As I was catching up on reading back issues of Analog: Science Fiction and Fact I noted, for the first time in nearly 40 years of reading the magazine, not one but a pair of articles (one fact, one fiction) addressed the Intelligent Design controversy.

Both articles were written by physicist Carl Frederick.

The first (non-fiction) titled The Challenge of the Anthropic Universe is about the so-far fruitless quest by physicists to find an explanation for the fine tuning of the universe (basis of Cosmological ID) that doesn’t involve intelligent design. The article begins:

In the early 1990’s, a creeping realization swept through the theoretical physics community that the probability for the universe to even exist was vanishingly small. Indeed, the only “theory” around that seemed able to explain the universe’s existence was Intelligent Design. This was not something physicists and cosmologists liked to talk about.

Later on, after describing the “problem” in detail, he quotes what Lee Smolin considers the four possible solutions:

Which Way Out?

Lee Smolin considers that there are four solutions to the problem, schemas if you will.

[below are truncated for brevity -ds]

1) God tuned the parameters for our benefit.
2) There are a very large number of universes each of which has random parameters.
3) There is a “unique mathematically consistent theory of the whole universe”.
4) The parameters evolve in time – in the Darwinian sense.

[end truncation -ds]

A good number of very intelligent people have argued for schemas two, three, and four above. At the moment there is nothing resembling a consensus among physicists.

Interesting that Frederick fails to mention very intelligent people arguing for schema one. Maybe that’s so self-evident it hurts him to repeat it. 🙂

Read More ›

Dichloroacetate (DCA) Promising for Endometrial Cancer DCA virtually disappeared from the news about a year ago when it was forced off the open market by the FDA and all research into its efficacy as a cancer therapeutic had to go through officially sanctioned channels. I’ve kept track of it all this time through Google Email Alerts. This is the first bit of news on it in relation to cancer in a long time. To see the history check out the list of articles I wrote here under the sidebar category DCA. I became interested in it because it’s another example of the science establishment exerting undue control over things they believe they “own” including science education in public schools and Read More ›

John Templeton died today in the Bahamas. He was 95. I had long one-on-one conversations* with him over consecutive dinners back in 1999 during a conference titled “Complexity, Information, Design: A Critical Appraisal,” convened by Charles Harper and Paul Davies. Sir John impressed me as a good and sincere man who cared deeply about the misuse of science to marginalize religion and spirituality. On balance, his impact in facilitating conversation between science and religion has been enormously beneficial. Would that his advisors and administrators at the Templeton Foundation were as broadminded as he. ———— *He shared with me regarding his initial investments at the end of the Great Depression and how they paid off big time: he chose 100 stocks Read More ›

A reader of The Spiritual Brain asks,

… , you write that evolution (i.e., macro-evolution, descent by a common ancestor) is a fact, given the fossil record. Do you really believe this, or this is simply a concession to the scientific establishment, in other words, a disclaimer of sorts that is making sure that your ideas in this book can be taken seriously …

Well that was grounds for a gourmet cup of coffee!

The Spiritual Brain was an enormous amount of work. Mario and I risked much to maintain what we think the evidence supports about the non-material nature of the human mind. 

Anyone who thinks we would complicate our lives by also maintaining positions we do not support … has a future in writing afternoon soaps, where life is the art of the impossible.

So I wrote back and said,

I am intrigued by the way you put your question, “Do you really believe this?”

It reminds me of the day I was received into the Catholic Church (as an adult).

But I am not sure that a question about common descent should remind me of my reception into the Church. Let me explain why: Read More ›

Congratulations to Roddy Bullock for having his first column, Judge says creationism for the birds, published in Worldnet Daily. Roddy is head of the Intelligent Design Network in Ohio. Roddy references Bill Dembski’s Immodest Proposal But there is another option, a brilliant solution if evolution’s defenders have any integrity. Put forth by author William Dembski, “Teaching the Non-Controversy – An Immodest Proposal” sets out an ACLU-proof way to teach evolution honestly. Because the AAAS, the NCSE and other champions of Darwin-only education claim there is no scientific controversy (evolution, they claim, is as well established as gravity!), why not let students simply explain why evolutionary theory is one of the few areas in science where no controversy exists? To further Read More ›

You know the old saying “If you lie down with dogs you get up with fleas”. It seems Massachusetts has itself a case of sand fleas. I found this article from the Boston Herald linked on the Drudge Report. It’s way off topic but I’m so sure most of our readers will appreciate it I just had to give y’all a heads up. Be sure to read the comments, they’re the best part. 😆

A friend writes to tell me that this article uses the design concept effectively. What do you think?

