“For every PhD there is an equal and opposite PhD”

Dr. Caroline Crocker Named First Executive Director of the IDEA Center

Dr. Caroline Crocker Named First Executive Director of the IDEA Center – January 15, 2008
Dr. Caroline Crocker, a biologist featured in the upcoming documentary film Expelled, has been hired as the Executive Director of the IDEA Center. A trained biologist who loves working with students, she received her Ph.D. in immunopharmacology from Southampton University, U.K., and an M.Sc. in medical microbiology from Birmingham University, U.K.

Dr. Crocker taught various biology courses for five years at George Mason University (GMU) and Northern Virginia Community College. While at GMU, she won three grants, including one from the Center for Teaching Excellence, and she received commendations for high student ratings and wrote a cell biology workbook. Nonetheless, after she mentioned intelligent design in a class at George Mason in 2004, she was subsequently banned from lecturing. Her story is told as part of the upcoming documentary film about persecuted pro-ID scientists, Expelled, featuring Ben Stein.

“Having personally witnessed the hostility in the academy towards intelligent design, I am excited about helping students in IDEA Clubs to investigate intelligent design in an intellectually honest manner,” said Dr. Crocker.
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“The temperature in Harbin reaches forty below zero, both Fahrenheit and Celsius, and stays below freezing nearly half the year. The city is actually further north than notoriously cold Vladivostok, Russia, just 300 miles away. So what does one do here every winter? Hold an outdoor festival, of course! Rather than suffer the cold, the residents of Harbin celebrate it, with an annual festival of snow and ice sculptures and competitions.” So says a news report. But of course the images below from this so-called Harbin “snow festival” depict merely the detritus of a snow storm. Snow festival indeed! When are people going to get over their teleocentrism and stop trying to see everything as designed?

And don’t use Google, you cheaters! That’s not guessing. Both passages — arguments about possible modes of evolutionary change — were written by the same scientist. He is offering his own view, not expounding that of others. Sample 1: In real life, major evolutionary innovations perhaps had to wait for radical mutational ‘inventions’ that fundamentally altered the basic body plan. Once such a radical change in body plan had arisen, a whole new rush of evolution became possible. An example might be the invention of segmentation early in the ancestral history of annelid worms, arthropods and vertebrates. Sample 2: My suggestion is that Scyllarus may actually present an example in the wild of a homeotic mutation, analogous to antennapedia in Read More ›

Click here to sign yourself up as a volunteer to help promote the movie Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed Not sure? Watch the movie trailer below and then decide if you should help get the message out. P.S. This YouTube trailer is a little dated. The movie is slated for April release in all major movie theaters. You can see a higher resolution version of this trailer and others by clicking here.

DEBATE: Atheism vs. Theism and The Scientific Evidence of Intelligent Design Sunday, January 27th at 4pm PST, Stanford University WHAT: Stanford University will play host to a debate entitled Atheism vs. Theism & the Scientific Evidence for Intelligent Design. This debate is being organized by student groups at Stanford: IDEA Club at Stanford,The Stanford Review and Vox Clara: A Journal of Christian Thought at Stanford. WHO: Chirstopher Hitchens vs. Jay Richards Christopher Hitchens — Contributing editor to Vanity Fair; visiting professor, New School in New York; author of God is Not Great. VS. Jay W. Richards — Research Fellow and Director of Acton Media at the Acton Institute; co-author, with astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez, of The Privileged Planet: How Our Place Read More ›

The mind does not exist – or anyway it cannot cause anything to happen, right? Well, it would be very convenient for materialists if that could be shown to be true.

Here, commenter Magnan writes, in response to my recent post on dealing with Darwinist hate,

Such a deep dynamic could explain, for instance, why parapsychology is nearly as implacably opposed today as in the early days of psychical research, 1870-1900 (at least this is my impression).

Well they have certainly tried to implacably oppose it.

But actually, Magnan, things are changing a little bit – though it took way too long, to be sure. Professional unidirectional skeptics are giving up on trying to disprove the idea that there are no paranormal phenomena.

It’s about time. History lesson: Read More ›

Excerpt: When a scrap of evidence supports any one of the competing theories of the origin of life, doubts about that theory itself are often not discussed in the article. That practice distorts the overall picture. To see why, suppose for example that the police are trying to determine which of three suspects stole a car. None of the suspects is considered a truthful witness, so asking for a confession isn’t an option. We hear about – and focus on – information that apparently places one of them at the scene of the crime. However, what if – on the balance of the evidence – the police believe that that particular suspect was out of the country at the time? Read More ›

Remember the dark days of vestigal organs? You know, back when there was a list of 180 vestigal organs? Or remember the days of junk DNA – when repetitive DNA, large regions of non-protein-coding DNA, and all sorts of mobile DNA were assumed to be non-functional simply because the investigators had assumed Darwinism rather than design?

