Alex Tee Neng Heng and David C. Green think they have demonstrated that the “monkeys typing” hypothesis is true here.  The class is assigned the task of identifying their blunder.

As Michael Behe discusses in the article I linked in my last post, Darwinists Kenneth Miller and Francisco Ayala reject ID, because they believe it makes God (if one assumes God is the designer) culpable for all of the pain and misery in the natural world.  Ayala goes so far as to suggest that ID is blasphemous because it implicates God in causing this pain and misery. Miller and Ayala are wrong, and their error stems from their failure to understand elementary principles of culpability that any 1st year law student can stand and recite from memory. Generally, the law recognizes four culpable mental states (mens rea for the Latin buffs).  In descending order they are: Intentional conduct.  An actor acts intentionally when Read More ›

See here:  www.amazon.com/gp/blog/A3DGRQ0IO7KYQ2/…

A friend of mine and I have been reading Antony Flew’s new book THERE IS A GOD. Flew had been the English-speaking world’s most prominent atheist until Richard Dawkins assumed that role. A few years ago, Flew announced his conversion to theism (though not full-blown Christianity). This caused a stir at the time, but true to their materialist bias, the academy and media quickly fluffed it off (“poor Antony — he’s just getting old and a bit soft in the head”). As the following excerpts (that my friend collected) attest, Flew knew exactly what he was doing in rejecting his lifelong commitment to atheism. Also, a refreshing feature of the book is Flew’s evident grace, good will, and sensitivity — the contrast with the boorishness of neo-atheists like Dawkins-Hitchens-Harris is stark.

>From p. 79 ff:

“For Dawkins, the main means for producing human behavior is to
attribute to genes characteristics that can significantly be
attributed only to humans. Then, after insisting that we are all the
choiceless creatures of our genes, he infers that we cannot help but
share the unlovely personal characteristics of those all-controlling
monads.

“Genes, of course, can be neither selfish nor unselfish any more than
they or any other nonconscious entities can engage in competition or
make selections. (Natural selection is, notoriously, not selection;
and it is a somewhat less familiar logical fact that, below the human
level, the struggle for existence is not “competetive” in the true
sense of the word.) But this did not stop Dawkins from proclaiming
that his book ‘is not science fiction; it is science …. We are
survival machines — robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the
selfish molecules known as genes.’ Although he later issued occasional
disavowals, Dawkins gave no warning in his book against taking him
literally. He added, sensationally, that ‘the argument of this book
is that we, and all other animals, are machines created by our genes’ Read More ›

I was looking at some numbers concerning the Cambrian explosion.  The results were quite stunning to me. Simple life, we are told, emerged 3.8 billion years ago, and the Cambrian Explosion occurred 550 million years ago.  In a single 10 million year period (taking the longest estimate), 95% of the animal phyla appeared.  The math: For the first 85% of the history of life there was no significant animal life. Almost all animal life arose in only the last 15% of the history of life. Indeed, 95% of animal phyla arose in a length of time that is only one forth of one percent of the history of life (0.25%). If the entire history of life were 3,800 years long, almost all Read More ›

The two most recent books I’ve read are Biochemistry Professor M.Behe’s Edge of Evolution and Cornell geneticist J.Sanford’s Genetic Entropy. Edge of Evolution I found to be amazing. It presented a case history of a eukaryote (P.falciparum) that has replicated billions of trillions of times within a span of a few decades. More importantly this is one of the most well studied organisms in biology due to its huge toll on human lives. In the last decade we’ve gone beyond phenotype analysis of the bug and have completely sequenced its genotype. This represents the largest test of evolution that we can hope to observe. The result of random mutation + natural selection being given billions of trillions of opportunities to Read More ›

HT to Phil Johnson for giving me the link. As I’ve been saying, Global Warming isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Check this out… Warming Revives Flora and Fauna in Greenland By SARAH LYALL October 28, 2007 The New York Times NARSARSUAQ, Greenland — A strange thing is happening at the edge of Poul Bjerge’s forest, a place so minute and unexpected that it brings to mind the teeny plot of land Woody Allen’s father carries around in the film “Love and Death.” Its four oldest trees — in fact, the four oldest pine trees in Greenland, named Rosenvinge’s trees after the Dutch botanist who planted them in a mad experiment in 1893 — are waking up. After lapsing into stately, Read More ›