ASAP Biochemistry, ASAP Article, 10.1021/bi800357b
Web Release Date: June 19, 2008
Copyright © 2008 American Chemical Society
11-cis- and All-trans-Retinols Can Activate Rod Opsin: Rational Design of the Visual Cycle†
Masahiro Kono,* Patrice W. Goletz, and Rosalie K. Crouch
Department of Ophthalmology, Medical University of South Carolina, Charleston, South Carolina 29425
Received February 29, 2008
Revised Manuscript Received May 25, 2008

Abstract:
Rhodopsin is the photosensitive pigment in the rod photoreceptor cell. Upon absorption of a photon, the covalently bound 11-cis-retinal isomerizes to the all-trans form, enabling rhodopsin to activate transducin, its G protein. All-trans-retinal is then released from the protein and reduced to all-trans-retinol. It is subsequently transported to the retinal pigment epithelium where it is converted to 11-cis-retinol and oxidized to 11-cis-retinal before it is transported back to the photoreceptor to regenerate rhodopsin and complete the visual cycle. In this study, we have measured the effects of all-trans- and 11-cis-retinals and -retinols on the opsin’s ability to activate transducin to ascertain their potentials for activating the signaling cascade. Only 11-cis-retinal acts as an inverse agonist to the opsin. All-trans-retinal, all-trans-retinol, and 11-cis-retinol are all agonists with all-trans-retinal being the most potent agonist and all-trans-retinol being the least potent. Taken as a whole, our study is consistent with the hypothesis that the steps in the visual cycle are optimized such that the rod can serve as a highly sensitive dim light receptor. All-trans-retinal is immediately reduced in the photoreceptor to prevent back reactions and to weaken its effectiveness as an agonist before it is transported out of the cell; oxidation of 11-cis-retinol occurs in the retinal pigment epithelium and not the rod photoreceptor cell because 11-cis-retinol can act as an agonist and activate the signaling cascade if it were to bind an opsin, effectively adapting the cell to light.

The rest of the article is in Paywall City. If you’re from there, read and spill.

Also, new at the Post-Darwinist: Read More ›

Friends remind me of an excerpt from a debate between intelligent design advocate Phillip Johnson, a constitutional lawyer, and Darwinist philosopher William Provine, in which Provine proclaims,

First, the argument from design failed. There is no intelligent design in the natural world. When mammals die, they are really and truly dead. No ultimate foundations for ethics exist, no ultimate meaning in life exists, and free will is merely a human myth. These are all conclusions to which Darwin came quite clearly. (Stanford University, April 30, 1994)

Provine has said this elsewhere over the years, most notably in the Expelled movie.

A friend comments that he admires Provine for at least being honest about where materialist atheism leads – as opposed to Richard Dawkins, who moralizes with abandon, without recognizing that his belief system cannot privilege one morality over another by definition.

What happens then? Well, what happens then is being played out in Canada right now, and all across Europe. All ethical systems come under attack, and degenerate into a swamp of unfocused feelings. In Canada, a quasi-judicial body known as a “human rights commission” – with far more power over individual Canadians’ lives than any court would ever have – is alike empowered to pass judgment on a clergyman’s pastoral advice and a late-night comic’s jokes – based on assorted individuals’ feelings of hurt or offense. One astonishing decision follows another, and you can read about many of them on a regular basis at civil rights lawyer Ezra Levant’s blog.

Straw in the wind: When Levant recently tried debating an establishment lawyer, the establishment lawyer began to claim that Levant “needs counselling” – there are few more ominous words in a rapidly degenerating materialist society. The establishment neither has nor needs arguments for its position; it only needs to flow in whatever direction it is driven by the moods of the moment, and those whose moods (not “ideas”, notice) are out of synch – “need counselling.”

As Mario Beauregard and I put it in the The Spiritual Brain, the root of this sort of abuse is materialist atheism, in which

“science-based, effective and progressive policies” are not offered by a self to other selves, but driven by an object at other objects.” (p. 117)

That, I think, is what breeds the totalitarian impulse. The materialist has first dehumanized himself, then he dehumanizes others.

Also, just up at The Mindful Hack Read More ›

Cool. This should be interesting when it gets to court. As I was reading the complaint it mentions Barbara Forrest’s talk was sponsored by the Austin Center for Inquiry. So basically Comer was using taxpayer funded resources owned by the Texas government to help the Austin Center for Inquiry advertise the event it was sponsoring. This raises the question of who exactly is the Austin Center for Inquiry and why should they be entitled to free advertising from the state of Texas? CFI Austin The Center for Inquiry Austin was created for people who call themselves Brights, Atheists, Secular Humanists, Skeptics, Agnostics, Freethinkers – you get the idea! It is a chance not only to meet other local people whose Read More ›

Where is ID on this scale? Bruce G. Charlton Editor-in-Chief, Medical Hypotheses “An old joke about the response to revolutionary new scientific theories states that there are three phases on the road to acceptance: 1. The theory is not true; 2. The theory is true, but it is unimportant; 3. The theory is true, and it is important – but we knew it all along. The point of this joke is that (according to scientific theorists) new theories are never properly appreciated. The ‘false’ phase happens because a defining feature of a revolutionary theory is that it contradicts the assumptions of already-existing mainstream theory. The second ‘trivial’ phase follows from a preliminary analysis which suggests that the new idea is Read More ›

