Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

EXPELLED Sticker Contest

In my last post, I mentioned the prospect that THE DESIGN OF LIFE would, with the help of our Darwinist friends, become a companion volume to Ben Stein’s EXPELLED: NO INTELLIGENCE ALLOWED (www.expelledthe movie.com — check out also www.getexpelled.com). In the event that THE DESIGN OF LIFE becomes such a companion volume, a colleague sent me a sticker that could be put on it. Here is that sticker: I like it, but frankly I think we can do better. I’m therefore offering a $100 prize to anyone who can come up with a better sticker (receipt of payment for the prize cedes copyright to me). The sticker needs to be posted online as a jpeg with a link in the Read More ›

The Upside of Amazon Manipulation

THE DESIGN OF LIFE is being shamelessly manipulated by the Darwinists at Amazon (go here). Not only are they posting negative reviews that give no indication that the reviewers have read the book but they are also voting up their negative reviews so that these are the first to be seen by potential buyers. The following 1-star review, posted 8 hours ago, illustrates the Darwinists’ level of discourse at Amazon: By E. Duran (San Jose, CA USA) – See all my reviews I just finished reading this book without vomiting. I had to go back and read Darwin’s “Origin of Species” again to remove the bad taste out of my mouth. This is the whole review, unedited and unabridged. Even Read More ›

Let’s open minds, textbooks to intelligent design theories

A thoughtful article by a perceptive engineer. A good example of priming the Origins Debate pump. —————————— Let’s open minds, textbooks to intelligent design theories Intricacies of Earth life-forms, microscopes challenge evolution ideas Gordon Rose, Letter, Indianapolis Star Dec. 15, 2007 “In our school systems today, science, with its dramatic and continual advancement in knowledge, has to be one of the most interesting as well as important subjects being taught. Strangely enough, it is here that we are teaching unchallenged, the biggest lie in education — the theory of evolution. Not that the theory shouldn’t be taught — it should, simply because it is believed to be true by so many scientists. But the latest research with modern tools such Read More ›

> 400 Scientists Disputed Man-Made Global Warming: US Senate Report

How do science skeptics and those introducing paradigm shifts get their papers published in the face of politically correct coercion by a dogmatic majority and lemming press? Persistence, and banding together may help. Following is a fascinating report by the US Senate that may result in a critical mass begin to form against the politically correct band wagon of man-made global warming. Perhaps we can begin to have a serious scientific debate on this issue based on evidence. What can ID learn from these developments? ————————————————————— U.S. Senate Report: Over 400 Prominent Scientists Disputed Man-Made Global Warming Claims in 2007 Senate Report Debunks “Consensus” “Complete U.S. Senate Report Now Available: (LINK) Complete Report without Introduction: (LINK) INTRODUCTION: Over 400 prominent Read More ›

Why Global Warming Pundits Are So Shrill…

Their hypothesis featuring the boogeyman Carbon Dioxide is falling apart before their eyes. Hurricane activity set record lows the past two years right after the alarmists shamelessly tried capitalizing on the 2005 killers Katrina and Rita by saying it’ll only get worse from here. There hasn’t been any net global warming in the past 9 years even while CO2 concentration continued to build during that time. And now 2007 is going down in the record books as one of devastating cold. Don’t say I didn’t tell you that this was a big blown out of proportion hoax for attaining polictical goals disguised as “settled” science. Expect the alarmists to become even more shrill. They’re running out of time and they know it. If they don’t get treaties inked and inked soon the house of cards they built will collapse. Mother nature is showing us in no uncertain terms who was right and it isn’t the alarmists. I hope there’s enough egg to cover all the deserving faces. I know there isn’t enough crow in the world for them to eat but hopefully there’s enough so they can all choke on at least a few feathers.

Year of Global Cooling

By David Deming
December 19, 2007
Washington Times

Al Gore says global warming is a planetary emergency. It is difficult to see how this can be so when record low temperatures are being set all over the world. In 2007, hundreds of people died, not from global warming, but from cold weather hazards.

Since the mid-19th century, the mean global temperature has increased by 0.7 degrees Celsius. This slight warming is not unusual, and lies well within the range of natural variation. Carbon dioxide continues to build in the atmosphere, but the mean planetary temperature hasn’t increased significantly for nearly nine years. Antarctica is getting colder. Neither the intensity nor the frequency of hurricanes has increased. The 2007 season was the third-quietest since 1966. In 2006 not a single hurricane made landfall in the U.S.

South America this year experienced one of its coldest winters in decades. In Buenos Aires, snow fell for the first time since the year 1918. Dozens of homeless people died from exposure. In Peru, 200 people died from the cold and thousands more became infected with respiratory diseases. Crops failed, livestock perished, and the Peruvian government declared a state of emergency.

Unexpected bitter cold swept the entire Southern Hemisphere in 2007. Johannesburg, South Africa, had the first significant snowfall in 26 years. Australia experienced the coldest June ever. In northeastern Australia, the city of Townsville underwent the longest period of continuously cold weather since 1941. In New Zealand, the weather turned so cold that vineyards were endangered.

