Excerpt:  “After all, who wants to believe that they’re at the whim of chance, accident, or worse—a sovereign God? The idea of being either lost in a Darwinian universe or limited by environment, genetics, and luck is much too disheartening. And the prospect of being in the hands of an unsafe Creator, who sends rain on the just and the unjust alike, is absolutely infantilizing.”

My last post included a reference to one of several carnivorous plants whose traps appear to be irreducibly complex. One reader commented that it seems that Michael Behe’s mousetrap actually exists in Nature, and wondered why Behe didn’t mention this example in Darwin’s Black Box. Another reader explained that Behe is a microbiologist, not a botanist. However, these spectacular examples of irreducible complexity have not gone completely unnoticed by botanists; see the very interesting section entitled “The origin of carnivorous plants” (pp 5-6) in the Nature Encyclopedia of Life Sciences article here .

When Botnik approached me about whether it would be all right to post his parody of what President John Lilley of Baylor might be thinking in trying to justify his expulsion of Prof. Robert Marks’s Evolutionary Informatics Lab from Baylor, I thought it mirrored what motivates many academics in wanting to stamp out ID. Besides, it seemed to me so over-the-top that I didn’t think the parody would be lost on anyone. And UD has had its humorous side (witness Galapagos Finch). Clearly, readers of UD fell for it, but so did many people on the other side, judging by all the many emails they sent President Lilley to confirm whether Botnik’s parody actually represented Lilley’s words. In retrospect, it’s Read More ›

As some of you know…
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IDers like to portray evolution as being built entirely on an edifice of darwinian natural selection. This caricature of evolutionary biology is not too surprising. Most molecular, cell and developmental biologists subscribe to the same creed, as do many popular science writers. However, it has long been known that purely selective arguments are inadequate to explain many aspects of biological diversity.

Michael Lynch, May 2005

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Yesterday, the Baylor University administration shut down Prof. Robert Marks’s Evolutionary Informatics Lab because the lab’s research was perceived as linked to intelligent design (ID).

Robert J. Marks II, Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Baylor, had hoped that a late-August compromise would save his lab, but the University withdrew from the previous offer yesterday morning. While President Lilley was not at the meeting, an insider senses his hand in the affair, noting that Lilley was the only person with the authority to overturn what the Provost, who was at the meeting, agreed to.

Here is the sequence of events to date: Read More ›