November 2007

Your responses to this condensed version of an editorial would be appreciated. (This item is available free as a special feature.) “Anti-Darwin activism is alive and well. The most insidious movement promotes ‘intelligent design’ (ID) – the notion that some features in nature are best explained by an intelligent cause – as an alternative scientific theory to evolution by natural selection. Pro-ID interest groups can be found throughout US and Europe. It becomes increasingly likely for a scientist to be confronted by a pro-ID campaigner or challenged by a student, friend or neighbor intrigued and seduced by the concept of a scientific theory of design. How to respond is not a trivial matter. One can choose to fully engage in debate Read More ›

Douglas Kern at Tech Central Station warned, in 2005 that intelligent design is going to win.

And why was that?

He starts with the claim that ID types are more likely to be fertile than others.

I will not hash that out here except to say this: If it means YOU, you might want to include a budget item for receiving blankets, gripe water, and soothers – and if you do not know what those terms mean, ask your nearest and dearest … 

Update note: Your nearest and dearest may even have some amazing news for you that will change your, um, “expectations.”  Like remember that night when you and she got along so well?  Okay, well, life goes on. No, really, it does, and this is how it does. )

He then argues that “the pro-Darwin crowd is acting like a bunch of losers”: Read More ›

A golden fossil turned to dross?

According to Natural Resources Canada:

To many mid-Victorian geologists and paleontologists these laminated green and grey rock specimens from altered limestones of the Canadian Shield of Ontario and Quebec were the most important fossils ever found because they constituted evidence of the existence of complex life forms deep in the Precambrian. J. William Dawson, the Principal of McGill University and one of the foremost geologists in Canada, named the fossil Eozoon canadense — the Canadian dawn animal. In his presidential address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1864, Sir Charles Lyell singled out this fossil as “one of the greatest geological discoveries of his time”. Charles Darwin, in the fourth edition of Origin of Species in 1866, was relieved to be able to cite the first fossil evidence that the succession of life on earth proceeded from simple unicellular organisms to complex multicellular animals and plants.

But what happened thereafter is a cautionary tale.

British physicist David Tyler, whose work I have been profiling recently, tells the story here, of how the fossil was greeted with tidings of great joy.

Charles Darwin welcomed the find and brought it into the 4th edition of the Origin in 1866. He wrote: “After reading Dr Carpenter’s description of this remarkable fossil, it is impossible to feel any doubt regarding its organic nature”. The problem for Darwin was that the earliest known fossils were complex, and his theory required something much simpler to precede the forms of the Cambrian Explosion. It was a relief when Eozoon appeared to provide evidence supporting gradualism.

In the 6th edition, Darwin modified the text to read: “The existence of the Eozoon in the Laurentian formation of Canada is generally admitted”.

But there was dissent. In this case, from geologist Professor William King and chemist Thomas Rowney at Queen’s College, Galway.

They did not think that Eozoon was in fact a fossil. And they had good reasons for thinking it wasn’t. They knew how it could have been formed without any input from a life form at all.

So what happened between 1866, when those Galway men were basically a problem to be seen off, and 1879 when the truth was eventually revealed?

As Tyler explains,

The characteristics of the ensuing controversy are the subject of an interesting paper by Adelman.* She points out that the Canadian geologists adopted a “diffusion” model of communication: “scientific facts were confirmed within the scientific community and then presented to the public.” London was the focus of their attention, because the opinion-formers were located there. “The ‘Eozoonists’ felt that the fossil’s credibility was established once the leaders of the scientific community in London had accepted it.” The dissenters, however, chose not to play this game.

And the Galway dissenters were treated with contempt, their credibility under severe question, for years. Their crime? Raising entirely reasonable objections against Darwinism. Read More ›

Nothing in the intelligent design controversy is more instructive than a convinced Darwinist making his true position very, very clear.

This happened again recently, I see, when Britain’s elite science journal Nature responded to US Senator Brownback, who had written in the New York Times (May 31, 2007). Pointing out that – when he famously raised his hand during a Republican debate – he did not dispute evolution as a process but did dispute the materialist deductions drawn from it, he said,

While no stone should be left unturned in seeking to discover the nature of man’s origins, we can say with conviction that we know with certainty at least part of the outcome. Man was not an accident and reflects an image and likeness unique in the created order. Those aspects of evolutionary theory compatible with this truth are a welcome addition to human knowledge. Aspects of these theories that undermine this truth, however, should be firmly rejected as an atheistic theology posing as science.

To which Nature’s editors responded in “Evolution and the Brain”, sniffing with obvious distaste (June 14, 2007), “With all deference to the sensibilities of religious people, the idea that man was created in the image of God can surely be put aside.” Read More ›

Paul Davies was recently interviewed on the Dennis Prager show, and a caller challenged Davies with the neg-entropic nature of living systems. Paul’s response was the usual: local, open systems can experience decreases in entropy, as long as the overall system experiences an entropy increase. He gave the example of a refrigerator, which can make ice cubes (thus decreasing entropy inside the refrigerator), while the room warms up as a result of the heat pump, thus providing a compensatory entropy increase.

There are two big problems with this line of reasoning.

