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 […]
Month: November 2007
From the files: Why intelligent design is going to win, revisited
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 […]
History lesson: Eozoon – the dawn – and dusk – of the bogus dawn animal
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 […]
Reflections on key recent events: Eminent science journal advises meat puppets to get over “image of God” rubbish
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 […]
Paul Davies on the Dennis Prager Show (or, A Second Look at the Second Law)
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 […]
New ID Briefing Packet for Educators
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 […]
Guillermo Gonzalez — the latest
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 […]
Flowering Plant Big Bang
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 […]
Apology to Prof Lawrence Krauss
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. […]
News Release: Harvard’s XVIVO Video
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 […]
Vestigial organs, anyone? The humble appendix begs to differ
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 […]
Darwinism predicts “X.” Oh, you tell me the opposite of “X” happened? Well Darwinism predicted that too.
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 […]
E. O. Wilson on ID
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 […]
Melanie Phillips on Secular Fanatics
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 […]
Time Magazine: Science is Close to Demonstrating Morality is a Function of Brain Activity
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 […]