I received the following email dated 1.31.08 from Ian Musgrave: Dear Dr. Dembski Determining where a genome has been produced or altered by an intelligent designer is a matter of some importance. Consider the claims that the HIV virus was engineered as a biowarfare weapon, or the concern that virulence genes from other organisms could […]
Month: January 2008
DNA is the Blueprint of All Life
Here’s an article from PhysOrg saying something that has been said on this blog for years. The experimenters were working with gold crystals, trying to build different structures. Here’s some of what they write in this summary article: “He likens the process to building a house. Starting with basic materials such as bricks, wood, siding, […]
Scientific Consensus: The Last Bastion of Scientific Uncertainty
I was reading an exchange on anthropogenic global warming between Dr. George Somero, the David & Lucile Packard Professor in Marine Sciences at the Hopkins Marine Station (pro) and Dr. Roy Spencer, recipient of NASA’s Medal for Exceptional Scientific Achievement and principle research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville (con) where the usual […]
Details Of Nuclear Pore Complex With Spin
(Credit: Image courtesy of Rockefeller University) From ScienceDaily (Jan. 30, 2008) A cell’s membrane-bound nucleus uses hundreds to thousands of nuclear pores as its gatekeepers, selective membrane channels that are responsible for regulating the material that goes to and from a cell’s DNA. Rockefeller scientists have nailed down the first complete molecular picture of this huge, […]
Dr. Geoff Simmons vs PZ Myers Debate
I’ve just received the following notice from PSSI (Physicians and Surgeons for Scientific Integrity), of which I am a member. I’m taking the liberty of posting it up here in case anyone else is interested in this debate. Fresh from our What Darwin Didn’t Know events in Spain, Dr. Geoff Simmons, author of What Darwin […]
Reminder about “Who Designed the Designer?”
Permutations of the question “Who designed the designer?” are trite, easily addressed, and if you read the moderation rules you’ll find that comments using this and other trite arguments are deleted. There is not enough data to make any determination of who designed the designer. When and if we can identify the designer of organic […]
Ignorance: Inspired and Promoted by Mainstream Media
A family friend, who is a brilliant electrical engineer, recently spent some time at our home for a holiday get-together. The topic of ID came up and he asked me how I could possibly have bought into such a silly idea. I quizzed him about what he knew about ID. I asked him about which […]
Thought for the Day
From Nietzsche’s The Gay Science: Thus the question “Why science?” leads back to the moral problem: Why have morality at all when life, nature, and history are “not moral”? No doubt, those who are truthful in that audacious and ultimate sense that is presupposed by the faith in science thus affirm another world than the world […]
A book for your local school library, just in time for Darwin Day …
Here’s an interesting recent book, just the thing for Darwin Day, I guess: Apes or Angels?: Darwin, Dover, Human Nature, and Race by Cornelius J. Troost. Here’s his publisher’s blurb, abbreviated a bit: APES or ANGELS?: It speaks the truth about Darwin’s views on human origins and race. Contrary to the beliefs of most academicians […]
Prediction, prediction, who’ll bet the RENT on a prediction?
Recently, a hoo-haw among some Darwinists vastly spiked traffic to one of my blogs, The Post-Darwinist, out of all proportion to usual interest levels. It had to do with some predictions I had made. People who can force the taxpayer to fund their activities are generally mega rotten at understanding the point of view of people […]
The alignment nightmare (part 1)
Alignment is probably the most difficult and least understood component of a phylogenetic analysis from sequence data. — David L. Swofford and Gary J. Olsen, chapter on Phylogeny Reconstruction, in Molecular Systematics (Sinauer, 1990, eds. D.M. Hillis and C. Moritz), p. 417. Twenty years ago, as a 2nd-year graduate student, I attended the first Molecular […]
Understanding Intelligent Design Theory – The Seoul Times
Posted to give glimpses of international interest in ID. Korea appears to allow significant freedom of speech and inquiry. ———————————- Special Contribution By Babu G. Ranganathan The Seoul Times, Global Views Jan 28, 2008 Understanding Intelligent Design Theory Imagine finding a planet where robots are programmed so that they can make other robots just like […]
Design of Life: Extinction – and so, good night, the final curtain …
Textbooks often don’t discuss extinction – the death of all members of a species – in any detail. No surprise there, it’s a frustrating and depressing topic. Frustrating because museums would bid billions to bring back a live tyrannosaur. And depressing because good answers are often not available. So discussion can lurch dangerously into the […]
OOL is a Sticky Situation
Experimenters have recently found that genes–whereby they mean particular sequences of DNA–can “find” one another without the intervention of proteins or other factors. It appears to be strictly an effect caused by electrical charges along the DNA strand; the longer the ‘gene’ (that is, sequence length), the greater theapparent ease in ‘finding’ one another. The […]
Thanks for Your Support … Evolution of M&M’s
Thank you for your support! Dembski’s copyright infringement charges have been dismissed and, after all the shenanigans of you ID crazies, I am back in North Dakota [Details Here]. I now recognize we must all continue to contribute to the evolutionary process. Whenever I get a package of plain M&Ms, I make it my duty […]