I found the following research quite intriguing. It has far reaching implications of interest to IDists. One implication requires a front-loading IDist to appreciate. Basically what the researchers found is that there are risk assessments in the promoter regions of genes. If a gene is critical and random mutations to it would be bad news it is marked as high risk and isn’t subject to mutation. If it’s not so critical it is marked low risk and exposed to experimentation.

How does this apply to front-loading? A major problem for front-loading is no known mechanism for conservation of genomic information other than natural selection. Information stored for a distant future that isn’t used in the present is ostensibly destroyed by deep time and random mutation. Other research we’ve blogged here showed compelling evidence that a mechanism for conserving unexpressed information exists. This is even more compelling – tags saying “conserve this”. Now all we need to find is the enhanced error detection and correction mechanism that is employed to conserve information tagged for conservation and there’s our mechanism for presevation of front-loaded genomic information over deep time.

Evolution: When Are Genes ‘Adventurous’ And When Are They Conservative?

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Details at www.TheBrites.org

Philosopher Antony Flew used to be the most prominent atheist in the English-speaking world. In the last decade, however, that has changed. Unlike Flew, who has always been civil and insightful, a new breed of atheists, who are crass and unruly, has supplanted him, notably, Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins. Also, Flew is no longer an atheist. Flew’s newfound belief in God and his assessment of today’s neo-atheism are both described in his delightful new book (coauthored with Roy Varghese), There Is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind. Throughout his philosophical career (going back to the late 1940s, when he rubbed shoulders with C. S. Lewis), Flew was committed to following evidence wherever it leads. Late Read More ›

Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard and I will be on American radio host and columnist Dennis Prager’s show today, at 1:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, to discuss the findings from our recently published book The Spiritual Brain (Harper One 2007). Here’s the link to listen. I will try to transcribe some of it. I will also be on Radio Maria, November 8, on Culture Watch with Tony Gosgnach, from 6:05 to 7:05 p.m. Go here and click the Listen Live icon. The show will be repeated as follows: Repeat: November 13, 11 a.m. – 12 noon Repeat: November 15, 6:05 – 7:05 p.m. The studio is sending me an .mpeg file, and I will try to transcribe some of it. P.S.: Read More ›

Weather Channel Founder: Global Warming ‘Greatest Scam in History’ By John Coleman It is the greatest scam in history. I am amazed, appalled and highly offended by it. Global Warming; It is a SCAM. Some dastardly scientists with environmental and political motives manipulated long term scientific data to create an allusion of rapid global warming. Other scientists of the same environmental whacko type jumped into the circle to support and broaden the “research” to further enhance the totally slanted, bogus global warming claims. Their friends in government steered huge research grants their way to keep the movement going. Soon they claimed to be a consensus. Environmental extremists, notable politicians among them, then teamed up with movie, media and other liberal, Read More ›

For those who haven’t listened to it, I encourage UD readers to check out The Incorrigible Dr. Berlinski. I paraphrase some of his comments below the fold.
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Or else … You haven’t read The Design of Life. But first … A friend draws my attention to “Judgment Day,” an upcoming American Public Broadcasting Service special on the Dover Trial. In this  press release, we learn that Vulcan Productions – which produced the program for PBS – has long been committed to the subject of evolution and its teaching,” remarked Vulcan Productions Executive Producer, Richard Hutton. “When we co-produced the Evolution series with the WGBH Science Unit in 2001, we set out to bring the richness of Darwin’s theory to life.” Well, sure, believers have been recruited to front Darwin. The part that intrigued me was NOVA Senior Executive Producer Paula S. Apsell’s comment: “Evolution is one of the most Read More ›

I’ll be speaking on the topic, “Does the Complexity of Life Prove Intelligent Design?” at two schools in New York this week. The first lecture will take place at the University of Buffalo’s North Campus, in Cooke Hall, Room 121, on Thursday, November 8th at 8:00 pm. For directions to this location click here. I will also be lecturing a second time on Friday, November 9th at 6:30 pm at Daemen College in the Wick Center Social Room. For directions to this location, click here. I’d love to meet you, UD reader, if you have the time to stop by.