He who sups with the devil must bring a long spoon. – proverb An American living in Paris, a secular agnostic Jew, and both a mathematician and a novelist – so why isn’t Berlinski caterwauling about the Visigoths at the gates, who think there is evidence for design in the universe? Well, for one thing, he is way too smart. He is also a relentless foe of fashionable mediocrities. Thought enforcers mutter darkly against him. No doubt there will be a law against him some day, but the bureaucrats will need to make good time. He was born in 1942. Meanwhile, … Well now, what of Berlinski’s Devils?, that is The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions? The book Read More ›

Searching news.google.com for “intelligent design” I happened across a recent article by a favorite author of mine, Jerry Pournelle. Click here for his biography on Wikipedia. Jerry has written a lot of science fiction, and I quite enjoyed some of it, but that’s not the writing of his that I liked the most. It was his many years of computer technology columns, Chaos Manor, in Byte Magazine that I most enjoyed. I also thoroughly enjoyed his many articles and short stories in Analog Science Fiction and Science Fact Magazine . I’ve read almost every issue of that cover to cover since I first discovered it in the school library in the 7th grade. I still subscribe to it today almost Read More ›

I don’t think she has a leg to stand on. The policy of her government employer was to remain neutral in any official capacity regarding the public controversy over evolution by chance vs. creation of life by design. The government should remain neutral on this subject by neither fostering or restricting differing beliefs on how life orginated and diversified. Clearly Comer, through her advertisement of Barbara Forrest’s lecture, using her employer’s computer network to broadcast it, and using her government email address and title to lend strength to the advertisement, violated a clear and constitutional government mandate regarding how employees are to conduct the government’s business. Forrest’s lecture, because it centers on creationism, even though critical of it, is still Read More ›

While reading Mike Gene’s The Design Matrix: A Consilience of Clues, I also had the fun of encountering a letter from Richard Sever, of Cold Spring Harbor lab, to the journal Nature informing its editors that he wishes that his colleagues would “reduce confusion” by using the word “design” more intelligently. (Nature 454, 27 (3 July 2008) | doi:10.1038/454027c; Published online 2 July 2008 Paywall)

That is to say,

Few scientists would dispute that evolution provides a far more satisfactory explanation for the workings of living organisms than does ‘intelligent design’. But a much more subtle ‘design’ movement abounds that can distort how they approach their research.

Sever means that scientists refer to the design of organisms to mean the design of organisms. But everyone knows that organisms are not “really” designed; they only look exactly like they are … and this supposedly confuses people.

My favourite line is “Systems that emerge by selection differ fundamentally from those conceived by design.”

Oh? Amazing! If devout Darwinists like Sever are right, that’s precisely what isn’t true.

The designs produced by the random walk of Darwinian evolution cannot by definition differ from the designs produced by human selfish-gene robots formed by the random walk of Darwinian evolution. Everything is essentially due to Darwinian evolution, right?

Hey, look, on the Darwinist view, if there were a God and he designed things, he too must have evolved by the random walk of Darwinian evolution. So … so what exactly is Sever’s problem?

There shouldn’t really be a semantic problem along the lines that Sever suggests. Unless, of course, it is legal to doubt Darwinism … But surely the appropriate authorities are slowly but surely taking care of all that. So we can delay the introduction of duckspeak a little longer, can’t we, while we smooth out the quacks?

Actually, Sever’s sort of proposal has a  history. While writing The Spiritual Brain (Harper One, 2007), Mario Beauregard and I ran into similar serious proposals to eliminate language that implies that people have consciousness, personality, or ego, for example:

The social, psychological and cognitive sciences remain stuck with prescientific words and concepts. For many of us the word “soul” is as obsolete as “phlogiston,” but scientists still use such imprecise words as “consciousness,” “personality” and “ego,” not to mention “mind.”

Perhaps it is time that, in science at least, “imagination” and “introspection” are remodelled or, preferably, retired. Artists can have fun with them, but the serious business of the world has moved on. (Peter Watson, “Not Written in Stone”, New Scientist (August 29, 2005, quoted at p. 119 TSB )

When people can’t address the reality, they try to banish it from the terminology.  And people who live in a highly bureaucratic environment have real difficulty comprehending people who are insufficiently “cratted”, and thus continue to use real language.

Also, today at Colliding Universes:

Large Hadron Collider: And what if, $3 billion later, they don’t find the God particle? Read More ›

Vivendi Entertainment acquires home video rights of Expelled MUMBAI: Vivendi Entertainment has acquired home entertainment distribution rights to Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, produced by Premise Media. The announcement was made by Vivendi Entertainment president Tom O’Malley and Expelled executive producer John Sullivan. Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, starring journalist and actor Ben Stein, is an independent documentary film that explores the theory of Intelligent Design. The film examines the conflict between advocates of intelligent design and evolutionists, and the hostility of the scientific community towards scientists that embrace intelligent design. “Ben Stein brings his unique perspective to this controversial topic and creates an incredibly insightful and entertaining film. Expelled is one of the most successful theatrical documentary films ever released and Read More ›