Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Dawkins: “Darwinism Leads to Fascism”

As irksome as Richard Dawkins can sometimes be, one must nevertheless admire his occasional outbursts of honesty.  Over at First Things  Fr. Ed Oakes refers to an interview  Dawkins gave to an Austrian newspaper, Die Presse (July 30, 2005), in which he said: “No decent person wants to live in a society that works according to Darwinian laws. . . . A Darwinian society would be a fascist state.”

Global Warming Puzzle: Amazon Rain Forest Getting Greener

The long and the short of it is that Global Warming alarmists were wrong again. They correctly predicted that the Amazon rain forest would get drier. What they didn’t predict is that it would get greener as it got drier. It seems rainforest growth is limited by sunlight. As it experienced a drought in 2006 the clouds dissipated a little, more sunlight got through, and productivity increased. The details, satellite maps, and whatnot is in the article below.

Global Warming Puzzle: Amazon Rainforest Showed Better Growth During Drought

Accepted global climate models had predicted the Amazon forest would begin to “brown down” after just a month of drought and eventually collapse as the drought progressed. Instead, drought-stricken regions of the Amazon forest grew particularly vigorously during the 2005 drought, according to new research.

“Instead of ‘hunkering down’ during a drought as you might expect, the forest responded positively to drought, at least in the short term,” said study author Scott R. Saleska of The University of Arizona. “It’s a very interesting and surprising response.”

UA co-author Kamel Didan added, “The forest showed signs of being more productive. That’s the big news.”

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How does the actor act?

Although ID continues to gather supporters, it happens now and again that erstwhile ID supporters lose their enthusiasm and jump ship. One such former supporter is a very prominent European scientist. I met him first in 2004, when he was still attracted to ID. Now he is no longer. I asked him about this recently: Question: If not ID, what then? The Darwinists are bankrupt. And the self-organizational theorists are hopelessly fuzzy. James Shapiro — he presupposes the very thing that needs to be explained, namely, the origin of systems that perform their own “natural genetic engineering.” Kirschner and Gerhardt are no better with their “facilitated variation” — whence the facilitation? He responded: Excellent question of course. So the search Read More ›

Pat Buchanan speaks out about Global Warming

The global-warming hucksters Excerpt from Buchanan’s article: Put me down as a disbeliever. Like the panics of bygone eras, this one has the aspect of yet another re-enactment of the Big Con. The huckster arrives in town, tells all the rubes that disaster impends for them and their families, but says there may be one last chance they can be saved – but it will take a lot of money. And the folks should go about collecting it, right now. This, it seems to me, is what the global-warming scare and scam are all about – frightening Americans into transferring sovereignty, power and wealth to a global political elite that claims it alone understands the crisis and it alone can Read More ›

You a Christian? Well then, October 23 is your BIG day! Or so the Toronto Star reporter thought …

Last Saturday afternoon, I was working quietly in my office, when the phone rang. I recognized the number of course (416 367-2000) – the Toronto Star has had that number about as long as I can remember. A reporter wanted to know what Christians were planning to do to celebrate October 23.

October 23? Well, in my tradition, that’s the feast of the saintly John Capistrano, but I don’t expect everyone to know. I didn’t myself, until I looked it up.

It turned out that the reporter had learned that a 17th century Irish archbishop Ussher had methodically dated the origin of the world to this date about six thousand years ago. And, given that I was a “fundamentalist author”, he was sure I could tell him about the big celebrations to be expected today …  Read More ›

The Edge of Horizontal Gene Transfer

Horizontal Gene Transfer (HGT) is now being invoked fairly often as a magic wand by Darwinists. So what experimental evidence do we have?

Genome-Wide Experimental Determination of Barriers to Horizontal Gene Transfer

Horizontal gene transfer, in which genetic material is transferred from the genome of one organism to another, has been investigated in microbial species mainly through computational sequence analyses. To address the lack of experimental data, we studied the attempted movement of 246,045 genes from 79 prokaryotic genomes into Escherichia coli and identified genes that consistently fail to transfer. We studied the mechanisms underlying transfer inhibition by placing coding regions from different species under the control of inducible promoters. Our data suggest that toxicity to the host inhibited transfer regardless of the species of origin and that increased gene dosage and associated increased expression may be a predominant cause for transfer failure. While these experimental studies examined transfer solely into E. coli, a computational analysis of gene transfer rates across available bacterial and archaeal genomes supports that the barriers observed in our study are general across the tree of life.

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Honest Louisiana governor is ID sympathizer?

The news I’ve heard about new Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal is that he threatens to break with a centuries-old Bayou tradition by being both a governor and an honest man. But also, this just in from the New York Times: Mr. Jindal is a technocrat and a Roman Catholic convert, a policy aficionado well-versed in free-market solutions to the crisis in health insurance and a proponent of “intelligent design” as an alternative theory to evolution, suggesting it may be appropriate in school science classes. The India Times advises, Jindal, who was born as a Hindu but converted to Catholicism, attended high school at Baton Rouge Magnet High School. In 1991, he graduated from Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, with Read More ›

Yet ANOTHER prominent environmental scientist disputes global warming alarmism

Reprinted by permission from Imprimis, a publication of Hillsdale College.

August 2007

“Global Warming: Man-Made or Natural?”