Read More ›

Check out Discovery Institute’s “The Theory of Intelligent Design: A Briefing Packet for Educators.” As part of its response to the PBS-NOVA documentary “Judgment Day: Intelligent Design,” Discovery Institute just released this packet (for free download, see below). The packet contains numerous resources for educators to effectively teach about biological origins in public schools. These resources include: 1) An introductory letter helping teachers to understand the debate and to avoid the pitfalls in the PBS-NOVA’s educational resources; 2) An FAQ answering common questions about evolution and intelligent design, discussing definitions and evidence for both theories. 3) The truth about the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial. 4) A summary of the law regarding teaching evolution in public schools. 5) A list of Read More ›

Backers battle ISU professor’s tenure denial By LISA ROSSI • REGISTER AMES BUREAU • November 28, 2007 Ames, Ia. — The fight will rage on over Iowa State University astronomy professor Guillermo Gonzalez, who advocated for intelligent design, the theory that disputes parts of evolution, and lost a bid for tenure. Advocates for Gonzalez said in a release distributed Tuesday that they will hold a news conference at 11 a.m. Monday in Des Moines. There, they said, they will discuss documents they contend will prove that Gonzalez “lost his job” because he supports intelligent design, not because he was deficient as a scholar. Gonzalez’s backers say an appeal to the Iowa Board of Regents and possibly a lawsuit would be Read More ›

See the story here. “From the ubiquitous daisy to the fantastical orchid, flowering plant species are as diverse as they are numerous.  It turns out that these bloomers went through an evolutionary “Big Bang” of sorts some 130 million years ago . . . “Flowering plants today comprise around 400,000 species,” said Pam Soltis, curator at the University of Florida’s Florida Museum of Natural History. “To think that the burst that gave rise to almost all of these plants occurred in less than 5 million years is pretty amazing — especially when you consider that flowering plants as a group have been around for at least 130 million years.” . . .  From the length of the diagrams’ branches along with Read More ›

I would like to apologise to Prof Krauss for a posting which inferred, based entirely on the quotes in a Telegraph UK interview(see here), that he had asserted that observing the universe had adversely changed the universe. Unfortunately the New Scientist paper upon which the Telegraph article is based is not available on line without subscription. idnet.com.au

News Release: Harvard’s XVIVO Video By William A. Dembski | originally posted November 26, 2007 | updated November 27, 2007 Back in September of 2006 I announced at my blog UncommonDescent that a “breathtaking video” titled “The Inner Life of Cell” had just come out (see www.uncommondescent.com/…/the-inner-life-of-a-cell). The video was so good that I wanted to use it in some of my public presentations, but when I tried to purchase a DVD of it (I sent several emails to relevant parties), I was informed it wasn’t ready (to my knowledge the video is still not available for sale in DVD or any other format — if it were, I would gladly purchase it and encourage others to do so). Moreover, Read More ›

Despite its name – which means “hanger on” – the human appendix works for a living, according to recent research (helping kill germs). As British physicist David Tyler notes, despite the claim of evolutionary biologists from Darwin to the present day that the appendix is junk left over from evolution, the appendix actually has a function – and the current crop of evolutionary biologists try hard to avoid acknowledging that they were wrong about that. He comments, It might be hoped that Darwinian evolutionary biologists would acknowledge that errors have been made; that Darwin’s claim for the appendix being useless was a claim made from ignorance rather than knowledge; that their theory had coloured their understanding of the data; etc. Read More ›

Marx (Karl, not Groucho) predicted that under capitalism workers were bound to become more and more dissatisfied and therefore a workers’ revolution was inevitable.  When workers’ conditions actually improved under capitalism, Lenin modified the theory — of course the workers’ lot is improving; the capitalists are bribing them to keep them pacified, just what the theory predicted would happen. In Edge, Behe talks about Ernst Mayr’s 1960’s prediction that on Darwinian grounds the search for homologous genes would be quite futile.  Now Darwinists use homologous genes as evidence for the theory; after all the existence of such genes was predicted by the theory (after the fact). What can you say about a theory that can just as easily predict “X” and Read More ›

Here’s what E. O. Wilson writes in THE NEW SCIENTIST: . . . Many who accept the fact of evolution cannot, however, on religious grounds, accept the operation of blind chance and the absence of divine purpose implicit in natural selection. They support the alternative explanation of intelligent design. The reasoning they offer is not based on evidence but on the lack of it. The formulation of intelligent design is a default argument advanced in support of a non sequitur. It is in essence the following: there are some phenomena that have not yet been explained and that (most importantly) the critics personally cannot imagine being explained; therefore there must be a supernatural designer at work. The designer is seldom Read More ›

The real nutters are the fanatics who despise religious belief by Melanie Phillips 26th November 2007 . . . the antipathy to religious faith goes far wider and deeper than fear of terrorism. It is the outcome of a dominant secularism which claims that faith and reason are irreconcilable, and that belief in a supernatural creator is the equivalent to believing in fairies at the bottom of the garden. Though most people still say they believe in some kind of God, religious faith has become progressively more enfeebled and unable to resist the secular onslaught. . . . MORE

From the December 3 issue of Time:  “Morality and empathy are writ deep in our genes.  Alas, so are savagery and bloodlust.  Science is now learning what makes us both noble and terrible.” “The deeper that science drills into the substrata of behavior, the harder it becomes to preserve the vanity that we are unique among earth’s creatures.” “Sociobiology has been criticized as one of the most reductive of sciences, ascribing the behavior of all living things — humans included — as nothing more than an effort to get as many genes as possible into the next generation.  The idea makes sense . . .” “The brain activity that most closely tracked the hypothetical crimes . . . occurred in the Read More ›