Here’s an addendum, dated 2.1.08, to Ian Musgrave’s challenge (go here for the original challenge): Dear Dr. Dembski There has been some confusion about the wording of the original challenge. I’ve re-written the contest rules slightly as some people were confused as to what designer they were supposed to detect. A reminder, to win, you have to: 1) Identify which sequences have been produced by a human designer 2) Describe how you identified the sequence as being designed (eg. I used PKZip to compress the sequences and ordered the output according to the following criteria) 3) Describe what the sequence does (eg. “This is the active site of a triose phosphate isomerise engineered into a riboprotein — this due to Read More ›

I have a challenge for Ian Musgrave. The sequences provided code for 80 amino acids. That’s almost certainly not a whole protein and not enough information to determine design/non-design. Indeed, none of the six sequences begin with a start codon which means we aren’t given enough information to even frame the sequence into codons. Ian states: 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 be inserted into viruses and bacteria to “weaponise” them. If this were for real we would know the species in which the Read More ›