S. Fred Singer
Professor Emeritus of Environmental Sciences, University of Virginia

S. Fred Singer is professor emeritus of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia, a distinguished research professor at George Mason University, and president of the Science and Environmental Policy Project. He performed his undergraduate studies at Ohio State University and earned his Ph.D. in Physics from Princeton University. He was the founding dean of the School of Environmental and Planetary Sciences at the University of Miami, the founding director of the U.S. National Weather Satellite Service, and served for five years as vice chairman of the U.S. National Advisory Committee on Oceans and Atmosphere. Dr. Singer has written or edited over a dozen books and monographs, including, most recently, Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years.

The following is adapted from a lecture delivered on the Hillsdale College campus on June 30, 2007, during a seminar entitled “Economics and the Environment,” sponsored by the Charles R. and Kathleen K. Hoogland Center for Teacher Excellence.

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IN THE PAST few years there has been increasing concern about global climate change on the part of the media, politicians, and the public. It has been stimulated by the idea that human activities may influence global climate adversely and that therefore corrective action is required on the part of governments. Recent evidence suggests that this concern is misplaced. Human activities are not influencing the global climate in a perceptible way. Climate will continue to change, as it always has in the past, warming and cooling on different time scales and for different reasons, regardless of human action. I would also argue that—should it occur—a modest warming would be on the whole beneficial.

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Atlanta, Ga: Where did the hurricanes go?

Atlanta is becoming increasingly distressed over a drought that has reached “exceptional” level threatening to leave more than 3 million city residents without tap water if the drought persists more than a few more months. What happened to the increasingly frequent and severe Atlantic hurricanes that so-called “global warming” was supposed to produce? There’s nothing but the proverbial sound of crickets chirping in the southeast where there should be at least a few howling hurricanes or remnants thereof dumping torrential rain on the region. Meanwhile, on the western side of the Gulf coast, Texas has had an unprecedented amount of rainfall even absent hurricane activity. Lake Travis, a 20,000 acre flood control reservoir near me, has been near or into Read More ›

DNA pioneer James Watson embroiled in PC racism uproar: Updates

Watson is currently suspended from chancelor duties.

Watson’s own institute has itself been linked to historical Darwinian racism, even though it dutifully denounced him.

Also, here’s a spoof interview from The Brites on the reaction of a paragon of political correctness, trying to hold together Darwinism and egalitarianism. (Of COURSE it doesn’t work. As I point out here, you can’t have both Darwinism and egalitarianism. The only possible result is PC idiocy. )

More seriously, a friend offers some brief extracts from Watson’s book DNA:

“Our discovery had put an end to a debate as old as the human species: Does life have some magical, mystical essence, or is it, like any chemical reaction carried out in a science class, the product of normal physical and chemical processes? Is there something divine at the heart of a cell that brings it to life? The double helix answered that question with a definitive No” (xii).

No?

“Only with the discovery of the double helix and the ensuing genetic revolution have we had grounds for thinking that the powers held traditionally to be the exclusive property of the gods might one day be ours. Life, we now know, is nothing but a vast array of coordinated chemical reactions. The ‘secret’ to that coordination is the breathtakingly complex set of instructions inscribed, again chemically, in our DNA” (396).

One of the most innovative scientists I know has strictly cautioned me against any kind of “nothing buttery” as observed above.

Watson is nonetheless generous, after his fashion:

I do not dispute the right of individuals to look to religion for a private moral compass, but I do object to the assumption of too many religious people that atheists live in a moral vacuum. Those of us who feel no need for a moral code written down in an ancient tome have, in my opinion, recourse to an innate moral intuition long ago shaped by natural selection promoting social cohesion in groups of our ancestors.

But, unbelievers that we are, Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard and I doubt that any such “innate moral intuition” can be created by the magic of natural selection. The moral intuition of relatedness comes rather from the relationship between our limited minds and the mind that created the universe in which we live.

Oh, well, it is obvious that Watson is not a corner stool at our local coffee klatsch. He doesn’t even like Gattaca, whose limitations I concede myself – but he dislikes it for entirely different* reasons: Read More ›

Open Inquiry: the New Science Standard

In Kitzmiller et al vs Dover, the issue over whether or not Darwinian Evolution could be allowed critical evaluation by students, rather than be presented as established fact, was settled once and for all. Furthermore, any consideration of an alternate theory was off the table. All across the land, scientists cheered, since at least for now, science had been saved from an ‘assault by religion’. Just after the decision was handed down, Ohio’s State Board of Education in a 9 to 8 vote kept with their lesson plan, saying in effect, “go ahead and sue us” [Toledo Blade Op Ed 1/14/06]. Although many school districts had been considering broadening their standards to allow a more open discourse, many shelved their Read More ›

Jim Watson apologizes … sort of

According to the Guardian, following the row that erupted over his characterization of people of African origin as less intelligent (whatever that means, given that no one has ever defined “intelligence” in an empirically meaningful way), DNA pioneer Watson has backed off: Prof Watson’s statement did not clarify what his views on the issue of race and intelligence are, but he hinted that he had been misquoted. I somehow doubt that.  According to the Independent, Watson’s own institute has apparently disowned his comments: “Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory does not engage in any research that could even form the basis of the statements attributed to Dr Watson,” the institute’s president, Bruce Stillman, said. Dr Watson’s comments were entirely his own and Read More ›