Last evening I truly enjoyed a wonderfully edifying experience at Biola University in La Mirada, California: a debate between Paul Nelson and Michael Ruse. The theme of what was characterized as an “undebate” was, What would it take to make you change your position on Darwinism versus ID? Both men were extremely articulate, and I witnessed a side of Ruse of which I had not been aware. He has a clever sense of humor. Nelson concentrated on two evidential issues and one philosophical issue: the problem of the origin of self-replicating biological systems and their complex machinery, the problem of the origin of new body plans (specifically the Cambrian explosion), and the truth-seeking deficiencies associated with the exclusion of design Read More ›

Interesting article in Tuesday’s NYTimes on digital forensics — especially as it applies to scientists who doctor their images and data. It would be interesting to see how much (or how little) “evolutionary evidence” can withstand the scrutiny of digital forensics. Need it be added that digital forensics consists in drawing design inferences. A Conversation With Hany Farid Proving That Seeing Shouldn’t Always Be Believing By CLAUDIA DREIFUS Published: October 2, 2007 HANOVER, N.H. — As Hany Farid sat in his office here at Dartmouth College on a recent morning, he fiddled with his laptop and cracked disconcerting little jokes. “Don’t ever send me a photograph of yourself,” said Dr. Farid, head of the Image Science Laboratory at Dartmouth. “I’ll Read More ›

 In a previous post a commentor attacked design on moral grounds using this example:  “Would you conclude that the designer was sadistic for creating insects that kill one another in the mating process?”  Of course, at one level this attack has been answered again and again.  In this blog’s “arguments that have been defeated over and over” section we say: This [argument] is really odd as it is basically a religious argument being made against Intelligent Design. The proponent of this argument is making a faith based assertion that God is perfect and hence incapable of bad design. ID makes no claim that the source of complexity is a perfect God incapable of imperfection [or, in the commenter’s example, sadism]. Read More ›

Here’s an interesting conference with some top-notch speakers on a topic central to ID. I wish I could make it. The conference takes place October 20th. Single Molecules and Molecular Machines Sponsored by: California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences and The New York Academy of Sciences Organizers: Clayton Heathcock and Susan Marqusee, California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences (QB3) Advances in single molecule methods have resulted in the exciting, burgeoning field of single molecule biophysics. These approaches have been exceptionally important in studies on molecular motors, the biological machines essential for providing force and movement in living organisms. Leaders in the field will present studies that reveal new behaviors and molecular details that are obscured by traditional ensemble-based approaches. . . . Read More ›

The blog, Anarchic Harmony , operated by William J. Murray, is worth a look. About many world’s theory (= every time you turn right instead of left, a new universe is created in which you turned left) Murray writes,

I thought you might be interested in an argument I came up with in a new blog about how the MWI theory, which scientists are now starting to invoke in order to explain the anthropic principle and the origin of life, supports ID theory and indicates it would in fact be a better scientific model to use in many cases.

Say what? [also, links to Mindful Hack stories below] Read More ›

Friends draw my attention to this Banned Books Week event at Baylor, and this hasty reassurance that we are NOT supposed to think that there is any clear comparison between the suppression of Bob Marks’s evolutionary informatics lab and the banning of books. (Hat tip Anarchicharmony’s William J. Murray.)

No, there isn’t. At Banned Books Week, so far as I can tell from the advertising, you mostly snore through old chestnuts whose ideas have long been accepted or dismissed by most of society. You don’t learn about dangerous ideas that genuinely threaten the CURRENT establishment. Oh, and you might hear calls for violent jihad, et cetera, that some have tried to ban.

The jihadis actually do pose a physical threat to subway, train, and airline passengers, as well as restaurant and supermarket patrons. But whether the best way to address the problem is by banning access to detailed information is a question of security strategy rather than ideas as such. I have yet to hear of anyone who wanted to be a jihadi’s blast victim – but complained that the government was somehow interfering with that individual’s personal liberty by preventing terror attacks … (Oh, make my day … surprise me. Tell me about such a case … )

The best way to see what happens when someone genuinely threatens the current establishment’s illusions is not to look at ID guys like Guillermo Gonzalez or non-Darwinists like Rick Sternberg – interesting as their cases are. I always say, look at Larry Summers, once Harvard prez, now Unperson. His crime? Only to say what every thinking person actually knows: That the preponderance of men in maths and hard sciences is most likely based in nature, not social prejudice.

