Or are we just connecting to the universe, as the Design of Life authors think.I’ve always found the connection between soft math and useful information easy (like, you get charged for a side of fries you never ordered, and never would have ordered). But HARD math? That’s about something else for sure. Go here for more about why hard math matters. Also: Today at the Post-Darwinist Christianity Today features news item on young astronomer denied tenure Catholic Darwinists to congregate in Rome? Also: Today at The Mindful Hack: The myth of the Christian Right: What happens when you ask Democrats if they too are born again? God must exist, otherwise he wouldn’t be able to enjoy this debate.

A commenter to my article about John McCain supporting the teaching of ID in public schools replies that he won’t vote for McCain because of it. The stated reason is the United States is falling behind other industrialized countries in science literacy. Piffle! The notion that science literacy in the U.S. is substandard is rooted in the results of science surveys that include questions about evolution. Without doubt a much larger fraction of the US populace doesn’t believe in mud to man evolution than compared to any other industrialized nation. So in those surveys they give the “incorrect” answer to questions about the origin of life. In all other category of science questions Americans score as well as or better Read More ›

Clandestine meeting of skeptics with strange deists & theists. Details at TheBRITES.

Well, he could be, at least about some things.Don’t shoot! Look, no one expected that the human being would have only a few more genes than the worms that survived a space shuttle blowup and were returned to their owners. We could be wrong about lots of other things too. Anyway, here’s Jane Harris-Zsovan’s story, just up at The Design of Life: Lolle’s 2005 paper with Robert Pruitt of Purdue University, Genome-wide non-mendelian inheritance of extra-genomic information in Arabidopsis”, suggested that a mutant variety of this species overrides its genetic code and does indeed revert back to its wild state.Starting in the 1990s, the researchers began using specimens of A. thaliana to study plant cuticles. Lolle and Pruitt bred plants Read More ›

Recently, Bill Dembski and Jonathan Wells published a textbook supplement called The Design of Life. It’s pretty controversial, as you can tell by all the ignorant remarks and insults at the Amazon site.

The book explains the reasons why Darwin was wrong. Stuff you won’t find in the textbook your taxes pay for (or your student loan pays for if your prof puts it on the course.)

You can find out more about the book (or even buy it) here.

Meanwhile, trusty Canadian bloggers Jane Harris-Zsovan and I blog at the Design of Life blog on items that help explain why the book was written: To help students understand the facts of life that don’t mesh with Darwinism.

Now, maybe you know all this stuff. Great! Have you considered encouraging friends or family who DON’T know it to have a look?

Remember, your nearest and dearest are always hearing from legacy media, schools, and museums why Darwin was right (your tax dollars at work again, usually).

If you don’t help them understand why that’s mainly propaganda in the service of materialism, can you really blame them for just saying, “Okay, whatever … whatever they want me to believe, I’ll just believe, so they will shut up and go away … “?

For example, here are some stories that someone you know might appreciate:

Origin of life: Popular science media solve the origin of life every few weeks. Huh?

Origin of species? Check out the beefalo and see if you STILL believe the textbook. Read More ›

Discussions of evolution (theistic and materialistic) have too often been cast within a Darwinian framework.  From M. A. Corey’s special pleading for deistic evolution (see his Back to Darwinism [1994]) to the recent sparring match between Robert A. Larmer and Denis O. Lamoureux in a series of exchanges in Christian Scholar’s Review (see issues for fall 2oo6 and fall 2007), discussions are invariably cast within a framework of how much or how little theism Darwinism will admit.  Seldom is Alfred Russell Wallace (1823-1913) ever brought up.  But, in fact, Wallace completely revised the theory he independently founded.  I suggest he did so within a much older Hermetic tradition in science.  What, you ask, does Wallace have to do with Hermeticism?  I’ll admit on its face it appears unlikely. But such a seemingly strained connection is relaxed considerably by seeing Wallace less as an evolutionist-turned-crackpot and more as a prescient thinker himself evolving a teleological view of nature on the one hand and seeing Hermeticism as less a curious exercise in medieval and early modern superstition and more as a viable metaphor for a more integrated worldview on the other.  By re-visioning both we may indeed find the foundation for a historically coherent — certainly a more historically rooted — ID paradigm.