You’ve probably heard about all the apes who have been taught to communicate using sign language in recent years. As Mario Beauregard and I discuss in The Spiritual Brain, the discovery that American Sign Language could, in principle, be taught to apes spurred a number of interesting research projects – and some pretty unrealistic claims. In Dragons of Eden (1986), for example, Carl Sagan dreamed of a day when Although a few years ago it would have seemed the most implausible science fiction, it does not appear to me out of the question that, after a few years in such a verbal chimpanzee community, there might emerge the memoirs of the natural history and mental life of a chimpanzee, published Read More ›

The tired old “ID is not scientific” has reared its ugly head again in another thread. This is simply not true. Karl Popper famously stated that a hypothesis is scientific if it can be falsified. He used swans as an example. He stated a hypothesis: All swans are white. Popper said that it can never be proven that all swans are white because there is always the possibility that a black swan exists somewhere but has not yet been observed. He stated that the hypothesis is still scientific because it can be falsified – the observation of a single black swan will falsify it. The biological ID hypothesis can be stated as: All complex biological systems are generated by intelligent Read More ›

In reading the article/speech below, ask yourself how successful (or unsuccessful) by comparison Darwinists have been in selling their product to children.

Inhofe Slams Leonardo DiCaprio and Laurie David
by Marc Morano (more by this author)
www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=23092
Posted 10/29/2007 ET
Updated 10/29/2007 ET

Senator James Inhofe (R-OK), Ranking Member of the Environement and Public Works Committee, delivered a more than two-hour floor speech today debunking fears of man-made global warming. Below is an exerpt of his remarks about how Hollywood, led by Leonardo DiCaprio and Laurie David, has promoted unfounded climate fears to children. For video of speech section denouncing Hollywood is below. Read More ›

Semiotic 007 commented at Mike Behe and Bad Design that Christian researchers embrace atheistic notions of science simply as “the rules of the game”, for getting things done. He goes on to note,

Everyone wants science to explain phenomena in natural, not supernatural, terms whenever possible. Historically, there were big problems with investigators invoking the supernatural whenever it suited them. I believe it was simply easier for Christians to join Enlightenment philosophers in cutting God out of the picture than to obtain some disciplined approach to admitting the supernatural at times and excluding it at other times.

Okay, but how come they don’t see the hook sticking right out of the bait? Read More ›

Blogs for books at Amazon are great! I just wanted to draw your attention to Mike Behe’s Edge of Evolution blog, where he tackles the problem of “evil design”, in connection with the writings of Christian Darwinist Ken Miller (and all kinds of other stuff):

Behe, a fellow Catholic, has the same problem I do. One of the shell games that I had to learn to detect when I first started covering this beat, while writing By Design or by Chance?, was the “Christian evolution” demand that we “Leave God out of it!”

As in “Surely no Creator would …” Hey, wait a minute! Weren’t we supposed to leave God … out … of … ?

Well, it turned out that you could drag God into it, as long as you were saying that he isn’t responsible for the way things are. It all just sort of happened, see. Nonetheless, he is the Lord of Creation?

Shell game city.

Anyway, Behe says, Read More ›

As an undergraduate studying evolutionary biology — like many other such students, I suppose — I read Will Provine’s classic The Origin of Theoretical Population Genetics (University of Chicago Press, 1971), a standard history of the laying of the mathematical and conceptual foundations, in the work of Fisher, Haldane, and Wright, of what later came to be known as the Evolutionary Synthesis (i.e., textbook neo-Darwinism). When Chicago reissued the book in 2001, Provine added a remarkable Afterword. With characteristic candor, he wrote that “my views have changed dramatically.” Natural selection, for instance, Provine no longer saw as a “force” or “mechanism” of any kind: Natural selection does not act on anything, nor does it select (for or against), force, maximize, Read More ›