It is instructive to note that the vast majority of the people who would nod approval at propositions as foolish as the Big Bazooms theory of human evolution probably purse their lips at Larry Summers, who has nothing on his side but the preponderance of the relevant evidence. However human evolution happened, it left more men than women with the types of aptitudes that are rewarded in math and hard sciences.

So the tendency for Banned Books Weeks to be, essentially, dinosaur halls of the mind, is part of a trend, actually. Go here, here, and here for recent examples of the pervasive and growing problem that genuinely challenging ideas are increasingly banned or shunned. And go here if you want to help do something about it.

How bad has it got? Pretty bad, actually.

In The Spiritual Brain, Mario Beauregard and I chuckled at the ideas that The Edge (Wedge the Edge! – d.) thought “dangerous” in 2006: Read More ›

[Comp Sci. /Eng, Informatics] I felt compelled to offer a tribute….. A great pioneer of Intelligent Evolutionary Design and non-Darwinian evolutionary computing passed away September 20, 2007. See this Washington Post Article: Ryszard Michalski; Shaped How Machines Learn. Michalzki created the notion of Intelligent Evolutionary Design and advanced the hypothesis of non-Darwinian evolutionary computing. From Foundations of Intelligent Systems: 12th International Symposium In contrast to Darwinian evolution, an intellectual evolution is guided by an “intelligent mind,”…. Every Easter at George Mason, Campus Crusade would flood the campus bulletin boards with a list of professors offering to share their wisdom and knowledge with students. Ryszard S. Michalski’s name was always on the list.

A couple of days ago I received the following email from a student in France:

 Hello,First of all, please excuse my poor English (I am a French native).  I am currently writing an essay in epistemology with two of my co- students (I’m in second year of M.Sc in research, specialized in Evolutive Ecology and Epidemiology of Host-Parasites relationships), in which we focus on the gloabl acceptance by society of different models to explain evolution. More than the models (we choose the “original” theory of Charles Darwin, the transformist theory of Lamarck, the “balanced equilibrium” theory of Stephen Jay-Gould, and the more recent Intelligent Design), we are interested in the people who believe in them.I contact you because the blog “Uncommon descent” states you as a friend of them. This blog is well known in France as one of the main information stream on Intelligent Design. My question is: how do you comme to trust in Intelligent Design? What do you think to be the most important flaws in the modern theories describing the course of evolution?

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Some years back a colleague from England emailed me about an article by Paul Gross against intelligent design. He wrote: This is loaded with extreme polemical language almost from the first sentence. I find it so biased that I simply cannot get beyond the first page. That the editor is proud to present this polemical babble is astonishing. If this is the best that the ‘scientific establishment’ can do, then that establishement is culturally decadent. It confirms what I have worried about for a long time: that science today simply does not have the cultural depth, the conceptual and linguistic resources, to conduct civilized scholarly debate about its foundational commitments and assumptions. Thomas Huxley would be deeply embarrassed by this Read More ›

Needless to say, I loved this new review of The Spiritual Brain by Bryan Appleyard in the Philadelphia Inquirer, where he says of my lead author Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard: The great strength of his position is the folly of the materialists. Beauregard continually draws attention to the scientifically dubious basis of their leap of faith. They argue that it must be so and then set about proving it. Their triumphalism – driven by big publishing deals – is their greatest weakness. There are plenty of examples … The nicest thing about a review like Appleyard’s is that, agree or disagree, he sees what WE see – plenty of bumph marketed as the “assured results of modern science.” As applied Read More ›

That’s the thesis of a deeply interesting paper by Momme von Sydow, cognitive psychologist and philosopher of science at the University of Göttingen. In his analysis, “Charles Darwin – A Christian Undermining Christianity? (in D.M. Knight and M.D. Eddy, eds., Science and Belief: From Natural Philosophy to Natural Science, 1700-1900 [Burlington: Ashgate, 2005], pp. 141-156), von Sydow shows how the construction of Darwin’s theory “essentially hinges on religious or metaphysical tenets” (p. 141). These tenets, “which initially appeared to him to have strong ethical and religious appeal” (p. 155), were the following: …three of the main influences on Darwin’s biological theory which had a direct or indirect religious origin: Paley’s belief in the divine design of nature, secondly, the conviction Read More ›