When I first wrote “My Failed Simulation” (now on the discovery.org main page here and at Human Events) it really never even occurred to me that anyone would think I had actually tried such a simulation, or that I was claiming to have tried it. I thought it was pretty obvious that it was just a thought experiment, designed to get people to think about the alternative to ID, namely that physics (the Schrodinger equation plus the elemenary particles of physics plus the four known forces of physics) alone can explain computers, libraries full of science texts and novels, and the Internet. My point was, not only is this the officially accepted view of science today, but anyone who doubts Read More ›

Finch and Knuther each received an award check for $15,000 plus a gold plated medallion for their evolution of “a man walks into a bar” jokes. Read their paper at TheBRITES.org.

Just plain big? How do animals get that way? Why the exploding palm tree explodes – or why it doesn’t Frog from hell? Well, that’s how Nature News is telling it. Apollyon, check your e-mail. The frog is loose again.

February 19, 2008 K.D. Kalinsky (Note from Denyse: An ID theorist asked me to publish this essay on detecting design in nature. It is exactly as the scientist gave it to me except that – I have linked the sections for easier Web handling – all the notes have been moved to the end. – I don’t see a font choice for superscripts or subscripts in Blogger, so have decided to enclose the element that would be super or subscripted in two periods. In the number 10.-64. assume that .-64. Is a superscript. In the equation, P.f. = M(E.x.)/N, assume that .f. and .x. are subscripts. A .pdf version of his paper exists but is not on line as of Read More ›

In another thread talking about engineers’ perspectives on the machinery of life the topic of entropy came up. Engineers have to deal with entropy in all their designs and the very best efforts at dealing with it only serve to slow it down and never stop it.

So one of my big questions isn’t why most cell lines sooner or later go extinct as that’s easily explained by entropy. Rather my big question is how a rare few of them have managed to persist for hundreds of millions or billions of years.

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A simpler cheaper system has been developed to code in DNA. This implicitly recognizes the more complex coding in native DNA. (The news article also assumes the evolutionary doctrine of “junk DNA”.) The contrast with hard drives, this low density coding method and natural DNA shows the very high coding density in DNA.
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Human genome may end up as world’s smallest hard drive

. . .the researchers discovered a system to encode digital information within DNA. This method relies on the length of the fragments obtained by the partial restriction digest rather than the actual content of the nucleotide sequence. As a result, the technology eliminates the need to use expensive sequencing machinery.

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David Berlinski is my favorite secular Jew and quintessential iconoclast. How could one not adore a guy who is a mathematician, no advocate of any religion, a Darwin skeptic, and phenomenally eloquent in both English and French, with a great penchant for ironic humor?

His latest opus is The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions, due out in April.
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“Evolution” is defined so broadly as to prevent refutation. That requires that the whale of “macroevolution” (simple organism to human beings) must be swallowed along with the gnat of “microevolution” – any mutation or change = “evolution”.

Now Kenneth Miller is attempting to transform the Design vs Evolution argument, by claiming nature reveals “evolutionary design” – purely based on “nature” – without an intelligent cause.
Will the public recognize this as an oxymoron?
OR
Will it welcomed as the Trojan horse that undermines Intelligent Design?
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There Is ‘Design’ In Nature, Biologist Argues

“ScienceDaily (Feb. 18, 2008) — Brown University biologist Kenneth Miller has to hand one victory to the “intelligent design” crowd. They know how to frame an issue. “The idea that there is ‘design’ in nature is very appealing,” Miller said. “People want to believe that life isn’t purposeless and random. That’s why the intelligent design movement wins the emotional battle for adherents despite its utter lack of scientific support.”