This is just too funny to pass up. As a preemptive strike against any commenters who feel a need to say “Aha! ID is all about religion” put a sock in it. I filed this under “Humor”. HT to Jon Wells for giving me the link to this article. Atheism: An Intellectual Revolt or Pelvic Rebellion? By Doug Giles Saturday, October 27, 2007 Atheists would love for everyone to believe that their motive for not believing is an intellectual one. Yes, the atheists ardently suppose that they are wise and the Christians, well, we’re the buckle-shoed buttheads. Yes, darling, the atheists would love all of us to suppose that they cannot believe because they are so astute and rational, and Read More ›

Package models and the information crisis of prebiotic evolution Daniel A. M. M. Silvestre,  Jos´e F. Fontanari http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0710/0710.3278v1.pdf The coexistence of different types of templates has been the choice solution to the information crisis of prebiotic evolution, triggered by the finding that a single RNA-like template cannot carry enough information to code for any useful replicase. In principle, confining d distinct templates of length L in a package or protocell, whose survival depends on the coexistence of the templates it holds in, could resolve this crisis provided that d is made sufficiently large. We review the prototypical package model of Niesert et al. (1981) which guarantees the greatest possible region of viability of the protocell population, and show that this Read More ›

In a recent column, Marvin Olasky observes New York Times columnist John Tierney recently offered a materialist version of “intelligent design”: All of us are actually characters in a computer simulation devised by some technologically advanced future civilization. Fanciful to the extreme, sure, but the growing number of such theories — life comes from the past (Mars, when it was theoretically livable) or future (Tierney) — is one more indication that Darwinism no longer satisfies. Reporters pretending to referee the origin debate used to have it easy: slick evolutionists vs. hick creationists, progress vs. regress. Now, Darwinism is looking fuddy-duddy, and sophisticated critiques of it are becoming more diverse. I interviewed Michael Behe, author of “Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Read More ›

. . . so long as the predicted event is safely 100,000 years in the future:  Human race will split into two different species  The human race will one day split into two separate species, an attractive, intelligent ruling elite and an underclass of dim-witted, ugly goblin-like creatures, according to a top scientist. 100,000 years into the future, sexual selection could mean that two distinct breeds of human will have developed. The alarming prediction comes from evolutionary theorist Oliver Curry . . . Dr Curry’s theory may strike a chord with readers who have read H G Wells’ classic novel The Time Machine, in particular his descriptions of the Eloi and the Morlock races.  In the 1895 book, the human race has Read More ›

Below is a fascinating report in the NYTimes about a long-retired professor who found that his work was being cited by “creationists” and THEREFORE decided to retract it. But, as an attorney friend points out, the very concept of “retraction” is inapplicable here. A retraction is something the original author is entitled to do ONLY IF he has discovered, by re-examining his original data or reasoning or mathematics, that it was flawed. That’s not what happened here. Instead, we have a situation in which — if we take the scientist (Homer Jacobson) at face value — later work by other people implies that the earlier work was wrong for some other reason. The proper action in such a case is Read More ›

Bill Dembski asked about design vs. mechanism , and quite a long thread ensued. I thought I’d post my own thoughts here, to break up the thread a bit.

Here are five things I know that may be useful to someone: Read More ›

In my last post I referred to Richard Dawkins’ assertion that a state organized according to Darwinian principles would be a fascist state.  In response some of the commenters alluded to Dawkins’ statement that he is “anti-Darwinian” when it comes to politics.  Dawkins, the commenters said, believes we can “rise above” our Darwinian impulses.  The problem with this assertion is that Dawkins is trying to have it both ways.  He writes: The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. As that unhappy poet A.E. Housman put it: ‘For Nature, heartless, witless Nature Will neither care nor know.’ DNA Read More ›

In the ISCID Brainstorms forum Emeritus Professor of Biology John A. Davison challenged my assertion that atmospheric CO2 increases are a good thing for plant growth. He said while it might apply to trees it doesn’t apply to grasses such as rice which don’t yield more grain in an elevated CO2 environment. He then went on to say that only in the laboratory can benefits be observed from elevated CO2 where other potentially limiting factors (sunlight, nutrients, water) aren’t an issue. Sorry John, but that’s just wrong on all counts. Rice grain yields increased 60% in outdoor field tests with elevated CO2. Yield peaked at 28C and then declined 10% for each additional degree. Even the global warming hysterics readily Read More ›