And there’s lots more DNA that doesn’t even deserve the name pseudogene. It, too, is derived by duplication, but not duplication of functional genes. It consists of multiple copies of junk, “tandem repeats”, and other nonsense which may be useful for forensic detectives but which doesn’t seem to be used in the body itself. Once again, creationists might spend some earnest time speculating on why the Creator should bother to litter genomes with untranslated pseudogenes and junk tandem repeat DNA. … Can we measure the information capacity of that portion of the genome which is actually used? We can at least estimate it. In the case of the human genome it is about 2% – considerably less than the proportion of my hard disc that I have ever used since I bought it. [Copied from Research Intelligent Design which cites: Richard Dawkins (1998) “The Information Challenge.” the skeptic. 18,4. Autumn 1998.]

Well, it seems that those people who “spent earnest time speculating on why the Creator should bother to litter genomes with untranslated pseudogenes and junk tandem repeat DNA” have been the real winners in the past (and likely upcoming) decade of genome research.

In any case, it seems despite the repeatedly failed efforts to assign vestigality to a range of structures, some people keep pursuing the case.

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I did a local radio show this morning, on which perceptive host Robert White asked me how I cope with hostility in connection with The Spiritual Brain and other books – trolls, votebots, idle anonymous threats, and such.

I think I rather surprised him by pointing out that I didn’t really care much.

Essentially, I can’t do anything about the fact that science, which was supposed to dramatically confirm atheism (remember when?), hasn’t done anything of the kind. Read More ›

Now it’s personal. More.

Because of a prediction, a very strong prediction, I made on another thread, I’ve had reason to look into just what has been happening to Darwin’s finches way off on the Galapagos Islands.

Here is a paper published last year in Science Magazine by the Grants, experts in Darwin’s finches. I looked at their paper, looked at their data, and have come to the conclusion that what I predicted as the ultimate explanation to changed beak sizes is the more reasonable interpretation of the data they present.

But before we even get to the data, here’s a remark from a National Geographic website review of the article that supports my basic position:

“ Researchers from New Jersey’s Princeton University have observed a species of finch in Ecuador’s Galápagos Islands that evolved to have a smaller beak within a mere two decades.
Surprisingly, most of the shift happened within just one generation, the scientists say.”

The shift happened in ONE year? What kind of population genetics are at play here?

Well, to the data:
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Here is a gem for you:   The idea of nanotechnology is founded in the premise that it will be possible to construct machines with atomic scale precision (Feynman, 1961; Drexler, 1981; Drexler, 1986). Biology provides many examples that this is possible; we “merely” need to learn what has been achieved by evolution and copy it. But eventually we must determine what the engineering limitations of molecular machines are. [emphasis mine]   (Thomas D. Schneider. Nanotechnology. )   Here are some examples of scientists attempting to emulate the engineering marvels of ID (Oops! I meant EVOLUTION):     (Small Visions, Grand Designs) I am wondering why evolution has not already produced a bacterial propeller such as the one engineered by Read More ›

It is frustrating for me to see that even most ID proponents are ready to concede a Darwinian explanation for any complex structure which does not seem to be irreducibly complex. If someone could show, for example, that the bacterial flagellum could have been constructed through many gradual improvements, would I find a Darwinian explanation reasonable? Heck no. It seems reasonable only if you assume that random errors are only occurring in the DNA. Gil Dodgen gave a brilliant analogy in a Sept 28, 2006 post at UD: he said that if you really want to simulate evolution with computer programs, you should introduce random errors not only in the string simulating DNA, but also in your entire program, the Read More ›

On  July 7, 2005 Cardinal Christoph Schönborn wrote an article Finding Design in Nature  that seemed to level serious criticism at Darwinism and neo-Darwinism.   “Now at the beginning of the 21st century, faced with scientific claims like neo-Darwinism and the multiverse hypothesis in cosmology invented to avoid the overwhelming evidence for purpose and design found in modern science,” wrote Schönborn, “the Catholic Church will again defend human reason by proclaiming that the immanent design evident in nature is real.”  More recently the Cardinal has elaborated upon his position in his latest book Chance or Purpose: Creation, Evolution, and a Rational Faith (Ignatius Press, 2007).  The work itself emanating as it does from such a well-positioned Catholic leader, one intimate with the Pope, is worthy of some extended comment.

 Schönborn’s book is in some senses confusing.  On the one hand the Viennese Cardinal has some harsh criticism for Darwinian evolution as a metaphysical worldview.  On the other hand Schönborn takes the reader on a much murkier journey in which he appears to defend Darwin’s Origin as a “stroke of genius.”  Freeing himself from the dogma of independent creations, Darwin developed a theory of natural selection and common descent that was, according to  Schönborn, a product of “honest and intense intellectual struggle” (p. 53).  The Cardinal essentially supports Darwin’s biological mechanisms as secondary causes, which “can thus perfectly well be reconciled with belief in creation.  The natural causes,” he writes, “are an expression of the activity of creation”  that occurs throughout all aspects of creation.   Schönborn has a purpose in mind here, namely, to make a distinction between the so-called science of Darwin and the metaphysics of Darwinism in an effort to make Darwin’s biological theory implicitly compatible with theism.  Here begins the Cardinal’s troubles. Read More ›