I’m pleased to announce the IDEA Center’s new Executive Director has just rolled out her own website:

IntellectualHonesty.info

I met with Dr. Crocker recently at a screening of the movie Expelled. She will be featured prominently in the movie!

The Darwinists have framed the ID debate as being about what should and should not be taught in the public school science classroom. I speculate that the debate over the public school classroom is another example of Bulverism.

As I pointed out here, the real issue is whether life is designed. If so, most every other question pales in comparison. And also lost in the Darwinist Bulverism is whether individuals in universities will have the chance to answer the question of design for themselves, and whether these individuals will have the freedom to tell others what they discover.

The whole time I was a part of the GMU IDEA club, our club officially refrained from taking a position on what should or should not be taught in science classes both in the public schools and universities. Not that the issue was unimportant, but the issue was not to be the focus of IDEA at GMU. In fact, I personally have lobbied that for the time being, instead of the science classroom, ID and creation science could be discussed and studied elsewhere. [See: My correspondence with Eugenie Scott on ID in the universities.]
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Further to Granville Sewell‘s work on the 2nd Law in an open system, here is Duncan & Semura profound insight into how loss of information is the foundation for the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. This appears foundational to the understanding and development and testing of origin theories and consequent change in physical and biotic systems. ———————

The key insight here is that when one attempts to derive the second law without any reference to information, a step which can be described as information loss always makes its way into the derivation by some sleight of hand. An information-losing approximation is necessary, and adds essentially new physics into the model which is outside the realm of energy dynamics.

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Recently, I was interviewed by a fellow journalist who wanted me to explain why the Council of Europe thought that intelligent design theory was a threat to human rights. I said quite honestly I hadn’t a clue. If they are post-modernists, their views can be fact-free. The relevant question might be “What do you guys smoke these days?” Finally, this morning, I stumbled on an answer that at least moves the Council of Europe from the realm of toxic smoke to the realm of coherence. They’re still wrong, at least as far as North America is concerned, but at least they are now making sense. Here’s a short trail of correspondence that explains it.

For many years I was an avid hang glider pilot, and one of my specialties in aerospace R&D is Guidance, Navigation and Control software development for precision-guided airdrop systems.

During many of my hang glider flights I had the opportunity to observe, from an unusual perspective, hawks in their native environment — the air. Flying wingtip to wingtip at the same airspeed, one gets a profound appreciation for these amazing creatures and their GN&C.

On a number of my hang glider flights, hawks came up close. They always seemed to be curious about me, flying my lumbering 32-foot-wingspan Dacron and aluminum aircraft. Up this close, I could observe the subtle adjustments they made in their primary feathers to compensate for the turbulence in the air, and they would glance furtively at me.
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From Jane Harris-Zsovan’s recent story at Design of Life blog: Darwin’s theory of natural selection requires offspring to diverge from a common ancestor to create new species. It requires genetic differences to increase as descendants adapt to their environmental niches. It is this ‘natural selection’ and ‘adaptation’ that creates species. And, as the newly created species continue to adapt, they should become more different over time. Following this line of thought, hybrids should be less viable than their parents. Not only is there evidence that natural selection oscillates over time, but some hybrids, in both plant and animal kingdoms, are better suited to their environments than their parents. In the case of the Darwin’s finches, even the ‘purebred’ finch populations Read More ›

I saw this yesterday on ESPN and couldn’t stop laughing. It’s all over YouTube. Way to go Michigan women’s basketball coach Kevin Borseth:

Prof Richard Dawkins is retiring from his position at Oxford. There is a search underway for the next Charles Simonyi Professorship in the Public Understanding of Science. Who would we at UD like to take up this position and why? http://www.admin.ox.ac.uk/fp/wd9-018.shtml

{Frost122585and Gerry Rzeppa started an interesting off topic train of thought on Leibniz and design of “machines of nature” vs “artificial automata” that is worth its own thread. I copied those posts below and will delete the others. DLH}
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Frost122585
In Leibniz’s Monadology he talks about the difference between man made art and the art of God- which for me creates a very interesting problem for ID- one that could if described and understood correctly – lead to an even better understanding of Design in nature-

“Thus the organic body of each living being is a kind of divine machine or natural automaton, which infinitely surpasses all artificial automata. For a machine made by the skill of man is not a machine in each of its parts. For instance, the tooth of a brass wheel has parts or fragments which for us are not artificial products, and which do not have the special characteristics of the machine, for they give no indication of the use for which the wheel was intended. But the machines of nature, namely, living bodies, are still machines in their smallest parts ad infinitum. It is this that constitutes the difference between nature and art, that is to say, between the divine art and ours.”

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