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Practical Biology (Not)

Yet another ancestor to modern whales is hypothesized. It’s hard to believe people get paid to produce stuff like this. Whales may be related to deer-like beast By SETH BORENSTEIN AP Science Writer Wed Dec 19, 6:55 PM ET WASHINGTON – The gigantic ocean-dwelling whale may have evolved from a land animal the size of a small raccoon, new research suggests. What might be the missing evolutionary link between whales and land animals is an odd animal that looks like a long-tailed deer without antlers or an overgrown long-legged rat, fossils indicate. The creature is called Indohyus, and recently unearthed fossils reveal some crucial evolutionary similarities between it and water-dwelling cetaceans, such as whales, dolphins and porpoises. For years, the Read More ›

One thing about Darwinists – they are consistent. They really do NOT believe in information

Bill Dembski has drawn my attention to the Darwinists who vote up negative reviews at Amazon of Design of Life, his textbook supplement with Jonathan Wells, on whose behalf I blog at Design of Life blog. He writes, The Design of Life has 13 five-star reviews and 4 one-star reviews. None of the one-star reviews give evidence of the reviewer having read the book. Yet the three reviews placed front and center by Amazon are the one-star reviews and none of the five-star reviews appear there. That’s because the Darwinists keep voting up the negative reviews and voting down the positive reviews. Please go to the link right now, look at the reviews, and vote on them (toward the bottom Read More ›

Highlights from Mike Gene’s THE DESIGN MATRIX

A friend of mine emailed me the following quotes from Mike Gene’s new book THE DESIGN MATRIX, available from Amazon.com here. “The vast majority of scientists do not view Intelligent Design as science and I happen to agree with them.” (pg. xi) “I should make it explicitly clear from the start that I did not write this book to help those seeking to change the way we teach science to our kids. I do not argue that design deserves to be known as science. At best, Intelligent Design may only be a nascent proto-science and thus does not belong in the public school curriculum. Nor does this book argue that evolution is false and deserves to be criticized in the Read More ›

Modern Biology vs. Historic Biology

In a private listserv the question was recently asked by one of the participants: Just out of curiousity, what would we consider to be the fundamentals of biology? Obviously, you can do biology without trying to shove everything into Darwinian just-so stories. Professor Dembski thought my answer worth repeating on Uncommon Descent so here it is: The salient question is what CAN’T you do in practical biology without resort to mechanistic theories of prehistoric evolution. The answer appears to be there is nothing you can’t do. Modern biology is the study of living tissue not imprints in rocks or theoretical ancient ancestors. Knowledge of The Edge of Evolution is critical in some areas. One needs to know, for instance, the Read More ›

Are Those Without Formal Academic Training in Evolutionary Biology Justified in Challenging the “Experts”?

This is a recurring challenge that most recently reared its head in a comment concerning my essay, Why Mathematicians, Computer Scientists, and Engineers Tend to be More Skeptical of Darwinian Claims.

The argument goes like this (as presented by the commenter in the link provided above):

The majority of degreed computer scientists, engineers, and mathematicians have completed no college course work in the life sciences. Virtually all have college physics under their belts. Some studied chemistry in college. Relatively few enrolled in college courses in biology.

Among “expert” critics of scholarly fields not their own, at most one in a thousand makes a substantive contribution. If UD should happen to be chock-full of engineers, computer scientists, and mathematicians who have all caught life scientists in fundamental error, then it would constitute a singular event in the history of science.

If UD readers promise not to tell anyone, I’ll disclose a secret about my college academic training.

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The New York Times – Et tu, Brute?

The New York Times is giving lip service to a letter signed and sent by 100 scientists to the UN Global Warming conference in Bali. The letter essentially said that climate change is natural, unstoppable, and attempts to control climate change rather than adapt to it only serves to make the problem of adapting to it much more difficult as vast sums of time and money are diverted to attempting the impossible when the same resources could be productively employed in solvable problems. When what is perhaps the least conservative major newspaper in the world gives space to global warming “skeptics” and doesn’t add the seemingly obligatory condemnation of said skeptics to the report I think it’s a sign that the debate is rapidly changing in favor of the skeptics. I knew this would happen. Anthropogenic global warming is based on cherry picking data to fit a bogus climate model. It was only a matter of time before it collapsed because, unlike Darwinian fairy tales of mud to man evolution over billions of years, climate change does happen quickly enough to observe over practical lengths of time. For instance, there hasn’t been any net global warming in almost 10 years yet the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has increased substantially over that time. The computer models of CO2’s effect as a greenhouse gas are simply and (now) demonstrably wrong.

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Compromise?

Dr. Sewell’s post below generated a fairly heated debate, but it is not my purpose to address the substance of his claim or his opponents’ responses.  Instead, I was fascinated by a couple of the commenters’ calls for “compromise” between the ID camp and the NDE camp.  As a general matter, “compromise” is a very fine thing, and if there were more of it the world would doubtless be a better place.  But it seems to me that compromise does not fit in well with the quest for scientific truth.  If two mutually exclusive theories purport to explain the same data, one of them may be right and the other one wrong, or they may both be wrong, but no one suggests we should seek Read More ›

[Offtopic:] The Amazing Paul Potts

Watch the faces of the judges as this fellow walks on the stage. Based on his looks and the fact that he is a cell phone salesman, they initially misjudge him. Sometimes you have to stop believing what everyone is telling you and start listening to your passion. Click here: Phone Salesman Amazes Crowd – Video

“Made from Scratch”??

As you read this article from the Washington Post, ask yourself how far such research would get without enzymes and a host of other materials “borrowed” from existing life-forms. “From scratch” properly should mean “made only with chemicals available in a realistic prebiotic environment.” That’s not what we’re dealing with here. And even if we were getting back to chemicals available in a realistic prebiotic environment, could the same be said for the investigator inteference of Craig Venter and his colleagues? Wouldn’t it be safer to say that they are acting as intelligent designers and not as mere accelerators of existing blind evolutionary processes? Synthetic DNA on the Brink of Yielding New Life Forms By Rick Weiss | Washington Post Read More ›