“To fight back, scientists need to reclaim the language of ‘design’ and the sense of purpose and value inherent in a scientific understanding of nature,” he said.
In a Feb. 17, 2008 symposium at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) annual meeting in Boston,* Miller will argue that science itself, including evolutionary biology, is predicated on the idea of “design” — the correlation of structure with function that lies at the heart of the molecular nature of life. . . “

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Jonathan Wells reflects on how almost everything Darwin believed is being disconfirmed: There was a time when I would half-heartedly join in the chorus that praises Darwin as a great scientist, even though some of his ideas were mistaken. Now, when I look for Darwin’s positive contributions to biology, I see only that he made a persuasive case that something analogous to artificial selection operates in natural populations (a case also made by others, including A.R. Wallace). That and a few minor studies on barnacles, orchids, and such. But natural selection has never been shown to accomplish anything more than its artificial counterpart — which is to say minor changes within existing species. All of Darwin’s Big Ideas — universal Read More ›

Recently I wrote an article about where disbelief in Darwin leads. It generated a lot of good discussion. Now I’d like to pose the question where does the pursuit of science, in particular the quest for material explanations of life, lead?

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Evolutionists continue to be much exercised about evolution being treated as “merely a theory,” arguing that to identify it as such is as disreputable as treating gravity or the second law as “merely a theory.” But consider, as a close colleague recently reminded me: The late Ernst Mayr, a Harvard professor called “the Dean of American Evolutionists ” wrote in his 1976 book Evolution and the Diversity of Life: Selected Essays: “When I lectured in the mid-1950’s to a small audience in Copenhagen, the great physicist Niels Bohr stated in the discussion that he could not conceive how accidental mutations could account for the immense diversity of the organic world and its remarkable adaptations. As far as he was concerned, Read More ›

The cover story of the current (March 2008)issue of National Geographic is “Inside Animal Minds.”
It is an interesting, persuasive, and I’m sure quite unintentional argument against the Darwinist position that mind is an illusory epiphenomenon of the material brain.

The article presents truly interesting examples of studies involving dogs, elephants, fish, primates, sheep, octopus, dolphins, and birds purportedly showing that these animals have real minds and are not just behavioristic, deterministic biological machines.
The article further credits Darwin with the original insight that “earthworms are cognitive beings”

The examples they cite do make a good case that animals have real minds, not just a set of biologically and environmentally encoded behavior, and argues against “behaviorism, which regards animals as little more than machines.”
It asks the really excellent question: “But if animals are simply machines, how can the appearance of human intelligence be explained?” (page 48)
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Okay, I have probably got myself into a peck of trouble by deciding to just say what I think about Darwinism and Evolution Sunday and all that. I used to be tremendously polite to senior clergy, teachers, and opinion leaders who know that you must obey the system and say nice things about Darwin, whether or not it follows traditional religion or otherwise makes any sense. But I cannot even pretend to make excuses for them any more. I have decided to stop being a dhimmi for Darwin. I will no longer support or promote any excuse whatever about the havoc that the Darwinists have wrecked on our society, which they are celebrating this year and next year. I’ve explained Read More ›

One of the grand engineering challenges issued by The National Academy of Engineering is to Reverse-engineer the brain.
If the NAE considers it possible to Reverse-engineer the brain, does not that imply that the brain may have been engineered in the first place? i.e., as in designed by an intelligent agent? As you read through these materials, compare the close parallels with engineering design methods and what researchers are discovering about the brain, (compared to chance processes.) (Hmm. Is that why brain neurons were used for The Design of Life cover!) Perhaps we can see productive reverse engineering research supported by grants from the National Academy of Engineering. with true scientific freedom to pursue where the data leads.

Reverse-engineer the brain
Why should you reverse-engineer the brain?

The intersection of engineering and neuroscience promises great advances in health care, manufacturing, and communication.
. . . the secrets about how living brains work may offer the best guide to engineering the artificial variety. Discovering those secrets by reverse-engineering the brain promises enormous opportunities for reproducing intelligence the way assembly lines spit out cars or computers. . . .

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Jane Harris has a new article at Design of Life blog about a newly discovered genus of palm in Madagascar (yes, that’s right, a GENUS): “New findings in science: self-destructive palm puzzles botanists” The tree waits about 100 years to flower and then explodes in tonnes of flowers and then just dies. I’m glad local trees in the Toronto area are more measured in their response to sex. (They live man y decades but flower decorously every year, and never just explode in flowers and die.) Like, the palm tree’s sort of behaviour would be okay for weeds, but … for TREES? And no one has any idea yet how it got itself to Madagascar.