2008

The Texas Academy of Mathematics and Science is offering incoming students this summer a choice of two T-shirts (go here):

Ben Stein Smart Bombs Darwinian Bunker A rousing SRO preview on Tuesday of the new Ben Stein documentary, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, brought a Kansas City audience to its feet. And with good cause. Stein’s often funny, always engaging frontal assault on the oppressive neo-Darwinist establishment is arguably the smartest and most sophisticated documentary ever produced on the right side of the cultural divide, on any subject, ever. As such, Expelled represents still another blow to the progressive orthodoxy of government-issued science in its winter of discontent. The winter started early when in November two separate labs, one in Wisconsin, one in Japan, announced the breakthrough discovery that adult skin cells can be reprogrammed to mimic embryonic stem cells. Just Read More ›

Paul Kurtz’s Center for Inquiry is partnering with SUNY-Buffalo (the State University of New York) to offer an Ed.M. in “scientific literacy” (which will include a whopping dose of Darwinism and an assault on ID). For a description of the degree, go to their website. Below is a description of the program from an email I just received. In reading it, ask youself what would happen if Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, which is far less sectarian than the Center for Inquiry, were to partner with a state university to offer a program in “scientific literacy.” It’s okay for the Center for Inquiry to promote atheism in the name of science but anything that even gets close to Read More ›

As every child in our public school system knows, all critics of neo-Darwinism are religious fanatics. Except those who aren’t, such as University of Madrid biologist Maximo Sandin, whose dislike for Darwinism seem to be as much based on its association with capitalism (here) as with its inconsistency with the fossil record and other evidence. The theories which have been proposed to replace neo-Darwinism tell us something about the respect that many biologists have for the official version. Sandin’s alternative theory involves viruses and bacterias (he refers more or less approvingly to Alfred Hoyle’s “Evolution from Space”). The following is excerpted from one of his essays , an English translation is here . Viral and bacterial response capacity to environmental Read More ›

Joseph Farah at World Net Daily is one of the select few who has seen an advance screening of Ben Stein’s EXPELLED. I’ve been to three advance screenings, giving a little talk on ID at the one on Times Square in New York a few weeks ago. To me the most amazing part of the film is where Dawkins gives away the store by taking seriously a scenario in which a designer might have brought about life on Earth. Farah agrees: go here for his review of the film. I expect that Dover was not the end of litigation involving ID. In the next court case, it will be interesting to depose the people on the other side who appear Read More ›

David Goldston (extensively edited) “Scientists tend to underestimate the public receptivity to science, and the battles ahead. Intelligent-design advocates try to sell their wares as science rather than religion partly as a legal gambit, but also because science and scientists are held in high esteem. Scientists do not face a public inherently hostile to science even among fundamentalists, and should address the public with respect rather than contempt. Although a remarkably high percentage of Americans do not believe that humans evolved from earlier life forms, it’s not clear whether this is just a casual way of saying they viscerally reject the notion of a random Universe. Evolution is largely a symbolic issue to the public, and may be a poor measure of how religious Read More ›

HT to Larry Moran’s Sandwalk for the link to this fascinating long piece by journalist Suzan Mazur about an upcoming (July 2008) evolution meeting at the Konrad Lorenz Institute in Altenberg, Austria. “The Altenberg 16” is Mazur’s playful term for the sixteeen biologists and theoreticians invited by organizer Massimo Pigliucci. Most are on record as being, to greater and lesser degrees, dissatisfied with the current textbook theory of evolution. Surveying the group, I note that I’ve interacted with several of the people over the years, as have other ID theorists and assorted Bad Guys. This should be an exciting meeting, with the papers to be published in 2009 by MIT Press. Mazur’s article is worth your attention. Evolutionary theory is Read More ›

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