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Help this guy. He wants to know when artificial intelligence will surpass human intelligence.Here are his numbers so far: A question very simply crafted poll I’m asking a few friends to gain a better perspective on the time-frame for when we may see greater-than-human level AI. Results posted below… if you wish to participate, email me (bruce-at-novamente.net) an answer for the following: [ ] 2010-20 [ ] 2020-30 [ ] 2030-50 [ ] 2050-70 [ ] 2070-2100 [ ] Beyond 2100 [ ] Never [ ] Prefer not to make predictions [ ] Other: __ He recounts, “Many people have replied Never, so I’ve separated this answer from the replies and have added it to the survey results (above). – Read More ›

Evolution of anatomy and gene control  Evo-devo meets systems biology. Georgy Koentges Nature Vol 451|7 February 2008  (excerpts only)

Since Darwin we know that we must explain organisms not only in mechanistic terms (of mutation, selection and adaptation on the population level) but also in historical terms, as ‘descent with modification’, evolution in phylogeny. All heritable morphological changes derive from developmental changes in molecular control hierarchies and networks.

Genetic control networks must have changed to create phenotypic diversity. Historians of life are interested in the specific succession of changes over evolutionary time.

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A commenter on my previous article asked whether John McCain supports intelligent design or not. After a quick google I can happily say the answer is yes. McCain sounds like presidential hopeful By C.J. Karamargin ARIZONA DAILY STAR Tucson, Arizona | Published: 08.24.2005 As the Gallup Poll noted, McCain has a generally consistent conservative voting record but forged a national reputation after a series of notable breaks with fellow Republicans. On Tuesday, though, he sided with the president on two issues that have made headlines recently: teaching intelligent design in schools and Cindy Sheehan, the grieving mother who has come to personify the anti-war movement. McCain told the Star that, like Bush, he believes “all points of view” should be Read More ›

In the wake of the fact that Guillermo Gonzalez’s appeal has been dismissed by the Iowa Board of Regents (this was expected, actually, and more later), Discovery Institute has launched an Academic Freedom petition: Across America, the freedom of scientists, teachers, and students to question Darwin is coming under increasing attack by self-appointed defenders of the theory of evolution who are waging a malicious campaign to demonize and blacklist anyone who disagrees with them. You can help by signing the Academic Freedom Petition If you are an American, you can go here to sign. By the way, academic freedom is under severe attack in many forums, not just the study of design in the universe. Go to The Fire to Read More ›

The modern method [of argumentation] is to assume without discussion that [your opponent] is wrong and then distract his attention from this (the only real issue) by busily explaining how he became so silly. In the course of the last fifteen years I have found this vice so common that I have had to invent a name for it. I call it Bulverism. Some day I am going to write the biography of its imaginary inventor, Ezekiel Bulver, whose destiny was determined at the age of five when he heard his mother say to his father — who had been maintaining that two sides of a triangle were together greater than the third — ‘Oh you say that because you Read More ›

For those following this thread at the Panda’s Thumb, I’m providing here (as a pdf) the slides from my talk at the Wistar Retrospective meeting, held this past June in Woburn, Massachusetts. Pay attention to the puzzle described in slides 14-21. Here’s a brief outline of the problem: 1. To establish cellular differentiation in a metazoan (i.e., an animal), instructions must be provided to the starting cell. 2. Natural selection is one possible process by which this occurred, when the metazoan in question first appeared. 3. A necessary condition for natural selection is reproductive capability. 4. But reproductive capability (in an animal) requires cellular differentiation. 5. Thus, a necessary condition for natural selection lies causally downstream from the phenotypic outcome Read More ›

I’ve been meaning to catch up with the Catholic side of the controversy over Darwinian evolution, and now at last I have a moment: Recently, Pope Benedict XVI gave a talk in which he said explicitly: “Man is not the fruit of chance or a bundle of convergences, determinisms or physical and chemical reactions,” he told a meeting of academics of different disciplines sponsored by the Paris Academy of Sciences and Pontifical Academy of Sciences. This sort of language explains why Catholic Darwinist Ken Miller got so upset with Christoph, Cardinal Schoenborn, a close B16 associate, over his famous 2005 op-ed in the New York Times. Miller was upset because he knows as well as anyone that this and other Read More ›

In an excellent essay in NATURE, Kevin Padian gives his views and concludes (some editing) …  “Has any single individual made so many lasting contributions to a broad area of science as Darwin did to biology? Darwin moved intellectual thought from a paradigm of untestable wonder at special creation to an ability to examine the workings of that natural world, however ultimately formed, in terms of natural mechanisms and historical patterns. He rooted the classification of species within a single branching tree, and so gave systematics a biological, rather than purely philosophical, rationale. He framed most of the important questions that still define our understanding of evolution, from natural selection to sexual selection, and founded the main principles of the sciences Read More ›

  Portraits of Darwin created by a computer model of evolution acting on the painting top left. NATURE today published a piece by Kevin Padian entitled “Darwin’s enduring legacy”. The title page of the essay has this picture. I think the computer simulation of evolution has grossly degraded the CSI contained in the original picture in an irreversible manner. This is the type of thing that evolution is good at doing, and it is hardly a process I would let loose on biological systems if I were seeking improvements!